On Comprehension

While hardly a direct (or even indirect) response to my query, last year, of a suitable term to replace the epithet "scientism,"  I seem to be, at long last, getting some answers all the same. Not particularly satisfying answers, but answers nonetheless. And so I pick up where I left off.

Jerry Coyne, for example, writes:

If you want to see a philosopher’s justification of scientism—in this case “philosophical naturalism,” read Barbara Forrest’s paper published in 2000 in Philo.

All fine, except that "philosophical naturalism" is not what is usually meant by scientism. Philosophical naturalism just means a disbelief in supernatural entities. Scientism, on the other hand, is the assertion that the only things that count as "knowledge" can be derived from science. An exemplar of this view is the chemist Peter Atkins, who perhaps can be excused for the exuberant characterization of science as "limitless" (we all get carried away), but not for his assaults upon both philosophy and poetry:

Although poets may aspire to understanding, their talents are more akin to entertaining self-deception. They may be able to emphasize delights in the world, but they are deluded if they and their admirers believe that their identification of the delights and their use of poignant language are enough for comprehension.  Philosophers too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets … They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists … While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates.

Now that's scientism. We also see it in the writings of E.O. Wilson from time to time, as he expresses the conviction that science will overtake all the humanities before we're through--not just philosophy, but literature, economics, jurisprudence, and aesthetics. He calls this "consilience," and means it as a good thing.

Coyne is able to resile to the defense of scientism as merely philosophical naturalism because he has a conveniently pliable definition of what science is depending on who's asking. He twists a magic ring on his finger, and science is the renowned practice that is able, through concise and rigorous methodology, to make reliable predictions about the world. (In WVO Quine's phrase, "a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”) This kind of science--professional science--has resulted in targeted gene treatments and missions to mars, and is now looking for the Higgs boson in a cave below Switzerland. This definition of science is narrow and rarefied. Only with a great deal of patience and effort is it able to come to any reliable conclusions at all.

Speaking of that cave under Switzerland, for example, there was much to-do recently about preliminary data suggesting neutrinos were traveling at faster-than-light speed, which would cause problems for the Theory of Special Relativity, upon which much of our present understanding of physics relies. Professional science treats this as matter for great skepticism, and we will, I'm sure, be seeing a number of carefully constructed experiments conducted and analyzed before any conclusions are reached that will either confirm or challenge the Theory of Special Relativity on those grounds.

As important and valuable as this type of science is, it has obvious limitations. For one thing, there simply isn't time to apply these methods to all aspects of our lives. We need folk empiricism to get by--to find a good babysitter, to buy food safe from contaminants, to accept a "good" job offer, to pick a good date movie. Even just to confirm rather simple empirical observations, such as "The sun is shining outside my window."

We make decisions such as these with some combination of reason and observation, add in a bit of gut feeling, and hope for the best. We try not to delude ourselves that we aren't putting our trust where it doesn't belong--if we're especially honest and courageous we might examine the flaws in our judgement from past decisions and see if we can find where the distortion lies, but this is not science in anywhere near the same sense as discovering the helical nature of DNA or deriving the combined gas law. Everyday knowledge, that is, employs a great deal of reason and empiricism, but lacks a number of characteristics that professional science is typified by: quantification of terms, articulation of a hypothesis, isolation of variables, experimental design, gathering of data, and applying the "null hypothesis" (where a scientist questions his or her own assumptions by asking how the data might also support a contrary hypothesis.)

The second, and more profound, limitation of professional science as a source of all knowledge is that so much of what we "know" is subjective. We know that we like Woody Allen movies, that we hate humid weather, that we trust certain politicians, are creeped out by spiders, and sexually aroused by (let's say) damsels in distress. The best science can do, here, is verify what we already know firsthand, or will come to know. It cannot contradict this knowledge. No brain scan can tell you, while you are in the heights of delight, or apprehension, or disgust, that you actually feel something other than what you feel, or that you believe other than what you believe. And these too, are important types of knowledge, that we can't do without--they are every bit "facts about the world," just as much as the corresponding states of our neural activity that might be observed by a third party are also facts.   

We cannot have "science" both ways as it pleases us. We cannot on the one hand call Intelligent Design, or homeopathy, or telekinesis, or climate change skepticism "unscientific," and in the same breath say, as PZ Myers has done, that courting one's wife is doing science: The methods and rigor (or lack of same) in each case are the same. What is needed is to determine where folk empiricism is appropriate, and where it is not.

