Carl Sagan, whose Demon Haunted World Lele highlights in his post, partially dodges this issue by asserting in that book not his own humility, but that of his tribe, the scientists, but I think the effect is the same. (Epimenides, remember, didn't claim that he was a liar, specifically, but rather that all Cretans were.) In particular, I am inclined to be less generous than Lele regarding the following quote, from DHW:
I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find.This has a mythical flavor to it, that I don't think is borne out by the actual spirit and practice of science. Is it really humble to desire to know the secrets and regularities of nature, in order to render it more predictable, and thus easier to tame and control? Is it humble to build underground caverns the size of a small city, in order to smash particles together at immense speeds? To perform medical research on animals so that humans might be, for a time, spared the ravages of disease? To send manned spacecraft, and unmanned probes, to other planets? To test, develop, and mass produce synthetic materials whose brief usefulness is eclipsed by their long lifespan as detritus (think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas.) To genetically engineer crops and livestock?
I am not anti-science; not wholesale, anyway. I don't argue here against the potential benefit of many of these endeavors. But to my ear, "humble interrogation" is just the wrong word for them. And I would argue that in few other areas of life do we "impose our needs and wants on Nature" with as much brio as we do in the scientific arena; our needs and wants not just to understand nature, but to master it, to perhaps even outwit it. A position farther from humility would be difficult to stake out.
Sagan was sincere, I think, in his belief that science was humble, as are, surely, most if not all of advocates for science today. And it's true that the best scientists are always prepared to find themselves in the wrong. Every now and again a scientist will even express the hope that his hypothesis is overthrown, and you can't get much more humble than that. But for each one of these, how many feeding frenzies, such as the one Jerry Fodor stirred up with his recent book critiquing natural selection (which is not to defend his thesis in that book, though the response was instructive.)
Humility isn't everything. Sometimes what is called for is self assertion, sometimes bared teeth. The question is whether, where humility is a virtue, it is in any more ready supply in scientific communities than religious ones (or, since the world not is not actually divided in merely two, in artistic ones, political ones, historical ones, literary ones, etc.) Lele shows that Sagan needs some pretty creative bookkeeping to make his point, by personifying Science. Because of the tenacity and arrogance of a Galileo, for example, "Science" gets the credit for revising its picture of the cosmos from geocentrism to heliocentrism. And while science may, as Sagan claims, bestow its highest laurels on "those who convincingly disprove established beliefs," there are a lot of stops along the way where the incentives run in the opposite direction. You don't make your career by conceding other people's theories.
The basic point being that science is participated in by humans, just as religion is, and it is hard (and not always wise) for humans to be humble. There should be no shibboleth here. Let each tend to his own garden.
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Humility is a reaction of apes when faced with dominance. We react that way because we are more or less programmed to, and because we tend to agentify the natural world. Personally I think we should be more realistic about our capacities and foreswear humility.
That's just a tad reductionist, don't you think? We have perfectly good words for deference and submission, no need to downgrade the much more perspicacious and sublime virtue of humility to the level of a conditioned response.
In either case, though, the rubric for who is, or should be, humble, should be applied evenly, which I take to be the point of Lele's post. There are humble and arrogant religionists, and humble and arrogant materialists. The practice of science, for all its merits, is no hedge against the tendancy to overstate one's certainty about how things are. Nor is the practice of religion in all cases a suit of armor that lets in no recognition of ignorance. (One of the signature works of medieval theology is called the Cloud of Unknowing, after all.)
Hi Chris - thanks for the detailed reply! Overall I would say I agree with most of it; basically, take what I said in the humility post together with what I said in the previous week's post. "Science" means at least two things, as does "Christianity" or "Buddhism": a set of normative ideals to which people are encouraged to aspire on one hand; and on the other, a set of institutional practices in which people, being mere fallible humans, typically and even inevitably fall short of those ideals. Humility as Sagan describes it is part of the ideal.
