Maverick Philosopher

A Reason Why We Need Philosophy

You have heard it said, "Take the bull by the horns." But I say unto you, "Take the bull by the shovel."  Enjoy this Substack entry wherein I take some journalistic bull by the shovel.

Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

Substack latest. 

If you can poke a hole in anything I say, I'll buy you lunch when next our paths cross.

Will Science Put Religion out of Business?

A tilt at transhumanism.

Substack latest.

Can Consciousness be Explained?

Top o' the Stack. Dennett debunked! 

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

Substack latest.

If nothing else, philosophy is prophylaxis against infection by scientistic pseudo-understanding.  Take the jab! Boosters to follow.

Could Free Will be an Illusion?

Science journalists shovel a lot of bull crap anent this topic. I debunk their sophistry.

Substack latest.

A Per Impossibile Counterfactual

It is equally true that if science could get rid of consciousness, it would thereby get rid of itself.

Information Realism?

Physicists love to play the philosopher, and when they do the result is often nonsense. A recent example is the so-called information realism of physicist Max Tegmark. Here is the gist of it:

. . . according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind—psyche, soul—is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation.

When I read this, I said to myself, "I will have no trouble blowing this nonsense out of the water." Reading on, however, I noted that the author of the Scientific American piece, Bernardo Kastrup, did exactly that. 

We humans naturally philosophize.  But we don't naturally philosophize well.  So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it.  (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles.  Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.

Schlick's Scientism: An Antilogism

Remember Moritz Schlick?  He wrote, "All real problems are scientific  questions; there are no others." ("The Future of Philosophy" in The Linguistic Turn, ed. R. Rorty).  The Schlickian dictum sires an antilogism.

1) All real problems are scientific.

2) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is real.

3) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is not scientific.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Which member of the trio should we reject?

I reject (1). There are real (genuine) problems that are not scientific  in the way that the natural sciences are scientific.  Scientific problems are amenable in principle to solution by empirical observation and experiment. This is not so for (1). So I must disagree with Schlick the positivist.  

Related: The Death of Moritz Schlick

Exercise for the reader: Is the meaning of the proposition below the method of its verification? If yes, then what method might that be?

More Bad Philosophy of Mind by a Scientist

 Christof Koch:

I was raised to believe in God, the Trinity, and particularly the Resurrection. Unfortunately, I now know four words: “No brain, never mind.” That’s bad news. Once my brain dies, unless I can somehow upload it into the Cloud, I die with it. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m not going to believe something if it’s opposed by all the facts.

Isn’t there still the old “mind-body problem?” How do three pounds of goo in the human brain, with its billions of neurons and synapses, generate our thoughts and feelings? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and the mental world.

No, it’s just how you look at it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this idea that physics is really just about external relationships—between a proton and electron, between planets and stars. But consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology. So there aren’t two substances. Of course, a number of mystics throughout the ages have taken this point of view.

It does look strange if you grew up like me, as a Roman Catholic, believing in a body and a soul. But it’s unclear how the body and the soul should interact. After a while, you realize this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.

Koch is telling us that there is no body-mind dualism, no dualism of substances, but also, presumably, no dualism of properties either. There is no problem about how brain activity gives rise to consciousness. There is no problem because there is no gap that need to be bridged.  "It's just how you look at it."  We can view consciousness from the inside and from the outside.  From the inside  consciousness is experience; from the outside it is synapses, sodium ions, voltage differentials, neurons: the objective items studied by physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, biology and all cognate disciplines.

So one 'thing' -- consciousness -- can be viewed in two very different ways. Hence a monism of subject-matter, but a dualism of perspectives upon that one subject-matter.  The dualism is epistemic, not ontic.  It may seem that what Koch is urging is a neutral monism according to which consciousness is neither mental nor physical but some third thing or stuff.  But I don't think that that is what Koch is saying. He says,"consciousness is really physics from the inside." That's a sloppy way of saying that consciousness is just physical reality as known from the first-person point of view.  What he is saying, then,  is that consciousness is material in nature, and exhaustively understandable in terms of physics, chemistry, etc.  Thus the view from the inside and the view from the outside access the same reality, and that reality is physical, not mental.  There are no mental substances or properties in reality; mental talk is merely a subjective way of talking about what alone is objectively real, namely matter. 

But here is the problem:  the subjective side of experience is entirely unlike the objective, physical side, and it too is real.  If I kick you in the testicles, the pain you feel is undeniably real; it is no illusion, and it is impossible to be mistaken about it.  What's more, the sensation has phenomenological features it would make no sense to ascribe to brain processes and states, and vice versa: the latter have electro-chemical features that it would make no sense to ascribe to pain sensations.  

If at this point you insist that the felt pain is identical to the brain state/process, then you have said something unintelligible that violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals. You have said something 'theological.' Compare: "this man, born in Bethlehem, who died on Calvary, is identical to the immortal creator of the universe.'  You have said something that beggars understanding.

At this point one could take a mysterian line: "Look, it is just true that the felt pain is a brain state; it is true whether we find it intelligible or not."  Alternatively, one could go eliminativist and deny that there is any felt pain.  Of these two approaches, the eliminativist one is surely absurd in that it denies the very datum that gave rise to the problem in the first place. 

But I rather doubt that a scientist would want to go mysterian. The point of science is to eliminate mysteries, not confess them.  The point of science is to demystify the world, to render it intelligible to us, not to pronounce the ignorabimus.

If we are neither eliminativist nor mysterian, then I think intellectual honesty requires us to admit that the so-called 'hard problem' is both a genuine problem and that it is indeed hard, even if we are unwilling to pronounce it insoluble.

So it is not "just how you look at it."  The subjective side of experience is undeniably real and not identifiable with anything  the objectifying sciences study.  Koch is blind to the depth of the problem, and his 'solution' is bogus.

More later on the interaction business.  

Article here.

A Frustrating Discussion with a Non-Philosopher about Stephen Hawking

Ed reports on a recent trip to Africa:

I didn’t run into any philosophers, but there was a chap I met over dinner who was banging on about Stephen Hawking. I have a strict rule never to discuss philosophy with anyone who has no obvious training in the subject, but he was insistent, and I gave way. A brief summary which may appeal to you:

He asked me if I had read any Hawking and I said I hadn’t, as I was not particularly interested in modern physics, and particularly not interested in those with an undoubted aptitude in some scientific or technical subject, but with doubtful philosophical expertise. Philosophers with no training in physics should not write about physics, likewise physicists without training in philosophy should not write about philosophy.

He demurred. Hawking was writing about physics, but then we looked up some chapters of his last work Brief Answers To The Big Questions, one of which was about the existence of God, et habui propositum.

He then said that everyone has a right to their opinion. I agreed, but I also had a right not to read their opinion. Equally I had a right to say anything about astrophysics, without him having the obligation to read it.

He said I should not dismiss Hawking’s work without having read it. I objected that there are hundreds of thousands of books in print, and life is short. This is why we have book reviews. I had read reviews of Hawking’s work by people I respected, suggesting it was not worth reading him, so I didn’t. The principle of taking opinions on trust is a well-established one, and mostly useful, though not infallible.

He got very upset by this point, saying that Hawking was one of the most brilliant men who had ever existed, one had a duty to read him etc. I was about to launch into a discursus on brilliant people throughout the ages, some of whom had considered precisely the arguments that Hawking had put forward as his own (e.g. Hawking argues that there are only three types of matter, and nothing else exists, ergo God does not exist), but Fiona, seeing the glint in my eye and the lust for a kill, wisely said we had to be up early the next morning, and we departed.

Wittgenstein: ‘[the physicist Sir James Jeans] has written a book called The Mysterious Universe and I loathe it and call it misleading. Take the title...I might say that the title The Mysterious Universe includes a kind of idol worship, the idol being Science and the Scientist.’

I may look at the Hawking, notwithstanding.

Have a look, but Hawking's philosophical books are bad.  I offer my opinion here; I quote Tim Maudlin's negative judgment here.

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Krauss Canned

Unable to control the fire down below, the outspoken atheist, well-known physicist, and "professional amateur philosopher" (to cop a brilliancy from Ed Feser) Lawrence Krauss has been handed his walking papers by Arizona State University.  Good riddance.

One of the tasks of philosophy is to debunk bad philosophy of the sort purveyed by  Krauss & Co. to turn a buck. Samples of my debunking operations available here.

Why Do Physicists Write Popular Garbage?

To make money, and because writing bad philosophy is easy while doing good physics is hard.

Latest example to come to my attention. It appears in that noted philosophy journal, Financial Times.

I've had it with refuting this crap.  I used to think it was worth doing, but no longer.  It is like evaluating a bad student paper. Where does one start?

Stephen Hawking and Bad Philosophy

With the passing of physicist Stephen Hawking, the encomia are rolling in. Hawking no doubt deserves most of the tributes and accolades he is receiving. But a bit of balance is in order: we should not forget the bad philosophy he has promoted.  Herewith, a repost from 9 October 2010, slightly redacted. I was initially planning to go through The Grand Design chapter by chapter but soon realized it would have been a waste of time given the low quality of the initial chapters.

.........................

Notes on Chapter One of Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design

Many thanks to reader David Parker for sending me a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010).  Not a book worth buying, but graciously accepted gratis! When physicists need money, they scribble books for popular consumption.  But who can blame them: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy.

Numbers in parentheses are page references.

The first chapter, "The Mystery of Being," gets off to a rocky start with a curious bit of anthropomorphism: the universe is described as "by turns kind and cruel," (5) when it is obviously neither.  Imputing human attitudes to nature is unscientific the last time I checked.  And then there is the chapter's title.  I would have thought that the purpose of science is to dispel mystery.  But let that pass.  The authors remind us that we humans ask Big Questions about the nature of reality and the origin of the universe, e.g., "Did the universe need a creator?" (5)  True, but the past tense of that question betrays a curious bias, as if a creator is a mere cosmic starter-upper as opposed to a being ongoingly involved in the existence of the world at each instant.  It is the latter that sophisticated theists maintain.

The Big Questions traditionally belong to philosophy, but we are told that  "philosophy is dead." (5)  Unfortunately for the authors, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers," as Etienne Gilson famously observed in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937, p. 306) He calls this the first law of philosophical experience.  Memorize it, and have it at the ready the next time someone says something silly like "philosophy is dead." As a codicil to the Gilsonian dictum, I suggest "and presides over their oblivion."

Philosophy is dead, the authors opine, because she "has not kept up with modern developments in the sciences, particularly physics." (5) To get answers to such questions as Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? and Why this particular set of laws and not some other?  we must turn to physics. (These three questions are listed on p. 10)  It will be very surprising if physics -- physics alone without any smuggled-in philosophical additions -- can answer the first and third questions.  But it will never answer the second question.  For we are conscious and self-conscious moral agents, and no purely physical explanation of consciousness, self-consciousness and all it entails can be derived from physics alone.

What I expect the authors to do is to smuggle in various philosophical theses along with their physics.  But if they do so -- if they stray the least bit from pure physics -- then they prove that philosophy is alive after all, in their musings.  What they will then be doing is not opposing philosophy as such, but urging their philosophy on us, all the while hiding from us the fact that it is indeed philosophy.

That's a pretty shabby tactic, if you want my opinion. (And there you have it, even if you don't want it.)  You posture as if you are opposing all philosophy which you claim is "dead," which presumably means 'cognitively worthless,' and then you go on to make blatantly philosophical assertions which are neither properly clarified as to their sense, nor supported by anything that could count as rigorous argumentation. For example, in Chapter 2, the authors opine that "free will is just an illusion."  (32)  The sloppy  'reasoning'  laden with rhetorical questions that leads up to this obviously philosophical assertion is nothing that could be justified by pure physics.  

Quantum theory is brought up and the suggestion is floated that "the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence." (6) It has "every possible history."  A little later we are introduced to M-theory:

. . . M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.  Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god.  Rather,these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. (8-9)

The writing here is quite inept.  If the authors want to say that these universes came into being out of nothing, they should say that, and not say that they were created out of nothing.  Creation, whether out of nothing or out of something,  implies a creator.  It is also inept to speak of 'intervention.'  If God creates a universe, he does not intervene in it; he causes it to exist in the first place.  One can intervene only in what already exists.  Such sloppy writing does not inspire confidence, and suggests that the thinking behind the writing is equally sloppy. 

But even ignoring these infelicities of expression, it is a plain contradiction to say that these universes comes into being out of nothing and that they arise naturally from physical law.  Whatever physical law is, it is not nothing!  That's clear, I hope.  So why don't our physicists say what they mean, namely that these multiple universes came into being, not from nothing, but from physical law.  That would be non-contradictory although it would prompt the question as to the nature and existence of physical law or laws. 

Part of the problem here is that the authors want to do philosophy with the resources of physics  alone.  They are not content just to assume that there are physical laws and that the cosmos exists and then get on with the their proper task of  figuring our what those laws are.  They want an explanation from physics of why there is a cosmos in the first place. As a result the end up talking nonsense. Wanting an explanation from physics. they cite physical laws. Wanting a philosophical explanation, they say that the universe arose from nothing. But they miss the blatant contradiction: the cosmos cannot both arise from nothing and from physical laws since the latter are not nothing. 

If, on the other hand, they use 'nothing' in some special sense which allows physical laws to be nothing, then they are playing a shabby semantic trick.

Another apparent contradiction worth noting: After mentioning quantum theory in the Chapter 1, the authors assure us in Chapter 2  that "scientific determinism" is "the basis of all modern science." (30) How quantum indeterminacy and determinism are supposed to jibe, is not explained.  But hey, when the idea is to make a fast buck, who cares about such niceties as logical consistency?

