Interviews - Resources http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/ Thu, 17 May 2012 05:11:00 +0000 43200 Opening ideas to a wider audience. John Wilkins: Biology and Philosophy http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/john-wilkins-biology-and-philosophy-r51 John S. Wilkins is a sessional lecturer at the University of Queensland in philosophy. He runs a philosophy of biology blog, Evolving Thoughts, which is part of the Seed Magazine stable of science blogs. John worked in publishing and printing for 25 years while he eventually finished his philosophy studies with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He used to boast that he had never learned anything of direct practical use, which is a bit of a stretch as he also has a computing diploma.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2008)

PN: On your blog you say that "philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important". How did you come to study the subject and why is it important?

JSW: That’s a long story. The short version is that I was studying theology at an Anglican college in Melbourne, Australia, when, rather undramatically, I lost my faith. I found out shortly before that I was good at intellectual pursuits, getting my first 100% mark and coming first across the seven colleges of the examination, which came as a shock since I was kicked out of school for being an idiot. So I wanted to do something to continue this run of success, as I found it fascinating to relate broad ideas and social attitudes, history and philosophy. I went to a university aged 24 and asked if I could do a degree there. It happened to be one of the two best departments for philosophy in Australia, but I did a double major in history. Even now I think of myself as a philosopher-historian.

At first I just did basic philosophy, focussing on philosophy of religion, social science and history. In my masters, though, I studied David L. Hull’s Science as a Process [1], which was an outworking of my studying philosophy of science. This topic fascinated me, and after doing the usual - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Laudan - I came up with what I thought was a killer solution to the problem of theory change: evolution by (theoretical) natural selection. Of course I soon learned I had been anticipated somewhat. T. H. Huxley came up with the first such account, and of course the evolutionary epistemology movement was still at that time in full swing. Hull’s book turned out to be the best account of science as an evolutionary process, and had just been published, so on a business trip to the US I visited Chicago and contacted David by phone. He was on sabbatical but was more than generous and we talked for quite a while (during a barbecue at his place). Since then he has been an active mentor to me, and I still think that his evolutionary philosophy of science is the best account, although on many other matters I have moved away from his views.

Of course, this meant that I had to actually learn some biology; no small feat for a straight humanities student. David and the other philosophers of biology I have learned from, like Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths, make a special point that philosophy of science done without actual knowledge of the science concerned is mere armchair theorizing. So although I had no science education I took it seriously, and was very fortunate in my choice of PhD advisors. Neil Thomason, who was a student of Paul Feyerabend, and Gareth Nelson, formerly of the AMNH and a leading light of the cladistics revolution, were my advisors, so I was introduced to some careful thinking. Of course I managed to become independent in my own way; they are not to blame. It basically took me 25 years to complete my studies, while working full-time.

Why do I think it’s important? Well I never found sport all that interesting (I am uncannily able to place my forehead in the path of any ball in play), politics basically bores me and the ideas in biology are the foundation for everything that we as humans do or are. Tell me that’s not at least twice as important as sport or politics. Aristotle knew it: “Man” is a zoon politikos, a political animal.


PN: Do you think that coming to academia later in life has had an influence on your views and your approach to your research?

JSW: Yes it has. While I often regret not taking the path less remunerative earlier in my life, coming to it now means I am a lot more measured, but at the same time a lot less inclined to agree with the prevailing views of things. I don’t take academic politics that seriously (except when it hurts people I respect) after 30 years in office politics outside academe. Moreover, my experience of popular debates about antievolutionism has actually led me to deal with some topics I might not otherwise have done, such as misunderstandings about information in biology.

One thing I am extremely concerned with is guiding students to find their own voice and opinions. In particular I want my own students to come out feeling confident they can do this stuff.


PN: Should biologists pay any attention to the philosophy of biology? How receptive are they to your work and that of other philosophers?

JSW: Whether they should, many do. I think that biology as a broad discipline is perhaps one of the more philosophical of the sciences, and the scientists themselves engage in philosophy. Really, the philosophers sometimes have a hard time keeping up. Ernst Mayr is one example, and the species debate, which is my PhD topic, is rife with biologists doing philosophy, so they clearly think it is something worth talking about. There are a few biologists who treat philosophy with derision, but nearly every professional evolutionary biologist, ecologist or taxonomist I have discussed the matter with treats it seriously. Philosophers like Hull, Brandon, Sober, Sterelny and many others in fact collaborate with biologists on philosophical matters.

That said, I often have to deal with incredulous stares from the occasional biologist, who says, in effect “You can’t mean that!” The role of a philosopher of any science is to raise issues in ways that often run counter to the established consensus or the ideas that the professionals were taught as undergraduates. For example, I was recently at a conference in Salt Lake City where I tried very hard to convince a biologist or two that species are not theoretical objects, and hence not units of evolution. To say jaws hit the floor is an understatement. But philosophers can also do some egregiously bad philosophy when dealing with biology. First off, they should never make prescriptions about how biology ought to be done, in my view. Philosophy doesn’t ascertain method, science does. Philosophy explains after the fact why it works or not (or at least tries to). Second, many times philosophers who do not specialize in the philosophy of biology can say some seriously stupid things without realizing how stupid they actually sound to biologists, especially when dealing with matters concerning my special interest, classification. Or maybe it just seems like that to me because I am sensitive to it. But I have cringed under the embarrassment of the ignorance of my profession at times.


PN: Would you like to give some examples?

JSW: Err, not really, although I did blog about it here. I don't want to single out that speaker, though. A good many philosophers of, say, language or metaphysics have over the years assumed that a popular understanding of biology gives them all they need to do philosophy about biological issues. An example is the view that species are natural kinds; this has never been the view of working biologists (except Louis Agassiz and his disciples, and they were an aberration, and Platonists). In the past thirty years or so, in large part due to the work of Hull and others, this has receded somewhat.


PN: In your opinion, in what way would debates about science, and about biology in particular, be affected if participants had a better understanding of the philosophy of science?

JSW: There are a lot of myths about science, and they get used, as myths do, to bolster various schools of thought in science itself, political agendas, and debates over the role of religion in society. So I think we had better ensure that we are actually talking about science and not some strawman designed to skew perceptions to serve a vested interest. Science is crucial to our social fabric and survival - we had better not mess it up for polemic reasons.

One of the core myths is about the “scientific method”. As Feyerabend observed years ago, no such beast exists. But by the same token, science is not arbitrary. Sciences have a “family resemblance” in that while nothing is shared by all sciences, much is shared by most, and it is not impossible, as some who claim to be postmodern think, to tell the difference between real science and the ersatz, though there may be borderline cases. For example, homeopathic medicine has no scientific warrant at all. Nobody who understands science would think otherwise. But failing to recognize that science is about exemplars rather than rigid borders leads a lot of otherwise clever people to make silly mistakes. The best way to “define” science is to point at core examples of it, and not spend too much time debating what the inclusion criteria are. Science is very Wittgensteinian.


PN: In what way is it Wittgensteinian?

JSW: Well three reasons: one is that science is represented by a family resemblance predicate (FRP) set of techniques, methods, and protocols. Another is that in order to understand science one has to "look", as Ludwig said, at examples, not try to define it. The third is that science is a community with rules, in which the rules themselves change over time by the conventions of the scientists themselves. While Wittgenstein had a notorious antipathy to evolution, as many of the Cambridge circle at the time did, it has always seemed to me that his "language community" perspective isn't all that far from an evolutionary view of a taxon, had he but realized it.

Many, maybe most, non-theoretical concepts in biology are like this: they do not have rigid definitions and denotations, but rather they are phenomenal objects identified by sharing most of some set of core properties. Massimo Pigliucci has proposed that species are FRP sets. I think it goes further: "species" (the concept) itself is an FRP set. Concepts derived from a theory have exact definitions to the extent that the theory is properly formalized, but many concepts, “species” included, are not derived from theory.


PN: Your research has looked at species concepts, which you have written "everybody thinks they understand, but which nobody agrees upon". What is at issue and why is it important?

JSW: In the literature since the evolutionary synthesis in the 1940s, over 25 distinct “concepts” of what species are have been published, nearly all by biologists, and they are not commensurable. Choice of concept radically changes the numbers of species in the world, which affects everything from horticulture to conservation. Given that the concept of a species was one of the first, and is one of the central, concepts of biology, this confusion is problematic and it interests me why this is so.

Many things are believed by biologists and philosophers alike about species. One is that a species is a unit of biological diversity, without which we cannot determine how rich or poor a region or ecosystem is. Another is that it, like other taxonomic ranks, is a fact about the world and not a fact about how biologists like to talk about the world. These and many other issues are not as simple as it seems.

So, like a great many other concepts in biology, it is beginning to look like species aren’t actually units. In fact, as Samir Okasha has argued, it may be that biology has no units that apply to all and every case. This would effect a major revolution in biological thinking.


PN: How is it that the "[c]hoice of concept radically changes the number of species in the world, which affects everything from horticulture to conservation"?

JSW: On the so-called "biological" species concept (actually one of a class of reproductive isolation conceptions of species) a species is an isolated (or sometimes a mostly isolated) gene pool. If routine introgression (trafficking in genes between species) occurs, on that conception there is only one species, not two. We know, for example, that wolves and coyotes occasionally interbreed - the red wolf is the result. If you take a reproductive isolation view, then the red wolf has no standing in conservation efforts. But if, as seems likely, many species are formed this way, and in botany it looks like *most* species are, at least for seed broadcasters like ferns, then you are dramatically underestimating the diversity out there in the world.

According to a conception known (misleadingly) as a phylogenetic species concept (I prefer to call it the Diagnostic Conception), a species is any specifiable or diagnosable group. This would, depending on the group, increase the number of species three- to seven-fold. The implications for both studies of extinction and conservation are immense. In particular in the recently established field of agricultural biodiversity, this would affect the impact agriculture is thought to have on the local ecosystem, and the carrying capacity of a farmland. These things matter. If a concept is devised in a science, it very often will have practical consequences in policy and social contexts.


PN: How would this "effect a major revolution in biological thinking"? What would change?

JSW: We are so used to thinking, as in physics, that there are units of organization in a science. There has to be, for example, a class of objects that are genes, a class of objects that are organisms, a class of objects that are species and so on, in order for the science to even be possible. But each time we try to develop a definition or conception of these typical units they turn out to be distinct in many cases - not all heredity is done by nucleotides, not all organisms are individuals throughout their lifecycle, not all species are sexual, or stable, etc. If we abandon that assumption, that there must be units, we resolve all the problems of commensurability across the class the concepts are supposed to cover. I have argued that being a species is like being a vertebrate or an angiosperm or any other evolved class - something that is evolved uniquely in each lineage. Species are not commensurable, because they are each unique traits. A species of rabbit might be commensurate with another species of rabbit, and maybe relatively commensurate with a species of cow or ape, but the further away on the evolutionary tree, the less like each other species are.

So, abandoning the notion that there must be units or grades or ranks in biology is going to make a difference to how biology is done. It will solve, I think, a number of conundrums biologists have had traditionally.


PN: How has our understanding of species as a concept varied over the years and what does this tell us, if anything, about the development of scientific theories?

JSW: That is the topic of my book, which I hope to have published next year. The term is, of course, just an ordinary Latin (and before that Greek) word press-ganged into service in philosophy, and then biology. There has been a story told by biologists and philosophers for over 50 years now, since around the centenary of the publication of the Origin in 1959, that before Darwin, species were held to be defined by essences, a view that we all inherited from Aristotle (the all-purpose evil demon in biology). In the course of my PhD I decided to summarize some of the thinking between Aristotle and Linnaeus. That has developed into two books and around 300 pages, and it turned out that nowhere that I looked were biologists (and natural historians before that term was invented) ever essentialists about species. Moreover, it also turned out that when people did their biology empirically, they tended to be good observers about species no matter what views on generation were currently in fashion.

So I became aware that the usual view that theory determines observation held weakly if at all in natural history, and I began to have a more respectful appreciation for the empiricism of biology. There are certainly cases where theory drove observation in biology, but species are not one of those cases. Moreover, in discussing species and other taxonomic ranks it became obvious also that in the nineteenth century before and after Darwin the discussions about what was a natural classification were rather sophisticated, contrary to the impression one might get from the textbooks. For instance, the Linnean system, although sometimes called the Natural System, was understood to be conventional, and its ranks above species artificial, by its proponents. An excellent book by Peter Stevens [2] covers much of this.

So my conclusion was that biologists were not fools in thrall to Aristotle before Darwin, and they didn’t suddenly become smart and good observers after him. I suspect some of this mythology is due to the influence of physics-centric philosophy of science in the latter half of the twentieth century being applied to biology. The essentialism story is basically, I think, a confusion of the term as used in logic and as used in biology. It’s a homonym for distinct matters, not helped by a 2500 year tradition of using biological examples to illustrate the logical relations.

The major difference in thinking about taxonomy is, I think, the Mendelian and post-Mendelian revolution in genetics, not in evolution as such. Up until 1900 or so, people were mostly concerned with how species arose (the “species question”). After a famous talk by Poulton in 1904, it became the species problem [3]. The reason was, I think, that genetics made species potentially definable for the first time. An early view was the “pure line” concept of De Vries, for example. When genetics and evolution were synthesized, this meant that species became problematic in that field also. The debate rages today, and I have seen taxonomists in particular get very emotional in protecting their taxonomies.


PN: You contributed a paper to the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography. What light can biology shed on history, and vice versa?

JSW: That’s a very interesting question. Biology, like history and a number of other sciences that deal with contingent and particular matters, is a special science. What we learn about, say, DNA, will not translate into knowledge of heredity on another planet. It’s terrestrial biology, and a historical subject at that. We deal with the history of life on planet earth in biology. Hence, formally the issues are the same in each discipline. We take evidence and try to reconstruct the past, as Sober said in a famous book. In both cases that is not possible much of the time - history destroys information - but many people think they can reconstruct it wie es eigentlich gewesen as von Ranke had it.

Being a special science, biology has had to deal with the use of imperfect information about the past and cladistics - the method of presenting the relationships of taxa as tree diagrams - has an elaborate set of techniques (some still highly contested) for doing this which are sometimes used in various kinds of history, such as manuscript reconstruction or linguistic evolution. It’s a set of techniques (and issues) that can be more widely applied in history, I think. While I tend not to like the post-structuralists, the idea that history is a kind of paleontology is a good one. Foucault should have used the metaphor of paleontology instead of archeology, I think.

But these issues have been debated amongst historians for well over a century (and in biblical studies as well) and philosophers of biology should attend to these debates. Since the issues are the same, in my view, and only the subject investigated is different, solutions and problems in one domain will translate into the others relatively directly. For example, what is explanation in biology turns out also to illuminate explanation in history.

While Darwin was not a historiographer, his ideas have focused the debate about the past in one well-elaborated discipline. That has to have implications for history. Hennig’s views and the cladistics revolution have made clear the relation between data and the paths of history, even if many biologists themselves are still confused about it. Although a cladogram merely indicates which taxa are more closely related to another than a third taxon, biologists routinely interpret cladograms as evolutionary trees. You can’t get historical trees without a host of possibly weak ancillary assumptions. This doesn’t mean you can’t get history, but that it is a matter of (Bayesian) likelihoods rather than warrantable statements read right off the tree. The whole matter of homologous “informative” characters (data points) versus convergent and “uninformative” characters maps right onto interpretation in history and diffusionism in social anthropology.


PN: Can you briefly explain these terms for non-specialists?

JSW: Cladistics is an attempt to classify organisms in terms of their evolutionary relatedness. It means that one must use homologies - shared traits that are the same no matter what changes they have undergone. Classification had previously been either by similarities, as measured in various ways, or by a mix of genealogy and similarities. But cladistic classification is an attempt to find the “natural” relationships between taxa without requiring the arbitrary application of measures like “similarity”. A cladogram represents relationships of the form “A is more closely related to B than either is to C” as a tree diagram.

In the 1970s there was a considerable battle joined between those who wanted “theory free” similarity classifications (called “phenetics”), those who wanted a mix of genealogical and similarity, or “grade based” classifications (called “evolutionary systematics” and cladistics (originally and properly called “phylogenetic systematics”). This is described in Hull’s book, although many of the proponents disagree with the interpretation there, like different witnesses to a traffic accident. Cladistics won out, although there remain deep disagreements about what that consists of.


PN: You have been strongly critical of so-called challenges to evolutionary theory such as creationism and Intelligent Design. What originally inspired you to get involved?

JSW: There are a lot of proponents against evolution in the public forums these days, and have been since the conservative evangelicals decided, back in the 70s when I was a party to these discussions, to attack modernism and especially evolutionary biology. But there are very few proponents for science and evolution. A quick Google search on any scientific issue will confirm this - vaccination, psychiatry, and biology are only the most prominent cases of manufactured controversies to advance vested interests against science. Although I was not a scientist, I felt that I could use my philosophical training to counter some of the more egregious philosophical mistakes these opponents of modernism committed. In the process I was given something of a free education by various biologists and other scientists who were also concerned about this.

Recently, in the Dover case, philosopher Steve Fuller argued for the intelligent design defense, and justified this in a chat group by saying “we aren’t philosophers for science”. I totally disagree with this, and the implicit relativism of knowledge Fuller expounds. Philosophy is about knowledge, and since science has been done, that is the locus of the exemplar of knowledge. If philosophy of science is not for science, who will be? This is not, of course, the same as being uncritical about science. Philosophy of science must critique the logic of science and explore the myriad ways in which it is done, but there’s no reason one cannot be “for knowledge” and against ignorance and obfuscation.

So I began to write FAQs for the TalkOrigins archive (some of which show the limitations of an undergraduate) and debate the matter. However, I have only one peer reviewed paper on the topic, as philosophically Intelligent Design isn’t very deep or interesting, and creationism even less so.

What is crucial here, however, is that we deal with the allergic reaction of society to modernism, whatever that may be. I don’t know what modernism is supposed to be, but whatever it is that postmodernism is post to, that is what I think worthwhile. I guess I’m a prepostmodernist, or as a friend relabelled it, a preposterist. The problem is not that modernism failed (at least, not in general society; architecture is another matter) but that it was never properly explored, and we are seeing the fruits of that reaction around us today with failing public health care, religious exceptionalism and over-influence, and so on. As Gandhi is reported to have said of western civilization, modernism would be a good idea. We only have to try it.

So my involvement is for several reasons: one to defend what I think is the best hope for a reasonable and just society; two to understand how science is done and how it affects our social structures, and three to try to convince the intelligent but as yet underinformed that what their pastors and religious authorities are telling them about evolution, and by implication the wider society, is not true. The latter is because, for fully fifteen minutes in the late 70s, I was a creationist myself, and so I have some sympathy for their plight. Nobody can hope to learn everything even to a basic level; there isn’t time. So they have to rely on authorities for most of their opinions, and authorities that are lying, even for a good cause as they see it, or are just incompetent in the field they are dictating about, need to be cut down to size by those who have done the work. I have a paper in waiting in Synthese about this, in which I make the counterintuitive claim that creationists, most of them, are in fact rational (in the Herbert Simon sense of “bounded rationality”).

PN: What happened in the 1970s?

JSW: It's no secret. Evangelicals in the early 70s had decided they had lost control of the public debate over many things, including morals. Under the influence of various writers, including Francis J. Schaeffer, there was a movement to regain control by various means. This resulted in, among other things, the use of the tools of the media that had been previously used by the New Left, and the Contract With America of the Gingrich Republicans. I was a “party” to the discussions only in that I met a lot of the folk involved while working for a vocal evangelical magazine.


PN: Has looking at the issues from the perspective of a philosopher of biology made a difference in any way? What is your view of philosophical critiques and contributions to the debates in general?

JSW: If you mean the debates over creationism and evolution, not really. There is no debate amongst the scientific community, and the problem of design was long ago dealt with by Hume, and more recently by Kitcher and Ruse. Much more interesting is understanding the nature of evolution itself, whether biological or cultural.

Dennett once wrote of the “white picket fence” we erect around human nature. All those other animals behave in this or that way, but we humans are lucky and can forecast the future, act rationally, and evade the costs of nature. Of course, this is pure bunkum. No matter how special humans may be, all species are special (in fact, “special” is just the adjectival form of “species”), and we no more evade selection and the laws of ecology than we do the laws of physics. So viewing the human species from a biological perspective, and trying to tease out the implications for our self image, not to mention our understanding of things like personal responsibility, rationality, and psychology, gives us a rather different view of humanity than the traditional assumptions that underlie, for example, analytic philosophical thinking on social behaviour, mind and ethics.

Viewing humanity from the perspective of a biologist (I like to call it the perspective of an anthropologist from Mars) humans are an odd species, but not all that unusual. Sure, we can think, but we can’t see as well or move as fast as a mantis shrimp. All species are the best at being what they are. Treating humans as exceptions tends to overinflate our uniqueness, and consequently we tend to expect that we can solve problems by fiat, without unintended consequences. A biological, or more general naturalistic, view of human cognition and social structure has a lot yet to teach us.

For example, a biological point of view, as Sober once titled a book, is being applied now to such topics of human behaviour as religion, and this will bear fruit both as an explanation of the human propensity for religions, and on human nature in general. Others are considering the concept of innateness, such as Griffiths. This affects such things as education theory and other social matters. Social biology, if not sociobiology, is an increasingly important aspect of biology and we need to understand how it affects some of our ruling beliefs about ourselves.


PN: Given the lamenting from some commentators that people do not understand biology well enough today, why should we take time to learn more about the philosophy of biology? What relevance does it have to laymen?

JSW: Biological assumptions and philosophies have in the past had a large effect, mostly malign, on laymen. Consider the false anthropology the Nazis relied upon. Failing to understand the actual biology and the philosophical issues it raises will lead to outcomes that are at best mistaken and at worst deleterious to a civil society. While the notion of what a species is in biology might seem recondite, consider its relevance when people start to call “races” different and less valuable species, as the Nazis did. More current is the role that species play in measures of biodiversity in conservation biology. A lot of money rests on the use of these concepts. We cannot predict exactly what the errors of the future will be. For that reason we must investigate the philosophy of biology as widely as we can. Notions like “genes” have played a crucial role in a lot of public discourse, not least the funding of medical research. Recent work on the ways the brain controls behaviour has led to a new subject: neuroethics. These are a class of topics with immediate implications for society, and as such they need to be resourced. But to someone like me, they are interesting in their own right, and are worth the knowing for that reason.