Your post also raises the question of the extent to which humility is even an ideal in science. Here, one might make a distinction between science and technology. Sagan's book is really about science and not technology; he makes several impassioned pleas for institutional recognition of "pure" science with no obvious practical application, which simply attempts to understand nature without changing it. Ecological critiques of technology themselves come out of this kind of science, which tells us that our carbon emissions have been changing the climate and our pollutants have sickened us, and in that respect probably encourages a certain kind of humility before nature. But technology is a very different thing. The ideal of science, as Sagan describes it, remains focused in many respects around truth, discovering the truths about nature. The ideal of technology is very different: it is a utilitarian one, focused on creating great beneficial consequences for many human beings (often, though not always, at the expense of other human beings).
Thanks, Amod. I gave the science/technology distinction a little bit of thought when writing this post, which is why I opened with the example of the LHC--an instance of pure, not applied, science. I would maintain that even pure science takes a certain liberty in de-sacralizing the world, and affording researchers a unique right to disrupt Nature as they will. I think the history and sociology of modern science shows pretty clearly that it originated not in a desire to have a gentle dialogue with Nature so as to harmonize better with it, but rather how to get it to yield its secrets under duress, so as to gain the upper hand upon it. (I am primarily thinking of Bacon, who was not shy with his rapine metaphors, but the intent to "control" Nature is explicit though most of its history.)
And so I take issue with Sagan's characterization of science as truth-seeking. It is that, but it is also much more, just as "enhanced interrogation" is more than a friendly chat.
You can't reduce a feeling, even if you were to accept the notion of bottom-up physicalist causation (which I don't), for the simple reason that a feeling cannot be objectively measured. Feelings can be personally correlated with objective events, but that's not objective science.
Allow me to disagree.
An ancient People erect a colossal monument to the sun-god. While the monument itself is all but humble, it is a sign of their humility.
Arrogance is: "I do not need to erect a monument. God can see into my pure heart".
Humility is: "I am flawed. I need to compensate for those flaws in hard work".
In this respect, the modern scientist is extremely humble. He does not say (as the modern mystic does) "my perfect mind can penetrate into the essence of things", but rather: "I am so flawed that I need a multi-billion-dollars monument-to-nature to show me a glimpse into the essence of things, and even then it would take me a lifetime of research to understand what I saw".
The LHC-monument is all but humble, but the hard work put into it is a sign of the humility of those who built it.
Humility demands that we replace "cannot be objectively measured" with "we have no idea how to objectively measure".
Thus, being humble opens up the possibility that future humans might be able to do so.
I think science is humble in this personal sense - do not assume that all would be unable to do the things you cannot do. This makes the scientific endeavor very arrogant in that it gives us hope that we might one day transcend our limitations.
<span>"Thus, being humble opens up the possibility that future humans might be able to do so." </span>
No, it is a deeper philosphical and logical issue. There is a fundamental dichotomy between the definitions of objective and subjective. Think of them as the "outside" and the "inside". Science explains in terms of the outside. It cannot say anything about any putative internal essence that is not observed on the outside. Once it is observed with the senses, it is on the outside. There are hidden variable theories, but they assume that these variables are on still on the outside, even though they can't be seen as of yet. To the strict physicalist, arrogant in my opinion, there is no inside. Everything is explained in terms of the outside and the inside is an "illusion" and simply ignored. At the other extreme is the solipsist, who explains everything in terms of the inside - there is no outside (I don't know what the term is for those who believe in both). Note that if you believe in other minds or in a conscious God separate from yourself, you also believe in an objective reality, just not the same one as the strict materialist.
You may think that some future technological advance will allow for a bridge to another mind, a "mind meld", or something similar, but there would still be no way of knowing whether the other mind has become one with yours, or whether only your perception has changed and there is still another mind out there invisible to yours. It's the problem of other minds.
On the subject of humility, note what you imply: that classical 18th centuary metaphisics - as it is tought at introduction to philosophy courses - is the final word. That it is an absolute truth and that the philosophical understadning it supplies is unquestionable and will always be unquestionable.
What about Quine's web of belief? Of Wittgeinstein's investigations? Of Nelson Goodman's riddle of induction? You sail clear of 20th centuary philosophy.
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