Not only did many universes come into existence out of physical law (or is it out of nothing?), but "Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is at times like the present . . . ." (9)  Most of these states are unsuitable for the existence of any form of life.  It is our presence that "selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence." (9)  That's a neat trick given that universes "have no independent existence." (6)  If so, then we have no independent existence and cannot function as the "lords of creation" (9) who select among the vast array of universes.

But I want to be fair.  Perhaps later chapters will remove some of the murk.  There is also this consideration:  Even bad books are good if they stimulate thought. But don't buy it.  Borrow it from a library.

As I always say, "Never buy a book you haven't read."

Many thanks to reader David Parker for sending me a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010).  Not a book worth buying, but graciously accepted gratis! When physicists need money, they scribble books for popular consumption.  But who can blame them: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy.

Numbers in parentheses are page references.

The first chapter, "The Mystery of Being," gets off to a rocky start with a curious bit of anthropomorphism: the universe is described as "by turns kind and cruel," (5) when it is obviously neither.  Imputing human attitudes to nature is unscientific the last time I checked.  And then there is the chapter's title.  I would have thought that the purpose of science is to dispel mystery.  But let that pass.  The authors remind us that we humans ask Big Questions about the nature of reality and the origin of the universe, e.g., "Did the universe need a creator?" (5)  True, but the past tense of that question betrays a curious bias, as if a creator is a mere cosmic starter-upper as opposed to a being ongoingly involved in the existence of the world at each instant.  It is the latter that sophisticated theists maintain.

The Big Questions traditionally belong to philosophy, but we are told that  "philosophy is dead." (5)  Unfortunately for the authors, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers," as Etienne Gilson famously observed in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937, p. 306) He calls this the first law of philosophical experience.  Memorize it, and have it at the ready the next time someone says something silly like "philosophy is dead." As a codicil to the Gilsonian dictum, I suggest "and presides over their oblivion."

Philosophy is dead, the authors opine, because she "has not kept up with modern developments in the sciences, particularly physics." (5) To get answers to such questions as Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? and Why this particular set of laws and not some other?  we must turn to physics. (These three questions are listed on p. 10)  It will be very surprising if physics -- physics alone without any smuggled-in philosophical additions -- can answer the first and third questions.  But it will never answer the second question.  For we are conscious and self-conscious moral agents, and no purely physical explanation of consciousness, self-consciousness and all it entails can be derived from physics alone.

What I expect the authors to do is to smuggle in various philosophical theses along with their physics.  But if they do so -- if they stray the least bit from pure physics -- then they prove that philosophy is alive after all, in their musings.  What they will then be doing is not opposing philosophy as such, but urging their philosophy on us, all the while hiding from us the fact that it is indeed philosophy.

That's a pretty shabby tactic, if you want my opinion. (And there you have it, even if you don't want it.)  You posture as if you are opposing all philosophy which you claim is "dead," which presumably means 'cognitively worthless,' and then you go on to make blatantly philosophical assertions which are neither properly clarified as to their sense, nor supported by anything that could count as rigorous argumentation. For example, in Chapter 2, the authors opine that "free will is just an illusion."  (32)  The sloppy  'reasoning'  laden with rhetorical questions that leads up to this obviously philosophical assertion is nothing that could be justified by pure physics.  

Quantum theory is brought up and the suggestion is floated that "the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence." (6) It has "every possible history."  A little later we are introduced to M-theory:

. . . M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.  Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god.  Rather,these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. (8-9)

The writing here is quite inept.  If the authors want to say that these universes came into being out of nothing, they should say that, and not say that they were created out of nothing.  Creation, whether out of nothing or out of something,  implies a creator.  It is also inept to speak of 'intervention.'  If God creates a universe, he does not intervene in it; he causes it to exist in the first place.  One can intervene only in what already exists.  Such sloppy writing does not inspire confidence, and suggests that the thinking behind the writing is equally sloppy. 

But even ignoring these infelicities of expression, it is a plain contradiction to say that these universes comes into being out of nothing and that they arise naturally from physical law.  Whatever physical law is, it is not nothing!  That's clear, I hope.  So why don't our physicists say what they mean, namely that these multiple universes came into being, not from nothing, but from physical law.  That would be non-contradictory although it would prompt the question as to the nature and existence of physical law or laws. 

Part of the problem here is that the authors want to do philosophy with the resources of physics  alone.  They are not content just to assume that there are physical laws and that the cosmos exists and then get on with the their proper task of  figuring our what those laws are.  They want an explanation from physics of why there is a cosmos in the first place. As a result the end up talking nonsense. Wanting an explanation from physics. they cite physical laws. Wanting a philosophical explanation, they say that the universe arose from nothing. But they miss the blatant contradiction: the cosmos cannot both arise from nothing and from physical laws since the latter are not nothing. 

If, on the other hand, they use 'nothing' in some special sense which allows physical laws to be nothing, then they are playing a shabby semantic trick.

Another apparent contradiction worth noting: After mentioning quantum theory in the Chapter 1, the authors assure us in Chapter 2  that "scientific determinism" is "the basis of all modern science." (30) How quantum indeterminacy and determinism are supposed to jibe, is not explained.  But hey, when the idea is to make a fast buck, who cares about such niceties as logical consistency?

Not only did many universes come into existence out of physical law (or is it out of nothing?), but "Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is at times like the present . . . ." (9)  Most of these states are unsuitable for the existence of any form of life.  It is our presence that "selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence." (9)  That's a neat trick given that universes "have no independent existence." (6)  If so, then we have no independent existence and cannot function as the "lords of creation" (9) who select among the vast array of universes.

But I want to be fair.  Perhaps later chapters will remove some of the murk.  There is also this consideration:  Even bad books are good if they stimulate thought. But don't buy it.  Borrow it from a library.

As I always say, "Never buy a book you haven't read."

When Physicists Get Physical: A Tale of Sex and Scientism

Allegedly, Lawrence Krauss is a sexual predator. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, his philosophical incompetence or his sexual predation. Both are forms of seduction, one cerebral, the other carnal.

Scientism, Underbelief, and Overbelief

The secular nail their colors to the mast of scientism.  Or most of them do.  Their attitude is an amalgam of underbelief and overbelief.  Their underbelief is their belief that science alone is genuine knowledge.  Their overbelief is that this is so - - when it is plain that it is not something known scientifically.

There is so much that we know that we do not know by means of the natural sciences. Some examples for you to think about.

1. There is logical knowledge.  How do you know that the A and O forms of the traditional square of opposition are convertible while the E and O forms are not? By empirical observation and experiment?
2. There is mathematical knowledge.
3. There is semantic knowledge.
4. There is moral knowledge.

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First Philosophy or Scientism?

I was going to add to this old draft from 15 December 2009, but it looks like I won't be getting around to it. So here it is.

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Robert Cummins (Meaning and Mental Representation, MIT Press, 1989, p. 12) regards it as a mistake "for philosophers to address the question of mental representation in abstraction from any particular scientific theory or theoretical framework." Thus we ought not naively ask, What is mental representation? as if there is something called mental representation that is common to folk psychology and such theories as orthodox computationalism and neuroscience. "Mental representation is a theoretical assumption, not a commonplace of ordinary discourse."

(show)

The right way to proceed, according to Cummins, is to "pick a theoretical framework and ask what explanatory role mental representation plays in that framework and what the representation relation must be if that explanatory role is to be well grounded." In other words, one takes a theory such as orthodox computationalism and then one asks: what must the nature of mental representation be if this theory is to be both true and explanatory?

So the question of mental representation is not a question of 'first philosophy,' i.e., a question to be settled independently of, and prior to, empirical research, but a question in the philosophy of science exactly analogous to the following question in the philosophy of physics: what is the nature of space given that General Relativity is true and explanatory? The properties of physical space are for physics to determine. Philosophy's role is correspondingly modest, that of a handmaiden. To coin a phrase: philosophia ancilla scientiae, philosophy is the handmaiden of science, similarly as it was the handmaiden of theology in the Medieval period. Philosophy becomes the philosophy of science. And according to Quine, who is quoted by Cummins on the fontispiece of his book, "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."

It ought to be the same, Cummins thinks, with psychology. Whether or not there are mental representations becomes the question whether or not the best theories in cognitive science and psychology posit mental representations, and the nature of the representation relation is to be read off from whichever theory is taken to be true and most explanatory.

But there is a problem with this view. If we want to know about physical space and the nature of matter, we turn to the physicist. And if we want to know about the brain, we turn to the neuroscientist. But if we want to know about the relation of mind and brain, we cannot base ourselves solely on empirical science.

Here is one consideration. The extant empirical theories imply the existence of mental representations. But surely their existence is not obvious. Looking at a photograph of a mountain, I become aware of the mountain and some of its features via the picture. Here it makes sense to say of the picture that it is a representation of the mountain. But when I look directly at a mountain, there is no phenomenological evidence of any epistemic intermediary or representation: I see the mountain itself. I don't see sense-data or representations or any kind of epistemic deputy.

Perhaps I will be told that I am nonetheless aware of an internal image but not aware of being aware of it. Compare the case of walking into a room and seeing a depiction of Hillary Clinton so realistic and convincing that I take it to be Hillary herself. In such a case I am aware of an image, but not aware of being aware of an image. Why couldn't it be the same with outer perception? One crucial difference is that I can come to be aware of the Hillary-image as an image. But I cannot come to be aware of any supposed internal image that mediates my outer perception. This is particularly obvious if the internal image is a brain state. I cannot, while gazing at the mountain, 'focus inwardly' and become aware of the brain state that is supposedly mediating my perception of the mountain. Given this fact, I suggest that it is unintelligible to say that there is an internal image that mediates outer perception. The word 'image is' being misused. An image that I cannot become aware of as an image is in no intelligible sense an image of something.

No doubt the brain and its states are part of the causal basis of perception. And there is no doubt that an organism's brain is in (some) of the states it is in because of what is happening in its environment, e.g., bright light is being reflected from a snow field into the organism's eyes. But to say that some of the brain states represent the environment makes no sense assuming that 'represent' has the sense it has when we attend to the phenomenology of representative consciousness. To speak of material representations literally in the head is to read back into a third person conception of the world notions that make sense only from a first-person point of view.

You may agree with what I just said or not. But the discussion we will have about these matters surely does not belong to any empirical science. It belongs to first philosophy. The question of whether there are mental representations at all, for example, cannot arise within disciplines that presupposes their existence. And the relation between a first- and third-person view of the world cannot be treated within an exclusively third-person point of view. Finally, there is the point that the claim that science alone can clarify these questions is itself unscientific and so an instance of (negative) first philosophy.

A Physicist's Petitio Principii

One of my self-appointed tasks is to beat up on physicists when they play at philosophy and makes fools of themselves.  The following is from an interview with Richard Muller in Physics Today:

PT: You mention in your introduction that some physicists have concluded that the flow of time is an illusion. Why do you think that’s not the case?

MULLER: The flow of time does not exist in the usual spacetime diagram of physics. Time is mysterious; in any relativistic coordinate system, it is linked to space. And yet time is different—and I mean much more than simply a sign in the metric. Time flows. Choose any coordinate system and you can stand still in space but not in time. That different behavior breaks the otherwise glorious spacetime symmetry. Moreover, there is a special moment in time we call “now.” No such special location exists in the dimensions of space.

Is this guy serious?  His argument boils down to: The flow of time is not an illusion because time flows!  There is no spacetime symmetry because there is a special moment in time called 'NOW.'  Well thank you very much for resolving this thorny question at long last.  The 'diameter' of this circular reasoning is embarrassingly short. Both interviewee and interviewer need a course in Logic 101.

The following entry will give you some idea of the theory that our physicist thinks he has refuted.

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Poor Barry Manilow

Here:

In an experiment published in 2000, the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues asked undergraduates to wear a piece of clothing that they found embarrassing—a t-shirt with a picture of singer-songwriter Barry Manilow on it. After putting on the shirt, the undergraduates had to spend some time in a room with other students and were later asked to guess how many of the other students noticed what they were wearing. The undergraduates tended to overestimate the proportion by a large margin, and did the same when asked to wear a t-shirt with a positive image on it, like Bob Marley or Martin Luther King Jr. In study after study, experimental subjects thought that other people would notice them much more than they actually did.

Another study that confirms what we already knew.  Were any tax dollars used to fund it?  In a scientistic culture ignorant of its own rich traditions it is thought that only what is 'scientifically' validated can be taken seriously.  I am not denying that a study such as this one might have some slight value.

More interesting, I should think, would be a study of why Marley and King have a positive image and Manilow a negative one, not that I would be caught dead listening to Manilow's schmaltz, except for analytic and culture-critical purposes.  Or a study why there is a preponderance among the young of Che Guevara T-shirts over, say, Maggie Thatcher T-shirts.

Scientism

I am tired of refuting this species of bushwa.  Let somebody else do it.

We humans naturally philosophize.  But we don't naturally philosophize well.  So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it.  (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles.  Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.

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Free Will Meets Neuroscience

Here is an excerpt from Alfred R. Mele, Free Will: Action Theory Meets Neuroscience

In a recent article, Libet writes: "it is only the final ‘act now’ process that produces the voluntary act. That ‘act now’ process begins in the brain about 550 msec before the act, and it begins unconsciously" (2001, p. 61).10 "There is," he says, "an unconscious gap of about 400 msec between the onset of the cerebral process and when the person becomes consciously aware of his/her decision or wish or intention to act." (Incidentally, a page later, he identifies what the agent becomes aware of as "the intention/wish/urge to act" [p. 62].) Libet adds: "If the ‘act now’ process is initiated unconsciously, then conscious free will is not doing it."