PN: What role do you think online media have to play in both education and discussion about science, philosophy and other subjects? How do you see them evolving in future?

JSW: The online media, in contrast to the “mainstream media” or MSM as they are called, are a source of much good information. Of course, 90% of the sources out there are rubbish, but as [Theodore] Sturgeon’s Law puts it, 90% of everything is crap. I maintain, for example, a list of “Basic Concepts in Science” blog posts, which is now up to around 200 entries, which links to chatty introductory essays on different aspects of science and the philosophy and ethics of science. These things exist as ways to learn without actually having to do a degree.

These essays are used by educators. Both my entries here and on the TalkOrigins.org archive are routinely used in university and high school lectures and projects - I know because the teachers contact me for approval (which is automatic: I have a Creative Commons License for them all which allows anyone to use them). Quite apart from the fact they are free, and can therefore be used by educators anywhere in the world, they also often present a non-textbook view of things by those who work in the field. Textbooks are by nature conservative, and they can miss the sense of ongoing debate within a science. The online media can add a lot to a science’s public profile.

They can also serve to keep people honest. Several sites closely monitor work done in particular fields. One I especially like is NASA Watch, which has more than once caught out political and managerial interference in the actual science. And they can make sure that if people are deceived by what we like to call “woo” science, they at least can hear the dissenting voices from within the profession.

The MSM have a limited set of pigeonholes into which they can place a science story, made worse by the general scientific illiteracy of editors and publishers. Someone once remarked that all science magazines ought to have a sticker on the cover reading “Danger! Scientific breakthroughs are further away than they appear!” The MSM loves drama, and knowledge isn’t always, or even often, dramatic except to a specialist. When specialists blog, for instance, they convey more of that drama than a phalanx of journalists and editors ever could. Science magazines often have a “Gee whiz!” breathlessness to their treatments of science, and at the end of it the reader has acquired an attitude but very little knowledge, in contrast to the magazines of my youth that expected you’d work to understand the material being presented. Now, working to understand is regarded as an indication of failure by the MSM journalist. Even such stalwarts as Scientific American seem to have dumbed down their presentations.


PN: Who do you consider to be doing the most important and/or interesting work in the philosophy of biology today? How do you see the discipline developing in years to come?

JSW: I’m perhaps not the right guy to ask that, as I have a very specific set of interests. But for what it’s worth, I think we will move away from gene-based philosophy of evolution, into protein and functional molecular philosophy, and from evolution in particular to other fields, especially, of late, development, epigenetic inheritance, and the philosophy of ecology, a relatively untouched domain. On ecology, Greg Cooper, Gregory Mikkelson, Sahotra Sarkar and Jay Odenbaugh are developing this subdiscipline almost from a standing start.

Some traditional topics are getting a revival, such as the role of trees in classification and the epistemology of working from a statement of relations to a statement of history (there it is again!). And of course the rise of social biology - and yes, sociobiology - in actual research will generate a whole slew of novel philosophical issues, and revive a host of old ones. We didn’t necessarily sort it all out in the 70s.

Microbial biology is a region of the taxonomic tree that has until recently been ignored, although by far the bulk, both in taxa and weight, of life is microbial. John Dupre and Maureen O’Malley have started working in this field, and I’ve published on it myself.

PN: What projects are you currently working on?

JSW: I have a number of burgeoning interests. One is information in genes. I want to say the notion of information either just means causal specificity, or it’s an illicit metaphor. Another is the role of theory in the delimitation of species. A third, and this looks to be my focus for some time, is the evolution of religion. I have a theory which I hope you will understand my not putting out there in detail just yet.


PN: What would you say to someone considering a career in the philosophy of biology today?

JSW: I would wish them the best of luck and tell them to find the very best graduate advisors they could. It’s a shrinking world of opportunities out there at the moment, and like me, they may find themselves living hand to mouth for many years. A good advisor, one with influence on selection committees, is worth a thousand papers on the CV. Or maybe I exaggerate a little here.

Most of all I’d say: study what excites and inspires you. You are going to spend a long time on a topic; so you don’t want to find halfway through that it bores you. There’s lots of interesting things about biology - almost an infinite number. Don’t be pushed into a topic that interests your advisor more than you.

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Notes:

1. Hull, David L., Science as a process: an evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

2. Stevens, Peter F., The development of biological systematics: Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, nature, and the natural system (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

3. This point was made in email to me by Jody Hey at Rutgers. I wish I could say I noticed it first.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:48:40 +0000 7f24d240521d99071c93af3917215ef7 Per Ahlberg: Evolution and Palaeontology http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/per-ahlberg-evolution-and-palaeontology-r50 Per Ahlberg is Professor of Evolutionary Organismal Biology at Uppsala University in Sweden and a prominent critic of so-called alternatives to evolutionary theory. I was fortunate enough to be able to ask him about his work in paleontology and why he is so passionate about educating the public about evolution.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2008).

PN: How did you originally become interested in palaeontology?

PA: In the first instance from being given a little book on life in the past, illustrated with the Zallinger murals from the Peabody Museum. I think it may have been a Swedish edition of the Time/Life book The World We Live In. Anyway, I was about five at the time - this was in the late '60s - and dinosaurs weren't the common cultural currency they are today, so I was blown away by these colourful and lifelike images of a world I never knew had existed. That initial fascination has never left me.


PN: In what ways does palaeontology mesh with evolutionary biology? Is it possible to study one without the other?

PA: Palaeontology provides the only direct information we have about the past history of life (as opposed to inferences drawn from comparisons between living forms), and the evolutionary events that generated present-day biological diversity occurred in the deep past that is illuminated by fossils, so the two are deeply intertwined. Of course, you can study one without the other. Biostratigraphers study fossils as age indicators for sedimentary rocks, something you can do without much thought to evolutionary relationships, and many aspects of evolutionary biology (molecular processes, natural selection etc.) can be studied perfectly satisfactorily in living organisms without reference to fossils. However, palaeontology without evolution tends to descend to mere stamp collecting, whereas evolutionary biology without fossils is sometimes led astray by the lack of this crucial data set.


PN: Can you explain how vital evolutionary theory is to biology and just how little of the subject would make sense without it?

PA: It's been said before: nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Literally nothing at all. Biological systems are, above all, evolving systems. Of course it is possible to study aspects of biology with no knowledge of evolution, just as it would be possible to study and even understand the structure of a car engine without knowing anything about the design and manufacturing process (or even the existence of such a process), but the understanding could never move beyond the merely descriptive.


PN: You work in evolutionary organismal biology. How does this field differ from molecular and cellular biology and why did a split between them occur in the first place?

PA: Evolutionary organismal biology represents not so much as split as a reconnection of branches of biology that became sundered long ago. The oldest branch of biology is whole-organism comparative biology, which has been around ever since the days of Aristotle. Comparative embryology and palaeontology also have lengthy pedigrees. Molecular biology, by contrast, is a young subject that only developed during the 20th century. For a long time it ploughed its own furrow, and there was a widespread perception that it had left "traditional" whole-organism biology behind. However, with the emergence of genomics (the study of how genes are activated and interact with each other to govern the construction and life processes of the organism) over the past two decades we suddenly find ourselves able to reintegrate molecular and whole-organism biology, to seek detailed molecular explanations for traits such as body form. This is what evolutionary organismal biology is about: we seek to understand particular evolutionary events (say, the origin of jawed vertebrates) on both whole-organism and molecular levels.


PN: Palaeontology perhaps differs from some sciences insofar as it provides us with extraordinarily visual examples of what is being studied and what we can learn. Do you think the obvious contrast between museum displays of giant (and not-so-giant) dinosaurs and many traditional accounts of creation is one of the reasons why fossil discoveries have been so difficult to explain for critics of evolutionary theory? Do dinosaur finds have an impact that perhaps hominid finds cannot, at least for the general public?

PA: I don't actually think there is a difficulty at all, or no more than with any other science. The problem lies entirely with the fact that some people have a strong vested interest in the scientific account of Earth history (ancient Earth, evolutionary origin of humans, and all) not being true – and are prepared to systematically mislead their followers/congregations about the evidence in order make them believe this. It’s another matter that evolution is not always presented well to the general public – popular versions tend to be subtly influenced by progressivist narrative structures that really have little or no basis in the evidence – but this is a marginal problem compared to the impact of the popular misinformation put out by the anti-evolution movement.


PN: In philosophical terms, evolutionary theory is interesting because it is said to be (along with quantum theory in physics) probably the most highly-confirmed theory we have, but evolution is also often described as a fact. One of the main misunderstandings with regard to evolutionary theory concerns this distinction between evolution as a fact and evolution as a theory. Can you explain the difference and why it is important?

PA: I don't really like the description of evolution as a "fact". A "fact" (to my mind, anyway) is an observation that can be securely verified without reference to an elaborate framework of theory and inference. It is a fact that there is a blue coffee cup on my desk; it is a fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising year on year. From this perspective, there are numerous facts that underpin evolution: the fact that organisms share hierarchically distributed non-overlapping sets of similarities (molecular as well as morphological); the fact that the fossil record shows a succession of forms, becoming more similar to those living today as you look at successively younger strata; the fact that variation is heritable; the fact that organisms produce supernumerary offspring; and so forth. The theory of evolution accommodates and explains these facts and many others: it is extremely well confirmed, and I have no doubt that it is true (though there are still aspects of it that we do not understand well), but it is not a "fact" in the strict sense.


PN: What consequences would you envisage if support and funding were withdrawn from biology departments to help fund so-called alternatives to evolutionary biology?

PA: The consequences would be disastrous. Firstly, because important biological research would not get done (so we would not learn things we need to know about how living organisms and ecosystems work), and secondly, because the "alternatives" are mere pseudoscience and would produce no usable results at all, no matter how much money you poured into them. The latter is an important point, which may not be well understood by people who do not actually work in science. Evolutionary biology is simply what you get when you apply the scientific method – i.e. the search for natural falsifiable explanations - to the study of living systems. "Alternatives" such as "Intelligent Design" are not alternative-but-valid versions of biological science but pseudosciences specifically designed to fail to find answers. The whole idea about ID is that it purports (falsely) to demonstrate that natural explanations are insufficient for the existence of living organisms, thus supposedly opening the door (again, falsely) for a magical non-falsifiable "explanation" involving an unknown and unexplained "Designer". Such a "programme of enquiry" cannot, by definition, produce explanations for anything at all.


PN: Evolutionary theory does not claim to explain how life began (abiogenesis) but the question is still a pressing one and important to many people. Some critics say that the chances of life arising in a naturalistic context are so remote that we are justified in embracing a form of design inference for abiogenesis. What is your response and what do evolutionary biologists currently think about this difficult issue?

PA: See above. There is no possible design inference that does not create more problems than it solves. Where did the designer come from? As for how life actually originated, there is a great diversity of opinion, and summarizing it would require an article in its own right. Interested readers can try web searches using terms such as "RNA world" and "autocatalytic systems". These should yield plenty of leads.


PN: Some commentators and participants in the recent debates surrounding the status of creationism and intelligent design (ID) have argued that for biologists and the science community at large to even discuss either alongside evolutionary biology provides them with a false legitimacy, - in short, making it look as though there really is a controversy where actually the scientific consensus is very much otherwise. However, others have insisted that it is always better to engage with challenges or criticisms, even where the objections are misguided. Do you think biologists have a responsibility or even a duty to get involved in these kinds of debate? What motivated you to take part yourself?

PA: I think mainstream science has a duty and a responsibility to expose creationism and ID for the pseudoscientific frauds that they are. This is something quite different from engaging them in debate, the way you would do with adherents of an opposing but conceptually sound scientific viewpoint. Scientists must expose them simply because they are frauds, and it won't do to have large parts of the population bamboozled by the lies and misrepresentations of charlatans. Apart from anything else, it creates a serious democratic deficit. We live in a world where questions that are ultimately scientific in nature (anything from global warming to wise resource management to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria) are impacting people's lives like never before: how are they supposed to make informed political decisions about them if they haven't the first idea how to assess the validity of a scientific claim? Note that there is an important point here: creationists and ID proponents by necessity attempt to befuddle their audience, not just about the evidence for evolution, but about the nature of scientific enquiry in general. They have to, because it is their only way of concealing the threadbare nature of their own claims.

From this, it should be clear why I have chosen to take part; though you can add the fact that I enjoy talking to people and presenting my ideas to popular audiences. Money, fame and hot chicks would be welcome but have not been forthcoming so far…


PN: Why do you think the debate became and remains so acrimonious? Could it have been otherwise?

PA: No, it could not have been otherwise. It is acrimonious because one side has a prior commitment to a revealed "truth" that happens to be at variance with observable reality, and they are prepared to lie and obfuscate in order to conceal this conflicting information from their target audience.


PN: Challenges to evolutionary theory have found their way into the courtrooms over the years. What is your view of the successes or otherwise of the several trials in the United States in recent times?

PA: I was pleased with the outcome of the Dover trial. Can't really speak about the others, as I didn't follow them closely.


PN: Some philosophers of science have argued that it was a mistake to take on creationism and ID via an insistence that neither are science, since this would put the debate on philosophical grounds (specifically problems of demarcation) rather than empirical. How do you think evolutionary biologists should argue in defence or in support of evolutionary theory? Have some approaches been counterproductive?

PA: No I don't think it was a mistake. Any "explanation" that relies on positing an undefined, unexplained, unobservable, untestable, infinitely malleable supernatural designer with magical attributes is no explanation at all, and certainly isn't science. We should not be afraid to say so.


PN: Although some scientists are interested in the philosophical aspects of their disciplines, many are openly hostile or consider philosophers of science useless at best and often unhelpful. Do you think the philosophy of science – and philosophy of biology in particular – have a role to play or should science be left to the scientists? Have you been interested in or benefited from philosophical considerations of your own work?

PA: I'm generally positive. The work of Karl Popper in particular has been very valuable to the development of systematic biology, as it was a key influence on the development of rigorous methods of phylogenetic analysis (reconstruction of family trees of organisms) by the likes of Willi Hennig. Palaeontology and phylogenetics perhaps need a greater degree of philosophical sophistication than experimental branches of biology, because we often have to draw rather complex inferences from incomplete and non-reproducible data.


PN: What role do you think online media have to play in educating people about evolutionary biology? Should teachers and academics be increasingly active online? Are there any Internet resources that are currently needed or lacking, in your view?

PA: I think they're becoming increasingly important, and I certainly feel that academics should be active online. A key point is the lack of geographical and cultural barriers: this is the only medium I can think of where, for example, it is possible for a young person from a culturally homogeneous rural fundamentalist Christian environment to not only gain access to a wide range of top-quality written material by leading evolutionary biologists, but actually engage with them in discussion. The kid's hardly going to get that from the magazine rack of the local corner store! I'm not sure I can point to any particular resources that are currently lacking, but I follow the development of the medium with great interest.


PN: Notwithstanding the possible perception of a controversy regarding the status of evolution, actually there are plenty of debates going on within biology itself that are perhaps at least as interesting if not considerably more so. Can you give some examples of the unresolved issues that biologists study? Do you think more should be done to focus attention on these internal questions, hence showing that biology is richer and deeper than its critics allow?

PA: The internal debates are very interesting, but often so esoteric that they are difficult to present to a broad audience. One current problem that I find particularly interesting (not saying that it is any more important than a myriad others I could mention; it just happens to come from my particular sphere of interest) is the occasional calamitous clash between phylogenies (family trees) based on molecular data versus comparisons of whole organisms. By and large these corroborate each other remarkably well, but there are specific instances where they do not. The one that particularly interests me concerns the three main vertebrate groups: the jawed vertebrates and the jawless lampreys and hagfishes. Whole-organism data indicate unambiguously that lampreys are closer to jawed vertebrates than hagfishes. For example, unlike jawed vertebrates and lampreys, hagfish hearts are not controlled by nerve impulses, the retinas of their eyes lack bipolar cells, and their body fluids are as salty as the surrounding sea water (in jawed vertebrates and lampreys they are less salty). And yet, molecular phylogenies (based on comparisons of DNA sequences) almost invariably group lampreys and hagfishes together. Clearly, something is going wrong: either the whole-organism data are wildly misleading, or some systematic error in the analysis of the DNA sequences gives us the same error every time. Whatever the answer is (and I'm leaning towards the latter) the resolution of this will have profound implications for the reconstruction of early vertebrate evolution and relationships in general.


PN: If you had to recommend palaeontology or biology in general to a prospective student or a layman in a few lines or paragraphs, what would you tell them?

PA: Biology is the study of life, in all its myriad forms. Palaeontology is the study of the history of life, from its first beginning to the extraordinary diversity of today. Both have something to say about our place in the world. If those simple prospectuses do not tickle your desire to know more, then biology is obviously not for you; if they do, welcome aboard!


PN: What are you currently working on and how do you see your research developing in years to come?

PA: I'm currently working on the origin of land vertebrates (tetrapods) and jawed vertebrates. My own work is largely palaeontological, but increasingly I am integrating this with molecular developmental biology in order to understand the molecular basis for the morphological transitions we observe in the fossil record. This interdisciplinary research is likely to form an ever-larger component of my work in coming years.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:47:56 +0000 01f78be6f7cad02658508fe4616098a9 Bradley Monton: Debating the Philosophy of Science http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/bradley-monton-debating-the-philosophy-of-science-r49 Bradley Monton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder who specialises in the philosophy of science, particularly the philosophy of physics. He is the author of several papers looking at the intersection of the philosophy of science with public debates surrounding the issue of what should or should not be taught in science classrooms and has a keen interest in arguments for or against the existence of God that rely on science. I was fortunate enough to be able to ask him some questions on these and other areas.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2007)

PN: In the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District case, Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design was creationism and not science. This ruling greatly heartened scientists, but you were critical of it, in your paper Is Intelligent Design Science? Dissecting the Dover Decision. Could you explain your objections?

BM: I was disturbed by the fact that so many people seemed heartened by this decision. In general in life, one will get into trouble if one doesn’t distinguish good arguments for a conclusion one likes from bad arguments for a conclusion one likes. In the Dover case, most science-minded folks wanted the judge to reach the decision that ID isn’t science, and hence shouldn’t be taught in public school science classes, so they were happy that he did. The problem is that the argument he gave was flawed.

It wasn’t completely the judge’s fault that he gave a flawed argument; he was relying on the testimony presented to him in the trial, and the anti-ID people had philosophers like Robert Pennock testifying, and Pennock has (in my opinion) confused ideas about demarcation issues. The law firm representing the Dover school board did a really bad job dealing with the philosophy of science issues – they should have had as one of their expert witnesses a reputable philosopher of science defending a view opposed to Pennock’s, but they didn’t. When they asked Pennock about the demarcation views of other philosophers of science (Larry Laudan in particular) Pennock gave what I think was a misleading answer, not adequately admitting that his view is a controversial one in the philosophy of science community.

Pennock endorses methodological naturalism, and (in part as a result) Judge Jones did too, but I think methodological naturalism is a bad principle to endorse. Methodological naturalism is the principle that holds that when doing science one should follow the methodology that one can only postulate natural causes and explanations; one can’t consider supernatural causes or explanations. There are two main versions of the doctrine of methodological naturalism, and many people who endorse it aren’t clear on which version they are endorsing. The weak version holds that, since we don’t have evidence for supernatural things, we shouldn’t be allowed to postulate them when doing science. The strong version holds that it’s part of the very nature of science that we can’t postulate supernatural things. The difference between the two is that those who endorse the weak version would allow that, if we started to get empirical evidence for the existence of supernatural things, we should change the methodology of science, so that we are allowed to consider supernatural hypotheses. Those who endorse the strong version would say that, even in the face of this sort of evidence, when one is doing science one can’t consider supernatural hypotheses.

While it wasn’t completely clear, I got the sense that Judge Jones was endorsing the strong version: he said that ID may be true, but it isn’t science. I think it’s unreasonable for these sorts of methodological considerations to have the consequence that science isn’t a pursuit of truth. That may well be the case – it’s controversial in the philosophy of science community as to whether the aim of science is truth – but I don’t think this methodology-based argument is the right way to get there. (Bas van Fraassen, in his The Scientific Image, gives what I think is a much better argument in favour of the doctrine that the aim of science isn’t truth.)


PN: What are the problems in general with attempting to demarcate science from non-science or pseudo-science? Even though there are philosophical difficulties involved, should scientists continue to make a distinction in practice so that the business of science can proceed?

BM: Before I offer my thoughts, I should point out that the best paper on this issue of how (and whether) we should demarcate science from non-science is Larry Laudan’s The Demise of the Demarcation Problem. It was originally published in what as far as I can tell is a rather obscure collection on Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis, back in 1983, but it’s still the most influential paper on the topic today. While I don’t agree with everything in the paper, I basically think that it’s on the right track.

Laudan points out that every attempt to give general criteria that we can use to say what counts as science and what doesn’t hasn’t been successful. This isn’t the sort of argument that can be given quickly; each purported demarcation criteria has to be carefully analyzed, and shown to be unsuccessful. Laudan’s paper isn’t long enough to really do this successfully, but I think he shows how the argument would go.

Now, just because extant demarcation criteria don’t work, that doesn’t mean that there are no demarcation criteria. Surely what goes on in a standard chemistry lab counts as science, and what goes on at a football game counts as non-science. So why can’t we give a successful demarcation criterion? To do so we’d have to do conceptual analysis – we’d have to give necessary and sufficient conditions for what it is for some practice to count as a scientific practice. The problem here is that conceptual analysis is notoriously difficult, even for seemingly simple concepts. An exercise I like to do with my students is to break them into groups and have them try to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for what it takes for some object to be a chair. I’ve never seen a successful analysis of the concept of a chair.


PN: How have scientists - if they have at all - responded to your critique of the Dover decision? In your experience, do scientists appreciate philosophical critiques of their practices, methodologies and assumptions, or do they resist such philosophical inquiry?

BM: I actually haven’t talked with any scientists about my Dover paper. In general, I find that scientists don’t concern themselves too much with philosophical issues, which is fine by me. When they do, the results are often not good. For example, in Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, he gives a philosophical argument against the existence of God which is pretty bad. Al Plantinga rightly criticizes it in his review.

On a more positive note, sometimes I think it’s good that scientists don’t concern themselves with philosophy because by avoiding philosophy they’ll do better science as a result. For example, I once had a physicist who was doing work on quantum gravity ask me: do philosophers have good arguments to show that space and time have to be aspects of fundamental reality? Researchers in quantum gravity were (and are) pursuing theories where space and time aren’t part of fundamental reality, and this physicist wanted to know if that was legitimate. My answer to him was “no”, and I would have given something like that answer even if I thought that there were good arguments for that view; I wouldn’t want philosophy to stifle scientific developments. I’ve tried a couple times to write a philosophy paper taking up this type of relationship between philosophy and physics in more detail, but so far I haven’t managed to produce anything solid.