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Coyne's post is a commentary on an earlier post by Jason Rosenhouse, who writes to object that philosopher Michael Ruse has recently unfairly accused biologist David Barash of scientism. Rosenhouse's defense is nearly as silly as Coyne's, but has the virtue of being problematic in slightly more interesting ways. After a frivolous annexation of Rosenhouse's own field, mathematics, yielding "scienceandmathematicism*" as the One True Epistemology, Rosenhouse's principal objection to Ruse is that instead of scientism, what he really means is positivism:

Even if we take that at face value, [Ruse's article is] a refutation of positivism, not scientism. The issue before us is not whether we can make meaningful but nonscientific statements about the world. Moral statements are only a refutation of scientism if you assert that we can learn their truth values by some method that isn't scientific. From the way Ruse phrased this paragraph, it seems clear that he sees it as a statement of opinion, not of fact, that the authorities should be ashamed of themselves in this case. At least in this case, then, he is not asserting that we can have knowledge of, as opposed to strong opinions about, the truth or falsity of moral assertions.

The move Rosenhouse makes here is the very move that makes scientism plausible in the first place (and he's right that there is a direct lineage to positivism), re-defining "knowledge" as "scientifically verified knowledge," making scientism true by virtue of a tautology. This is nothing less than linguistic imperialism, and it is on these grounds that most of scientism''s critics are moved to object to it, myself included.

Such a theory of knowledge is, unfortunately, deeply embedded in mainstream analytic philosophy, most strains of which formally define "knowledge" as a "justified true belief" (JTB). Such a phrasing has a veneer of respectability to it (oh, well if it's justified, then!), but even over the course of its short history this veneer has been laid bare in enough places to expose the rather shoddy construction underneath. Brandon Watson had a post at Siris a couple of years ago critiquing the myth of the timelessness of JTB theory, which he recapitulated on a comment thread at John Wilkins' Evolving Thoughts.

In response, John, citing Quine, reiterated his assertion that "knowledge is a species of belief." But if we take this seriously, it seems to trivialize both concepts. For example, to comment on an illustration by Quine, I can state that I “know” there are no such "things" as Homeric gods, but I also know a great deal “about” the Homeric gods. What is the role of belief in all of this? If it is just that I believe other people told certain stories, then technically my knowledge implies a belief in the fact that these stories were actually told, but it’s hard to see why anyone would ever want to consult or invoke this belief. The question gets even more trivial when we ask what Homer believed he wrote about the Homeric gods (or what Apollonius Rhodius, Ovid, et al, believed they wrote). Such belief has little to no bearing on the meaning or value of these stories—or on the structure of their content.

I propose that the formulation opposite to John's is true. That we "know" things, first, before we believe them. This accords with Brandon's reportage of Locke's view of knowledge as "perception of the agreement or the disagreement between two ideas." To have an idea of something is to know it; the greater we can articulate the properties of it, the better we know it. Belief then follows as a secondary concern. How dedicated are we to an idea, once articulated? I can know a great deal about The Austrian School of Economics, or Epicurianism, or Moral Error Theory, without believing they represent all that much that is true. My belief is a higher order of perception, then, because it attempts to integrate what I know into some kind of coherent picture.

Such a view of knowledge allows us to be much more creative and playful about how we talk about the things that matter. If we can "know about" before we decide that we "know that," we have a huge repository of metaphors to help explicate difficult concepts. (I consider it an open question whether Friedrich Kekule would ever have discovered the ring structure of benzene if he did not "know" the myth of Ouroborus.)

But mythic or metaphorical knowledge is not merely instrumentally important. It is part of the natural way we think about things, which is why literature remains such an important part of our culture. There are things we will always best understand in their guise as stories and dramas, even if later we may try to generalize from them with moral reasoning. This is why it is so alarming that in the case of an extreme scientism like Atkins', we are seriously asked to consider that poetry (or literature generally) can offer us "delight," but not "comprehension." It is a minor relief to this alarm to see that when the chips are down in the contest between poetic and literal knowledge (needless though it be) even such a one as Atkins finds it proper and wise to adopt the language of metaphor--of poetry--over "brute fact" to best make his case.

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*Can two play this game? I counter-propose "sciencemathpoetryhistoryalchemymusicmysticismliterarytheorydialecticaestheticsismadvaitism"?