I have already explained that Libet has not shown that a decision to flex is made or an intention to flex acquired at -550 ms. But even if the intention emerges much later, that is compatible with an "act now" process having begun at -550 ms. One might say that "the ‘act now’ process" in Libet’s spontaneous subjects begins with the formation or acquisition of a proximal intention to flex, much closer to the onset of muscle motion than -550 ms, or that it begins earlier, with the beginning of a process that issues in the intention.11 We can be flexible about that (just as we can be flexible about whether the process of my baking my frozen pizza began when I turned my oven on to pre-heat it, when I opened the oven door five minutes later to put the pizza in, when I placed the pizza on the center rack, or at some other time). Suppose we say that "the ‘act now’ process" begins with the unconscious emergence of an urge to flex – or with a pretty reliable relatively proximal causal contributor to urges to flex – at about -550 ms and that the urge plays a significant role in producing a proximal intention to flex many milliseconds later. We can then agree with Libet that, given that the "process is initiated unconsciously, . . . conscious free will is not doing it" – that is, is not initiating "the ‘act now’ process." But who would have thought that conscious free will has the job of producing urges? In the philosophical literature, free will’s primary locus of operation is typically identified as deciding (or choosing); and for all Libet has shown, if his subjects decide (or choose) to flex "now," they do so consciously.

What Libet et al. want to show is that the notion that conscious willing plays a genuine role in the etiology of a behavior such as flexing a finger is illusory.  Their evidence for this is that the process in the brain that initiates the action begins some 550 milliseconds before the action and is unconscious.  Only 400 msecs later does the subject become aware of his wish or urge or intention or decision to act.  This is supposed to show that the conscious intention is not causally efficacious and that conscious will is an illusion.

Mele rebuts this argument by showing that it trades on a confusion of decisions/intentions on the one hand and wishes and urges on the other.  To want to do X is not the same as to decide to do X.  Phil may want another Fat Tire Ale but decide not to drink another because he has already decimated Bill's supply and doesn't want to presume on his host.  So even if the wanting to do action A begins in the brain a half a second before the doing of A, and is unconscious, it doesn't follow that the decision to do A begins in the brain a half second before the doing of A and is unconscious.  Free will is displayed in decisions and choosings, not in wants and urges.

Basically, what Mele does quite skillfully in this article is show the indispensability of accurate conceptual analysis and phenomenology for the proper interpretation of empirical findings.  The real illusion here is the supposition that the empirical findings of neuroscience can by themselves shed any light.

Related: Could Free Will be an Illusion?

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Wisdom from Putnam on Science and Scientism

Here is a repost from 2009 in observance of the passing of the distinguished Harvard philosopher.  Please note: 'Hilary,' not 'Hillary.'

.....................................

Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. xiii (emphasis added):

. . . I regard science as an important part of man's knowledge of reality; but there is a tradition with which I would not wish to be identified, which would say that scientific knowledge is all of man's knowledge. I do not believe that ethical statements are expressions of scientific knowledge; but neither do I agree that they are not knowledge at all. The idea that the concepts of truth, falsity, explanation, and even understanding are all concepts which belong exclusively to science seems to me to be a perversion . . . .

Putnam does not need the MP's imprimatur and nihil obstat, but he gets them anyway, at least with respect to the above quotation. The italicized sentence is vitally important. In particular, you will be waiting a long time if you expect evolutionary biology to provide any clarification of the crucial concepts mentioned. See in particular Putnam's "Does Evolution Explain Representation?" in  Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992).

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Edward Feser on Jerry A. Coyne

In  Omnibus of Fallacies, Ed Feser applies his formidable analytic and polemical skills to that sorry specimen of scientism, Jerry Coyne.  The First Things review begins like this:

Faith versus Fact is some kind of achievement. Biologist Jerry Coyne has managed to write what might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre. True, the competition for that particular distinction is fierce. But among other volumes in this metastasizing literature, each has at least some small redeeming feature. For example, though Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing is bad as philosophy, it is middling as pop science. Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great was at least written by someone who could write like Christopher Hitchens. Though devoid of interest, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is brief. Even PZ Myers’s book The Happy Atheist has at least one advantage over Coyne’s book: It came out first.

Why do I refer to Coyne as a "sorry specimen of scientism?"  Is that a nice thing to say?  See here, for starters.

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More Scientistic Bullshit

Yet another exercise in silly scientism.  Shut up already with this stuff.  I've refuted this genre of crap too many times before. Here is a sample: Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness be a Conjuring Trick?

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Angst and the Empty Set

Lawrence Krauss

His latest outburst sullies the pages of The New Yorker. When readers brought it to my attention, I thought I might write a response, but then thought better about wasting my time, once again, on a fool and his foolishness.  And now I see that my efforts are unnecessary: Edward Feser has done the job in the pages of Public Discourse.

Ed is uncommonly gifted at polemic.  He characterizes Krauss as a "professional amateur philosopher."   I wish I had come up with that brilliancy.  But now that I have the phrase you can expect me to use it.

Here are some anti-Krauss entries of mine.

Why Physics Needs Philosophy

A short piece by Tim Maudlin. Good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go deep enough.  Maudlin rightly opposes the "reigning attitude":

The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean.  But putting computation ahead of conceptual clarity can lead to confusion.

He has some other useful things to say about philosophy's role in conceptual clarification.  But there is no mention of what ought to strike one as a major task: an explanation of how recherché physical theories relate to the world we actually live in, the world in its human involvement, what Edmund Husserl called die Lebenswelt, the life-world.  This is a task that falls to philosophy, but not to contemporary analytic philosophy with its woeful ignorance of the phenomenological tradition.  On the other hand, judging by the philosophical scribblings of physicists, they would make a mess of it too.

A related task of philosophy is to debunk and expose the bad philosophy churned out by physicists in their spare time when they need to turn a buck and play the public intellectual.  Understandable: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy. Think Lawrence Krauss for a recent prime offender.  And then there is the awful Hawking-Mlodinow book mentioned by Maudlin, entitled The Grand Design.

Five years ago I began a series on it.  But the first chapters were so bad, I didn't bother to proceed beyond my first entry.  Having just re-read that post, it stands up well.  

One more point about Maudlin. He (mis)uses 'mystical' as a pejorative, thereby betraying his ignorance of the subject of mysticism.  That's an Ayn Rand-y type of blunder.

Physicist George Ellis on Physicist and Pseudo-Philosopher Lawrence Krauss

From Scientific American, 22 July 2014 (HT: Karl White), emphasis added:

Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?

Ellis: Certainly not.  He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did.  And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being.  Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed  (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.

It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy. It seems that science education should include some basic modules on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and the other great philosophers, as well as writings of more recent philosophers such as Tim Maudlin and David Albert.

That's exactly right.  As I said in an earlier post,

I fear that a lot of our contemporary scientists are hopelessly bereft of general culture.  They are brilliant in their specialties but otherwise uneducated.  But that does not stop the likes of Dawkins and Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and Mlodinow from spouting off about God and time and the meaning of life . . . .  They want to play the philosopher without doing any 'homework.'  They think it's easy: you just shoot your mouth off.

My Scientism category contains detailed critiques of Krauss and other 'scientisticists' to give an ugly name to an ugly bunch of 'philosophistines.'  I coined 'philosophistine' years ago to refer to philistines when it comes to philosophy.

Jerry Coyne's Latest Outburst re: Pope Francis, Big Bang and Evolution

It doesn't merit a lot of attention, but I will mention two stupid moves that Jerry  Coyne makes.  Or if not stupid, then intellectually dishonest. 

First, Coyne states that "We know now that the universe could have originated from 'nothing' through purely physical processes, if you see 'nothing' as the 'quantum vacuum' of empty space."  By the same token, we now know that Jerry Coyne is a fool if you see 'fool' as equivalent in meaning to 'one who thinks that a substantive question can be answered by a semantic trick.'

Second, Coyne maintains that the belief that human beings have souls "flies in the face of science."  In other words, the belief in question is logically inconsistent with natural science.  Why?  Because, "We have no evidence for souls, as biologists see our species as simply the product of naturalistic evolution from earlier species."  The reasoning is this:

1. Biologists qua biologists see the human biological species as simply the product of evolution.

Therefore

2. Biology uncovers no evidence of souls.

Therefore

3. Biology rules out the existence of souls.

(1) is true.  (2) is a very unsurprising logical consequence of (1).  For biology, as a natural science, is confined to the study of the empirically accessible features of living things, including human animals.  It is therefore no surprise at all that biology turns up no evidence of souls, or of consciousness or self-consciousness for that matter.   By the same token, cosmology and quantum mechanics uncover no evidence that anything is alive. 

The move from (2) to (3), however, is a howling non sequitur.  (In plain English, (3) does not logically follow from (2), and it is obvious that it doesn't.) Biology is simply in no position to uncover any evidence of souls that there might be, and it shows a failure to grasp what it is that biology studies to think that such evidence would be accessible to biology.

To argue from (2) to (3) would be like arguing from

4. Mathematics uncovers no evidence that anything in nature  can be studied using complex (imaginary) numbers.

Therefore

5. Mathematics rules out the existence of anything in nature that can be studied using complex (imaginary) numbers.

That too is a howling non sequitur: we know that alternating current theory makes essential use of complex numbers.

At the root of Coyne's foolishness is scientism, the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, the view that reality is exhausted by the space-time system.  Both are philosophical views; neither is scientific.  There are powerful arguments against both.

Enough beating up of a cripple for one day.  And that reminds me: Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols refers to Kant as a concept-cripple (Begriffskrueppel). What would that make Coyne?  A stillborn concept-cripple?

More critique of Coyne here.   The man should stick to biology.  And the same goes for Dawkins.

Angst and the Empty Set

When I first saw this article, I thought to myself, "Oh boy, another load of stinking, steaming, scientistic bullshit by some know-nothing science writer or physicist for me to sink my logic shovel into!"

You have heard it said, 'Take the bull by the horns.'  But I say unto you, 'Take the bull by the shovel!'

But then I started reading and realized that the author knows what he is talking about.  Philosophers won't find anything new here, but it is an adequate piece of popular writing that may be of use to the educated layman.

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Seeing and Reading: More on Marcelo Gleiser's Physics-Driven Pseudo Philosophy

This entry takes up where I left off yesterday.  R. Crozat, responding to yesterday's post, e-mails:

I agree that philosophy is tasked to evaluate the philosophical claims of scientists. Your post on Professor Gleiser does the job.

In addition to confusing seeing with object seen, Gleiser seems to mix physics with meaning. He writes “You say, “I’m reading this word now.” In reality, you aren’t.” Here, his use of "reading" confuses:

a)  an optical process that enables reading, with

b) actual reading, which is the interpretation and understanding of the meaning of information.

Gleiser's description of the optics is informative, but he misunderstands the nature of reading. He refers to “reading” then proceeds to treat the optics as if optics is reading. But they are not identical. Clearly, one can run his eyes over words without reading them. The light-traveling and eye-running are physical; the reading is mental/intentional. Gleiser’s mistake is like confusing driving with a gasoline fill-up, photography with light and lens, or jogging with trail-mix, bones and muscles.

I can imagine Socrates rephrasing Phaedo 99b: “Fancy being unable to distinguish between a mental faculty and the process without which that faculty could not be enabled!”

My correspondent is exactly right.  I spotted the blurring of seeing and reading too, but decided not to pursue it in the interests of brevity, brevity being the soul of blog, as has been observed perhaps too often in these pages.

Reading involves understanding, but one can see a word, a phrase, a sentence, and so on without understanding it.  So there is more to reading than seeing.  Seeing is with the eyes; understanding is with the mind.  Note also that one can read without seeing, reading Braille being an example of this.

I would add to what my correspondent states by making a tripartite distinction among (i) the causal basis of visual perception, (ii) seeing, and (iii) reading.  It is not just reading that is intentional or object-directed; seeing is as well.  To see is to see something as something.  One cannot just see, and all seeing is a seeing-as.  It may be that our physicist is guilty of a three-fold confusion.

There is no reading (in the ordinary sense of the word) without seeing, and there is no seeing without brain, eyes, neural pathways, light, physical objects, etc.  But to confuse these three is a Philosophy 101 mistake. 

The quotation from Phaedo 99b is entirely apt although the topic there is not seeing and understanding, but free human action.  Plato has Socrates say:

If it were said that without bones and muscles and other parts of the body I could not have carried my resolutions into effect, that would be true.  But to say that they are the cause of what I do, . . . that my acting is not from choice of what is best, would be a very loose and careless way of talking.

Our physicists need to educate themselves so as to avoid the loose and careless ways of talking that they readily fall into when, eager to turn a buck, they inflict their pseudo-philosophical speculations on the unwitting public.

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This Just Now In: There is no Now! More Bad Philosophy from a Physicist

One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose bad philosophy.  Scientists pump out quite a lot of it.   Physicists are among the worst.  I have given many examples.  Here is another one.  Let's get to work.  Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser writes in There is No Now, 

You say, “I’m reading this word now.” In reality, you aren’t. Since light travels at a finite speed, it takes time for it to bounce from the book to your eye. When you see a word, you are seeing it as it looked some time in the past. To be precise, if you are holding the book at one foot from your eye, the light travel time from the book to your eye is about one nanosecond, or one billionth of a second. The same with every object you see or person you talk to. Take a look around. You may think that you are seeing all these objects at once, or “now,” even if they are at different distances from you. But you really aren’t, as light bouncing from each one of them will take a different time to catch your eye. The brain integrates the different sources of visual information, and since the differences in arrival time are much smaller than what your eyes can discern and your brain process, you don’t see a difference. The “present”—the sum total of the sensorial input we say is happening “now”—is nothing but a convincing illusion.

Gleiser is confusing seeing with object seen.  True, light travels at a finite speed. So the word seen is the word as it was one nanosecond ago.  But it doesn't follow that I am not seeing the word now. The seeing occurs now at time t, the word seen, however, is not the word as it is at t, but the word as it was at t* (t*<t). 

When I glance at the sun, I see it as it was about eight minutes ago.  But it does not follow that the seeing (glancing) is not occurring now, or that there is no now.