Also, a lot of my research is in philosophy of physics, specifically on the issue of how best to understand quantum mechanics. Here I think there is lots of room for fruitful interaction between physicists and philosophers. But here we're not stepping back and analyzing the nature of science; we’re actually engaging in a particular mode of inquiry which is on the border between physics and philosophy. Because philosophers of physics and physicists who work on foundations of physics issues share the same practices, methodologies, and assumptions, fruitful collaborative work gets done.


PN: Given your argument that it is improper to demarcate evolution from ID on the ground of the difficulty (impossibility?) of demarcating science from non-science, and your argument that we cannot exclude supernatural explanations from scientific inquiry in advance, how should school districts respond to those who argue in favour of including intelligent design in school curricula?

BM: There are two ways I can answer this question. One is as a political philosophy question, about how the ideal society’s educational system should be structured. Here I have libertarian sentiments – I support a system where all schools are private, where the government would only get involved in setting minimal standards for what students need to be taught, and perhaps in having some sort of voucher system to ensure that all children get an adequate education. The minimal government standards I would set would allow ID arguments to be taught in science classes, as long as the science was taught as well. Basically I think parents should be allowed to decide what their children learn, subject only to the sort of guidance that the children aren’t taught horribly wrong things.

This is basically how our society works nowadays – parents can teach their children pretty much whatever they want. The main difference is that there is also a public school system, but for those parents who choose not to send their kids to public school there are (as in my ideal society) minimal government standards for what the kids should be taught.

So this leads to the question – what should be taught in public school? Well, it’s legitimate to teach ID in public school, as long as it gets taught in a comparative religion class, or a current events class, or something along those lines. The controversy is over what should be taught in public school science classes. Here my basic opinion is that it doesn’t matter that much whether ID gets taught or not. There are all sorts of problems with how science is taught in public school, and whether ID is added as a component of the curriculum isn’t going to affect things that much (as long as it’s not made the focus of the class – but that clearly wasn’t the case in the Dover trial; the issue there was whether a brief (and rather silly) disclaimer would be read).

We’d be much better off as a society if we focused on big-picture issues regarding how science is taught – right now there is too much focus on memorization of facts and mathematical problem-solving, and not enough on teaching methodologies for scientific research and conceptual understanding. I could see ID being incorporated really well into a discussion of the latter issues, regarding methodologies and conceptual issues in science. This might involve teaching the students a bit of philosophy of science, in addition to the science, but I don’t think this would be a bad thing.

Of course, the people who worry about ID being taught in public school are really worried about the proselytizing teacher. Well, I agree, teachers shouldn’t be allowed to proselytize, whether it be about religious matters, or politics, or sex, or what have you. There’s nothing special about the ID debate here, in my opinion. There are ways of teaching without proselytizing – one puts the issues on the table, fairly presents the arguments on both sides, and lets the students critically think about the issues. If ID were taught that way in public school science classes, I don’t think it would be a big deal.

The ID movement is going to run into trouble is they keep trying to get ID in the schools at the school board level, as they did at Dover. They’d be better off just trying to get it to be the case that individual teachers are allowed to teach ID as a topic if the teacher chooses to, as long as the teacher also covers all that’s required by the curriculum. I’d love to see a test case where a teacher was brought to court for doing that, when the teacher taught ID in a non-proselytizing way.


PN: What is your opinion of how online media such as blogs and discussion forums have contribute to this debate, particularly arguments that involve the philosophy of science?

BM: I like how they can easily bring people together who are interested in a topic to have a discussion. After the Dover trial, there was a lot of online debate, which was fun to read about. I posted my paper about Dover online just a week or so after the judge’s decision was issued, and my paper quickly got a lot of discussion. That couldn’t have happened in pre-internet days.

I also like how search engines make it easy to find a discussion on some particular topic that one might not have ever found otherwise. Sometimes the quality of the discussion isn’t that good, but then again the quality of discussions one has in person sometimes isn’t that good either.


PN: Why do you think this debate has been so acrimonious? Could it have been otherwise?

BM: It’s clear that the debate need not be acrimonious – there are people like Del Ratzsch, Robin Collins, Neil Manson, and I who are engaging in the debate in a respectful, objection fashion.

Some people think that the acrimony – the involvement of emotive rhetoric – is how minds are changed and decisions won. I don’t know whether that’s true or not – that’s a psychological question that would need to be addressed with empirical research. I do know that I don’t much care whether I change minds or win decisions in the public forum. What I care about is getting at the truth. I wouldn’t want to change minds with bad argumentation, and whether I give good arguments for the views I think are right is much more important to me than whether, say, ID gets taught in public school.

Now, if the teaching of ID in public school will somehow cause our society to become an oppressive theocracy, I would be concerned, and might even be willing to sacrifice my quest for truth in favour of political expediency. But I really don’t think that’s going to happen, and absent such extreme possibilities, I’m going to pursue good arguments, without worrying about whether they are effective arguments.

One thing to keep in mind here is that the focus on changing minds and winning decisions tends to be a short-term focus, while philosophy arguments are (hopefully, at least) around for the long term. This may be hopelessly Pollyannaish of me, but I envision my writings being read 200 or 300 years from now, in a political climate without the sort of heated rhetoric that we have now, and I picture those readers saying: “yes, Monton had it right”. Those people are my real audience, not the people who are just looking for the latest salvo to defend their side in a culture war.


PN: In your paper Life is Evidence for an Infinite Universe, you wrote: "Richard Dawkins has said that one could not be an intellectually fulfilled atheist before Darwin; in my opinion one cannot be an intellectually fulfilled atheist until one recognizes that the universe is infinite." Could you explain what you mean by this, and why life is evidence for a spatially infinite universe?

BM: Regarding the first question, here perhaps I let my desire for rhetorical flourish get the better of me. But here’s what I had in mind, which I still think is basically right. Dawkins’ point, I take it, is that before Darwin one could be a rational atheist, but there would be a gap in our understanding of the world – we wouldn’t understand how complex life came to be. Because of this gap, we can’t be intellectually fulfilled. My point was that, even understanding how complex life came to be, there is a further gap in our understanding, that of understanding how life came to exist in the first place. An appeal to the infinite universe helps account for how life came to exist in the first place, and hence fills that further gap in our understanding.

Even now there are gaps in our understanding of the world. For example, I don’t think we understand the phenomenon of consciousness very well. So in that sense, I would say that, even now, we can’t be intellectually fulfilled atheists. Some theists might take the phenomenon of consciousness to provide some evidence for the existence of God, and I think they would be reasonable to do so. We atheists have to say: we don’t understand this, and in that sense we’re not intellectually fulfilled, but nevertheless we hold out hope that there is a naturalistic explanation of this phenomenon.

Regarding the question of why life is evidence for a spatially infinite universe, here’s the basic idea. My argument appeals to what’s sometimes called “the likelihood principle”. This principle holds that, if some bit of evidence is more probable under the assumption that Hypothesis A is true than it is under the assumption that Hypothesis B is true, then that bit of evidence provides evidence for Hypothesis A over Hypothesis B. This principle is pretty uncontroversial – it follows from basic probability theory. Now, take the evidence that life exists, and consider two hypotheses: the hypothesis that life is infinite, and the hypothesis that life is finite. The existence of life is more probable under the assumption that the universe is infinite than it is under the assumption that the universe is finite, and hence the existence of life provides evidence for the hypothesis that the universe is infinite. It may not provide a lot of evidence, but my argument is that it provides at least some, and I think that’s interesting enough.


PN: In several of your papers you have discussed William Dembski's design inference based on the concept of specified complexity, which roughly holds that certain patterns (such as life arising from non-life) are so unlikely in a naturalistic context that we should instead infer that a designer is responsible for life. In your analysis of a spatially infinite universe, you show why Dembski's reasoning is flawed; but if instead it turns out (against current evidence) that the universe really is finite and restricted to the observable universe, do you think that Dembski's specified complexity claim has force? Or should we instead think that life arising is not just a result of chance, but of other organizing factors?

BM: This is a good question, and it’s not one I’ve addressed in my published writings. I think there are a number of good critiques of Dembski; the reason I’ve focussed on my particular critique is that (i) I think it’s a strong one, and (ii) no one had given it yet. So even if my critique is wrong, the other ones may well be right.

One problem with Dembski’s model for design inferences is that he views the design inference as an all-or-nothing choice: either you infer design or you don’t. I’d like to view it instead as a probabilistic argument: the question is whether some bit of evidence provides evidence for design. If we learned that the whole universe is the observable universe, I would think that the existence of complex life would provide some evidence for design. It might not be a lot of evidence though, in the sense that one’s probability for design might go up very much. And in general when evaluating probabilities one has to take into account all the evidence one has. So the existence of life might provide evidence for the existence of God, but the existence of something else (like the plague) might provide evidence against.

I don’t really have an opinion on how likely it is for life to arise from non-life, given the appropriate conditions, and I certainly don’t have an opinion on how often those conditions obtain in the universe. I’m generally sceptical of those people who talk of the universe being self-organizing, or having an built-in drive to produce intelligence, or what have you, but the claims would have to be made more precise than they generally are in order to be seriously evaluated.


PN: Although an infinite universe would presumably have an infinite amount of resources, making us expect that any possible outcome, no matter how remote, should arise an infinite number of times, it also seems to be the case that regions of space will forever be disconnected by the speed-of-light limit, hence foreclosing them for any causal contact. Does this idea at all influence the probability calculations we should make about spatial infinity?

BM: People sometimes try to say that there’s an important philosophical issue here, but I don’t think there is. I think that all that’s being pointed out is that there’s an epistemic limitation on what we can directly observe. I don’t think this influences any of the metaphysical lessons one should draw from the existence of these other regions. There are all sorts of things that we can’t directly observe, from the interior of the sun to the quarks in an atom, and yet we think we have good evidence for their existence, and we don’t treat them any differently in our reasoning about the world than we do the things that we can directly observe. Of course, we might be sceptical that quarks actually exist, just as we might be sceptical that these distant regions of the universe exist, but those questions have to be adjudicated by appealing to a combination of empirical evidence and theoretical considerations. We can’t be certain that quarks exist, just as we can’t be certain that the distant regions of the universe exist, just as – for that matter – we can’t be certain that other minds exist. (Perhaps you have consciousness, but everyone else is just a mindless hulk. Can you prove otherwise?)


PN: You have said that in a spatially infinite universe, we should expect that there exists an infinite number of inhabited worlds, and even an infinite number of worlds with intelligent entities. This would be so no matter how unlikely life/intelligence is, because in a spatially infinite universe anything with a non-zero probability of happening would be expected to happen not just once but an infinite number of times. Could we go further and say, along with the physicist Max Tegmark, that in a spatially infinite universe, we should expect that there are an infinite number of exact duplicates of planet earth, and hence that we all have an infinite number of doppelgaengers?

BM: I don’t think you can get the exact duplicates result, but this has to do with some technical issues associated with ergodic theory – Tegmark would know more about this that I do. The result I think you can get is arbitrarily close duplicates. So for any measure of closeness you pick (as long as it isn’t absolute match) we should expect that there are an infinite number of systems that at least that closely match planet earth.

This is certainly surprising but I don’t think the fact that it’s surprising constitutes an argument against it.


PN: Some philosophers have argued that if in fact the universe is infinite, and we all have an infinite number of doppelgangers playing out every possible variation of "our" lives, this implies ethical nihilism, because there is no way to add "good" to the total amount of good in the universe, since the total amount of "good" is already infinite (as is the total amount of "bad"; so we cannot add to or subtract from the total amount of "bad" either.) Should this sort of reasoning about ethics concern us?

BM: I think this is an interesting line of reasoning and it’s important to consider, but ultimately I don’t think that it’s a good argument. By far the best paper on this is by Peter Vallentyne and Shelly Kagan, called Infinite Value and Finitely Additive Value Theory, published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1997. (A draft copy is available here.) Vallentyne and Kagan point out that we all clearly think that a universe with an infinite number of agents is better if each agent has two units of utility than if each agent has one, even though the total amount of utility in each scenario is the same. They then extend this line of reasoning in interesting ways, to try to establish principles that enable us to determine whether one scenario is better than another, even when both scenarios have an infinite amount of utility.

Of course, it would be possible for someone to deny the initial intuition; they could say that a universe where each agent has one unit of utility is no better than if each agent has two units of utility. If someone is willing to say that, I would simply say that they are ethically confused, but there’s not much more I could say beyond that. (I guess if I had to I would start by asking them what universe they would prefer to live in.)


PN: Presentism is the idea that only the present exits. The past used to exist but no longer does; the future does not yet exist, but will come into being. Eternalism is the idea that past, present and future events, people, objects and ideas are all ontologically "on par" with one another. Eternalism seems to be supported by special and general relativity, which relativises the concept of "Now" to reference frames and seems to suggest that in some important sense, past, present and future all "exist" in a kind of ontological block. Yet you reject this, describing yourself as a presentist and a Heraclitean (believing that change is a real aspect of reality) as opposed to an eternalist and a Parmenidean (believing that change is an illusion). Why are you a Heraclitean presentist?

BM: The best way for me to answer this question is to just report a philosophical intuition I have. I can’t back up this intuition with any sort of solid argument, and that’s why I haven’t published a paper on this topic, but here’s the intuition. I think that consciousness couldn’t exist in a world without an objective flow of time. I think that if there’s just a static block universe, consciousness wouldn’t exist at all. I wish I had a good argument for that, and while I do have various ideas in my head for why this is the case, they aren’t the sort of ideas that I could express in words in a few pages and have them be convincing to other people.

With regard to the question of presentism being in conflict with relativity theory, I think that there probably is such a conflict, but it doesn’t follow that presentism is false. It could be that relativity theory is false, and in fact we have good evidence that relativity theory is false – it conflicts with quantum theory. This is why physicists are trying to come up with a new theory, a theory of quantum gravity, that will supplant both relativity theory and quantum theory. This leads to the question: is presentism in conflict with quantum gravity? I have a paper addressing that question, Presentism and Quantum Gravity. In short, my answer to that question is a nuanced “no”.


PN: If eternalism really is right, doesn't this imply fatalism? No matter what we do, would it not already be essentially foreordained?

BM: Well, there may be a truth of that matter about what will happen, but it wouldn’t have to be essentially foreordained. Imagine that someone had a reliable crystal ball, so that they could see what would happen in the future. They can know what choices you’re going to make, but it’s still you making those choices.


PN: What is wrong with the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a universal designer?

BM: I have a paper, God, Fine-Tuning, and the Problem of Old Evidence, where I try to address this issue. (A draft copy is available here.) I think that the fine-tuning argument is a tricky argument, and I don’t think there are any knock-down objections to it. I also don’t think that the argument is completely flawed – I think that reasonable people can have starting opinions such that, when they hear the argument, it leads them to shift their probabilities in favour of the hypothesis that God exists. I also think that it’s reasonable to have opinions such that the argument doesn’t lead to that shift.


PN: What are you working on now, and what are your future plans?

BM: I’m finishing up a book, Godless Physics: A Defence, where I argue that physics does not provide evidence for the existence of God. The idea is to take up physics-based design arguments, and to explain why they don’t work, but also to explain why many of the extant objections to these arguments are flawed.

As for future research, I’m really not sure. I’ve been thinking of working on some applied probability theory issues, such as how formal probabilistic reasoning should be used in the court of law. We’ll have to see!]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:47:06 +0000 ccb1d45fb76f7c5a0bf619f979c6cf36 James Howard Kunstler: The Long Emergency http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/james-howard-kunstler-the-long-emergency-r48 Rolling Stone and the author of nine novels and four non-fiction books, including his most recent, The Long Emergency. In it, Mr. Kunstler portrays a 21st century in which the southwest United States is largely reclaimed by desert; the interstate highway system has crumbled; the industrial and high-tech economy has gone into a terminal tailspin and the main economic activity of the United States is food production, with food grown and consumed locally, through hard physical labor.

The suburbs are slums, the big cities have contracted severely and people are forced to live locally, in small towns and without most of the amenities to which we have grown accustomed. The United States itself might break up into autonomous regions as big government, like everything else that is big, withers and gets small. It is a world in which the Industrial Revolution seems to have been repealed.

What accounts for this dystopian view, and why should we take it seriously? The answer lies with two interlocking propositions: The first is that we have good grounds to believe that we are at, or near, the peak of global oil production. When the peak is passed, oil production will decline relentlessly, at a time when oil demand will be greater than ever. And the second proposition is that the complacent assumption that something, anything, will replace oil - nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, what have you - is false. For a variety of reasons, Kunstler and others argue, these alternative energy sources will not scale to meet even a fraction of the needs of our current industrial, high-tech civilization. If this is right, globalization, thought to be the wave of the future, is already a thing of the past. Mr. Kunstler agreed to an interview with the Galilean Library, and we appreciate his time.

- Interviewed by David Misialowski (2006).

DM: In your book, you speak of attending a conference in which the depressing long-range prospects of the earth were discussed, and said that the experience made you feel like "gargling with razor blades". This was the same feeling I got reading your book, which, after all, deals with prospects not in some unimaginable future but right around the corner. Given these twin theses - that we are at or near peak oil production, and that no alternative energy source or strategy can plausibly replace an economy built on fossil fuels - why shouldn't anyone who believes this gargle with razor blades?

JHK: I'm describing some pretty sharp discontinuities in our way-of-life, but not the end-of-the-world, or even the end of civilization. The circumstances that I present imply that we have to make other arrangements for daily life. I think we can accomplish quite a bit toward that end, but we have to be willing to let go of some enormous previous investments. We are not going to run WalMart, Disney World, and Northwest Airlines on wind-power, switch-grass, uranium, or used french-fry oil. We will be foolish to invest our remaining resources in a defense of suburbia, since it would amount to a defense of the unsustainable. But there's an awful lot we can do to change the way we occupy the landscape, and the activities we bring to that. Forgive me for complaining, but I am often misunderstood on these grounds. I suspect readers are projecting their anxieties on my argument and coming to somewhat different conclusions than I do.

DM: Last August, The New York Times Sunday magazine featured peak oil as its cover story. Early in the article, the author said that the impact of peak oil "on the American way of life would be profound: cars cannot be propelled by roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban lifestyles, hinged to two-car families and constant trips to work, school and Wal-Mart, might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is imposed, impossible. Carpools would be the least imposing of many inconveniences; the cost of home heating would soar -- assuming, of course, that climate-controlled habitats do not become just a fond memory." After that, though, the author abruptly dropped the matter of future prospects, and devoted the bulk of his article to assessing Saudi oil capacity claims while talking about how Americans would need to practice conservation and pursue alternative energy sources, as if these options were solutions. Is the failure of the mainstream media to seriously examine the possibility that there are no solutions that will rescue our way of life in the face of fossil-fuel depletion an example of the "consensus trance" concerning our prospects that you speak of in your book? And if peak oil as a topic is nearly invisible in the mainstream media, why is it so dominant on the Web?

JHK: The failure of the mainstream media is pretty impressive. The author of that NY Times article, Peter Maass, was on NPR's "Fresh Air" show the day after his piece came out in the Sunday Magazine. Terri Gross asked him the inevitable question -- "what can we do" -- and Maass answered, pretty lamely in my opinion, that we should work on making cars that get better mileage. This is typical of the collective failure of imagination. There are, in fact, many intelligent things we could do, from restoring the US railroad system -- which would have the greatest impact on our oil consumption, and quickly, than any project we could do right away -- to reforming our planning-and-zoning codes comprehensively, to commencing a high level public debate on the need to re-launch a nuclear power program. We could promote walkable communities and public transit on the fine-grained scale. Unfortunately, we are talking about none of these things. Another example: a few weeks ago the NY Times Sunday book Review ran a cover story on Francis Fukuyama's new book concerning his disappointment with the Neo-cons and their foreign policy in particular. The review was by Paul Berman who has written extensively about Islamic terrorism. The word "oil" was never mentioned in the essay. Weird. Just in the past two months CBS's "Sixty Minutes" show has run two major pieces filled with gross misstatements about the extent of the Canadian tar sands and the value of coal liquifaction. CNN ran an equally misleading piece about ethanol on a recent Sunday night. All three shows declared that these various "alternative" resources would rescue us from the problems of the global oil predicament. They were a terrible disservice to the public, and will only promote more delusional thinking.

DM: A typical "green" website, or book, or organization, paints a rosy scenario of renewable energy powering a pollution-free civilization. An example is this page, in which it is asserted that "Solar energy is presently being used on a smaller scale in furnaces for homes and to heat up swimming pools. On a larger scale use, solar energy could be used to run cars, power plants, and space ships." Yet in your book, you lay out, in some detail, why solar energy, and none of the other anticipated replacements for fossil fuels, will work. Could you summarize your position on this?

JHK: Solar energy just isn't powerful enough to accomplish all those things we are wishing and hoping it would do. It can do many things, but on a very modest scale. The problems I discussed in the book had to do with whether we could manufacture the components for these technologies without an underlying cheap oil economy to enable all the advanced metallurgy and fabrication processes necessary to make photovoltaics, batteries, wind turbines, et cetera. I don't think we know the answer to that, but I am inclined to think it will be extremely difficult, especially if we don't get going on a new generation of nuke plants.

DM: You spend of good deal of time in our writings stressing the difference between energy and technology, to show why we should not expect a quick fix from the latter to solve our problems. Could you elaborate on this?

JHK: One of the principal delusions coming out of all this is the belief that energy and technology are identical, mutually substitutable. This is just not true. The Boeing 757s (and all the rest of the jet fleets) are either going to run on liquid hydrocarbon fuels or they ain't gonna run. No "technology" is going to fix that. And we are not going to change out the world fleets of the Boeing and Airbus jetliners, either. This is typical of the extreme wishful thinking we see out there.

DM: A number of places in your book, you speak of the necessity of keeping "the project of civilization" going. Yet given the dire scenarios you outline, how is this going to even be possible? And if it were possible, what would civilization look like, say 50 years hence? It what ways might it even be better than what we have now, something you also suggest is possible?

JHK: I think civilization will continue, but at a more modest scale. It is not absolutely necessary to have 6.5 billion human beings on this planet, or for them to be deployed in super-mega-giant hyper-cities. Industrial technology has brought out a streak of grandiosity in us that is very unfortunate, perhaps tragic. We are going to learn a harsh lesson.