Suppose that at time t I am visually aware of a word and of a cat.  I am focused on the word, but the cat is nearby in the periphery of my visual field.  So the seeing of the word and the seeing of the cat are simultaneous seeings.  But the word I see is the word as it was one nanosecond ago, whereas the cat I see is the cat as it was, say, 10 nanoseconds ago.  So I grant that there are a couple of illusions here.

The first illusion is that if a seeing occurs at time t, then the object seen is as it is at t. This cannot be given the well-known facts that Gleiser adduces.  The object seen is as it was at an earlier time t*.  But if you see through (forgive the pun) the first illusion, you may still succumb to the second.  The second illusion is that objects seen at the same time t are as they were at the same time t*, where t* is earlier than t.  In my example, the seeing of the word and the seeing of the cat occur at the same time, call it t.  But, given that word and cat are at different distances from the subject, there is no one time t*, earlier than t, such that word and cat were as they were when they were seen.

But again, that does not show that the present moment or the Now is an illusion.

Gleiser's thesis is that there is no Now, that it is a "cognitive illusion."  He sums up:

To summarize: given that the speed of light is fast but finite, information from any object takes time to hit us, even if the time is tiny. We never see something as it is “now.” However, the brain takes time to process information and can’t distinguish (or time-order) two events that happen sufficiently close to one another. The fact that we see many things happening now is an illusion, a blurring of time perception.

Gleiser is just confused.  There is an illusion, but it is the illusion that we see things as they are now.  But that is not to say that there is no Now, or that the Now is an illusion.  In fact, Gleiser presupposes that there is a Now when he says that we never see anything as it is now.  Right now the Sun is in some definite state, but the physics of visual perception make it impossible to see the Sun as it is now.  If it had gone supernova three minutes ago, it would appear to us now as it usually does.

Geiser confuses an epistemological claim -- We never see anything distant from us as it is at the precise time of the seeing -- with an ontological claim: there is no present moment.

There is other nonsense in Gleiser's piece.   Take this sentence: "The notion of time is related to change, and the passage of time is simply a tool to track change."  I'll leave it to the reader to sort this out.  I've had enough!

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Do Physicists Bullshit?

Why Do Some Physicists Talk Nonsense about Nothing?

"We're Just a Bit of Pollution," Cosmologist Says

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Global Warming: Questions That Need Distinguishing

My posting of the graphic to the left indicates that I am a skeptic about global warming (GW).  To be precise, I am skeptical about some, not all, of the claims made by the GW activists.  See below for some necessary distinctions. Skepticism is good.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry and a key partner in the pursuit of truth.

A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier.  To doubt or inquire or question  whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case.  It is a cheap rhetorical trick of GW alarmists when they speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial. 

What can a philosopher say about global warming? The first thing he can and ought to say is that, although not all questions are empirical, at the heart of the global warming debate are a set of empirical questions. These are not questions for philosophers qua philosophers, let alone for political ideologues. For the resolution of these questions we must turn to reputable climatologists whose roster does not sport such names as 'Al Gore,' 'Barbra Streisand,' or 'Ann Coulter.' Unfortunately, the global warming question is one that is readily 'ideologized' and the ideological gas bags of both the Right and the Left have a lot to answer for in this regard.

I have not investigated the matter with any thoroughness, and I have no firm opinion. It is difficult to form an opinion because it is difficult to know whom to trust: reputable scientists have their ideological biases too, and if they work in universities, the leftish climate in these hotbeds of political correctness is some reason to be skeptical of anything they say.

For example, let's say scientist X teaches at Cal Berkeley and is a registered Democrat. One would have some reason to question his credibility.  He may well tilt toward socialism and away from capitalism and be tempted to beat down capitalism with the cudgel of global warming.  Equally, a climatologist on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute would be suspect.   I am not suggesting that objectivity is impossible to attain; I am making the simple point that it is difficult to attain and that scientists have worldview biases like everyone else.  And like everyone else, they are swayed by such less-than-noble motives as the desire to advance their careers and be accepted by their peers.  And who funds global warming research?  What are their biases?  And who gets the grants?  And what conclusions do you need to aim at to get funded?  It can't be a bad idea to "follow the money" as the saying goes.

Off the top of my head I think we ought to distinguish among the following questions:

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity?

(3) is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be. One has to be aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Suppose there is a close correlation between global warming and man-made carbon emissions. It doesn't straightaway follow that the the human activity causes the warming. But again, this is not a question that can be settled a priori; it is a question for climatologists.

4. If anthropogenic, is global warming caused by humans to a degree that warrants action, assuming that action can be taken to stop it?

5. If GW is caused by humans to an extent that it warrants action, what sorts of action would be needed to stop the warming process?

6. How much curtailment of economic growth would we be willing to accept to stop global warming?

The first three of these six questions are empirical and are reserved for climatologists. They  are very difficult questions to answer.  And it is worth pointing out that climatology, while an empirical science, falls short of truly strict science.    This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high, and rightly so.  Is climate science science according to these criteria? No, it falls short on #s 3 and 4.  At the hardest hard core of the hard sciences lies the physics of meso-phenomena.  Climatology does not come close to this level of 'hardness.'  So don't be bamboozled: don't imagine that the prestige of physics transfers undiminished onto climatology.  It is pretty speculative stuff and much of it is ideologically infected. 

Our first three questions are empirical. But the last three are not, being questions of public policy. So although the core issues are empirical, philosophers have some role to play: they can help in the formulation and clarification of the various questions; they can help with the normative questions that arise in conjunction with (4)-(5), and they can examine the cogency of the arguments given on either side. Last but not least, they can drive home the importance of being clear about the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions.

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No Dissent Allowed! 79-Year old Skeptical Climate Scientist Victim of Witch-Hunt - Fears for his 'safety' after declaring himself a skeptic

My posting of the graphic to the left indicates that I am a skeptic about global warming (GW).  To be precise, I am skeptical about some, not all, of the claims made by the GW activists.  See below for some necessary distinctions. Skepticism is good.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry and a key partner in the pursuit of truth.

A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier.  To doubt or inquire or question  whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case.  It is a cheap rhetorical trick of GW alarmists when they speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial. 

What can a philosopher say about global warming? The first thing he can and ought to say is that, although not all questions are empirical, at the heart of the global warming debate are a set of empirical questions. These are not questions for philosophers qua philosophers, let alone for political ideologues. For the resolution of these questions we must turn to reputable climatologists whose roster does not sport such names as 'Al Gore,' 'Barbra Streisand,' or 'Ann Coulter.' Unfortunately, the global warming question is one that is readily 'ideologized' and the ideological gas bags of both the Right and the Left have a lot to answer for in this regard.

I have not investigated the matter with any thoroughness, and I have no firm opinion. It is difficult to form an opinion because it is difficult to know whom to trust: reputable scientists have their ideological biases too, and if they work in universities, the leftish climate in these hotbeds of political correctness is some reason to be skeptical of anything they say.

For example, let's say scientist X teaches at Cal Berkeley and is a registered Democrat. One would have some reason to question his credibility.  He may well tilt toward socialism and away from capitalism and be tempted to beat down capitalism with the cudgel of global warming.  Equally, a climatologist on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute would be suspect.   I am not suggesting that objectivity is impossible to attain; I am making the simple point that it is difficult to attain and that scientists have worldview biases like everyone else.  And like everyone else, they are swayed by such less-than-noble motives as the desire to advance their careers and be accepted by their peers.  And who funds global warming research?  What are their biases?  And who gets the grants?  And what conclusions do you need to aim at to get funded?  It can't be a bad idea to "follow the money" as the saying goes.

Off the top of my head I think we ought to distinguish among the following questions:

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity?

(3) is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be. One has to be aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Suppose there is a close correlation between global warming and man-made carbon emissions. It doesn't straightaway follow that the the human activity causes the warming. But again, this is not a question that can be settled a priori; it is a question for climatologists.

4. If anthropogenic, is global warming caused by humans to a degree that warrants action, assuming that action can be taken to stop it?

5. If GW is caused by humans to an extent that it warrants action, what sorts of action would be needed to stop the warming process?

6. How much curtailment of economic growth would we be willing to accept to stop global warming?

The first three of these six questions are empirical and are reserved for climatologists. They  are very difficult questions to answer.  And it is worth pointing out that climatology, while an empirical science, falls short of truly strict science.    This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high, and rightly so.  Is climate science science according to these criteria? No, it falls short on #s 3 and 4.  At the hardest hard core of the hard sciences lies the physics of meso-phenomena.  Climatology does not come close to this level of 'hardness.'  So don't be bamboozled: don't imagine that the prestige of physics transfers undiminished onto climatology.  It is pretty speculative stuff and much of it is ideologically infected. 

Our first three questions are empirical. But the last three are not, being questions of public policy. So although the core issues are empirical, philosophers have some role to play: they can help in the formulation and clarification of the various questions; they can help with the normative questions that arise in conjunction with (4)-(5), and they can examine the cogency of the arguments given on either side. Last but not least, they can drive home the importance of being clear about the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions.

On the Scientism Front

We defenders of the humanities need to do battle on three fronts against three enemies: scientism, leftism, Islamism.  Each is represented by a disturbing number of crapweasels, individuals who won't own up to who and what they are.  Thus prominent scientisticists -- to give an ugly name to an ugly bunch -- will deny that there there is any such thing as scientism.  (See my Scientism category for documentation.)  And the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the Pee Cee crowd and the Islamists. 

Here are two links so that you may know your enemies. 

Thomas Nagel and Stephen C. Myer's Signature in the Cell

Why Neil de Grasse Tyson is a Philistine (HTs: Dave Lull, J. Orsak, W. Chambers, et al.)

Related articles

Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Further Commentary

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

Science and Scientism

Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism'

Roger Scruton At The New Atlantis: 'Scientism In The Arts & Humanities'

Book Notice: Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics

This from the back cover:

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (editiones scholasticae, vol. 39, Transaction Books, 2014) provides an overview of Scholastic approaches to causation, substance, essence, modality, identity, persistence, teleology, and other issues in fundamental metaphysics. The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics, so as to facilitate the analytic reader’s understanding of Scholastic ideas and the Scholastic reader’s understanding of contemporary analytic philosophy. The Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality provides the organizing theme, and the crucial dependence of Scholastic metaphysics on this theory is demonstrated. The book is written from a Thomistic point of view, but Scotist and Suarezian positions are treated as well where they diverge from the Thomistic position.

I thank Professor Feser for sending me a complimentary copy which arrived a couple of hours ago.  So far, I have read the Prolegomenon (pp. 6-30) which is mainly a critique of scientism together with a rejection of the view of  philosophy as mere 'conceptual analysis.'

Scientism is the doctrine that "science alone plausibly gives us objective knowledge, and that any metaphysics worthy of consideration can only be that which is implicit in science." (10)  That is exactly what it is in contemporary discussions, although, for the sake of clarity, I would have added 'natural' before both occurrences of 'science.'  Also worth noting is that scientism is to naturalism as epistemology to ontology: scientism is the epistemology of the ontological view according to which (concrete) reality is exhausted by the space-time manifold and its contents as  understood by physics and the natural sciences built upon it such as chemistry and biology.

I won't repeat Feser's arguments, but they are pellucid and to my mind conclusive.  The usual suspects, Lawrence 'Bait and Switch' Krauss and Alexander Rosenberg, come in for a well-deserved drubbing.  Ed's prose in this book is characteristically muscular, but he keeps his penchant for polemic  in check.

By the way, if you want to read a truly moronic article on scientism, I recommend (if that's the word) Sean Carroll, Let's Stop Using the Word "Scientism.  Carroll thinks that the word is "unhelpful because it’s ill-defined, and acts as a license for lazy thinking."  Nonsense.  He should read Feser or indeed any competent philosopher's discussion of the topic.

Some of my take on these matters is to be found in Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism.'

Some hold that  philosophy, because it is not science, can only be conceptual analysis.  Ed makes a forking good point when he observes that this view is a variation on Hume's Fork:

The claim that "all the objects of human reason or enquiry" [Hume] are or ought to be either matters of "conceptual analysis" matters of natural science is itself neither a conceptual truth nor a proposition for which you will find, or could find, the slightest evidence in natural science.  It is a proposition as metaphysical as any a Scholastic would assert, differing from the latter only in being self-refuting." (26)

 Related articles

What is Scientism?

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

Catholicism to Atheism and Back

 

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose and debunk bad philosophy.  And there is a lot of it out there, especially in the writings of journalists who report on scientific research.  Scornful of philosophy, many of them peddle scientistic pseudo-understanding without realizing that what they sell is itself philosophy, very bad philosophy.  A particularly abysmal specimen was sent my way by a reader.  It bears the subtitle: "Without recognising it, Oxford scientists appear to have located the consience [sic]."  In the body of the article we read:

This isn't some minor breakthrough of cognitive neuroscience. This is about good and bad, right and wrong. This is about the brain's connection to morality. This means that the Oxford scientists, without apparently realising what they've done, have located the conscience. 

For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly - although the great HL Mencken once defined it as, "the inner voice which  warns us that someone may be looking". It's been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.

Now, thanks to neuroscience, we've found the actual, physical thing itself. It's a shame that it resembles a Brussels sprout: something so important and God-given should look more imposing, like a pineapple. But then it wouldn't fit in our heads.

Henceforth, when told to "examine our conscience", we won't need to sit for hours cudgelling our brains to decide whether we're feeling guilty about accessing YouPorn late at night; we can just book into a clinic and ask them for a conscience-scan, to let us know for sure.

Part of what is offensive about this rubbish is that a great and humanly very important topic is treated in a jocose manner.  (I am assuming, charitably, that the author did not write his piece as a joke.) But that is not the worst of it.  The worst of it is the incoherence of what is being proposed.

I'll begin with what ought to be an obvious point.  Before we can locate conscience in the brain or anywhere else we ought to know, at least roughly, what it is we are talking about.  What is conscience?

Conscience is the moral sense, the sense of right, wrong, and their difference.  It is the sense whereby we discern, or attempt to discern, what is morally (not legally, not prudentially) permissible, impermissible, and obligatory.  It typically results in moral judgements about one's thoughts, words and deeds  which in turn eventuate in resolutions to amend or continue one's practices.

The deliverances of conscience may or may not be 'veridical' or revelatory of objective moral demands or or objective moral realities on particular occasions.  Some people are 'scrupulous': their consciences bother them when they shouldn't.  Others are morally insensitive: their consciences do not bother them when they should.  If subject S senses, via conscience, that doing/refraining from X is morally impermissible, it does not follow that it is.  Conscience is a modality of object-directed consciousness and so may be expected to be analogous to nonmoral consciousness:  if I am thinking that a is F, it does not follow that a is F.

So  just as we can speak of the intentionality of consciousness, we can speak of the intentionality of conscience.  Pangs of conscience are not non-intentional states of consciousness like headache pains.  Conscience purports to reveal something about the morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory (and perhaps also about the supererogatory and suberogatory); whether it does so is a further question.  Suppose nothing is objectively right or wrong.  That would not alter the fact that there is the moral sense in some of us.

Can conscience be located in the brain and identified with the lateral frontal pole?  If so, then a particular moral sensing, that one ought not to have done X or ought to have done Y, is a state of the brain.  But this is impossible.  A particular moral sensing is an intentional (object-directed) state.  But no physical state is object-directed.  So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a moral sensing cannot be a brain state. 

So that is one absurdity.  A second is that it is absurd to suggest, as the author does, that one can examine one's conscience by examining a part of one's brain.   Examination of conscience is a spiritual practice whereby, at the end of the day perhaps, one reviews and morally evaluates the day's thoughts, words, and deeds.  What is being examined here?  Obviously not some bit of brain matter.  And if one were to examine that hunk of meat, one would learn nothing as to the thoughts, words, and deeds of the person whose hunk of brain meat it is.

If a person's feeling of guilt is correlated with an identifiable brain state, then one could perhaps determine that a person was feeling guilt by way of a brain scan.  But that would provide no insight into (a) what the guilt is about, or (b) whether the guilt is morally appropriate.  No brain scan can reveal the intentionality or the normativity of guilt feelings.

There is also a problem about who is doing the examining in an examination of conscience. A different hunk of meat, or the same hunk?  Either way, absurdity.  Examining is an intentional state.  So, just as it is absurd to suppose that one's thoughts, words, and deed are to be found in the lateral frontal pole, it is also absurd to suppose that that same pole is doing the examining of those contents.

I have emphasized the intentionality of conscience, which fact alone sufficies to refute the scientistic nonsense.  And I have so far bracketed the question whether conscience puts us in touch with objective moral norms.  I say it does, even though how this is possible is not easy to explain.  Well, suppose that torturing children to death for sexual pleasure  is objectively wrong, and that we have moral knowledge of this moral fact via conscience.

Then two problems arise for the scientistic naturalist:  how is is possible for a hunk of meat, no matter how wondrously complex, to glom onto these nonnatural moral facts? And second, if there are such facts to be accessed via conscience, how do they fit into the scientistic naturalist's scheme?  Answers:  It is not possible, and they don't.

Have I just wasted my time refuting rubbish beneath refutation?  Maybe not.  Scientism, with its pseudo-understanding poses a grave threat to the humanities and indeed to our very humanity.  David Gelernter is good on this. 

 Related articles

Bad Philosophy in Scientific American: Why Life Does Not Really Exist!

Nonsense From the Science Page of the New York Times

The Biology Of Conscience

Bad Philosophy in Scientific American: Why Life Does Not Really Exist!

We humans naturally philosophize.  But we don't naturally philosophize well.  So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it.  (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the institutionalized discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles.  Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.   But now on to the topic.

..............

Is there extraterrestrial life? 

To answer this question, one would have to have at least a rough idea of what counts as living and what counts as nonliving.  For example, "A working definition lately used by NASA is that 'life is a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution.'"

In a recent Scientific American article,  Why Life Does not Really Exist, problems with the NASA definition are pointed out.  I won't try to evaluate the putative counterexamples the author adduces, but simply assume that the NASA definition is not adequate.  Indeed, I will assume something even stronger, namely, that no adequate definition is available, no razor-sharp definition, no set of properties that all and only living things possess, no set of properties that cleanly  demarcates the animate from the inanimate, and is impervious to counterexample.

Supposing that is so, what could explain it?  According to the Scientific American article (emphasis added) what explains the difficulty of defining life is that life does not really exist!  It can't be defined because it is not there to be defined.  You heard right, boys and girls:

Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.

This startling passage provokes a couple of questions. 

The first is whether the author's conclusion, which we may take to be the conjunction of the bolded sentences, follows from the difficulty or even the impossibility of finding an adequate definition of life.  The answer is: obviously not!  One cannot conclude that nothing is living from the fact, if it is a fact, that it is difficult or even impossible to say what exactly all and only living things have in common that makes them living as opposed to nonliving.  That would be like arguing that nothing is a game (to invoke Wittgenstein's overworked example) because there is nothing that all and only games have in common that distinguishes them from non-games.  There are games and there are non-games and this is so whether or not one can say exactly what distinguishes them.

Not all concepts are such that necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct application can be specified.  There are vague concepts, family-resemblance concepts, open-textured concepts.  The concept bald, the concept game, the concept art. Their being vague, etc., does not prevent them from having clear instances and clear non-instances. A man with no hair on his head is bald.  Your humble and hirsute correspondent is most definitely not bald.  The fact that we don't know what to say about Donald 'Comb-Over' Trump does not change the fact that some of us assuredly are and some of assuredly not.

The second question is whether the author's conclusion, namely, that life is a concept that we have invented is even coherent.  It isn't.  I'll give two arguments.  I beg the indulgence of those readers who will feel that I am wasting my time and yours with the dialectical equivalent of rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple.  I agree that in general there is something faintly absurd about responding to a position whose preposterousness renders it beneath refutation.

A. If life does not exist, but is a mere concept we have invented, then a fortiori consciousness does not exist and is a mere concept we have invented. For if the difficulties in defining life are a reason for thinking there is no life, then the difficulties in defining consciousness are a reason to deny that there is consciousness. For example, there appears to be something very much like intentionality below the level of conscious mentality in the phenomena of potentiality and dispositionality. (See Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy.)  This causes trouble for Brentano's claim that intentionality is the mark of the consciously mental.  But it  would surely be absurd to deny the existence of consciousness on the ground that defining it is not easy.  There is a second point.  Those of a naturalist bent are highly likely to maintain, with John Searle, that either conscousness is a biological phenomenon or at least cannot exist except in living organisms.  So if there is no life, then there is no consciousness either.

But only conscious beings wield concepts.   Only conscious beings classify and subsume and judge. So if there is no life, there are no concepts either, and thus no concept of life. Therefore, life cannot be a concept. It is incoherent to suppose that a lifeless material object could classify some other objects in its environment as living and others as nonliving.

Moreover, if consciousness does not exist, but is a mere concept we conscious beings have invented,  then obviously consciousness is not a mere concept we have invented but rather the presupposition of there being any concepts at all. The notion that consciousness is a mere concept is self-refuting.

B.  The author tell us that "What differentiates molecules of water, rocks, and silverware from cats, people and other living things is not 'life,' but complexity. 

Note how the author takes back with his left hand what he has proferred with his right.  He appeals to the difference between the nonliving and the living only to imply that there is no difference, the only difference being one of material complexity.  But a difference between what and what?  Now if he were maintaining that life emerges at a certain level of material complexity he would be maintaining something that, though not unproblematic, would at least not be incoherent.  For then he would not be denying that life exists but affirming that it is an emergent phenomenon.  But he is plainly not an emergentist, but an eliminativist.  He is saying that life simply does not exist. 

If the difference between the nonliving and the living is the difference between the less complex and the more complex, then actually infinite sets in mathematics are alive.  For they are 'infinitely' complex. If you say that only material systems can be alive,, but no abstracta,  what grounds your assertion?  If life is a concept we impose, why can't we impose it on anything we like, including actually infinite sets of abstracta?  Presumably we cannot do this  because of the nature of sets and the nature of life where these natures are logically antecedent to us and our conceptual impositions.  Sets by their very nature are nonliving.  But then appeal is being made to what lies beyond the reach of conceptual decision, which is to say: life exists and is what it is independently of us, our language, and our conceptualizations.  One cannot argue from our poor understanding of what life is to its nonexistence.

The fallacy underlying this very bad Scientific American piece could be called the eliminativist fallacy.  An eliminativist is one who, faced with a problem he cannot solve -- in this case the problem of crafting an adequate definition of life -- simply denies one or more of the data that give rise to the problem.  Thus, in this case, the author simply denies that life exists.  But then he denies the very datum that got him thinking about this topic in the first place.

Not good!

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Popular Science: No Comments are Good Comments

Popular Science closes its combox.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

Certainly, not everything is up for grabs, i.e., not everything is  a topic of reasonable debate.  But it is equally certain that some things are up for grabs, and also certain that what is up for grabs and what is not is up for grabs. (Think about it.)

So while I applaud the closing of the Popular Science combox as the closing of a repository for what in the main is the drivel of cyberpunks and know-nothings, I must express skepticism at the incipient dogmatism and incipient scientism that lurks beneath both the author's words and those of the author of the NYT piece to which he links.

To mention just one item, talk of "scientific certainty" with respect to climate change, its origins, and its effects is certainly unscientific.  Natural science is not in the business of generating certainty on any topic, let alone something as difficult to study as climate change.

No gain accrues by replacing religious and political dogmatism with scientistic dogmatism.

To say it again: doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Inside of science and out.

Unfortunately, too much of present day 'science' is ideologically-infected.  Global warming alarmism is yet another ersatz religion for liberals.  See here.  Of course, I also condemn  those conservatives and libertarians whose knee-jerk rejection of global warming is premised on hostility to any empirical finding that might lead to policies that limit the freedom of the market.

Companion post: Would Schopenhauer Allow Comments? 

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"Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off."

Memory and the Operations of Reason

"Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651) 

This seems right.  Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge:

1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and the commutative properties and that these properties are distinct.

2. If scientism is true, then  it is not the case that (1).

Therefore

3. Scientism is not true.

I grasp (understand) this argument and its validity by reason.  To grasp any such argument, it is not sufficient that a succession of conscious states transpire in my mental life.  For if the state represented by (1) falls into oblivion by the time I get to (2), and (2) by the time I get to (3), then all I would undergo would be  a succession of consciousnesses but not  the consciousness of succession.  But the consciousness of succession is necessary to 'take in' the argument.  And this consciousness of succession itself presupposes a kind of memory.  To grasp the conclusion as a conclusion -- and thus as following from the premises -- I have to have retained the premises. There has to be a diachronic unity of consciousness in which there is a sort of synopsis of the premises together with the conclusion with the former entailing the latter.

But of course something similar holds for each proposition in the argument.  The meaning of a compound proposition is built up out of the meanings of its propositional parts, and the meaning of a simple proposition is built up out of the meanings of its sub-propositional parts, and these meanings have to be retained as the discursive intellect runs through the propositions.  ('Discursive' from the L. currere, to run.)  This retention -- a term Husserl uses -- is a necessary condition of the possibility of understanding.

And so while I do not grasp an argument by memory (let alone by sense perception or introspection), memory is involved in rational knowledge.

The Pascalian aphorism bears up well under scrutiny.

Example of associativity of addition: (7 + 5) + 3 = 7 + (5 + 3).  Example of commutativity:  (7 + 5) + 3 = (5 + 7) + 3.  The difference between the two properties springs to the eye (of the mind).  Now what must mind be like if it is to be capable of a priori knowledge?  Presumably it can't just be a hunk of meat.

But if the below companion post is right, not even sense knowledge is such that its subject could be a hunk of meat.  We are of course meatheads.  But squeezing meaning out of mere meat -- there's the trick!

Companion post: Pascal on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience  

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Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

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Is Philosophy of Mind Relevant to the Practice of Neuroscience?

This from a reader:

There’s a youngster here considering going to college to study neuroscience, and I’m doing my best to inoculate him against scientism while offering a case for dualism. I’ve offered broad worldview reasons why that would matter, but I’m not sure off the top of my head what I would say if he asked what professional difference it would make to be a dualist neuroscientist. The dualist would say that areas X and Y are associated with and bear some causal relationship with the mind’s being in state ABC, while the physicalist would say that areas X and Y constitute or realize or give rise to state ABC. Pharma would be just as effective, placebo effects aside, if one takes a physicalist rather than a dualist interpretation of the mind-body problem. Metaphysically and religiously, there are huge differences, but during the time I was intensely reflecting on the metaphysics of mind the question of what difference it might make to a neuroscientist qua neuroscientist never entered my mind. If you have any thoughts off the top of your…er, mind I would be most grateful.

Off the top of my 'head,' it seems to me that, with only three exceptions, it should make no difference at all to the practicing neuroscientist what philosophy of mind he accepts.  Emergentist, epiphenomenalist, property dualist, hylomorphic dualist, substance dualist, type-type identity theorist, parallelist, occasionalist, functionalist, panpsychist, dual-aspect theorist, mysterian, idealist,  -- whatever the position, I can't see it affecting the study of that most marvellous and most complex intercranial hunk of meat we call the brain.

Eliminativism, solipsism, and behaviorism are the exceptions.  