DM: In your book, you say that the war in Iraq was justified for a number of reasons, and that it could be the first in an increasing series of "resource wars" that might involve us in a confrontation with China. Recently on your blog, you also defended the idea, as reported by Seymour Hersh, that the United States was making plans to use bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons against Iran's suspected uranium enrichment sites. Ultimately, you suggest, our real reasons for the confrontations first with Iraq, and now seemingly with Iran, are about access to oil. But, if we are at or past peak oil, what would be the point of endless confrontations and wars over dwindling resources? Instead of fighting for the remnants of stuff that is going to vanish anyway, wouldn't it make more sense to spend our time, money and energy retrofitting our economy for the new conditions?

JHK: I've basically said that the American public has gotten the war they require. A lot of self-congratulatory "progressives" such as Harry Shearer on NPR complain about the war, but they're still enjoying the motoring fiesta. There's a lady in my town who drives a Ford Expedition with a "War Is NOT the Answer" bumper sticker on her car. At every opportunity I tell her that war IS the answer -- if you want to live like that. Progressives have been demonizing political leaders who are merely defending a way of life that people at all points on the political spectrum still expect to maintain. I take the position that we'd better start thinking of making those "other arrangements." The political left is just as AWOL on the railroad question as the right wing is. I think it would indeed make a lot more sense retrofitting our economy and changing our behavior, but the fact is that nobody
wants to do that. So, we have a resource war instead.

DM: In The Long Emergency, you emphasize your view that the creation of suburbia represented the greatest misallocation of resources in human history, because it depends on a car culture that will be unsustainable in an energy-poor world. Is there anyone or anything to blame, though, for this state of affairs, should the suburban (and urban) collapse you foresee come to pass? Looking back, would we say that capitalism, with its manic mantra for growth, was to blame? Or is blaming an economic system
too simplistic?

JHK: The suburban way of life IS going to collapse, in the sense that it will lose its usefulness and its monetary value. While there were some bad actors in the story -- like the General Motors and Firestone Tire conspiracy of the 1930s to systematically destroy the streetcar systems all over America -- in general one can say that suburbia was an "emergent" and "self-organizing" phenomenon like countless other social systems. It was a response, in America, to cheap oil, cheap and abundant rural land, and to the inadequacy and artlessness of our cities. It also represented a kind of indulgence we granted ourselves for winning World War Two. It turns out to have been a rather tragic enterprise. I certainly don't blame "capitalism," which I do not regard as either a belief system or a form of politics, but simply a set of laws governing the behavior of surplus wealth.

DM: In your book, you talk about the fantasy of unending growth, writing, "If we project 'housing starts' ninety-nine years forward at current rates, there wouldn t be a single buildable quarter-acre lot left in the world." The foregoing suggests to me a couple of things: first, that even without peak oil, the growth fixation is a dangerous one; and second, that perhaps there was something inevitable about the plight of civilization, as you suggest it will play out. Populations of all species grow exponentially in the presence of abundant resources and in the absence of serious predators or competitors. But frequently, they use up their resources and their populations crash. In using and then exhausting our fossil fuel endowment and growing from a population of one billion in 1800 to six and a half billion today, do you think it is possible that we are simply replicating on a grand scale the experience of the reindeer on St. Matthew Island?

JHK: Well, I think Malthus was essentially right. And I think Joseph Tainter has described the mechanisms of cyclical human failure very accurately in his phrase "over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns." The oil age was very special. Malthus wrote his famous essay about fifty years before the oil extravaganza started. His basic idea is sound. Oil postponed the Malthusian reckoning with our numbers. It's coming around again at a far greater scale, now, and it is liable to be a gnarly spectacle.

DM: I sometimes personally think that we'd actually be better off without most of the things that we take for granted: TV, cars, computers, mega chain stores, processed food and on and on. The reason is that all these wonders of what you call "the drive-in utopia" seem to have a great many unintended adverse side effects. What do you think?

JHK: I certainly agree. I don't write better because I have a computer (I composed my first five novels on typewriters or by handwriting.) Computers have not made me more efficient; they only waste my time -- for instance seducing me to submit to interviews out of sheer vanity. In my experience, I've had better times drinking and playing guitars with my friends than watching TV or driving on I-87. I think we way under-appreciate the negative consequences of our technofied experiences.

DM: You have said that one concrete step we can take now to prepare for the future that you describe is to rebuild the national railroad system. If you were given unlimited power to "get things done", what other steps would you take?

JHK: I would follow my friend Jeff Brown's excellent suggestion and replace the federal payroll tax (FICA) with a stiff gasoline tax. I'd legislate comprehensively against further suburban expanasion. I would do everything possible to reactivate our watefronts for shipping -- most of them have been dedicated to parks and condo development. I would re-direct all agricultural subsidies to small-scale, local farmers. I would begin at once a debate at the highest level about whether to go forward with investments in nuclear power. Many other things will tend to take care of themselves. For instance, increased energy prices will eventually put an end to pernicious activities like WalMart.

DM: In your book you write: "The circumstances of the Long Emergency will be the opposite of what we currently experience. There will be hunger instead of plenty, cold where there was once warmth, effort where there was once leisure, sickness where there was health, and violence where there was peace." This is a very bleak prospect to hold out to young people. How do they typically react when you present this prospect to them in your lectures? And what do you say to their responses?

JHK: I have to remind them that sometimes it is necessary for individuals and groups of people to show some heroism and fortitude. The time for being crybabies is over.

DM: I notice that you have an interest in the visual arts: that you paint, and that you discuss architecture a good deal, and at your website you maintain an "Eyesore of the Month" inventory of what you regard as architectural blunders, including works by some of the most famous names in modernity. You described David Childs' revised plans for the Freedom Tower as Ground Zero as lacking "the common dignity of a bowling trophy". I get the feeling that you think much of what we take as being "great" in architecture and the arts is a kind of tumor-like outgrowth, or overgrowth, of the one-shot bonanza of our fossil-fuel blowout, and that much of what the elites today believe to be significant accomplishments in the visual arts and architecture might seem, to our descendants, as grotesque or even insane. Is that a fair assessment of your views, and does it apply as much to canvas art as to modern architecture? What kind of art -- visual, literary, musical -- do you think will arise during the Long Emergency that you foresee?

JHK: Well, that is a fair assessment. I think Modernism in the arts was a fiasco -- but I hasten to add that Modernism only expressed the various guises of entropy at work in our culture during this period. The high-energy industrial experience has left us quite crazy, afflicted, demoralized, and injured. I very emphatically believe that our spirits will automatically respond to the vicissitudes ahead by restoring true notions of beauty and truth to the arts and to architecture.

DM: This website is primarily devoted to issues in philosophy. Does philosophy have anything to say -- even if only by way of consolation -- for what we face, if it comes to pass? I notice that you repeatedly stress, in your book and other writings, your view that "life is tragic". Is that a key part of your philosophy, and does it inform your response to the long emergency that you predict? Who are your favorite philosophers and thinkers, and what relevance, if any, do you think their views might have to the conditions that you think we face?

JHK: Yes, I believe we lost our recognition of the tragic element in life, and that this loss has made us foolish and ridiculous. My education had a lot of holes in it. I flunked philosophy 101 and never took another course in the field again.

DM: What are you currently working on? Your blog is amazingly busy, so I gather that takes up a lot of time. Are you writing, or planning to write, another book?

JHK: I am in the middle of a post-oil novel -- since that is a world that can only be imagined, not reported upon directly. I think people will be interested to receive a detailed, imagined picture of this future. The job of fiction is to create a plausible world. My blog connects me to my readership, but it, too, has diminishing returns. My email load as become a tremendous burden and an obstacle to getting things done. For the moment, I have accepted these consequences, but I can imagine a time ahead when I just "go tune my fiddle".]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:46:28 +0000 8d34201a5b85900908db6cae92723617 Del Ratzsch: Science and Design http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/del-ratzsch-science-and-design-r47 Del Ratzsch is professor of philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College. He specialises in the philosophy of science and has written extensively on issues surrounding design arguments.

- Interviewed for TGL* in 2006

TGL: How and why did you become interested in the philosophy of science, and in design arguments in particular?

DR: I have a love affair with science dating back to my early teens, and was initially working toward a physics/mathematics degree. Although I changed paths partway through and ended up in philosophy, I never lost my science fascination (maybe even science envy?), and gradually snuck back in a science-related direction via philosophy of science. And some of the things that had interested me in science had had philosophical overtones.

One other factor is that I was raised in a quite conservative Christian environment; my early love of science - especially a fascination with evolution and cosmology - seemed on occasion to collide rather hard with various specific beliefs I had acquired. That led to a general interest in science/religion issues, creation/evolution issues and eventually to traditional design and contemporary Intelligent Design (ID) issues.

TGL: How would you characterise the debate surrounding design in science? Why has it become so acrimonious and could it have been otherwise?

DR: The term "unfortunate" comes to mind. There is a whole battery of fascinating issues which design questions raise but unfortunately in some circles on both sides, emotion and agendas have trumped responsible investigation of issues. Fear of allowing one's opponents to make any points has led to pretty skewed caricatures, and on each side both a lack of respect for the opposition and bitterness over low blows, misrepresentations, incompetence-fueled vitriol, etc., from those opponents has resulted in some on both sides excusing themselves from the bother of getting even the positions of the opposition right.

Although the issues and groups are in fact distinct, many of the same combatants from earlier creation/evolution disputes have aligned themselves along ID/anti-ID lines respectively (e.g., some creationists adopting ID as another, seemingly more scientifically respectable anti-evolution weapon). Many have brought their pre-existing hostility with them into the new context. But that parallel alignment isn't universal. Many old-line young earth creationists have been very critical of the Intelligent Design movement, and quite a number of Christian anti-creationists have become staunchly pro-ID. (Of course, many ID advocates have blistering things to say about theistic evolutionists.) Even a few unbelieving anti-creationists have become quite sympathetic to ID. Despite the genuine distinction between ID and creationism, in anti-ID circles there have been extended, deliberate attempts to transfer the substantial intellectual opprobrium of creationism onto ID - hence the insistent use of the term "intelligent design creationism" - without acknowledging, the differences between the two. And in the other camp, many vocal anti-evolutionists have (I think mistakenly) embraced ID as inherently anti-evolution, overlooking, e.g., the fact that one of the main formative figures in the movement - Michael Behe - has repeatedly declared in print that he has no principial problems with common descent whatever. Many lay creationists also mistakenly take ID to be merely a plug for gaps they see in nature and which they think evolution can't fill and endorse it for that purpose.

I think that another part of the explanation for the acrimony is that many on both sides intuitively (and often only tacitly) correctly recognize that there are potentially some deep matters at stake - from the nature of science to the nature of human cognition to the nature of nature itself and perhaps ultimately to some basic and seriously consequential naturalism/theism issues. It really does matter how things come out.

TGL: What motivates you to continue working in this area, given the hostility on all sides that is associated with it?

DR: Well, some would say sheer perversity, but I hope it's a bit better than that. There have been times in my own life when I desperately wanted to avoid having to admit that the (of course) sleazeballs and gross incompetents on the other side of some issue from me might be right on some key point. Who wants to give people like that a chance to say "I told you so"? In such situations there has always been the temptation both to accept 'refutations' of the opposition uncritically - even gleefully - and to dismiss opposition arguments without really staring them in the eyeballs, feeling virtuously superior all the while. And the more deeply one is committed to views in the area, the stronger the temptation. But the ugly truth is that sometimes when one really does do the homework, one discovers that one's opponents are not absolutely without exception loony and morally vicious, and even if they are generally wrong they may (no doubt by sheer accident and for all the wrong reasons, of course) have gotten hold of some genuine embarrassment for one's own view which needs to be addressed.

It seems to me that some of the design issues are too important to let heat trump light, which has undeniably been part of the story to this point, and that the vitriol from both sides is an index of that importance. There are few matters that go deeper than the nature of human cognition, the nature of the reality we inhabit, naturalism/theism questions, and so forth. So I have wanted to try to wrestle some of those issues to the ground. I don't think I've completely managed that at this point, but that is hardly a unique position - at least as I see it, no one else has either. And besides all that, I just find the issues fascinating.

TGL: In the conclusion to your book, Nature, Design and Science, you write regarding the legitimacy of involving supernatural design in science. You say that "contemporary culture has on this question opted for easy resolutions". Could you explain what you mean by that?

DR: I had several things in mind there. The question of whether or not principles involving supernatural intelligent design can play any legitimate role in science under any circumstances turns out to be a quite complex one. Indeed, that question is the focus of the entire book. But - first - many people try to answer it by appeal to some definition of science. Of course, no one has a complete and defensible definition of science, and the definitions (or partial definitions) of science generally employed for this purpose are demonstrably oversimplified, and once suitably complexified they no longer so clearly do the proposed work. Second, many assert that design theories ultimately reduce to God-of-the-gap views and that such views are scientifically, theologically, or otherwise unacceptable. Among the problems with this shortcut dismissal are that although many design theories are indeed gap theories, some are not (e.g., what ID advocates sometimes refer to as "frontloading," according to which God built all the relevant potentials and capacities and directions into the original creation, subsequent developments being the designed, natural, unbroken, and continuous unfolding of those primordial potentials).

Furthermore, gap theories turn out to be not quite as easily dispatched as often thought. At the very least, it must be admitted that they are logically impeccable - if nature, chance, humans, aliens, etc., can't produce something which is manifestly sitting in front of us, then alternatives other than the supernatural are rather scarce. (Of course, establishing that impossibility is a large and very sticky wicket.) Gap theories might not be science (at least, that is widely asserted), but that will depend again upon a definition of science.

Third, many hold that science and religion function completely in separate domains generating an easy dismissal of religion – and of course of (supernatural) design – as irrelevant to science. Unfortunately, such ‘separation’ views (e.g., Gould’s NOMA) are highly problematic – indeed, I think that they are irreparably inadequate.

Of course, in a more general sense a number of vocal disputants in the ID case take easy routes by partially relying upon stereotypes, over-generalizations, catchphrases, mockery, straw men, and secondary literature. Here is one very simple example from one side at the lay level. It is now routine for the media to specifically define Intelligent Design as the view that the world or life is "too complex" to have arisen naturally, by accident, etc. That's easy to grasp - but simply inaccurate. Not only does it not even fit many historical design arguments, but the complexity mainstays of ID arguments involve not mere high complexity, but very special and specific types of complexity - "irreducible complexity" (Behe) and "specified complexity" (Dembski). That is not to say that their proposals work (and I argued in the appendix of Nature, Design and Science that Dembski's proposal is not adequate to the task he assigns it – Dembski disagrees), but it is to say that the proposals are not as simple as they are routinely represented as being.

TGL: You also argue that design could have some possible "payoffs" for science. What are some of those payoffs?

DR: First, I'm glad that you were careful to say "could" and "possible". I don't see the Intelligent Design movement as having yet made their case here, although I don't see any principial reason why they can't. Most of what I see as possible payoffs are indirect and not necessarily near the empirical ground level. That is not a criticism, of course, since that characterizes a lot of essential and profoundly consequential components of science - e.g., shaping metaphors (17th century machine metaphors), 'maxi-theories' (Darwinian evolution), and even structuring presuppositions of science (uniformity of nature). Such things primarily guide, specify boundaries, and dictate norms for theory construction, theory acceptability, concept legitimacy, success criteria and the like.

Those sorts of things have a subtly exercised but ultimately huge impact on science. Think of the consequences of the early modern shift from organic to machine metaphors in science. (Incidentally, note that both at the time were seen as products of design.) A design outlook would offer additional perspectives, additional conceptual resources, additional explanatory themata, additional shaping metaphors. And we humans have been pretty bad at guessing what concepts wouldn't ever be of future use, as every scientific conceptual revolution attests. Historically, design ideas served as important and fruitful heuristics in various disciplines and indeed continue to do so implicitly in e.g. biology. If design ever does alter science (again) I think that this deep shaping level is one important place to look.

Even in the empirical trenches, design isn't necessarily a total no-show. Cosmological fine-tuning has a least a whiff of design about it, and least action theories - notoriously redolent of design - are, according to e.g. Planck and some others, scientifically more productive than purely mechanistic theories. Furthermore, given the role of theology in the rise of science itself, and given that the cosmos which science presupposes has a creation-esque flavor (orderly, law-governed, elegant, intelligible, coherent, unified - as one might reasonably expect of a deliberately designed creation), it may be that science itself is a design payoff. (I've discussed some of these issues in more detail elsewhere.) In any case, design theories might conceptually lock into those design-shaped foundations more elegantly than do non-design or anti-design theories.

But perhaps most importantly, if - if - the cosmos or some things in nature are designed (and surely that isn't a matter to be decided either by philosophical edict or by appeal to human definitions of science), then genuinely understanding the relevant phenomena (and isn't that what science is about?) is likely going to require employment of some design concepts. But again, the above largely represent potentials - I don't know that anyone has detailed working proposals at this point, or knows specifically what such proposals would look like.

TGL: Many design arguments have relied on the recognition of design through inference or induction. You've written about an alternative - recognizing design through perception. Could you talk about what you mean by perceiving design and what implications this view might have for design arguments?

DR: Nearly everyone realizes that old-style foundationalism is a failure. One of the more intriguing among the multitudinous proposed alternatives has been the contemporary revival and spinoff of some of Thomas Reid's proposals, including the "Reformed Epistemology" developed by Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others. On Reidian views, our beliefs about the past, other minds, the existence of the external world and so on are not the products of arguments (or inferences, decisions, or the like), nor, rationally, need they be - which is a good thing for our prospects for rational propriety, given the twin facts that (i) there are no known past or present such arguments that actually work and that (ii) neither that failure nor even the apparent unanswerability of skeptic arguments seems to make the slightest difference to anyone's actual beliefs in the past, other minds, the external world, etc. On the Reidian view, we have innate faculties which simply generate such beliefs (both general principles and specifics) within us, and if these faculties are operating properly and under appropriate circumstances, the produced beliefs are rationally legitimate for us. Reid catalogued a variety of belief areas in which such belief-producing dispositions operated - again, the past, other minds, the external world, as well as basic moral principles, principles and processes of reason, acceptance of the testimony of others, aesthetics, and of present interest design in nature which, by a very short inference, led to conclusions about a designing mind.

Not only do I find much to like in this general type of view, but it struck me as interesting that just as unshakeable belief in the external world continues serenely on in the face of both the failure of positive arguments and the apparent power of skeptical cases, so widespread belief in design continues serenely on in the face of both difficulties in positive design arguments and the apparent power of the well known criticisms of such cases. My "Perceiving Design" was an effort at explicating Reid's own (fairly limited) remarks on design in the context of the contemporary design discussion.

Reid's basic idea was that we perceptually (and immediately albeit often implicitly) recognize marks of design and that it is a short (inferential) step from that recognition to the thing in question being designed and the existence of a designing agent. Among the marks Reid cites were contrivance, order, organization, intent, purpose, regularity, beauty and adaptation.

Perhaps the most immediate consequence for current design discussions would be to relocate some key parts of the issue. More or less every current contribution to the discussion presupposes that design is a matter of inference - indeed, Dembski's initial book, still the technical manifesto of the design movement, is titled The Design Inference. The pervasiveness of that presupposition is why Neil Manson (editor of God and Design in which my paper appeared) refers to the paper as "disruptive".

In any case, as I argued in that paper, even if inductive inferences are essential to many design cases, the base cases from which the inference proceeds cannot be inductive (on pain of regress), but must arise in some other way. Reid's suggestion may be quite important for those cases. Indeed, alternatives are rather scarce. There has been some interest in the idea, and even one recent doctoral dissertation on the topic by John Mullen at Notre Dame.

TGL: Design arguments are often associated with the idea of "gaps" in nature. How important are gaps to design arguments?

DR: For some design arguments, they are crucial. For instance, Dembski's 'explanatory filter' is completely gap-driven. I don't see that as necessarily a defect. We routinely employ gap arguments in all sorts of contexts. For instance, the SETI program is a gap-searching project - trying to find signals which nature alone couldn't or wouldn't produce, then constructing alien-civilizations-of-the-gap arguments. Further, it is nowhere written in stone that nature has no causal or explanatory gaps of the relevant sort. For all we know nature may contain gaps which can only be bridged by divine action. And that could be intentional - God might like running some things in nature hands-on, and might have created nature to allow for that in its normal operations. Anyway, gaps and gap arguments as such are unproblematic in principle.

Of course, there are serious questions concerning how we might identify supernaturally bridged gaps as such, especially scientifically. Such gaps might thus be inconvenient - or worse - for our investigative efforts and procedures, and we might have no choice but to assume continuity as a working strategy, but we can hardly demand that nature conform herself to our limitations - i.e., we cannot very appropriately issue inflexible ontological edicts propped up solely by reference to our epistemological limitations. Reality, it seems to me, is a bit more independent and robust than that. But many see gap-type arguments as having a troubled history and a troubling character.

But not all design arguments are gap arguments. In fact, during the heyday of natural theology - late 18th and early 19th centuries - non-gap arguments involving the interlocking structure of laws, cosmic order, the elegance and beauty built into nature, and the like, were very widely seen as preferable to and more powerful than gap arguments. And many contemporary ID advocates also embrace some non-gap arguments, including the 'frontloading' picture mentioned earlier. Front-loading types of design pictures go back at least to Augustine.

More specifically, gaps have to do with e.g. mechanical causal histories, whereas design has to do with intentional histories. Those are in many cases intimately related issues. Gaps can be important clues to design, since depending on the context an actual mechanical, causal gap could suggest agency as a causal factor, and it is a relative short step from there to design. But the issues are distinct, and the ritual allegation that design views are all God-of-the-gap theories is inaccurate philosophically, as well as historically and contemporarily. There are, again, many (especially lay) design-gap advocates, but the blanket universalization is straightforwardly mistaken.

It is also worth noting that if nature is designed and if it does contain causal or explanatory gaps, then any prohibition on gap theories will nearly guarantee that science - discarding one failed non-gap theory only by replacing it with another (not yet failed) gap theory - will not self-correct in the usual advertised way, and that science will never correctly understand the relevant phenomena.

TGL: It has been argued that the gradual "erosion" of scientific gaps has made religious belief unnecessary. What do you make of this argument?