One of the things that neuroscientists do is to determine the neural correlates of conscious states.  To work out the correlations requires taking seriously the reports of a conscious test subject who reports sincerely from his first-person point of view on the content and quality of his experiences as different regions of his brain are artificially stimulated in various ways.  Now if our neuroscientist is an eliminativist, then it seems to me that he cannot, consistently with his eliminativism, take seriously the verbal reports of the test subject.  For if there are no mental states, then the reports are about precisely nothing.  And you cannot correlate nothing with something.

Suppose now that our neuroscientist is a solipist.  He believes in other brains, but not in other minds.  He holds that his is the only mind.  It seems that our solipsistic  brain researcher could not, consistently with his solipsism, take seriously the reports of the test subject.  He could not take them as being reports of anything.  He could take them only as verbal behavior, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Something similar would seem to hold for the behaviorist neuroscientist. What the (analytical) behaviorist does it to identify mental states with behavior (linguistic or non-linguistic) and/or with dispositions to behave. Thus my belief that it is about to rain is nothing other than my rummaging for an umbrella in the closet, and the like. My feeling of pain is my grimacing, etc.  The analytical behaviorist does not deny that they are beliefs and desires and sensory states such as pleasure and pain.   His project is not eliminativist but identitarian. There are beliefs and desires and pains, he thinks; it is just that what they are are bits of behavior and/or behavioral dispositions. 

But if my pain just is my grimacing, wincing, etc. , then the brain scientist has no need of my verbal reports.  Stimulating the 'pain center' of my brain, he need merely look at my overt behavior.

One issue here is whether analytical behaviorism can be kept from collapsing into eliminative behaviorism.  If mind is just behavior, then that is tantamount to saying that there is no mind.  This, I take it, is the point of the old joke about the two behaviorist sex partners,  "It was good for you, how was it for me?"  If the feeling just is the behavior, then there is no feeling. 

So my answer to my correspondent, just off the top of my 'head,' without having thought much about this issue, is that a neuroscientist's philosophy of mind, if he has one, should have no effect on his practice of neuroscience except in the three cases mentioned.

But here is another wrinkle that just occured to me.  Consider scientism, which is not a position in the philosophy of mind, but a position in epistemology. If our neuroscientist were a scientisticist (to coin a term as barbarous as its nominatum), and thus one who held that only natural science is knowledge, then how could he credit the reports of his test subject given that these reports are made from the first-person point of view and are not about matters that are third-person verifiable?

If you poke around in my visual cortex and I report seeing red, and you credit my report as veridical, then you admit that there is a source of knowledge that is not natural-scientific, and thus you contradict your scientism.

So I tentatively suggest that no neuroscientist who investigates the neural correlates of consciousness can be a scientisticist! 

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Jaegwon Kim on Reductionism and Eliminativism

Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism'

Sweet Dreams of Dennett

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Overview

Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism'

A good deal of nonsense about scientism has been written lately by philosophers and scientists who, apparently unwilling to own up to their embrace of scientism, want to co-opt the term and use it in an idiosyncratic and self-serving way.  Fodor is a recent example among the philosophers and Pinker among the scientists.  (See articles below.) So it is refreshing to encounter Alexander Rosenberg's accurate definition and his forthright acceptance of the view.  (It is the forthrightness that wins my approbation, not the acceptance.)  I quote from James Anderson's review of An Atheist's Guide to Reality:

Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about. … Being scientistic just means treating science as our exclusive guide to reality, to nature—both our own nature and everything else’s. (pp. 7-8)

This comports well with the 'quickie' definition I have stated many times in these pages:

1. Scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.

But note that both Rosenberg's definition and mine need qualification given that 'science' is just the Latin-based word (L. scientia) for the English 'knowledge.'  Surely the following is perfectly vacuous:  "Scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is knowledge knowledge, epistemic knowledge."  So I say, nontrivially,

2. Scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge.

Among the natural sciences we have, in first place, physics.  And so a really hard-assed scientisticist (to coin a word as barbarous as what it names) might that hold that

3. Scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is physics and whatever can be reduced to physics.

But it would be more plausible  for the scientisticist to wax latitudinarian and include among the natural sciences physics, chemistry, biology, etc. and their specializations and offshoots such as quantum mechanics, electrochemistry, neurobiology, and what all else.  He ought also, for the sake of plausibility, to drop the idea that all natural sciences reduce to physics.  (It might be difficult to write a textbook on plant physiology that employed only concepts from physics.)  So definition (2) is to be preferred to (3).  But (2) is still a rather strong claim, so it is advisable to distinguish between strong and weak scientism:

4. Strong scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge.

5. Weak scientism is the view that, while the 'hard' sciences are the epistemic gold standard, other fields of inquiry are not without some value, though they are vastly inferior to the hard sciences and not worthy of full credence.

(For the strong v. weak distinction, cf. J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism, SCM 2009, p. 6.  My review of Moreland here.)

Rosenberg, judging by the above quotation, plumps for strong scientism.  It is this strain that I have under my logical microscope.

To illustrate the strong v. weak distinction, consider political 'science.'  Does it give us knowledge?  On strong scientism no; on weak scientism yes.

At this point we should ask what exactly makes the so-called 'hard' sciences of physics, etc. hard.  'Hard' does not mean (or does not primarily mean) that they are difficult to master and even more difficult to make a contribution to; it means  that the criteria they must satisfy to count as science are extremely stringent. 

This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high.  For example, is climate science science according to these criteria?  Or is it more of a mishmash of science and leftist ideology? I'll leave you to ponder that question. Hint: take a close look at #s 3 and 4.    There are branches of physics that cannot satisfy all five criteria.  But most of physics and chemistry meets the standard.  How about evolutionary biology?  Does it satisfy #s 3 and 4?

Is political science science according to these criteria?  Obviously not. Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters. 

Am I suggesting that the only real knowledge is rigorously scientific knowledge?  Of course not.  Consider the knowledge we find in the useful article to which I linked.  There is no doubt in my mind that each of the five criteria the author mentions is a criterion of science in the strictest sense.  (I leave open the question whether there are other criteria).  Now how do we know that?  By performing repeatable experiments in highly controlled conditions?  No.  By making testable predictions? No.  The knowledge embodied in (1)-(5) is clearly not natural-scientific knowledge.  It does not satisfy the above criteria. 

We know that (1)-(5) are criteria of genuine science by reflecting on  scientific practice and isolating its characteristics.  When we do that we engage in the philosophy of science.  Since some of the philosophy of science gives us genuine knowledge about natural science, knowledge that it not itself natural-scientific knowledge, it cannot be the case that all genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge.

One might respond by insisting that the knowledge embodied in (1)-(5) is natural-scientific depite its failure to satisfy the above five criteria.  But then one would be arbitrarily broadening the scope of natural-scientific knowledge which in turn would render (4) less definite and less interesting.  Broaden it enough and you approach vacuity. You approach the tautology, "The only genuine knowledge is knowledge."

Mathematics poses another problem for (4).  Mathematics  is not a natural science.  Empirical observation is no part of it.  Nor is experiment.  Mathematicians qua mathematicians do not make testable predictions about future events in the physical world.  If a mathematician were to predict that a certain theorem will be proven within ten year's time, he would not be making a prediction in mathematics about a mathematical object, but a prediction about psychological and physical events: he would be predicting that some mathematician would undergo a series of mental states that he would then commit to paper by physical acts of writing. And yet mathematical knowledge is genuine knowledge.

So what can a strong scientisticist do?  He can water down his definition:

5. Strong scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge plus mathematics.

But why stop there?    Mathematicians construct proofs.  Proofs are valid arguments.  Not all arguments are valid.  The disinction between validity and invalidity falls within the purview of logic.  Now logic is a body of knowledge, but it is not natural-scientific knowledge.  So logic is another counterexample to (4).  Will our scientisticist advance to

6. Strong scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge plus mathematics plus logic.

At this point someone might object that mathematics and logic are not knowledge but merely systems of notation that we use to help us make sense of physical phenomena.  And so, while natural science studies natural reality, there is no reality that mathematicians and logicians study.  Well, do those who make such claims claim to know that they are true? If yes, then they lay claim to knowledge which is neither natural-scientific nor mathematical nor logical.  They lay claim to philosophical knowledge, specifically, metaphysical knowledge.  They lay claim to knowledge as to what counts as real.  Will they then move to the following definition?

7. Strong scientism is the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge plus the philosophical knowledge that there is no logical or mathematical reality.

If they do advance to (7) then they are hoist by their own petard, or, to change the metaphor , they have completely eviscerated their own thesis.  (What's worse, to be hanged or disemboweled?)  After all, the whole point of scientism is to place a restriction on what counts as genuine knowledge.  'Genuine' is strictly redundant; I use it for emphasis.  Pleonasm is at most a peccadillo.)

Introspective knowedge is yet another counterexample to strong scientism as codified in definition (4).  The certain knowledge of my own mental states that introspection affords me is knowledge if anything is.  Which is better known: that I feel head-ache pain or that I have a brain?  The first, obviously.  But introspective knowledge is not natural-scientific knowledge.  The latter type of knowledge is knowledge via the outer senses, suitably extended by such instruments as microscopes and telescopes.  But introspective knowledge is not knowledge via the outer senses taken singly or in combination.  Suppose I see myself in a mirror wearing a sad expression and  thereby come to the knowledge that I am sad. That is is not introspective knowledge.  Introspective knowledge is first-person knowledge of one's own mental states via inner sense.

Since introspective knowledge is genuine knowledge, strong scientism is plainly false.

Memory is another source of genuine knowledge that refutes strong scientism.  How do I know that I had lunch at 12:30 and then read Gustav Bergmann's "Some Remarks on the Ontology of Ockham" while smoking a fine cigar?  Because I remember those events.  Memorial knowledge is not natural-scientific knowledge.  If you think it is, describe the repeatable experiments you had to perform to come to the knowledge that you had lunch.  And yet memory is a source of genuine knowledge.  It is of course not infallible, but then neither is sense-perception on which natural science is ultimately based.

And what of history?  Do we not have a vast amount of knowledge of the past?  We do, but it is not natural-scientific knowledge.   

There is aso the obvious point that strong scientism is self-vitiating.  Is the proposition All  knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge scientifically knowable?  No, it isnt.  Therefore, strong scientism, by its own criterion, is not knowable.  Is it true, but not knowable?  If you say that it is, then you must countenance other propositions that are true but not knowable.  If strong scientism is put forth as a linguistic recommendation as to how we ought to use 'knowledge,' then I decline the suggestion on the ground of its arbitrarity.

Finally, there is our knowledge of value and of right and wrong.  If strong scientism is true, then we cannot claim to know that natural-scientific knowledge is a value, or that knowledge is better than ignorance, or that kindness is to be preferred over cruelty, or that vivisection is morally wrong, or that the Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany were unjust.

But aren't these things better known than that strong scientism is true? 

Scientism is not science.  It is a philosophical claim about science that finds no support in any science.  What's more, it is plainly false, as I have just shown. 

Related articles

Jerry Fodor's Idiosyncratic Understanding of 'Scientism'

Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

What is Scientism?

Scientism

Is Political Science Science?

What is Left for Philosophy to Do?

 

Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Herewith, some commentary  on a very poor article by Steven Pinker, Science is not Your Enemy. 

I will first state in general why I consider the article of low quality, and then quote a large chunk of it and intersperse some comments (bolded).  This is Part One.  Part Two to follow if I have the time and energy, and if I can convince myself that continuing is worth my time and energy.

In the meat of his article, Pinker puts forth a number of mostly silly straw-man definitions of 'scientism' which he then has no trouble dismissing.  For example, he suggests that on one understanding of scientism, it is the claim that "all current scientific hypotheses are true."  Is Pinker joking? No reputable writer has ever said that or defined scientism in terms of it. 

After he is done with his straw-man exercise, Pinker proffers his own definition, which, as best as I can make out, comes to the following.  Scientism consists in the espousal of two ideals operative in science and which "scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life."    "The first is that the world is intelligible."  "The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard."

So Pinker's definition is essentially this.  Scientism is the view that all of our intellectual life ought to be governed by two ideals, the ideal that the world is intelligible and the ideal that knowledge-acquisition is difficult.

Now that is a pretty sorry excuse for a definition of scientism.  First of all, the intelligibility of the world is not an ideal of inquiry, but a presupposition of inquiry.  Inquirers do not aim at or strive after intelligibility; they presuppose it.  What they strive after is knowledge and understanding, a striving that presupposes that their subject matter is understandable, and is indeed, at least in part, understandable by us.  Second, that acquiring knowledge is hard is not an ideal either; it is a fact.  Third, Pinker's definition is vacuous and trivial.  Apart from a few radical skeptics, who would maintain that we ought not presuppose that the world is intelligible or maintain that knowledge acquisition is easy?  Even those who maintain that there are limits to what we can understand  presuppose that it is intelligible that there should be such limits.

Fourth, and most importantly, Pinker's definition is just a piece of self-serving rhetoric that has nothing to do with scientism as it is actually discussed by competent scholars.  What competent scholars discuss is something rather more specific than Pinker's nebulosities and pious platitudes.  There are a number of different types of scientism, but the following will give you some idea of how the term is actually used by people who know what they are talking about:

Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Scientism," Social Research, Vol. 15, No. 4 (December 1948), pp. 462-494. Voegelin speaks of

. . . the scientistic creed which is characterized by three principal dogmas: (1) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary.

Compare Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge University Press,
1975), pp. xiii (emphasis added):

. . . I regard science as an important part of man's knowledge of reality; but there
is a tradition with which I would not wish to be identified, which would say that scientific knowledge is all of man's knowledge. I do not believe that ethical statements are expressions of scientific knowledge; but neither do I agree that they are not knowledge at all. The idea that the concepts of truth, falsity, explanation, and even understanding are all concepts which belong exclusively to science seems to me to be a perversion . . .

Putnam does not need the MavPhil's imprimatur and nihil obstat, but he gets them anyway, at least
with respect to the above quotation. The italicized sentence is vitally important. In particular, you will be waiting a long time if you expect evolutionary biology to provide any clarification of the crucial concepts mentioned. See in particular, Putnam's "Does Evolution Explain Representation?"
in Reviewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Here is my characterization of scientism:

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science.  The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that natural-scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary.  Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

I will now quote and comment on some of Pinker's text: 

The term “scientism” is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine. Sometimes it is equated with lunatic positions, such as that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.” Sometimes it is clarified with adjectives like “simplistic,” “naïve,” and “vulgar.” The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of “queer” and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend.

Pinker gets off to a rocky start with these straw-man definitions.  Who ever defined 'scientism' as the view that "science is all that matters" or that "scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems"?  Furthermore, there is no such "definitional vacuum" as Pinker alleges.  The man has simply not done his homework.  If he had studied the literature on the subject, he would have encountered a number of specific, precise definitions, such as the one from Voegelin above. 

Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble.

Who ever said it was?

On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science.

Stop the straw-manning!  Who would ever get it into his head to think that all current scientific hypotheses are true?  And who ever maintained that this is what scientism means?

It is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them.

Nice rhetoric, but what does it mean concretely?  And to say that scientism is not imperialistic and expansionist simply flies in the face of  what major proponents of it maintain.  According to Edmund O. Wilson, "It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology to be included in the Modern Synthesis." (On Human Nature, Harvard UP, 1978, p. 90; quoted in Mikael Stenmark, "What is Scientism?" Religious Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, March 1997, p. 16)  If the humanities are branches of biology, then that counts as an "occupation" of the territory  of the humanities by a natural science.

If the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge, then the only genuine knowledge of the mind is via neuroscience and behavioral psychology; and if reality is all and only what is accessible to natural-scientific knowledge, then not only is phenomenological and introspective knowledge bogus, but the mind as we actually experience it is illusory.  To fail to see a threat to the humanities here is to be willfully blind.

And it [scientism] is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

I am afraid that Pinker hasn't thought his position through very well.  I am glad to hear that he thinks that there are truths and values in addition to "physical stuff."  What I'd like him to tell us is which natural science  is equipped to elucidate truth, falsity, explanation, inference, normativity, rationality, understanding, and all the rest.  Biology perhaps?

The Linder Gallery, c.1622-1629, Cordover Collection, LLC

The first is that the world is intelligible.

This is better referred to as a presupposition of scientific inquiry rather than as an ideal of such inquiry, but let's not quibble.  It is certainly the case that all inquiry, scientific or not, presupposes the intelligibility of its subject-matter, not to mention the power of our minds to access at least part of this intelligibility.  But pointing this out does nothing to support scientism  in any nonvacuous sense. 

The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.” The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of brute faith, but gradually validates itself as more and more of the world becomes explicable in scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be attributed to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by chemical and physical reactions among complex molecules.

What Pinker seem not to understand is that opponents of scientism are not opposed to natural-scientific inquiry.  He continues to waste his breath against a straw man.

Demonizers of scientism often confuse intelligibility with a sin called reductionism.

An awful sentence.  Let me rewrite it so that it makes some sense.  Demonizers of natural science (not scientism) often make the mistake of thinking that the quest for scientific understanding, which often takes the form of reducing X to Y, is somehow mistaken.  For example, these people think that if lightning is explained as an atmspheric electrical discharge, then this reductive explanation does not generate genuiine understanding.  But of course it does.

But again, what does this have to do with scientism, properly and narrowly understood?

Many of our cultural institutions cultivate a philistine indifference to science.

Sad but true!  But it is also true that our cultural institutions produce hordes of ill-educated scientists who know their specialties but are philistines outside of them. 

The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard.

No one will deny that the acquisition of knowledge is hard.  This is a fact, not an ideal.  So far, Pinker has told us that scientism -- in his mouth a 'rah-rah' word as opposed to a 'boo' word -- is the view that two 'ideals should be promoted, namely, the intelligibility of nature and the fact that knowledge-acquisition is hard.

But this definition is quite empty since hardly anyone will oppose scientism so defined.  Who denies that inquiry presupposes intelligibility and that knowledge-acquisition is hard?

The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

Now the problem is not that Pinker is saying something trivial but that he is saying something false.  One source of knowledge is the testimony of experts and authorities and eye witnesses.  Indeed much of what we know about the natural world is known on the basis of the say-so of experts whose authority we credit.  For example, I know that there is no such thing as the luminiferous ether even though I have not replicated the Michelson-Morley experiement.  How do I know it?  I know it by reading it in reputable science texts.  Besides, how many physicists have replicated the Michaelson-Morley experiment or the experiments or observations that confirm relativity physics?  Could one do science at all if one took nothing on authority and tried to work everything out for oneself, including the advanced mathematics without which modern physics is unthinkable?  Think about it. So it is simply false to say, as Pinker does, that authority is a "generator of error."  Sometimes it is.  But mostly it isn't.

Similarly with "conventional wisdom."  Sometimes it leads us astray.  But mostly it doesn't. 

To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

More platitudes!  Who denies this?  And what does any of this have to do with scientism?

 

Related articles

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

What is Scientism?

Scientism

What is Left for Philosophy to Do?

The French and Philosophy, Piaget and Scientism

Claude Boisson writes by e-mail:

We are very proud of this French peculiarity, which never fails to impress foreigners.

But Jean Piaget, the psychologist, wrote a little book (Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie, 1965) in which he suggested that premature exposure to philosophy could be detrimental to good thinking. According to him, adequate philosophizing presupposes the mastery of a science, and young students in France are encouraged to vaticinate in a void. 

Piaget was guilty of scientism, to be sure, but his view has some merit. Bad bad students, or bad good students (i.e. "bright" students who have learned rhetoric but don't really care about thinking), can get intoxicated with words.

That may account in part for French philosophical bullshitting of the Derrida type.

Professor Boisson is on to something.  But permit me a quibble.  While "vaticinate in a void" has a nice alliterative ring to it, it is not so much that young students in France are encouraged to prophesy but to think in ways that are excessively abstract and verbal and insufficiently attentive to empirical data and scientific method.  So I suggest 'ratiocinate in a void.'

The underlying problem, and it is not merely a problem for the French, is that of the "two cultures" to borrow a phrase from a lecture and a book by C. P. Snow, now over 50 years past.  There is literary culture and scientific culture and tension between them.  Jean Piaget sounds the same theme in his Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (World Publishing, 1971, tr. Wolfe Mays).  This is the book whose French title  Boisson supplies above.  I read it in 1972 but it didn't dissuade me from graduate work in philosophy the next year.  I began re-reading it this morning at the considerable temporal distance of 41 years.  I hope to dig into and 'blog' some of its details later or perhaps in this very entry.

One of the curious things about the denigrators and opponents of philosophy is that they never hesitate to philosophize themselves when it suits their purposes.  But somehow, when they do it, it is not philosophy.  It is something worthwhile and important and true! These scientistic denigrators never just stick to their laboratories and empirical research.  For example, Piaget's second chapter bears the bold and sweeping title, "Science and Philosophy."  He makes all sorts of interesting arm-chair claims and bold assertions about the respective natures of science and philosophy and the relations between them.  One wonders how careful, plodding empirical research bears upon these Piagetian pronunciamentos from the arm chair. They are obviously not scientific assertions, though they are the assertions of a scientist. 

In doing what he is doing Piaget must presuppose the validity of at least some philosophical thinking, his own.  What is annoying is when people like him fail to own up to what they are doing and refuse to admit that it is philosophy.  In an unbearably tendentious manner, they use 'philosophy' to refer to something cognitively worthless while posturing as if what they are doing is cognitively worthwhile and so can't be philosophy!  Richard Dawkins plays this game in a discussion with Stephen Law.  Law made a non-empirical, wholly conceptual point with which Dawkins agreed, but Dawkins refused to take it as evidence of the cognitive value of some philosophy.  Does Dawkins think that philosophy is by definition cognitively worthless?  If so, then I say that Dawkins is by definition an idiot.

But I digress. 

Returning to the "Science and Philosophy" chapter of Insights and Illusions, we observe that  Piaget makes bold to speak of the meaning of life, a question his positivist colleagues, wielding their version of Hume's Fork, the dreaded Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Significance,  had consigned to the dustbin of cognitive meaninglessness.  He calls it "the most central problem motivating all philosophy . . . the problem of the 'finality' of existence." (Insights and Illusions, p. 42)  But then he goes on to say this:  "To begin with finality [teleology], this concept is the prototype of those concepts that positivism considers to be metaphysical and nonscientific, and rightly so, since it concerns an anthropocentric idea, originating in a confusion between conscious subjective data and the causal mechanism of action, and involving, under the form of 'final causes,' a determination of the present by the future." (Ibid.)

My question to Piaget:  one the basis of which empirical science do you know this to be the case?  Or is this just another ex cathedra (literally: 'from the chair') asseveration?

 

Related articles

Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

What is Left for Philosophy to Do?

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

I thank old blogger buddy Keith Burgess-Jackson for sending me a pdf of Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Scientism," Social Research, Vol. 15, No. 4 (December 1948), pp. 462-494. Voegelin speaks of

. . . the scientistic creed which is characterized by three principal dogmas: (1) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary.

Compare Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge University Press,
1975), pp. xiii (emphasis added):

. . . I regard science as an important part of man's knowledge of reality; but there is a tradition with which I would not wish to be identified, which would say that scientific knowledge is all of man's knowledge. I do not believe that ethical statements are expressions of scientific knowledge; but neither do I agree that they are not knowledge at all. The idea that the concepts of truth, falsity, explanation, and even understanding are all concepts which belong exclusively to science seems to me to be a perversion . . .

Putnam does not need the MavPhil's imprimatur and nihil obstat, but he gets them anyway, at least with respect to the above quotation. The italicized sentence is vitally important. In particular, you will be waiting a long time if you expect evolutionary biology to provide any clarification of the crucial concepts mentioned. See in particular, Putnam's "Does Evolution Explain Representation?" in Reviewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Here is my characterization of scientism:

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science.  The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary.  Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

What is wrong with scientism? 

One problem with strong scientism is that it is self-vitiating, as the following argument demonstrates: (a)The philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge; ergo, (b) If all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, then the philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of genuine knowledge.

Hence one cannot claim to know that strong scientism is true if it is true.  For if it is true, then the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.  But strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge.  So scientism, if true, is not knowable as true by the only methods of knowledge there are.  How then could the proponent of strong scientism render rational his acceptance  of strong scientism?  Apparently, he can't, in which case his commitment to it is a matter of irrational ideology.

After all, he cannot appeal to rational insight as a source of knowledge.  For that is precisely ruled out as a source of knowledge by scientism.

Scientism falls short of the very standard it enshrines.  It is at most an optional philosophical belief unsupported by science. It also has unpalatable consequences which for many of us have the force of counterexamples.  Here are some positive considerations against it.

If scientism is true, then none of the following can count as items of knowledge: That torturing children for fun is morally wrong; that setting afire  a sleeping bum is morally worse than picking his pockets; that raping a woman is morally worse than merely threatening to rape her; that verbally threatening to commit rape is morally worse than entertaining (with pleasure) the thought of committing rape; that 'ought' implies 'can'; that moral goodness is a higher value than physical strength; that might does not make right; that the punishment must fit the crime; that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true; that what is past was once present; that if A remembers B's experience, then A = B; and so on. 

In sum: if there are any purely rational insights into aesthetic, moral, logical, or metaphysical states of affairs, then scientism is false.  For the knowledge I get when I see (with the eye of the mind) that the punishment must fit the crime or that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true is not an item of scientific knowledge.

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Sweet Dreams of Dennett

John W. Carlson's Words of Wisdom: A Philosophical Dictionary for the Perennial Tradition

Sweet Dreams of Dennett

The following first appeared on 15 January 2006 at the old Powerblogs site.  Here it is again, considerably reworked.

...........

I saw Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams (MIT Press, 2005) on offer a while back at full price, but declined to buy it: why shell out $30 to hear Dennett repeat himself one more time? But the other day it turned up for $13 in a used bookstore. So I  bought it, unable to resist the self-infliction of yet more Dennettian   sophistry. What am I? A masochist? A completist? A compulsive consciousness and qualia freak?

The subtitle is "Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness." That raises the question of how there could even be philosophical obstacles to such a science. I am not aware that philosophers control the sources of funding for neuroscience projects. And what could a philosopher say that could stymie brain science?

But let's look at a passage:

     If we are are to explain the conscious Subject, one way or another
     the transition from clueless cells to knowing organizations of
     cells must be made without any magic ingredients. This requirement
     presents theorists with what some see as a nasty dilemma . . . . If
     you propose a theory of the knowing Subject that describes whatever
     it describes as like the working of a vacant automated factory --
     not a Subject in sight -- you will seem to many observers to have
     changed the subject or missed the point. On the other hand, if your
     theory still has tasks for a Subject to perform, still has a need
     for a Subject as witness, then . . . you have actually postponed
     the task of explaining what needs explaining.

     To me, one of the most fascinating bifurcations in the intellectual
     world today is between those to whom it is obvious -- obvious --
     that a theory that leaves out the Subject is thereby disqualified
     as a theory of consciousness (in Chalmer's terms, it evades the
     Hard Problem), and those to whom it is just as obvious that any
     theory that doesn't leave out the Subject is disqualified. I submit
     that the former have to be wrong. . . . (p. 145)

Dennett has done a good job of focusing the issue. On the one side, the eliminativists who hold that the only way to explain the conscious Subject is by explaining it away. On the other side, those who are convinced that one cannot explain a datum by denying its existence.