DR: I'm suspicious. The "erosion of gaps" argument is both factually and philosophically weaker than usually acknowledged. Gaps have certainly evaporated in some cases under pressure of scientific advance, but I don't know of anyone who has actually done the work of constructing a historical induction for the usually assumed constant drumbeat of collapsing empirical gaps. The case is complicated by e.g. Kuhn's contention that sometimes in scientific revolutions ground is lost and previously closed gaps suddenly re-open. (Of course, from a design perspective, even one genuine gap would be of logical interest.) And intriguingly enough, at least one gap - cosmic fine-tuning - seems to be gaping ever wider the more fully it is investigated. The platform for this induction is missing a couple legs.

And beyond that, I don't think that science can even in principle provide a total account even in its own terms. Science requires a battery of presuppositions and those presuppositions are not direct results of science - they are conceptual structural materials science itself depends upon and without which there would be no science. Thus if we are rationally justified in accepting science then we must be rationally justified in accepting those foundational presuppositions. But not being results of science, their rational justification cannot rest upon science, but must lie beyond science. Thus, if we take science and its results to be rationally justified, science is not the only source of rational justification. There must then evidently be some deeper source of rational justification. Historically religion played a significant role here. But the present point is that even if the usual empirical gap-closing induction worked flawlessly, the story - even of science's own rational legitimacy - is not complete, and may require design ideas at some deeper level. (That would be an analog of Darwin's suggestion in his notebooks that design did not operate at the level of organisms, but that the deeper laws might be designed.)

The important point above is that this "unnecessary" claim rests upon a massive induction - from an alleged unbroken track record of closed gaps to the continuation and presumably eventual closure of all or nearly all such gaps - and that neither the history nor the projection is as straightforward as widely presumed.

In any case, since as noted above both historically and currently some design arguments have no connection to gaps at all, even were the huge induction to go through compelling us to believe that someday all empirical gaps would be scientifically closed, it is not clear that that would be fatal for design positions.

But your initial question had to do not just with design views, but with whether religious belief itself would be rendered unnecessary. Although that is commonly answered in the affirmative (e.g., Weinberg holds this position), it is not clearly true. The only way to make this claim even prima facie plausible is to see religious belief as functioning solely as a competitor to science, its only function being explanatory on the same level as science. There is a lot of pretty a priori speculation about how religion must have resulted from primitive people trying to cope with the world by inventing religion as an explanatory system, but I know of no good arguments for that, and arguing that an essentially ever-incomplete science either leaves no room for religion or is complete enough to render religion superfluous - especially a religion which goes beyond mere primitive attempts at explaining nature - takes more of a case than I think anyone has yet made.

But all that said, I think that one should be very wary of identifying something in nature as indicating a gap. Creationists and some (especially lay) ID advocates have been very – overly – ready to see gaps, and some opponents of ID have made the complete absence of any gaps in the entire cosmos a matter of principle. Neither position, it seems to me, fosters a suitable readiness to see what nature might have to say on the issue. And isn't that supposed to be part of what science is about?

TGL: Theories about the relationship between science and religion vary widely. Some people think religion has no place in science while others believe that religious books can directly provide content for scientific theories. How would you describe the relationship between science and religion?

DR: To say that views "vary widely" is putting it very diplomatically. I would tend to say that they are all over - and often off the edges of - the map.

Some of the usual categories (e.g., complete separation, complementarity, conflict) are, I think, demonstrably defective - sometimes woefully so. Clearly, there are integral connections - both historically and philosophically. To reprise just one, science cannot operate except with foundational presuppositions and assumptions of (and a world actually exhibiting) order of some level, consistency, intelligibility, etc. - i.e., a world like a creation. The necessary metaphysical and conceptual resources match up to a creation-like picture pretty nicely. As Paul Davies puts it in his Are We Alone?:

Quote

Science began as an outgrowth of theology, and all scientists, whether atheists or theists ... accept an essentially theological worldview.


But saying how deep the 'internal' connections may go is a tricky business. Since we have neither innate concepts nor direct experience of most theoretical matters - e.g., quantum phenomena - we cannot escape employing metaphorically the concepts we do have, trying to refine them and make them fit. (Indeed, Mary Hesse has argued that theoretical explanations just are "metaphorical redescriptions" of phenomena.) Given that metaphor is required precisely because our human concepts don't always map one to one into or onto nature, conceptual material which is extraneous to the theoretical situation at hand but which may be an irremovable constituent part of the concept unavoidably employed, gets imported into
science. And it turns out that some of the metaphors in question have theological roots.

But would any project that took explicit account of any theological theories or resources be science? In general, I have a sort of nostalgic soft spot for the old "damn the torpedoes" conception of science as going after the truth no holds barred (the phrase originally from Bridgman, I think). From that perspective, if we have rationally defensible reasons of whatever sort for thinking that something is true, then if that truth has implications for scientifically relevant issues it is not clear why as a scientist one should always be obliged to pretend to be ignorant of that truth. So if it should turn out that, say, Scripture provides rationally justifiable grounds for some proposition relevant to some scientific matter concerning the history, function, character, or contents of the cosmos, I don't see any inviolable reason in principle why qua scientist one is utterly forbidden from taking that possible truth into account in one's attempt to understand that facet of the cosmos. (On that general principle count, I think that some creationists are right.) Of course, one might need a case for the rational justification in question, and such cases might be difficult to generate. (And some creationists have gone way off the track in this area, and also concerning what Scripture really says, what science is and says, etc.)

Given human history, it might even be the best practical strategy to take absence of rational justification as the preliminary provisional default value. But that's no big deal - in fact, that is true of scientific proposals as well, which is why scientists typically demand replication, why the scientific mindset is often described as a form of skepticism, why Popperianism takes attempts at falsification to be the definitive scientific task and so forth.

TGL: In your paper Humanness in their hearts: Where science and religion fuse, you've argued that many of the cognitive processes involved in scientific thought are the same as the ones involved in religious thought. What implications does this have for how we think about their relationship?

DR: That's a very good question, and one I've been working on for some time. It seems to me that it tells us at a minimum that any simple, sharp separation of science and religion does not reflect our cognitive and neurological architectures, that there are deep interconnections between what we take to be scientific and religious beliefs, and that cases for the two being in deadly conflict - which already fail historically and philosophically - fail at the even deeper level of neural structures giving rise to our very cognition as well. Some of the deep interconnections between science and religion I think ultimately track back philosophically to the created structure of the cosmos itself, but also back to the fact that inputs from neurological structures and systems routinely associated with science - e.g., reason - and those routinely associated with religion - e.g., emotion - are not completely separate or separable systems. There is increasing and no longer even controversial evidence that reason itself does not function properly in the absence of properly functioning emotion neural systems, and in some cases the structures themselves and their inputs and outputs are integrated - fused - prior to our having conscious access to them.

Still, I'm not sure what all the positive implications are - I'm working on that - but again at the least it tells us that the structure, foundations, and cognitive underpinnings of science and religion are not in deadly opposition, as some contend.

TGL: In that same paper you use analogies, rather than propositions, to describe the science-religion relationship. Why did you decide to take that approach?

DR: Analogies (and metaphors and such) allow us to deal with and operate productively on a much richer and more complex conceptual landscape than do strictly propositional resources. It works much the same way (to sneak in an analogy already) that a visual graph typically allows an intuitive grasp of many aspects of a function which is much quicker, broader, and more employable than that offered by a complicated string of complex equations underlying the graph. (Recall Reid again - Hesse also.) The fact is that science isn't just propositional structures and processes, religion isn't just propositional structures and processes, and we humans don't operate cognitively - much less existentially - just in some abstract presuppositional realm, so it looked like a possibly fruitful strategy. In any case - sort of bearing out the point - the specific conception of science/religion relationships I had in mind seemed promising, and I still don't know how to - or if one can - reduce it to propositions, some algorithm, etc.

TGL: In your review Design Theory and its Critics, you wrote that "If (perhaps for overwhelmingly good reasons) science is restricted (even just methodologically) to 'natural' explanatory and theoretical resources, then if there is a supernatural realm which does impinge upon the structure and/or operation of the 'natural' realm, then the world-picture generated by even the best science will unavoidably be either incomplete or else wrong on some points. Unless one assumes philosophical naturalism (that the natural constitutes the whole of reality) that will be the inescapable upshot of taking even mere methodological naturalism as an essential component of scientific procedure." This suggests that the distinction between the two forms of naturalism collapses, but there seems to be little awareness of the argument. Do you intend to develop it further?

DR: I have discussed it some elsewhere (e.g., in "Natural Theology, Methodological Naturalism, and 'Turtles all the way down'" (Faith and Philosophy, Vol 21 #4, October 2004, pp. 436-455)). And I want to emphasize that - contrary to some critics of methodological naturalism - I don't argue that the distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism actually collapses, but that in the context of some specific presuppositions the outcomes of application are indistinguishable. But again, the claim is a conditional one - if certain other assumptions are made. To flesh it out a bit, here's a chunk from the above article.

Quote

The basic problem with pre-stipulated conceptual/theoretical boundaries is that if reality itself happens to fall outside those boundaries, theorizing within the confines of those boundaries will inevitably generate either incompleteness or error. But methodological naturalism just is a stipulated prohibition on anything outside the 'natural' playing any conceptual role in scientific theorizing and explanation. If it turns out that reality chooses to ignore our restrictions (and why on earth shouldn't it?), then theorizing forbidden to cross those boundaries will inevitably be either incomplete or mistaken.

Here is an analogy. [All right - caught analogizing again.] Suppose that during the final pre-launch crew briefing for NASA's first manned mission to Mars, the head of NASA warns the crew of the dangers of starting public panics and instructs them to make no mention in any of their reports of aliens - regardless of what they happen to find on Mars. The restriction does make some sense. But suppose that the first thing the crew sees upon exiting their lander is an utterly undeniable Martian bulldozer. The question instantly arises: where did that come from? But the crew has a problem answering that question. Given the prohibition barring reference to aliens, the crew has only two options: (i) they can refrain from addressing the question, or (ii) they can construct a theory of the chemical evolution of Martian bulldozers. But that means that their science of Mars will be either (i) woefully incomplete - leaving out perhaps the single most fascinating aspect of the mission - or (ii) outrageously mistaken.

[...]

But even just methodological naturalism conjoined with aspirations for completeness has substantive implications. First, if one restricts science to the natural, then assumes that science can in principle get to all truth, then one has implicitly presupposed philosophical naturalism. But even if one merely stipulates methodological naturalism as essential to science, then assumes only that science is competent for all physical matters, or that what science (properly conducted in the long run) does generate concerning the physical realm will in principle be truth, then if the truth of the specific matter in question is non-natural, even the most excruciatingly proper naturalistic scientific deliverances on that matter may be wide of the mark, typically in exactly the way a science built on philosophical naturalism would be. For practical purposes, that comes close to importing philosophical naturalism into the structure of science.

So whether methodological naturalism has substantive philosophical implications (contrary to the common denial) or is philosophically neutral depends upon what it operates in tandem with. At the least, methodological naturalism makes the de facto assumption that there is an identifiable realm of reality which is on the scientifically relevant level functionally self-contained, and which is on that level functionally de-coupled from the supernatural. That assumption is neither obvious, trivial, nor - since it is an empirical universal negative - demonstrable.


But to actually answer your question, I may try to push it a bit further. But despite the above (and some other) reservations and qualifications, I think that methodological naturalism is a useful - perhaps even essential - provisional strategy, and one not to be lightly overridden.

TGL: Much has been made of the importance of methodological naturalism, particularly as definitive of what makes something science. What do you think of the arguments in its favour?

DR: Arguments for its value as a provisional strategy may be right. But even as a strategy, it has to be used with care. Over-rigid adherence can (as indicated earlier) have consequences for the self-corrective nature of science, and it can have other consequences (as noted just above) if care is not taken concerning what assumptions it is employed with.

Arguments for it will depend in part on exactly what methodological naturalism is, and more care is required there than is sometimes given. For instance, it is quite common to see methodological naturalism defined as a requirement that science be restricted just to natural concepts, resources, data, and theories, that being interpreted to mean that whether or not philosophical naturalism is true, science must proceed as if it is. (That, for instance, is the position of the National Center for Science Education - or at least of its director.) But the problem here is that (as Boyle pointed out three plus centuries ago) nature in a created universe might well - indeed most likely would - be very different from nature in a random, chance universe. Thus, the typical equating of a restriction to the natural with proceeding as if philosophical naturalism is true, turns out to beg some deeper questions.

Most of the actual arguments for methodological naturalism being a definitive, unchallengeable rule of science seem to me to be problematic. Very briefly, the three most common types of arguments are (1) arguments that anything non-natural is outside the realm of empirical detectability or testability, (2) arguments that allowing the non-natural into science is destructive in that it allows scientists to take the lazy way out in difficult scientific situations (simply saying "Well, God must have done that - no point in trying to figure it out", then wandering off to find the coffee pot) and (3) historical arguments claiming that the history of science has shown the bankruptcy of non-natural considerations in science. The first is the most prima facie plausible, but I think that there could be possible empirical cases in which the most reasonable conclusion would be that something supernatural was at work. (That's one of the cases I try to make in Nature, Design and Science.) Regarding the second, it is often the conviction that something is a product of design that keeps scientists in the hunt. Any company trying to reverse engineer a competitor's new computer model pays particular attention to puzzling components - refusing to give up trying to understand it precisely because they believe it to be a product of design. And of course historically most scientists took nature to be a product of design, and saw themselves as in effect reverse engineering nature - trying (as Kepler is alleged to have said) to think God's thoughts after him. The fundamental intelligibility of nature consequent upon its being designed by God was one of the key motivations underpinning the whole scientific project. But surely, it is argued, the history of science itself has established that allowing reference to the supernatural into science at ground level has simply failed - a la argument (3). But that argument too I think doesn't perform quite as advertised when one looks at the actual historical detail. (I won't go into the complications, but that's the case I tried to make in "Intelligent Design: What does the history of science really tell us?" (in Scientific Explanation and Religious Belief, eds. Michael G. Parker and Thomas M. Schmidt, (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), Chapter 8, pp. 126-149).)

TGL: Why should people be interested in the debate about design?

DR: There is a lot tied up in the debate - everything from the possible existence of a designer, to whether or not there is genuine empirical evidence of a designer, to the nature of science, to the nature of the cosmos (designed or not), to some vexed political issues, is bound up directly or indirectly in the issue. And those are pretty large matters.

Education policy has, of course, been the recent flashpoint. If the general design outlook is right, theories that deliberately exclude such considerations may well be subtly but seriously inadequate, and if teaching those inadequate theories in public schools is mandated by law, and if teaching the (ex hypothesi) true design theories is forbidden by law, the situation is problematic. Indeed, if we teach students the very best theories we can construct under methodological restrictions, neglect to point out that that restriction could have implications for the truth (vs. just the scientific legitimacy) of those theories, and present them as true, we are, I think, engaged in shady practice. So the issues of what ID is (vs. the heavily pushed caricatures), whether it could be legitimate science (the basic philosophy of science question), and whether it might be right (the scientific question), are potentially consequential beyond the level of mere academic interest. And of course, if ID is right, some pretty pressing questions about the character and intentions of the designer - whether supernatural or not - immediately arise. And those are significant regardless of what classificatory label - science, religion, philosophy - one sticks on them. But as mentioned earlier, I don't think that the ID movement has yet delivered the relevant goods on the scientific question.

TGL: How can philosophy shed light on this and other debates concerning science? What is the relevance of the philosophy of science in general?

DR: Philosophy of science can't, of course, dictate science to scientists (much less to reality itself). There are a lot of things it cannot even legitimately pronounce on. But although there is no known precise, complete definition of science, and although the competencies and boundaries of science are matters of dispute, philosophy of science can still underwrite some useful assessments, and sometimes needed refutations, of contentions concerning what science is and is not, what it can and cannot do, where its boundaries are and are not, and what its limitations are and are not - contentions which are invariably deployed in science/religion discussions. And often particular positions and arguments depend upon such contentions which are pretty clearly demonstrably mistaken. More generally, I think it can help us recognize instances where science is not given its proper due (which is now fashionable in some circles, and historically endemic in others) or where too much is claimed for science (which is typical in various anti-religious polemics and even among some proponents of religious belief).

TGL: What are you currently working on?

DR: I'm currently working on a book MS exploring some of the possible implications of recent neurophysiological research for science/religion relationship - trying to track in more depth some of the themes initially developed in "Humanness in their hearts" mentioned above. Longer term, I want to look in detail at evolutionary accounts of religion. And as department chair, a lot of energy goes into trying to keep my rambunctious colleagues in line.

TGL: Who have been the main influences on your thought?

DR: Lots of people, in many different ways. But if I were to pick one, it would be Alvin Plantinga.

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*Please note: For personal reasons unrelated to the content, the author of this interview has asked to remain anonymous. Any errors are the fault of the site owner, who transcribed it.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:45:54 +0000 c75b6f114c23a4d7ea11331e7c00e73c John Dupré: The Disunity of Science http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/john-dupre-the-disunity-of-science-r46 John Dupré is a professor of philosophy of science in the Department of Sociology and Philosophy at Exeter University in the UK, and also the director of Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society. I was able to ask him about several keys areas of his work and relate it to contemporary issues in both science and the philosophy of science.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2006)

PN: You have written that "mathematicism", or the extension of mathematics to areas of science where it can play no role, is a form of scientism and "a sociologically significant contributor to scientific prestige". Can you explain why prestige is important given that science is often thought of as an objective endeavour?

JD: Prestige is important in science for the very simple reason that resources for science are limited. As Philip Kitcher eloquently explains in his recent book, Science, Truth, and Democracy, there is an inexhaustible reservoir of truth, and what science should aim to deliver is significant truth. Particular sets of scientific concepts, methods, instruments, and so on, give us a particular path into the endless thicket of potential knowledge, and which of these we invest in determines which more or less significant truths we may discover.

For reasons that a number of philosophers of science including myself have emphasised in recent years the highest status mathematical work in science is not addressed to discovering truth at all, but at best to developing tools and methods. Even the "fundamental" mathematical laws in physics are not true generalisations about the world but abstract formulae that may or may not prove useful in specific applications carefully tailored to address real problems. (Nancy Cartwright's work over many years has been very important in making this point.)

The problem with the field in which mathematicism has been most dominant, economics, is that the fetishisation of this tool construction activity has often led to a lack of interest in actually attempting to apply these tools to real problems. This has begun to be partly addressed by the project of experimental economics, which has investigated the basic psychological assumptions underlying economists' mathematical theories, and has found that they are often largely false. This raises serious doubts as to whether the mathematical endeavours that have been at the centre of high prestige economics have any real value at all.

The basic position underlying my hostility to mathematicism is empiricism. The success of science has always depended on its connection to empirical reality. Of course, one must be a sophisticated empiricist nowadays. The world does not simply speak to the scientist, the scientist must develop concepts and tools to interpret the world. But if these are not constantly evaluated and refined in interaction with empirical testing, they have increasingly little value. My objection to mathematicism, then, is that it constitutes a divorce of scientific work from empirical reality. It is not, of course, a claim that mathematics does not have an essential role in science; it is a warning against mathematics becoming an end in itself.

Sophisticated empiricism, for me, is ultimately the recognition that pure reason has never told us anything about reality. The challenge is to find ways of applying reason to developing ways of interacting with the world that can give us insight into reality. But experience of the world is always the final arbiter.

PN: What other sociological factors play a role in science?

JD: Science is a social process, and societies are extraordinarily complex things. So I certainly won't offer an exhaustive list of social factors that might affect the development of science. I'll just mention the factor that has been central to my work from the beginning, the development of scientific conceptual schemes. The sciences that I have been concerned with, the biological sciences and the social sciences, aim to tell us about things in which we have had a profound interest that long predates modern science. We talk about ourselves and the living world in a language in which fact and value are inextricably intertwined. I tried to develop this point in my earliest work in which I traced the various interest-relative ways in which people classify biological organisms. Even strictly scientific interests in biology are diverse, for example evolutionary versus ecological, and can lead to different classificatory practices.

The problem that is not, in my opinion, sufficiently appreciated is that scientific findings cannot be purged of this interest relativity. Many scientific claims are presented directly in terms of familiar everyday language, imagining that the applications of these concepts can be investigated in a purely objective, interest-free manner. This is one of my main objections to evolutionary psychology, a "scientific" project that I've spent a good deal of time criticising. The idea that one can illuminate a human problem such as rape by observing the behaviour of ducks or flies is an extreme example of this insensitivity to the subtlety of human language. But of course the reason that these investigations interest people, in fact are a great source of best-selling books, is that people want to learn about rape (or violence, altruism, mate choice, and so on), so this simplistic kind of argument is largely unavoidable. We can formulate scientific findings in esoteric scientific languages that may reflect only scientific, not social, interests. But then if anyone is to care we need to translate the findings somehow into the language we understand.

It is sometimes presented as an objection to this line of thought that physics and chemistry, at least, are sciences that use entirely objective languages generated solely by scientific experience. So shouldn't the biological and social sciences aspire to the same objectivity? The point that this objection misses, I think, is that the objectivity of the physical sciences is based on the fact that the matters they discuss are not ones that anyone else has any interest in, apart from purely epistemic interest. Electrons, say, were developed as a scientific concept in an entirely esoteric scientific context. Of course we care about some of the applications of the physical sciences. But the idea that physics might be free of social values hardly suggests that there are value free atomic weapons or nuclear power stations. And as explained in my answer to the first question, what we find out about physics or chemistry may certainly reflect the interests to which we hope to apply our findings, as is often claimed by those who point with dismay to the extent to which the physical sciences have been funded by the military.

PN: How can science benefit from sociological study?

JD: This is a very large question of which I can only scratch the surface. As I just mentioned, whatever else science may be, it is a social process. Understanding the way this social process works is surely one fundamentally important approach to understanding science. Though I am not a sociologist of science, my current job is as director of a Research Centre mainly concerned with social aspects of contemporary biology, specifically genomics. There are a host of important questions about how the production of scientific knowledge interacts with the rest of society that require sociological investigation. As should be clear from my previous remarks, this is not just a matter of the reception of science by particular interested groups and publics, but also a matter of how these groups affect the science that is produced. This is surely something scientists as much as anyone else would benefit by understanding better.

Related to my remarks about the importance of analysing concepts, I am very interested in the transmission of ideas between different groups of people. A term such as "gene" is understood in very different ways by different groups of scientists, and as scientific findings disseminate to doctors, lawyers, genetic counsellors, and the public at large, different understandings again emerge. This semantic drift has been a major focus of study at Egenis.

PN: In your work The Disorder of Things you claimed that there are problems with falsificationism. What are they and what do you make of the reliance on it as a demarcation criterion by many in the debates over creationism and ID?

JD: One problem with falsificationism is that it is a relic of a philosophy of science that held science to be fully intelligible as a set of propositions (laws, theories, etc). As I have said already, I take a particular scientific project to involve a number of elements: methods, concepts, background assumptions, instruments, and so on. (This is the most important thing that philosophy of science has learned from Thomas Kuhn, though no doubt he is not the only person who has tried to make the point.) It is these diverse elements of a scientific field that make the falsification of a prediction impossible to interpret in any conclusive way - our background assumptions may have been partially mistaken, our instruments may not have worked in quite the way we expected, and so on. No one is going to abandon molecular genetics, say, because it makes a few false predictions, simply because it is currently an enormously productive and successful scientific endeavour.

Of course this leads me to conclude that falsification is not the right concept with which to confront creationists. But the general picture of a successful scientific project will serve very nicely. Creationism has, as far as I can tell, not a single scientific achievement to its credit. Its "instrument" is a book written by a large number of different individuals in the distant pre-scientific past. Its main arguments are generally highly confused claims about scientific problems that a very successful scientific programme has yet to solve - and of course, any science will have plenty of those. And, to be blunt, its central explanatory concept, God, is one without a shred of empirical evidence. As I argue in Darwin's Legacy, prior to the development of compelling evolutionary theories, our ignorance about the possible origins of life were such as to make an intelligent creator a hypothesis worth considering, though as David Hume brilliantly showed in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, such a speculation was extremely tenuous and told us little we wanted to hear about the nature of God. As an empiricist I cannot see any conceivable role for the concept of God in science, at least pending His or Her decision to present Himself or Herself for empirical examination.

PN: Why do you think so many people, particularly scientists, have a "commitment to a universe amenable to one systematic and orderly description", and why do you not believe that such a universe exists?

JD: I might begin by saying that, at least among philosophers of science, I think that this commitment is in quite rapid decline. My main answer must, once again, be an appeal to empiricism: there is no evidence for such a systematic and orderly description. What we should certainly agree is that our description of the world should be coherent, non-contradictory. I suspect that underlying a lot of the insistence on a unitary account of the world is a vague sense that only such an account could meet the condition of being coherent. But I can see no credible grounds for this assumption.

There are a number of reasons why I do not believe a unified account of the universe is possible. I'll mention two. First, once again, is empiricism. While there are of course many points at which different parts of science interact and combine, I see no tendency towards unification. Unifying projects proposed by philosophers, such as the reduction of the mental to the neurophysiological, are not only exposed to powerful philosophical objections, but also are very diffusely reflected in scientific practice.

Second, there is a widespread assumption that causality flows only upwards from simple things to more complex things. This is of course a very metaphorical expression, and exactly what it means depends on an account of causality and what it is for it to "flow". Without trying here to sort out these notoriously difficult questions, it seems to me that this assumption expresses an ungrounded dogma. I cannot see why emergent properties of complex things should not cause the movements of their constituents, and it seems to me that this happens all the time. It is properties of me, including very complex relations to my social environment, that explain and, I would say, cause the movements of physical particles in my fingers as I type these words. Of course the arrangement of particles and molecules in my body are also necessary for the emergence of the powers displayed in my typing. This two way casual flow between levels of organisation is one of the things that makes biological processes so difficult to understand.

PN: What is reductionism and why do you object to it?

JD: Reductionism is the project of explaining the sciences of complex things, without remainder, by appeal to the laws that govern the behaviour of their constituents. I have already mentioned many of the reasons why I reject this position. Clearly it is incompatible with the downward causation I have just described.

Reductionism tends to come down in the end to the conviction that the laws of fundamental physics are universal in scope. If this were so, any laws claimed to apply to complex entities would have to be deducible in principle from these fundamental laws, or false. I can't address the details of the argument about fundamental physical laws. But one reason for being very sceptical about the conviction just mentioned is that it seems to be a hangover of the general view that science is ultimately directed at discovering universal laws, an idea that has proved to have little relevance to, for example, the biological sciences. A concept that has largely superseded this for most philosophers of science is that of a scientific model. Models provide partial representations of aspects of reality that provide more or less valuable, but always partial, insight into the complexities of the real world. Nancy Cartwright in particular has offered compelling arguments that so-called fundamental laws are higher levels of abstraction still that are useful in devising more concrete models. If this is right, the basic premise underlying reductionism is a non-starter.

PN: What do you consider to be the "limits of science"? Why is scientific imperialism (or "the tendency to push a good scientific idea far beyond the domain in which it was originally introduced, and often far beyond the domain in which it can provide much illumination") a problem?

JD: I certainly don't want to specify the limits of science a priori! My point, which follows from my remarks on reductionism, is only that scientific models are useful for a very specific set of questions. Evolutionary models, to take one example, have been enormously successful in helping us to understand the processes by which new forms of biological organisation emerged from earlier forms.

A saying of which I am rather fond is "if one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail". This gets at what I mean by "scientific imperialism". It is no doubt a natural tendency, when one has a successful scientific model, to attempt to apply it to as many problems as possible. But it is also in the nature of models that these extended applications are dangerous. The abstractions that work well in one context may eliminate what is essential in another. So human behaviour, for instance, though it is certainly an aspect of a biological entity that emerged from features of earlier biological entities, is very little illuminated by standard evolutionary models. Human development and human social organisation are two crucial aspects of the aetiology of human behaviour that standard evolutionary models abstract away from, and the attempt to make this particular "imperialist" expansion is to provide a parody of human behaviour.

I do think it is a reasonable hypothesis that the project of finding a general theory of human behaviour lies beyond the "limits of science". This is simply because the models that we have must abstract so drastically to provide useful and intelligible insights into very specific aspects of human behaviour that it is difficult to imagine how they could develop into one supermodel. I certainly won t rule this out a priori! But I think the onus of proof rests very much with the advocate of such an imagined achievement.

PN: What is your view of the manner in which concepts from the philosophy of science are employed in contemporary debates? Does it help for philosophers of science to explain the difficulties associated with demarcation, for example, or can questions of what is or is not science be addressed without them?

JD: As with scientists, philosophers will only provide useful interventions in public debates if they are able to express their findings in the terms in which those debates are framed. I don't think a concept such as demarcation is especially problematic, provided it is made clear that it is simply a word for distinguishing science from non-science. Having said that, I think that the concept of demarcation tends to suggest that there is a sharp line and some definite criterion that sorts the scientific sheep from the scientific goats. I think this is a highly misleading picture. History and philosophy are not (in the English speaking world anyhow) considered to be sciences, but they can be entirely credible grounds of knowledge. And sciences differ greatly in their epistemic credentials. As I argued in The Disorder of Things, I think we are much better to think in terms of epistemic virtues, features of an investigative practice that confer credibility. No doubt the cardinal empirical virtue is a proper connection with empirical evidence, which is the large grain of truth in the criterion of falsificationism. I don t know whether "epistemic virtue" is a good concept to apply to public debates, but the idea behind it is surely not especially esoteric.

PN: In your new book Darwin's Legacy, you are critical of the appropriation of evolutionary biology by psychologists. Why do you think evolutionary biology can tell us little about human nature? Why do others believe it can do more?

JD: As described above, evolutionary psychology is the paradigm of scientific imperialism. There is vastly more to human behaviour than an understanding of the evolutionary process that provided us with the capacities for behaviour so variously exercised by contemporary humans. Of course that is an interesting and difficult question, and a modest evolutionary psychology that attempts to address it - and there are modest evolutionary psychologists - is entirely respectable. My objection is to the project that supposes that specific behavioural dispositions can be inferred from evolutionary reflection, and that has usurped the name "Evolutionary Psychology".

My first objection is that this project is distressingly a priori. General reflections on evolutionary theory are taken to provide strong grounds for believing that humans have specific behavioural dispositions. Second, the project assumes a very crude view of genetics. The argument that our behaviour essentially evolved in the Stone Age presupposes the idea that evolution involves the gradual accumulation of genetic variations that generate behavioural dispositions. A quite simplistic view of the relation between genes and phenotypes is implicitly assumed. Thirdly, the vision of evolution - gradual accumulation of genes with definite phenotypic effects - comes from the 1950s. We now know that evolution can involve a great range of reorganisations of the developmental process, as well as of the genome, and can draw on a vastly greater range of developmental resources than this model assumes. These resources can range from the epigenetic - aspects of cellular chemistry that are transmitted in the maternal cytoplasm - to the construction of a developmental niche by former generations. In the human case the latter would include such things as schools and hospitals. Developmental cycles have had access to a great variety of potentially decisive changes in recent human history, and the assumption that our basic psychology is stuck in the Stone Age is entirely groundless.

It's difficult to speculate on why this programme is nevertheless so popular. No doubt a part of the problem is intrinsic to interdisciplinary work. It is difficult for a psychologist, say, to keep up to date with developmental and evolutionary genomics, so the danger of basing theories on antiquated science is ever present.

I do have more cynical suspicions, I must confess. Evolutionary Psychology has provided a wonderful recipe for best-selling science writing. Perhaps many people do like simplistic stories, and Evolutionary Psychology offers simple compelling Just So stories that mesh nicely with many stereotypes about human behaviour. The fact that these stories can have the effect of reinforcing such stereotypes and making them seem inescapable makes this activity not just bad science but, unfortunately, potentially socially harmful. That they can have these effects is not merely speculation, but is something that is being empirically explored and confirmed by some of my colleagues in social psychology at Exeter.

PN: What are some of the philosophical issues surrounding genetics and genomics and how do you think the philosophy of science can help address them?

JD: A fundamental issue is making sense of the concepts of "gene" and "genome". The former has been of increasing interest to both philosophers and historians of science. Historians have helped to understand the major disjunction between the classical "Mendelian" concept of the gene and the various concepts that have emerged from molecular genetics and genomics in the last half century. Philosophers have tried to make sense of this diversity of meanings and the relations between them, as well as the errors that can arise from conflating them. One noteworthy contribution has been the book by my colleague, Lenny Moss, What Genes Can't Do, in which he expounds a fundamental division between concepts of the gene directly related to phenotypic outcomes, and concepts grounded in molecular biology. He argues that the conflation of concepts of these two kinds has been central to public and professional misunderstanding of the concept. Another has been the project in "empirical philosophy" by Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz, who have explored what scientists mean by molecular genes and have found very little consensus. As I mentioned above, another very important project is tracing the relations between these diverse meanings of "gene" in professional scientific contexts and the understandings that are imported into various contexts outside science itself.

The concept of a genome has received less philosophical attention, apart from a general understanding that widely disseminated metaphors such as blueprint, programme, and recipe are seriously misleading. These, in fact, reflect exactly the conflation or confusion between concepts of gene connected to phenotypes and concepts derived from molecular biology. Another fundamental issue is the relation between understandings of the genome as a purely informational concept, as in the idea of the human genome as a particular sequence of nucleotides, and its treatment as a physical object interacting in diverse and complex ways with the cellular environment.

One might wonder why these were questions for philosophers rather than scientists. Scientists in these fields typically work in very well-defined areas for which very specific understandings of the "genes" with which they are concerned are well entrenched. Reviewing the diversity of such entrenched meanings both contemporarily and historically is not something they are normally called on to do, but is very important for developing a coherent overview of this scientific activity and its epistemic and social significance.

PN: What do you think is the relevance of the philosophy of science today? What are the main issues you are interested in other than those in the philosophy of biology?

JD: Science is (rightly in my view) the major authority on how we understand the world today, but what it is, and why it (sometimes!) deserves that status are very poorly understood. For this reason I think philosophy of science is an extremely important area of intellectual activity. A rather different activity, though certainly not unrelated, is science criticism. The authority of science presents a danger, only at its most obvious when actors in white lab coats endorse dubious health aids on television. It is inevitably difficult for most people to assess what is a well-grounded scientific fact and what is pseudo-scientific speculation, and philosophers of science have a potentially vital role in trying to explain the basis for making such distinctions, and in criticising ungrounded scientific claims.

It has to be said that a lot of contemporary philosophy of science is rather distant from these vital public concerns, and while some of their more esoteric concerns may be valuable, in a world in which no one much thinks intellectual activity is worth supporting for its own sake, I think it is very important for philosophy of science to engage more visibly in public discussions of the value and nature of science. One of my general interests that goes beyond the philosophy of biology relates directly to this belief, and is the extent to which scientific theory inevitably reflects social values.

PN: What is Egenis and what is the extent of your involvement?

JD: Egenis is part of a very large investment by the Economic and Social Research Council in investigating the social impact of developments in genomics and related areas of biology. It includes two other research centres and the Genomics Research and Policy Forum in Edinburgh. While the elements of this investment form a closely interacting network, the research centres have particular strengths and expertise, and Egenis is distinctive for its focus on detailed analysis of the production and content of genomic knowledge. This is dependent on close collaboration between the core work in social science and biologists and philosophers of biology. In parallel with the development of Egenis, the University of Exeter has developed an outstanding group of philosophers and historians of molecular biology (with major support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Wellcome Trust).

My current full-time job is Director of Egenis, including the work in philosophy of biology. This is an exciting interdisciplinary project, and though there is inevitably a fair amount of straight management involved, the presence of such a substantial and diverse group of experts in numerous aspects of genomics provides an extraordinary intellectual opportunity. And, fortunately, I do find some time to write philosophy, both independently and in collaboration with colleagues!

PN: What other projects are you currently working on?

JD: My work at the moment is very much concentrated on philosophy of genetics and genomics. I'm near completion of a collaborative book on the philosophy and sociology of genomics with my colleague (and Co-Director of Egenis) the well-known sociologist of science Barry Barnes. In the longer term I'm looking towards a book that will integrate this recent work with the ideas initially developed in The Disorder of Things, and will provide a wide-ranging ontological account of biology. At the time of writing I am on a short leave from Egenis as holder of the visiting Spinoza Professorship of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. This requires me to deliver two public lectures, for which I have chosen the title "The Constituents of Life". I am hoping that these will provide a skeleton for this developing project, which may become a collaborative venture with some of my fellow philosophers of biology at Exeter.

PN: Who have been the main influences on your thought?

JD: For some reason I have never been comfortable with this question. One undoubtedly important influence has been Wittgenstein. I was an undergraduate at St. John's College, where the resident philosophers were Peter Hacker and the late Gordon Baker, renowned experts on Wittgenstein's thought, and serious early exposure to Wittgenstein has had important influences throughout my career.

I have always been impressed by two sometimes underrated philosophical virtues, clarity and humour. These partly explain my selection of two other influences, Hume and J. L. Austin. Though much of Hume's philosophical system is fairly clearly indefensible today, his commitment to empirical knowledge is still inspiring. And his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion should be compulsory reading for all first year philosophy undergraduates (especially in the U.S.!). Austin is not a very fashionable philosopher today, but his combination of clarity, stylistic brilliance, wit, and common sense remains something to which I shall always aspire.

I should also mention that I am very proud to be associated with what has increasingly been referred to as the "Stanford School" in Philosophy of Science. I have mentioned Nancy Cartwright, who was my colleague at Stanford for many years, as was also Peter Galison, who has made decisive contributions to understanding the nature of experiment in physics. I only overlapped at Stanford very briefly with Ian Hacking, but his work in philosophy of science has been an inspiring model for me. All of these people, not to mention a good number of younger philosophers who did their PhD work at Stanford, share commitments to the diversity of scientific practices and the social embeddedness of science, while at the same time having a real interest in the detailed content of scientific knowledge. The opportunity to work in this philosophical environment has undoubtedly been a major influence on my philosophical development.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:42:31 +0000 ed265bc903a5a097f61d3ec064d96d2e Michael Ruse: Science and Religion http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/michael-ruse-science-and-religion-r45 Program in the History and Philosophy of Science in the Department of Philosophy at Florida State University, Tallahassee. He kindly agreed to be interviewed on the subject of the philosophy of biology and its part in the creationism debate, as well as on some wider, related issues. He is the author of many works, including the recent Can a Darwinian be a Christian?, looking at the relationship between science and religion.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2005)

PN: You recently worked with William Dembski on the volume Debating Design. Some commentators have complained that in so doing you have afforded Intelligent Design credibility it does not deserve. Why do you think engaging ID is a better option than ignoring it, as other academics like Gould or Dawkins have done?

MR: Well, let us face up to it, I am neither Gould nor Dawkins, so what I have to say or to do has nothing like the effect that surrounds them. In one sense, I think I might be giving ID credibility, but in another sense not. I am very critical of ID and never conceal this fact. I put together a volume that has others very critical of ID. I am convinced of the power of reason - it is what I stand for - and by putting the stuff together I hope that some people might read and make the right decisions. Also, I am very much aware that before the Arkansas trial, we evolutionists did nothing, and then things happened. So this time, I try to do something! I did ask Dawkins to participate, and he refused and I respected that decision - I still do.

PN: You have said with regard to Creationists that you "think our arguments are better than theirs and hence I am willing to be judged alongside them". One objection to debating creationists, however, is that skilful rhetoric and well-directed sound bites may win the day over reasoned argument, especially given the limited time allotted to most such encounters. How do you answer this criticism?

MR: True, sound bites do succeed too well. The last presidential election showed this. But I would like to think that there might also be a place for reason and this is where I try to come in. If reason does not count, then close down the universities, especially the philosophy departments.

PN: One of your own complaints against evolutionists is that some of them have been "too damn busy doing their research while Rome burns around them". What are the issues surrounding Creationism that have you so concerned and why are they important enough that academics should put aside their work to address them?

MR: I think that creationism is fundamentalist religion of a particularly silly kind - rapture and Armageddon and all of that. It is also dangerous, as we see in the blind support of Israel by creationists. (Don't read me as being anti-Israel, I am not. I am anti-anti- any kind of critical discussion of the Israel-Palestinian problems, and I think the settlements are just dreadful and wrong. I also feel shame as a European that we made Europe so awful for the Jews that they felt they had to leave.) I see the Iraq invasion as part and parcel of the simplistic Christian attitude that other religions are bad and that we can distinguish black from white and clean things up readily. Saddam Hussein was an evil man, but sometimes in this world one has to be more subtle about dealing with evil.

PN: What role does the philosophy of science (and in particular the philosophy of biology) have to play in the Creationism debate and the wider issues surrounding it?

MR: Look at my collection But is it Science?, or my new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle. I think we can try to understand things, both historically and conceptually.

PN: Following your experiences in Arkansas in 1981, Larry Laudan was critical of the approach that sought to define science, thereby leading to Creationism being judged non-science and hence not suitable for the classroom. Why did you feel this was the best course to take and do you still think the same in hindsight?

MR: We were fighting a court case. The US constitution bars the teaching of religion in science classes; it does not bar the teaching of bad science! We here at FSU are debating the possible existence of a school of chiropractic that the legislature has pushed on us. Many of us are arguing against it, but not on constitutional grounds. Larry Laudan is a Monday morning quarterback.

PN: Other than Creationism, what are the major issues concerning the philosophy of biology today in your opinion?

MR: The usual - species, reduction, the nature of evolutionary theory, teleology, and so forth. Evo-devo (evolutionary development) is the big topic in evolutionary biology at the moment and rightly attracting the attention of the philosophers.

PN: How would you explain the relevance of the philosophy of biology to laymen and, more specifically, those who are hostile to philosophy in general?

MR: Don't bother - I have other things to do. I defend my job as a teacher by showing that I am educating my students about important issues and teaching them how to write and so forth. For the rest, I simply say that man does not live by bread alone and leave it at that. (That is not quite true, because obviously I am interested in social issues - but I don't justify the doing of philosophy of biology as such in pragmatic terms)

PN: What would you say the representative opinion of the philosophy of biology is among biologists? In general, do scientists appreciate the input of philosophers of science?

MR: I could not care less, and that does not bother me at all. I think the biggest mistake a philosopher can make is to try to be a handmaiden for others. I have my problems and biologists have their problems. Leave it at that.

PN: What projects are you currently working on?

MR: I am trying to understand the natures of science and religion compared to each other. I am working now on a book about change and innovation in science and religion and whether they have similarities. We face in America today a big divide between science and religion, and I want to see if this is just contingent or necessary. I will not solve all of the problems in my lifetime, but I can try! I have another book coming out, Darwinism and its Discontents, that takes on the anti Darwinians - religious and otherwise.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:41:55 +0000 647bba344396e7c8170902bcf2e15551 Thomas Lessl: Science and Rhetoric http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/thomas-lessl-science-and-rhetoric-r44 Thomas Lessl is Associate Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. His work involves the rhetoric of science, looking in particular at the meeting of science with the public sphere. I was fortunate enough to be able to ask him some general questions about rhetoric as well as focusing on its role in scientific debate.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2005)

PN: How would you define rhetoric and why should we study it?

TL: Most simply I would define rhetoric as the art of public communication. Anyone who engages in public communication is practicing the art of rhetoric. Art can also mean a body of principles pertaining to its practices, and this is true of rhetoric as well.

Its most active practitioners are our social architects, most typically those political actors who craft the policies, ideologies, and shared identities that create polities. Scholars who study the rhetorical art, like critics and theorists of other art forms, are typically interested in instances of expression that have some particular significance. That significance may arise from a message's place in history, its creativity, or simply from the fact that it represents the features of a particular milieu.

Rhetoric is a subject of importance because its study enables us to better understand the processes of communication that underpin decision making in free societies. Judgments on matters of public policy take their cues from rhetoric, and so an understanding of any society's rhetoric will tell us a lot about its ideas, beliefs, laws, customs and assumptions - especially how and why such social features came into being. We don't typically think of it this way, but every law that is on our record books began as an act of rhetorical undertaking by some public or private citizen trying to fix a problem. Statutes and policies are the ends; rhetoric is the means. If law is the architecture of public life, rhetoric is the art that brings it into being.

PN: How is rhetoric used in communication? Does its influence depend on the subject of discussion?

TL: I'm not sure I would say that rhetoric is "used in communication" because that phrasing would suggest that it can be separated from communication - that there are some forms or instances of public communication that are rhetoric and others that are not. This is what American politicians and journalists often imply when they describe a particular message as rhetoric. For politicians to call an opponent's messages "rhetoric" is to accuse him or her of some duplicity. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding that pervades our culture. Rhetoric is not a category or strategy of communication. It might be better to think of it as a particular property of speech - its persuasive property. To use a simple analogy, physicists tell us that "heat" is one property of matter - which in quantitative terms is its degree of molecular motion. Some objects have very little heat and others have a lot, but they all have it. Absolute zero does not occur in nature, or in the lab. Speech is like that too. All acts of speech have some rhetorical potential, which is the potential to bring about change - some in small ways and others in large ways. But all speech can affect human judgment. So wherever there is speech there will be rhetoric.