What we have here fundamentally is a deep philosophical dispute about the nature of explanation, and not a debate confined to the philosophy of mind. What's more, it is not a debate that is going to be resolved by further empirical research.  Not all legitimate questions are empirical questions.

It ought to be self-evident that any explanation that consigns the explanandum (that which is to be explained) to the status of nonexistence is a failure as an explanation. Eliminativist moves are confessions of failure. Any genuine explanation of X presupposes (and so cannot eliminate) the
existence of X.  One cannot explain something by explaining it away.  Two related points:

1. One cannot explain what does not exist.  One cannot explain why unicorns roam the Superstition Wilderness, or why the surface of the moon is perfectly smooth.  There is nothing to explain.  In the case of consciousness, however, there is something to explain.  So it at least makes sense to attempt to explain consciousness.

2. An explanation that entails the nonexistence of the explanandum is no explanation at all.

Both (1) and (2) are analytic truths that simply unpack the concept of explanation.

I once heard a proponent of Advaita Vedanta claim that advaitins don't explain the world; they explain it away.  Now it is surely dubious in the extreme to think of this insistent and troubling plural world of our ongoing everyday acquaintance as an illusion.  Whatever its exact ontological status, it exists.  If it didn't there would be nothing to explain or explain away.  And if one were to explain it away, as one with Brahman, then one would have precisely failed to explain it.

What Dennet is maintaining about consciousness and the Subject is even worse.  There is some vestige of sense in the claim that the world is an illusion.  It makes sense, at least initially, to say that there is an Absolute Consciousness and that the world is its illusion.  But it is utterly absurd to maintain that consciousness is an illusion. The very distinction between illusion and reality presupposes consciousness.  In a world without consciousness, nothing would appear, and so nothing would appear
falsely.  Necessarily, no consciousness, no illusions. Illusions prove the reality of consciousness.

This is a very simple point. It is an 'armchair' point.  All you have to do is think to know that it is true.  But neither its being 'armchair' nor its being simple is an argument against it.  The law of non-contradiction is simple and  'armchair' too. 

The denigration of a priori knowledge is part and parcel of the pseudophilosophy of scientism.

Since consciousness exists, the project of explaining it at least makes sense, by (1).  By (2), an eliminativist explanation is no explanation at all.

The thing about consciousness is that the only way to explain it in terms satisfactory to a materialist is by denying its existence. It is to Dennett's 'credit' that he drives to the very end of this dead-end road, thereby showing that it is a dead-end.

My most rigorous demolition of Dennett's scientistic sophistry is in Can Consciousness be Explained? Dennett Debunked.

If Dennett were right, then we would all be zombies, including Dennett.  (See Searle, Dennett, and Zombies.) But then there would be no consciousness to explain and to write fat books about.

The demand that consciousness be exhaustively explained in terms involving no tincture of  consciousness is a demand that cannot be met.  Explanation of what by whom to whom?  Explanation is an inherently mind-involving notion.  There are no explanations in nature.  There is no way the science of matter can somehow close around the phenomena of mind and include them within its ambit.  Science, like explanation, is inherently mind-involving.  

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Philosophy Always Buries Its Undertakers

Philosophy always buries its undertakers (Etienne Gilson) and resurrects its dead.

There is a semi-competent article in The Guardian entitled Philosophy Isn't Dead Yet that is worth a look.  Why 'semi-competent'?

The author characterizes metaphysics as ". . . the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of nature – of space and time, the fundamental stuff of the world."  That is just wrong. If I were in a snarky mood I would say it is hilariously wrong.  For it forecloses on the possibility that there is more to reality than nature, the realm of space-time-matter.  You can't define out of existence, or out of the province of metaphysics,  God, the soul, unexemplified universals and the rest of the Platonic menagerie.  If they aren't metaphysical topics, nothing is. 

The author would have done much better had he defined metaphysics as the branch of philosophy that aspires to an understanding of reality.  A central question in philosophy is precisely whether reality is exhausted by nature.

Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

The middle sentence in this paragraph is exactly right.  But it is sandwiched between two very dubious sentences.  First of all, why is it a failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings?  It is undoubtedly a failure of naturalistic metaphysics, but the latter is not physics.  Don't confuse physics with a scientistic metaphysics based on physics.  Physics cannot be said to fail to accommodate consciousness for the simple reason that that is not the job of physics to do any such thing..  Physics abstracts from consciousness.  Conscious beintgs such as me and my cats  can be studied from the point of view of physics since we are physical objects, though not just  physical objects. 

Suppose you throw a rock, a cactus, a coyote, and me off a cliff at the same time.  Rock, cactus, coyote and man will fall at the same rate: 32 ft per sec per sec.  (Ignore my arm-flailing and the resultant wind resistance.) The foursome is subject to the same physical laws, the same physical constants, the same idealizations (center of mass, center of gravity, etc).  Physics abstracts from reason, self-consciousness, intentionality, qualia, animal life, vegetative life.  To expect physics to "accommodate" life, consciousneness, self-consciousness, agency, intentionality and all the rest is to tax it beyond its powers.

In his third sentence, the author tells us that ". . . physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists)."  This is an inept and confused way of making an important point.  The important point is that matter is known:  Our physics gives us knowledge of the physical universe.  It is indeed a strange and wonderful fact that matter reveals itself to us, that it possesses an inherent intelligibility that we are in some measure able to discern.  The author spoils things, however, by adding that matter reveals itself to material objects.  Of course, physicists are material beings; but it is to the minds of these material beings that matter reveals itself. 

The author is making an absurd demand: he is demanding that physics explain how knowledge is possible.  But it is actually worse than that: he is demanding that physics explain how knoweldge of the material world is possible by wholly material beings.  Good luck with that.

We are also told that current physics "mishandles time."  Smolin is mentioned.  Really?  Why demand that physics accommodate the full reality of time?  Physics, I would argue, does well, for its limited purposes, to abstract from the A-series.  The B-series is all it needs.  (See "Why Do We Need Philosophy?" below for an explanation of the distinction.) Physics can't account for temporal becoming?  Why should it?  One possibility is that temporal becoming is mind-dependent and not part of reality as she is in herself.  Another possibility is that physics simply abstracts from temporal becoming in the way it abstracts from life, consciousness, self-consciousness, intentionality, etc.

The author is right, however, to smell "conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication" when it comes to attempts by Lawrence Krauss and others to explain how the universe arose ex nihilo from spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, as if theose fluctuations and that vacuum were not precisely something.

If all's well that ends well, the author ends well with a paragraph that earns the coveted MavPhil stamp of approval and nihil obstat:

Perhaps even more important, we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by "reality". The dismissive "Just shut up and calculate!" to those who are dissatisfied with the incomprehensibility of the physicists' picture of the universe is simply inadequate. [. . .]This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead

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Another Example of Awful Science Journalism

My first example is here.  Read it for context and for some necessary distinctions.  Now for a second example.  Adam Frank writes,

For Smolin there is no timeless world and there are no timeless laws. Time, he says, is real and nothing can escape it.

Time, of course, seems real to us. We live in and through time. But to physicists, time's fundamental reality is an illusion.

Ever since Newton, physicists have been developing ever-more exact laws describing the behavior of the world. These laws live outside of time because they don't change.

That means these laws are more real than time.

First of all, it can be true both that time is real and that not everything is in time.

Second, if you want to tell us that time is an illusion, just say that, don't say, oxymoronically, that its fundamental reality is an illusion.  Obviously, if something has reality, let alone fundamental reality, then it cannot be an illusion.

Third, as I argued earlier, it is impossible to maintain both that time is an illusion and that, e.g., the Big Bang occurred 12-13 billion years ago.  If you want to say that temporal becoming or temporal passage is an illusion, then say that; but don't confuse the rejection of temporal becoming with the rejection of time altogether.  For it could well be that time is real, but exhausted by the B-series, as I explained in the earlier post.  And this, I take it, is what most physicists maintain.  They think of time as the fourth dimension of a four-dimensional space-time manifold.  That is not a denial of the reality of time; it is a theory of what time is.

Fourth, it is intolerably sloppy to say that "to physicists," time is an illusion when, as is obvious, Smolin is a physicist who denies this!

Fifth, If the laws of physics don't change, how is it supposed to follow or "mean" (!) that "these laws are more real than time."   What on earth is this guy getting at?  Is he suggesting that time is an illusion because the laws of physics are real?  The laws of physics are real and they 'govern' what happens in the changing physical world which is also real. 

Frank, I take it, is a physicist.  So he must be capable of precise thinking and clear writing.  Why then does he write such slop as the above in his off-hours?  Why can't he write something clear and coherent that is helpful to the interested layman?

I fear that a lot of our contemporary scientists are hopelessly bereft of general culture.  They are brilliant in their specialties but otherwise uneducated.  But that does not stop the likes of Dawkins and Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and Mlodinow from spouting off about God and time and the meaning of life . . . .  They want to play the philosopher without doing any 'homework.'  They think it's easy: you just shoot your mouth off.

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The Theological Virtues and the Scientistic Virtues

The theological virtues are three: faith, hope, and charity.  The scientistic virtues are two: faith and hope.  The scientistic types, pinning their hopes on future science,  are full of faith in things unseen, things that are incomprehensible now but will, they hope, become comprehensible in the fullness of time.  They thirst less for justice and righteousness than for the final slaying  of the dragon of the Hard Problem that stands  between them and the paradise of naturalism.  (Of course they fool themselves in thinking that the problem of qualia is the only hard problem in the philosophy of mind.)

What is strange here is the quasi-religious talk of "pinning  hopes on future science"  as if -- quite absurdly -- knowing more and more about the meat within our skulls will finally resolve the outstanding questions in the philosophy of mind.  And what, pray tell,  does science have to do with hope?  To speak of hope in this context shows that one has abandoned science for scientism. There is also something exceedingly curious about hoping that one turn out to be just a material system, a bit of dust in the wind.

"I was so hoping to be proved to be nothing more than a clever land mammal slated for destruction in a few years, but, dammit all, there are reasons to think that we are more than animals and have a higher destiny.  That sucks! Life would then have a meaning beyond the four 'F's: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and reproducing!"

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Thomas Nagel, Heretic

Andrew Ferguson writes on the the explosion of hostility toward Thomas Nagel after the publication of his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos.  Here is my overview of the book.  More detailed posts on the same book are collected under the Nagel rubric.

For a non-philosopher, Ferguson's treatment is accurate.  Here are a couple of  interesting excerpts in which he relates the thoughts of Daniel Dennett:

Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

What amazes me is that people like Dennett fail to appreciate the utter absurdity of what they are maintaining.  He obviously believes that civilization and civil order both exist and are worth preserving.  This is why he thinks the sober materialist truth ought not be broadcast to hoi polloi.  And yet the preservation of civilization and its order require the widespread acceptance of such illusory notions as that of moral responsibility and freedom of the will.  But if these notions are illusory, then so are Dennett's value judgment that civilization is worth preserving and his factual judgment that civilization exists.

It is absurd (self-contradictory) to maintain both that civilization is valuable and that every value-judgment is illusory.

It is also absurd to urge that the truth ought to be withheld from the ignorant masses.   There is no room for 'ought' in Dennett's eliminativist  scheme.  Nor is there any room for rational persuasion.  Rational persuasion requires that there be reasons, and that people are sensitive to them.  But in Dennett's world reasons must be as ultimately illusory as consciousness and free will and all the rest of Wilfrid Sellars' Manifest Image.

It is absurd to attempt to  persuade rationally if reasons are illusory.

It is also absurd to put forth 'truths' on a scheme that allows no place for truth. 

When all of the following are consigned to the junk heap, then the very eliminativist project consigns itself to the junk heap: consciousness, intentionality, purposiveness, qualia, truth, meaning, , moral responsibility, personhood, free will, normativity in all its varieties . . . .

It's nonsense and the various emperors of this Nonsense are naked.   And yet Dennett and Co. can't see it:

“I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we’ve made in the last 25 years, there’s this sort of retrograde gang,” he said, dropping his hands on the table. “They’re going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worth anything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.”

There was an air of amused exasperation. “Will you name names?” one of the participants prodded, joking.

“No names!” Dennett said.

The philosopher Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist’s Guide, leaned forward, unamused.

“And then there’s some work that is neither cute nor clever,” he said. “And it’s by Tom Nagel.”

There it was! Tom Nagel, whose Mind and Cosmos was already causing a derangement among philosophers in England and America.

Dennett sighed at the mention of the name, more in sorrow than in anger. His disgust seemed to drain from him, replaced by resignation. He looked at the table.

“Yes,” said Dennett, “there is that.”

Around the table, with the PowerPoint humming, they all seemed to heave a sad sigh—a deep, workshop sigh.

Tom, oh Tom .  .  . How did we lose Tom .  .  .

Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States—a bit like being the best power forward in the Lullaby League, but still. His paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was recognized as a classic when it was published in 1974. Today it is a staple of undergraduate philosophy classes. His books range with a light touch over ethics and politics and the philosophy of mind. His papers are admired not only for their philosophical provocations but also for their rare (among modern philosophers) simplicity and stylistic clarity, bordering sometimes on literary grace.  

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Krauss Kreamed

Ed Feser is quite the polemicist, as witness his latest flogging of Lawrence Krauss. 

Many commentators with no theological ax to grind -- such as David Albert, Massimo
Pigliucci, Brian Leiter, and even New Atheist featherweight Jerry Coyne -- slammed Krauss’s amateurish foray into philosophy.  Here’s some take-to-the-bank advice to would-be atheist provocateurs: When even Jerry Coyne thinks your attempt at atheist apologetics “mediocre,” it’s time to throw in the towel. Causa finita est.  Game over.  Shut the hell up already. 

But isn't there something unseemly about beating up a cripple and rolling a drunk?  Not that I haven't done it myself.

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