How influential rhetoric will be does depend upon how this persuasive property plays out at any given moment of history. Lincoln's Gettysburg address was influential because the American experiment with democracy was in crisis in 1863, and there was great uncertainly about what to do to fix it. That speech proposed a compelling solution. Persuasion plays a greater role when there is great uncertainty and great potential for change. And so subjects that introduce high levels of doubt in volatile times are going to be treated by messages that are "hot", that are rhetorical in a pronounced way. We're less dependent on rhetoric when there is a higher degree of certainty. People don't talk much about what is certain. What's the point? We talk about issues that are in doubt.

Rhetoric has never been understood in my field or in its history going back to classical antiquity as something optional, something that public actors can turn on or off. It is a term that denotes what human beings do whenever they enter into public communication. Anyone who engages in public communication is engaging in rhetoric in the same sense that anyone who paints portraits is a portrait artist. There are good and bad painters, but all are artists. And similarly, while it is possible to judge rhetoric as honest or dishonest, effective or ineffective, it is not possible to engage in public communication without also practising this art.

Rhetoric is used typically to persuade, because the public contexts for which it is created are ones marked by disagreement and competition. Political speech is persuasive because politicians are trying to win elections or to get legislation passed. But disagreement and competition characterize other public situations that are not ordinarily associated with rhetoric. The television news is persuasive because its producers want us to watch it at six o-clock rather than reruns of the Twilight Zone, or even worse the news on a competitor's channel. And, of course, I would strongly insist that scientific communication has this persuasive aspect as well.

Discourse in the public arena has certain characteristic properties, and many of them are undesirable. This is because the public arena is a place of competition and conflict, and so those who enter into it are often tempted to speak in unsavoury ways. This fact has always given rhetoric a bad name. But rhetoric encompasses the whole of public communication; it includes the high oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the demagoguery of Huey Long.

PN: How would you characterise the role of rhetoric in science?

TL: There is a popular and widespread misconception in the world that scientific communication is distinctly different from other forms of public communication, but this is not really so. Its persistence is explained by an old adage in my field, which I think comes from Roderick Hart at the University of Texas, which says that rhetoric is most effective which disguises itself as something else. And I would have to say that science is the master of disguises. This is a pattern that began to manifest very early on in scientific history, I would say in the rhetoric of Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century. Bacon idealized scientific thinkers as ones with "minds washed clean from opinions", as if to suggest that scientific method is an alternative to debate. Here's a longer example of how Bacon contrasted science against rhetoric.

Quote

For the end which this science of mine proposes is the invention not of arguments but of arts not of things in accordance with principles, but of principles themselves; not of probable reasons, but of designations and directions for works. And as the intention is different, so accordingly is the effect; the effect of the one being to overcome an opponent in argument, of the other to command nature in action.


Bacon, of course, was a rhetorical genius. He was trying to establish a place for science in English society and across Europe more broadly. What better way to do this than by creating the impression that science, by dealing in certainties rather than probabilities and demonstrations rather than arguments, might provide an alternative to humanity's endless squabbling?

In saying this I am not trying to suggest that science is not a profoundly powerful form of inquiry, that its truth claims are without substance or that many scientific questions cannot be answered with a definitive yes or no. But scientific communication has all the same kind of properties that we typically find in other arenas of communication. A chief reason for this is the fact that scientists are forever at the frontiers of knowledge. They're not concerned with what has been established but with what is still in doubt and still contested. Contrary to Bacon's spin, this means that science is all about arguments and opinions - the very stuff of rhetoric.

Many people confuse the rhetorical perspective on science with the radical subjectivism of post-modernists, but generally speaking that is not what we're saying. The position of rhetorical scholars who specialize in the study of scientific communication is just that science is mostly similar to other forms of public communication. Science, in other words, is argument and debate.

PN: How have studies of rhetoric in recent times impacted understanding of science?

TL: Rhetorical study of science is part of a much broader and growing academic interest in this area. The fields of sociology and philosophy have really been the pioneers here. In those two fields inquiry was initially driven by questions about the astonishing success that science has enjoyed since the sixteenth century. In earlier times the project of the philosophy of science and to some extent the sociology of science had been to figure out what had made science so singularly successful. The holy grail of the philosophy of science was to pin down the precise epistemological conditions that made science different from other kinds of inquiry - its boundary conditions so to speak. No such defining philosophy of knowledge has ever been identified - something that prompted Paul Feyerabend to create the impression that science is "anarchy" in his book Against Method. This of course was a rather reactionary stance, one, I suspect, that Feyerabend came to regret taking. But it illustrated a real problem. Every effort to define what science is has managed to exclude from consideration certain arenas of inquiry that most of us would regard as scientific. The most familiar example of this was Karl Popper's exclusion of Darwinian evolution as a "metaphysical program", because it did not satisfy his defining criterion of falsifiability. But in the late nineteenth century we have the case of positivism excluding atomic theory because of its inferential character.

There seems to be no singular path to truth about nature. The history of science has shown that different approaches work for different problems. Although people often think of science as something governed by certain methodological rigors, one can always find success stories in its history that don't fit that mould. The collapse of the whole demarcationist project late in the last century has given a tremendous boost to the sociology of science and of course to the rhetoric of science as well. The sociological approach goes back much farther than this, to the 1930s when Robert K. Merton began to suggest that part of the puzzle of science's success was to be found in social factors, in an institutionally enforced ethic or ethos that made science distinct from other forms of inquiry. It has now been succeeded by the more radical "strong program" out of the UK which is more sympathetic to the anarchy interpretation of Feyerabend.

A pivotal turn in the understanding of science seems to have come with the translation of the philosopher Marcello Pera's Scienza e Rhetorica into English in 1994. The University of Chicago Press unfortunately dropped the word "rhetoric" from Pera's Italian title in translation, probably in deference to readers who are put off by the term, but this is precisely the volume's approach. Pera presents the scientific efforts of Galileo on behalf of the Copernican theory as argument rather than demonstration. This is to say that Galileo tried to establish the Copernican position by appealing to whatever he thought would persuade interested readers. Galileo appealed to experimental evidence and to other specialized rigors of mathematical representation, but that is only a part of his case, and to Pera's mind not necessarily its most crucial part.

Like many of his successors, Galileo tried to make it seem that his case was base based on "proof", that it was merely an assemblage of facts. This was destined to become a characteristic rhetorical move for his successors. Of course Copernicanism was consistent with a multiplicity of facts, but that didn't prove it. This position was won by argument, much in the same way that other disagreements are resolves. Successful arguments create consensus, not proofs.

PN: How has your research agreed or disagreed with others looking at the rhetorical dimensions of science?

TL: The main thrust of work in this area deals with rhetoric as a model for looking at the professional and technical discourses of scientists. It brings a rhetorical perspective to scientific work. So, for instance, rather than presuming that scientific discourse belongs to a category of communication all by itself, rhetoricians of science have treated it as a discourse that follows the same conventions as other forms of public communication. Scholars like Gross, Fahnestock and Bazerman have done this with classic presentations of scientific work. Others, such as Taylor in his work on demarcation and Ceccarelli in hers on the creation of new scientific disciplines, look at how rhetoric comes into play in more specialized cases - but ones still having to do with the execution of scientific work.

My own focus has had a more public character. I'm interested in how science has established and maintained the bases of its patronage by speaking to its various publics. This kind of rhetoric has direct bearing on scientific work, since science is utterly dependent upon patronage.

PN: You have written that the public discourse of scientists often employs a "priestly voice", unwilling to accept interference from the public and "scientising" them rather than popularise science. Is this a resistance to "dumbing down" or something else?

TL: What I call science's "priestly voice" is the outcome of several hundred years of experimentation with different ways of relating itself to its patrons. Patronage is a perennial problem for science, one of huge proportions. Science is at once an exceedingly costly undertaking and also one that does not necessarily offer any immediate return on investments. We all know that science has produced applications of immeasurable benefit, but in history when scientific patronage has been dependent upon the promise of such payoffs, science work has suffered. This is because most of what we call basic science is exploratory and can't promise applications. It produces knowledge that winds up in science journals but not in pharmaceutical patents or medical applications. The characteristic expectation of Americans that science is valuable because it pays off has traditionally deterred scientific growth. This was why the U.S. remained a backwater province of theoretical science until after WWII - when the public began to realize that theory might pay off in things like atom bombs. But more generally, scientific culture has responded to the pressures of patronage by trying to construct a priestly ethos - by suggesting that it is the singular mediator of knowledge, or at least of whatever knowledge has real value, and should therefore enjoy a commensurate authority. If it could get the public to believe this, its power would vastly increase.

There's this old adage, Chinese I think, that says that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you feed him for a life time. The priestly character of scientific rhetoric reflects a similar logic. The approach that would sell the public on the worth of science on the basis of its practical payoffs is like making it a scientific patron on particular issues - which only feeds science for a day. But if the scientific culture can convince us that deep down we are all scientists, or at least that we should all aspire to this elite realm of knowing, then science might enjoy patronage for life. Priestly rhetoric, in other words, tries to recreate society in science's image.

Priestly rhetoric is not so much about a disdain for "dumbing science down". Scientists have reservations about "popularization" for good reasons. The priestly character of scientific rhetoric has to do with the need to identify science with the most essential human values by making it a world view - by creating a public culture based in scientism. The best known example of this approach to scientific communication in recent memory would be that taken by Carl Sagan. Perhaps more successfully than any other popular writer of the last century, except perhaps H. G. Wells, Sagan was able create the sense that history has a scientific destiny.

PN: In your essay Heresy, orthodoxy and the politics of science, you argued that the public rhetoric of many scientists is aimed at maintaining advantages like epistemic privilege or material benefits such as funding and grants. How did you arrive at this conclusion?

TL: That essay was based mainly on the internal dialogue that was going on among scientists during the creationist controversies of the early 1980s, and at the time the scientists who were most vocal about the threat of creationism were also likely to express these concerns. In some sense it would be reasonable for them to have these fears. This goes back to my previous comments about the precarious nature of scientific patronage. Evolution has always been a fairly unpopular subject with the American public, and so if creationism were able to gain some official sanction as science, as it threatened to do in the Arkansas and Louisiana cases from that decade, evolutionary biologists might very well have found themselves competing with creationists research societies for funding.

This is not a way of saying that evolutionary scientists act in bad faith in opposing creationism. I assume that they speak their personal scientific convictions in doing so. But this doesn't change the fact that science is driven by other motives as well - those of the pocketbook and the ego as well as those of the intellect. This is why a rhetorical perspective on science is helpful, since it is a perspective that traditionally tries to be persuasively holistic, to take into consideration every aspect of an argument.

PN: How would you describe the importance of rhetoric when considering the demarcation problem in science?

TL: The rhetorician Charles Alan Taylor has used the term "ecology" to describe what I just called the holistic character of the rhetorical perspective. Like any complex web of living organisms sharing a common environment, activities of scientific inquiry occur within a larger rhetorical ecosphere. This greatly complicates the problem of scientific demarcation. It may be meaningful, for instance, to demarcate science from religion, but not in any absolute sense. If science is embedded in a social environment that has certain religious characteristics, science is likely to reflect them - though this is not the same thing as saying that it is determined by them. The scientific work of classical cultures tended to be rationalistic because its religious culture was rationalistic. The same kind of religious culture that gave us a philosopher like Plato was also likely to give us scientific thinkers like Euclid and Pythagoras.

This means, among other things, that the issue of scientific demarcation is both an intellectual and a social problem. It doesn't denigrate science to acknowledge that its public communication may reflect social or institutional concerns. By definition science would have to be concerned with these matters because inquiry cannot be undertaken except where there is an institutional framework capable of sustaining it.

This rhetorical perspective explains the origins and endurance of the popular but clearly false belief that science and religion exist in a perpetual state of war. One would expect there to be disagreements between science and religion. There always have been, but nobody every called this a "war" until late in the nineteenth century. Even the famous and singular case of Galileo and the Catholic Church was as much an internal scientific feud as it was a science-religion feud. Although the Church believed that Copernicanism was a threat to the faith at that time, it also thought it was coming down on the side of good science in deciding to oppose Galileo. Urban VIII acted precisely as scientists wish for current Popes to act on the issue of evolution. They want the church to side with the scientific majority that stands on Darwinian evolution against a small minority of scientists who favor a design model of origins. Siding with the scientific majority was precisely what the Church did in the seventeenth century. So why do people believe that this incident demonstrates that science and religion are natural enemies?

The pervasiveness of the warfare metaphor, I think, reflects the pressures for demarcation. The metaphor first became prevalent, as the historian John Moore has shown, in the late nineteenth century. This was a time when science was in the midst of an institutional crisis. In the Victorian era science was making a move on the academy in Europe and the U.S. It was trying to greatly enlarge science's place in an academic culture that had been created by Christianity. The scientific culture needed to gain a stronger foothold in the universities in order to continue its growth, and what better to do this than by creating the idea that religion was science's evil stepmother?

History can't account for this belief but demarcation can, provided that we recognize that this is as much an institutional problem as it is an intellectual one.

PN: With regard to the creationism debate, it has been claimed that the scientific community had "retreated into orthodoxy" in response to the creationists, invoking "threadbare epistemic chestnuts" to define creationism as pseudoscientific. Why was this approach taken, rather than an alternative, and what were its consequences? What course do you think should have been followed instead?

TL: The retreat into orthodoxy is a logical response of institutions whose authority is tied up with any particular belief system. My early work on the scientific response to creationism drew its inspiration from research on the sociology of deviance (especially that of Kai Erickson and Lester Kurtz), which seemed to suggest that institutions have a certain attraction to deviant insiders or heretics. This is because heretics provide institutions with counterpoints against which they can articulate their official positions. While it is often difficult for institutions to say what they believe in any definitive sense (they may not really know, or there may be disagreement among elites), they can create consensus around what they reject - heresy. This is one of the reasons groups gain solidarity in having a common enemy. But having heretical enemies is particularly advantageous. This comes from the fact that heretics (as opposed to pure infidels) are more similar to their orthodox counterparts and thus capable of providing this useful contrastive benchmark for their right-thinking foes.

Deviance studies suggest that heresy hunts are likely to occur at moments of institutional insecurity. You might not get this impression from listening to anti-creationist rhetoric, except to the extent that it focuses so largely not on the scientific case for evolution as on secondary issues of method, metaphysics and motive. It is more often concerned with showing why creationism is not science than on showing why Darwinism is. This draws attentions away from difficulties that may plague evolutionary theory.

The difficulties that make creationism an attractive enemy for science are not necessarily intellectual ones - though they could be. To use Taylor's metaphor again, I'm of the opinion that public discourses are best regarded as belonging to some larger "ecology" of meaning. Science, when it goes public, may be concerned about advancing scientific truth, but it is also going to be concerned with a larger set of issues relating to patronage, authority, its place in the academy, etc. Were science merely a technical arena of inquiry, creationism wouldn't be a threat. The fact that a majority of Americans remain sceptical about evolution and the fact that some of these folks claim that science supports the religious doctrine of creation doesn't directly interfere with scientists' ability to pursue the naturalistic program they prefer. But creationism does threaten to disrupt the more fragile linkages between science and public culture that make patronage possible. Creationism is an important threat, but it is an indirect one. Scientists understand that public attitudes about science matter, because they understand that the flow of patronage that keeps research going is likely to be affected by public dispositions toward their work. Obviously if all Americans embraced the evolutionary paradigm with the same enthusiasm that Darwinists have for it, it would enjoy the kind of finding that supports research on cancer and birth defects.

PN: How does the response to the advocacy of Intelligent Design differ, if at all?

TL: One consistent pattern in the scientific mainstream's response to ID has been to try to identify it with scientific creationism, to paint it with the same brush so to speak. Such allegations are still frequently made - that ID is merely "creationism dressed up in a cheap tuxedo". This is what movement scholars call a strategy of "evasion", an institutional effort to slow the momentum of a movement by pretending that it doesn't exist - or in this case by pretending that it is made up of merely radical fundamentalists of no account. This strategy is still being plied in the mass media, for public audiences that remain largely ignorant about the differences between these two movements. But in many of the more academic settings where ID is being debated this stopped working long ago. On the inside there has been a more direct and sustained response to intelligent design. Scientific creationism was largely ignored by scientists - except when it tried to legislate for equal time in various states. But ID is not being ignored. As movements evolve the strategies of evasion initially plied by the institutions they challenge typically give way to strategies of confrontation and coercion. We see a confrontation approach in the whole cottage industry that has grown up within the scientific culture among writers like Kenneth Miller and Robert Pennock for whom the refutation of ID has become a full time job. Incidents of coercion are more localized but pervasive nonetheless.

PN: How can the study of the rhetorical aspects of these debates improve our conduct within them, and in similar discussions of pseudoscience?

TL: In a lecture way back in 1967 Stanley Jaki noted that science lacked an academic sub-discipline devoted to the criticism of science. Other disciplines, such as literature, history, and even biblical scholarship have a critical voice, but not science. A few reflective voices have emerged in the scientific community, such as that of Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn, but vulgar positivism still persists.

The rhetoric of science has a distinct role to play in the emergence of such a critical perspective. Some scholars view rhetoric as a kind of philosophy of public life. In his 1991 translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric the renowned classicist George Kennedy used the subtitle A Theory of Civic Discourse. This, I presume, was both an interpretation of how Aristotle saw rhetoric and a summary of how most rhetoricians see it now. To understand practices of public communication is to also understand how it can best serve the public good. It is likewise in the public's interest to understand scientific rhetoric, since science is now a major player in public life. The field of rhetoric brings the accumulated wisdom of 2500 years of study to this subject.

PN: What are the wider implications of the increasing number of papers and books considering the role of rhetoric?

TL: Broadly it means that our culture is beginning to recover from an unfortunate side effect of the Enlightenment. Modernism in large was a reaction against traditional sources of power in both the religious and political realms, and because rhetoric was tied up with these by various accidents of history it fell into disfavour. Although the Enlightenment championed the notion of a civilization based in political and personal liberty, by abandoning the traditions of rhetoric it also tended to undermine the only philosophy of communication that could sustain such changes. Rhetoric never died out entirely in democratic countries, which never wholly embraced the Enlightenment project, but it was virtually driven into extinction in the Soviet Union. When Americans started to go into the former communist empire shortly after its collapse they were astonished to discover how helpless its citizens were in their efforts to establish democracy. Democracy takes more than a constitutional plan. It also requires a critical mass of citizens capable of doing the work of democracy - which is the work of public deliberation and debate. It takes much education to cultivate such skills, and the Soviets had abandoned that part of the West’s intellectual tradition.

Rhetorical scholarship is also growing in our universities because lots of bright students are discovering how intellectually rich this curriculum is and also how eminently practical it is when they bring it to the world outside.

PN: What have been the main influences on your thinking?

TL: I tend to have one foot planted in the work of intellectual and cultural historians such as John Greene, Frank Turner, Adrian Desmond and Frank Manuel who are especially concerned with the larger societal implications of science. The work of intellectual and cultural historians is especially helpful to rhetoricians because it is history that has been forced to take a rhetorical perspective. To understand the history of ideas is to understand public debates and the artistry that make one side or another victorious.

The other foot is planted amidst an eclectic assortment of writers whose work has most shaped my own rhetorical perspective - Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, Hayden White and Clifford Geertz. The common thread that draws these scholars together is their exploration of the idea that narrative, a category of speech usually associated with fiction, is just as much a category of public communication. Like many others, I an inclined to regard this as one of the most significant developments in the humanities during the last century.

PN: What are you currently working on?

TL: I've recently completed a book manuscript under the working title Rhetorical Darwinism. This title reflects my efforts to situate the emergence of the evolutionary world view within its broader discursive context - in particular that part of this communication environment that has to do with science's institutional development. The volume's thesis is that for rhetorical reasons evolution of necessity develops both a scientific perspective and a scientistic ideology when it enters into the realm of public debate. This isn't to say that evolutionary biology is not a legitimate scientific pursuit. That's a judgment I'm not capable of making. As a rhetorician I've been educated to diagnose the features of public communication, and in its public presentations evolution has always been a blend of science and scientism. It may be grounded in evolutionary science but other added features of language always transform it into a kind of exercise in the architecture of ideology. My book tries to explain the historical and rhetorical reasons for this.

The most of familiar example of an evolutionary ideology is what was once called "social Darwinism", but that is not my precise subject. Rhetorical Darwinism is a phrase I use to characterize those public discourses used to instantiate the scientific identity - in the broadest sense. I argue that the highly professionalized identity that science developed in the nineteenth century found its most ideal expression in evolutionary symbols. These didn't originally come from Darwin. They came from the Enlightenment, but they have subsequently become tied up with evolutionary science because these scientific ideas do the most to give them a priestly status. Evolution is the naturalization of history, and it is from history that western societies have always drawn their notions of social authority. If you can define history you can define everything.

PN: What is your involvement with the incommensurability.com project and what do you hope to achieve?

TL: My involvement with this project is minimal, limited to one book chapter that is forthcoming in Randy Harris' Rhetoric and Incommensurability volume. My contribution examines the role played by Thomas Huxley in the emergence of the Darwinian paradigm in the nineteenth century. I enlarge upon a point made about Huxley and Darwin by the historian John Greene, namely that the scientific culture of that period was committed to evolutionism long before any scientific theory of development appeared. I contend that the emerging positivism of the Victorian period, which precluded design, was both a philosophy of science and an institutional ideology. Evolution and design became incommensurate for ideological reasons not intellectual ones.

PN: How do you see the involvement of rhetorical studies in discussions of science developing in future?

TL: I couldn't begin to predict what will happen in academic circles. What I hope to see more broadly is a growing rhetorical literacy in our culture that will make people more intelligent consumers of scientific information and argument.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:39:02 +0000 97e8527feaf77a97fc38f34216141515 Jolly Mathen: Incompleteness and Scientific The... http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/jolly-mathen-incompleteness-and-scientific-the-r43 On the Inherent Incompleteness of Scientific Theories is a fascinating look at the consequences of some important concepts in the philosophy of science and mathematics, which I was able to question him on recently.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2005)

PN: Can you explain the basic aim of your paper?

JM: Primarily to provide an argument for the incompleteness of scientific theories. Secondarily to show connections between scientific incompleteness, belief, arbitrariness, self-reference, and some ideas in the philosophy as science, such as the Quine-Duhem thesis, the underdetermination of theory, and the observational/theoretical distinction failure, and some ideas surrounding the concept of mathematical incompleteness, such as complexity, infinity and computational irreducibility.

PN: What do you mean by an "incomplete" scientific theory? In particular, you claim in your paper that "every field of scientific inquiry stands incomplete." Why?

JM: By an incomplete scientific theory, I mean that there will always be non-trivial questions left unanswered by the theory. In regards to my claim, "every field of scientific inquiry stands incomplete", it is just an observation of the present situation. Some scientists may believe that they may be close to a complete or final theory, but I don't think any of them would claim that their theories are presently complete; they are obviously still working on it. Can anyone today identify a complete scientific theory? Of course, in my paper I am arguing that, even in the future, scientific theories will remain incomplete.

PN: You point out that a problem for scientific theories is the "experimental dilemma"; that is, whether novel observations will ever cease and allow us to call a theory complete. Do you think this requirement can ever be met?

JM: Any scientific measurement is always accompanied by an error. That is, every measurement is taken with a certain amount of precision, which can always be improved. Because this is characteristic of every scientific measurement ever performed, I think we can take it to be a fundamental principle. This is just an inherent feature of scientific measurements and, more broadly, of our every day natural experience. We can always zoom in and get a more detailed picture of any natural phenomena. Some contend that this may come to a stop someday, for example at the ultra-subatomic level of the Planck scale; but I don't think so. In this sense, I don't think that novel observations will ever cease. Besides precision, I identify in my paper three other aspects of a measurement that can be tuned to give us a new look at the phenomenon under consideration: perspective, range and interaction.

The more important question though is whether the continued improvements in the precision of any measurement will reveal any surprises or not. If not, then the novel experience issue becomes a moot point. Presently no scientific theory, or meta-scientific theory, can guarantee that more precise measurements will continue supporting a theory. Unless such a guarantee is given, it will remain uncertain whether improved measurement precisions will result in surprises or not. Because of the arguments and results in my paper, specifically the theorem of undefinability of valid observations, I take it that no such guarantee can be given, and therefore novel experiences are a point of concern and not moot. Strictly speaking, however, the empirical evidence alone does not require such an interpretation. I believe that it is worthwhile to examine the issue further and see if there is a more clearer connection between novel experiences, the theorem of undefinability of valid observations and theoretical incompleteness.

PN: In your paper you compare the philosophical debate on the existence of God with the scientific debate on whether a Theory of Everything (TOE) is possible. Why are the two related?

JM: On a surface level these questions are related because the demonstration of a miracle (which would prove the existence of God) would depend on our having a complete TOE (or complete theory on any specific domain). For example, when Moses parted the Red sea, how do we know that some alien race whose knowledge of physical laws is far superior to ours was not orchestrating some complex technological drama for their curiosity and amusement? The only way we can know that this is not the case is that if we understand those laws completely. For then we can say whether the parting of the sea under the given circumstances is a physically possible event or really a miracle. (For those of you who are Star Trek fans, there was a Star Trek Next Generation episode where a female goddess was subjugating the people of a planet to all sorts of catastrophic "miracles" until the Enterprise discovered that the "goddess" had an invisible ship orbiting the planet.)

On a deeper level these questions are related because belief (religious or otherwise) and understanding are related. For instance, one might ask, "Can't I still believe in God in spite of having achieved a complete physical theory? What do my beliefs have to do with scientific theories?" The argument here is that our cognitive capacity to believe prevents our cognitive capacity of understanding from being complete. Theories fail to be complete because of our capacity to doubt them and believe in God (or some other theory); or, vice versa, belief is only possible because of the inherent incompleteness of our ideas about the world.

PN: As a result of this comparison, you conclude that the existence of God is "empirically undecidable". Can you explain what this means, how you argue for it and how this position differs from the traditional atheist/theist/agnostic spectrum?

JM: By "empirically undecidable" I mean that no matter what we observe or experience, as long as our scientific theories about those experiences remain incomplete, we cannot use those experiences to argue for or against God's existence. In other words, proving whether some observed phenomenon is a miracle or not is an impossible task in the light of scientific incompleteness. From the answer to the above question we can see how proving whether some observed phenomenon is a miracle is impossible as long as our understanding of physical laws remains incomplete. By similar reasoning, we can also see that as long as this understanding remains incomplete it is not possible to rule out the role that God plays: observations that the incomplete theory is thus far unable to explain maybe ultimately due to God; moreover, the theory being incomplete may then turn out to be actually incorrect, thus possibly ceding the explanation of all our observations ultimately to God.

Since I argue in my paper that scientific theories are incomplete for cognitive reasons, then because of the above implications I am also arguing that the question of God's existence is undecidable for cognitive reasons. Therefore, on reflection, I guess the argument supports an agnostic position.

PN: In your paper you relate the incompleteness of scientific theories to G del's work in mathematics. How closely are the two related?

JM: They are very much related, but not in the manner of the traditional argument stating that any math based physics is incomplete owing to G del's proof that arithmetic is incomplete. Scientific theories are incomplete regardless of whether their mathematical models exhibit undecidability or whether they even have mathematical models. Let me elaborate. Since Goedel's time, mathematicians have discovered many other systems that exhibit incompleteness and undecidability, for example, computers and cellular automata. By studying these systems, they have been able to identify two fundamental features necessary for incompleteness: infinity and complexity. Using arithmetic as an illustration, if we limit the natural numbers to some maximum, no matter how large, say, for example, one billion, then arithmetic can be given a complete description. The same holds true if we lessen the complexity of arithmetic by removing either the addition or multiplication operation (even if we allowed an infinite amount of numbers).

I suggest in my paper that the interaction between nature and our sensorial-cognitive system gives rise to processes that are also complex and infinite in character, thereby preventing our experiences and the theories of our experiences from ever being complete. We can easily see how infinity is involved. As pointed out above, we can always have novel experiences of natural phenomena, by either improving the precision of a measurement or by tuning its range, perspective or interaction. Thus we can continually count up new experiences as we can count up new numbers. How complexity is involved is more difficult to assess at this point. Besides the complex processes going on within our sensory-cognitive system, I would also guess that languages used to describe our natural experience must have a minimal complexity. The complexity question is certainly an area for future research.

Besides infinity and complexity, there are a couple of other features that we can associate with incomplete systems: self-reference and arbitrariness. Self-reference is a central feature in both Gödel's mathematical proof and in my demonstration of the undefinability of valid scientific observations. In both instances, it is employed in a manner similar to the construction of the liar paradox, "This statement is false". Incomplete systems are also characterized by the fact that they lead to multiple arbitrary formulations, without singling out any one true formulation. For example, there are multiple formulations of arithmetic, set theory and geometry. In science, arbitrariness was recognized early on in the 20th century by philosophers as the underdetermination of theory, which states that it is always possible to have multiple theories on a given domain of phenomenon. The relationship between incompleteness and arbitrariness is this: because our language cum theories cannot completely capture our experiences (or mathematical ideas), we must allow for flexibility and mutability in its usage. In summary, we see that mathematical and scientific incompleteness share many features in common: infinity, complexity, self-reference and arbitrariness.

PN: What is the relationship between incompleteness, theory-ladenness and underdetermination, in your view?

JM: The underdetermination of theory is a philosophical position that states that an observation(s) does not determine a unique theory, but allows for multiple competing theories. Deservingly so, it has been a point of much contention and confusion. How is it possible that two or more mutually inconsistent theories can possibly describe the same observational data? I argue that it is only so because the observational data is incomplete; if the observational data on some domain could be complete, then only one unique (class of) theory can be supported. Let me make an analogy. If you were given a low resolution image of a photograph and asked to guess what it represents, you may entertain several possibilities. But as the resolution of the image improves, the possibilities that you're willing to entertain becomes less and less, until finally the resolution matches that of the human eye and you can see exactly what the image represents. I suggest that in science we are always looking at a low resolution "image" of our experiences, which we are continually trying to improve the resolution of (for example, by making our experimental measurements more and more precise), but never reaching perfection. Due to the cyclical nature of scientific progress, there are times when the observational data on some domain appears almost complete and times when it is found wanting. During the prior times, scientists will settle on one theory (assuming, of course, that any technical hurdles in candidate theories are resolved) and any claims of underdetermination would only fall on deaf ears, whereas during the later times, scientists are willing to entertain multiple theories.

Incompleteness also makes clearer the much discussed connection between underdetermination and theory-ladenness, or holistic models of science. If an observation is incomplete, then the description of the observation is also incomplete. The observation and its description, like the low resolution photograph, are both fuzzy around the edges. This as a result undermines our ability to assign a unique observational term to the observation. At the same time, it allows us some play in the description. We can ply and mold it along its fuzzy edges to fit different theories. On a higher level, the descriptive incompleteness of multiple observations gets translated into an integrated theoretical incompleteness. All the language terms in the theory, being incomplete, are now laden with one another--observational and theoretical terms are inter-laden with the likes of both--resulting in a holistic web of inter-laden terms, in which there is a massive and multidimensional pliability along the fuzzy edges of the new theoretical superstructure. A pliable holistic model as required by underdetermination is therefore granted by the inherent incompleteness of the observational and theoretical terms occurring in the language of any theory.

As a note, I would like to add that theory-ladenness is more fundamental than incompleteness and under-determination, and is the cause of the later two. The theory-ladenness of observational terms, or the observational/theoretical distinction failure, is the scientific manifestation of a cognitive symptom: the inseparability of sensory and thought processes, an issue that, like the observational/theoretical distinction failure, is much debated. I think that it is a worthwhile program of future research to determine if this inseparability in fact exists and why, and how it leads to incompleteness.

PN: Can you explain briefly what you call "the problem of the undefinability of valid observations" and its relationship with other critiques of completeness?

JM: Our scientific theories are supported or refuted by our observations about the world. Therefore we need to have a clear idea when a certain observation has taken place. At first, one may say what is the big deal, isn't it obvious? Some philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued it isn't; our theories and background knowledge affect what we see with our naked eye and how we interpret our scientific instruments--the issue of theory-ladenness. Whether this is so and the extent of it is much debated. Second, even if we can distinguish observations independently of our theories, can we clearly distinguish among different observations? For example, is some large bush perhaps really a tree? Can we offer distinguishing criteria, perhaps based on sub-definitions of the tree's components, that will be sufficient? Finally, can we give definitions of observations that are thorough enough so that we can't be fooled by the best technological imitations or even some virtual reality simulation? (After all, we can't have some imitation observation dupe us into thinking that some scientific theory is true or false.) The above, taken as a whole, is the problem of determining valid observations.

Many of the issues we're talking about here, such as completeness, under-determination, theory-ladenness, and the identification of miracles, come to a head on the ability to determine valid empirical observations. For example, if we could determine valid observations, then we could assign definite, theory-free observational terms to them. In my paper, I produce a self-reference argument to show that there can exist no scientific procedure to determine valid empirical observations. The novel experience problem, or observational incompleteness, also lends some credit to this conclusion: because observations are always incomplete, or fuzzy around the edges, we can never make a clear determination of their occurrence.

PN: You give several critiques of the notion of completeness. Which do you consider the strongest - and why? Is your argument cumulative or does it follow from any of the objections to completeness?

JM: Presently, the two strongest reasons are the theorem of undefinability of valid observations, which is based on a self-reference argument (as just mentioned previously), and the novel experience problem, which is based on the observation that the precision of all scientific measurements can always be improved. The argument does not have to be cumulative, but a cumulative argument, as given in my paper, can serve to flesh out the connections between the many different critiques.

PN: Your paper explores the philosophical pedigree of your thinking, concentrating in particular on the Duhem-Quine thesis. Can you explain this thesis and why it was important to your argument?

JM: The Quine-Duhem thesis is a generalization of the under-determination of theory and, like it, presupposes that all the observational and theoretical terms, concepts and laws of a scientific theory are interconnected in a holistic web, and that by suitably modifying aspects of this web, any theory can be accommodated to any observation. This curiously, and alarmingly, makes science a somewhat arbitrary affair, and has therefore become a hotly debated issue. The Quine-Duhem thesis is important to my paper on two points. As mentioned above, scientific incompleteness, like mathematical incompleteness, requires theories to have a certain amount of arbitrariness to them. The Quine-Duhem thesis fulfills this requirement. In fact, the pliability implied by the Quine-Duhem thesis, like in the case of the underdetermination of theory, is due to the incompleteness of the observational and theoretical terms occurring in a theory.

The Quine-Duhem thesis also brings to the surface the role played by belief in science. As I mentioned earlier, scientific incompleteness and belief are joined at the hip. But this is not restricted to religious belief, but any kind of belief, even a scientific one. In fact, the two components of belief, faith and doubt, find exact parallels within the Quine-Duhem thesis. The Quine-Duhem thesis itself has two components. The first component is the underdetermination of theory, which again states that an observation(s) does not determine a unique theory, but allows for multiple competing theories. The second component is the underdetermination of observation, which states that a theory can accommodate multiple incompatible observations. As you may guess now, the underdetermination of theory plays the role of doubt: we can doubt some theory in favor of some other theory. The underdetermination of observation plays the role of faith: we can always hold onto some given theory no matter what the observational evidence.

In light of this parallel, we can draw another parallel between the God existence debate and the Quine-Duhem thesis. The inability to prove that God does exist can be likened to the inability to prove whether any given theory on a given domain of phenomena is the correct one. The failure is due to doubt or the underdetermination of theory. Second, the inability to prove that God doesn t exist can be likened to the inability to prove whether any given theory on a given domain of phenomena isn t the correct one. This failure is due to faith or the underdetermination of observation.

PN: What consequences do you see for your paper and the critique of completeness?

JM: Some are: (1) The study of meta-science can tell us something about our ability to believe. (2) That no matter what we may observe, "miracle" or "scientific fact", we can never prove that God exists or doesn't exist. (3) That we will never achieve a theory of everything in physics nor a complete theory of any domain of phenomena, i.e., of chemical interactions, genetics, cancer, star formation, evolution, etc. (4) That our understanding (theories) of all natural phenomena will continue to evolve. (5) That we can't rule out the development of seemingly impossible technological advances, such as faster than light travel and anti-gravity devices.

But more importantly, what do the above consequences tell us about sentient entities like ourselves and how they sense and understand the world around them? About living organisms and how they interact with their environment? It seems to me that there is something peculiar and deep going on here. I think there are bigger questions ahead.

PN: What are your next projects? Will you be continuing to work on the ideas in this paper?

JM: This question dovetails on the end of my last response. So let me expand on that. For starters, how is it that our experiences can never be complete, that is, our scientific measurements can never be 100 percent precise? Is this purely an extraneous feature or something that arises out of our interaction with the external world, and, if the latter, how does it arise? Another question is whether cognitive processes are necessarily wrapped up with sensory process and, if so, why? I think that cognitive science would be an excellent avenue of pursuit for these questions.

Also, the study of language and formal systems may be able to tell us something about the complexity requirements, if any, of scientific (and natural) languages. (As I mentioned earlier in the interview, a minimal level of complexity is a requirement for incompleteness.)
Last, I think that quantum physics may be able to shed light on scientific incompleteness. Quantum physics has taken science to the point where the role of the observer has become an integral part of the theory. It doesn't merely tell us about the world, but about our knowledge of the world. Further research may then tell us whether this knowledge can be complete or not. (In this spirit, the uncertainty principle and the novel experience problem may appear related, but, non withstanding further investigation, I can only see a superficial connection between the two.)

PN: Why are you interested in the philosophy of science? What prompted you to consider this issue at all?

JM: The philosophy of science, like epistemology and cognitive science, is interesting to me because it addresses the nature of knowledge and understanding itself, one of the great mysteries. I didn't pursue this interest seriously in the past because I thought philosophy to be too speculative and, at the same time, I was already taken by the mysteries of physics. Then about four years ago I decided to finally find out what was all the fuss concerning G del's incompleteness theorem in mathematics, a result that I had only heard about here and there but never really understood. What G del had discovered stunned me. How could such a formal and logically tight system as mathematics be eternally incomplete? To me, this said something about the nature of knowledge. It harked back to some ideas I had during my philosophy and history of science courses as an undergraduate. The new-found mystery and the rekindling of old ideas prompted me to investigate whether incompleteness was a more widespread phenomena, and what were its causes. My paper represents a momentary culmination in this on-going investigation.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:37:41 +0000 81448138f5f163ccdba4acc69819f280 Gonzalo Munévar: Feyerabend and Beyond http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/gonzalo-munevar-feyerabend-and-beyond-r42 Gonzalo Munévar is a professor in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Communication at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan, and a former student of the philosopher of science Paul K. Feyerabend. He is the author of several books, which are linked to in the body of the interview, and also a keen writer of fiction that his teacher enjoyed (see his The Master of Fate, for example). I was fortunate enough to be able to ask him about Feyerabend - both the man, his approach and his ideas - as well as some of Professor Munévar's own thinking.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2005)

PN: How did you first become interested in Feyerabend's work?

GM: I was writing a Master's thesis in the philosophy of mind when I ran across his papers on what later came to be called "eliminative materialism", the view of which the Churchlands are the main exponents today. Those papers made me realize that to do philosophy of mind properly one had to place it in the context of philosophy of science. When I went to Berkeley for my doctorate and became his student, it was only natural to read his work in the philosophy of science. He was so mesmerizing, one wanted to read his papers. That was four years before the publication of Against Method.

PN: What did you learn from your time as Feyerabend's student?

GM: You have to understand that at the graduate level Feyerabend never taught his own work, at least not directly. Everyone in his seminar was supposed to give a presentation, on a topic of the student's choosing, and he criticized every presentation in a very forceful way. If his views came in at all, they did so in the discussion, in the argumentation going back and forth. It was not in the style of most graduate courses and seminars, but rather in the style of Socrates, except that it did not have the endearing but self-serving statements Socrates used to make. Feyerabend was practically without ego, at least in his graduate seminar. After I presented what I thought was a very original idea in that seminar, I tried to impress another professor with it. The professor told me Feyerabend had already published it some years previously. It was in one of the few papers of Feyerabend I had not read. But sure enough, the idea was in it. I asked him why he had not said anything to me. He said he had forgotten all about it, so when he heard me explain it, he thought the idea was mine and new. I wish I had learned his modesty, but I am afraid I've never managed to be that good of a person.

In his undergraduate courses he did lecture, and in his lectures he did more formally exposed students to his views, but he never pushed those views even then. What I did learn from Feyerabend was to be true to my own philosophical inclinations. I guess that is why I gravitated towards him so easily: he let me be myself. I think by the time I finished my first seminar with him, it was understood that he would be directing my dissertation, even though we never explicitly discussed his involvement.

I also learned from him that it was possible to hold the intuitions (or prejudices) that I had about science and philosophy without being a fool. I went into philosophy because I thought it was a mess that needed straightening out. I had all the impulses of an analytic philosopher but felt that analytic philosophy was a dead end. So it was wonderful to meet such an extraordinarily gifted man who thought along the same lines (well, roughly) and encouraged me.

PN: Discussing Feyerabend's "Anything Goes" argument, you have written that "it should be an embarrassment to the profession that many reviews were completely unable to see the structure of this simple reductio". Why do you think philosophers of science then and since have been so quick to misunderstand Feyerabend?

GM: Not just philosophers of science. Epistemologists are even worse. The reason, I suspect, is that analytic philosophy is a very narrow way of thinking, and it is hard to manoeuvre mentally under such constraints. But there is really no excuse. Feyerabend's arguments were very simple and straightforward reductio ad absurdum arguments: you use reasoning to tie together what the philosophers' standards tell them is evidence, and then you point out obvious conclusions that completely destroy their empiricist views. But in offering a reductio, you need not accept the evidence or the reasoning yourself. Otherwise, atheists who offer reductio arguments against the existence of God would have to (sincerely?) accept that God exists, since they advance such existence as a premise for the sake of their argument. It's amazing that philosophers who constantly make this point, to their students for example, could not see that they themselves were committing the mistake.

PN: Why do you think Against Method and Science in a Free Society in particular were so misunderstood?

GM: Against Method attacked practically every major intuition about scientific method that philosophers had had for three hundred years. He just had to be wrong. People wanted desperately for him to be wrong. And he used the history of science to make his points. This presented two additional problems. The first is that the epistemology of science was supposed to be about how science ought to be, not about how it is. The second was that philosophy of science was also presumed to be about the "logic" and "grammar" of scientific concepts. Feyerabend showed that the latter approach was simply irrelevant to understanding science. As for the first, he showed not merely that scientists violated the methods thought up by philosophers (and by scientists like Newton in their philosophical moods) but that they actually had to violate such methods if progress (or what we know consider progress) was to result. So even the philosophers that thought history irrelevant were now looking at the history of science and building alliances with "solid" historians, for they thought that Feyerabend's account of history just had to be wrong. What eventually happened, of course, is that they came up with "devastating" objections that turned out to be little more than paraphrases of Feyerabend's own work.

By the time Feyerabend came out with Science in a Free Society, he was already a pariah and many philosophers refused to take the book seriously. The curious thing is that Feyerabend later took back just about every new thesis that he advanced in that book. That was the one work of his he came close to disowning. In particular, he took back the extreme relativism expressed in it (particularly on p. 70, for which it seems that I am to blame, if you pay attention to his footnote) and the thesis that all traditions should be equal before society, and he scaled back the most important corollary of that thesis, namely the separation of science and state.

PN: Describing Feyerabend, you have written that he "[was] probably the most interesting person I have ever met [...] but his devastating criticism [wa]s the sort one would wish on one's worst enemy, or oneself when taking seriously the notion that criticism is at the heart of progress and improvement of ideas. The man question[ed] everything; even obvious claims c[a]me up for challenge and sometimes ridicule." Did you ever have any reservations about his approach? Do you think it contributed to the hostile reception he received in some quarters?

GM: Some people never forgave his exposing their weak arguments for what they were. And the fact that he did it with a great sense of humor made them feel also ridiculed - they took it personally. I know that his mode of criticism contributed to the hostile reception he received in some quarters. He once showed me a letter from a famous philosopher whose book he had just criticized in print. The letter was one ad hominem insult after another. It also contained an announcement to the effect that Feyerabend was now in the writer's "enemies' list." On the other hand, he liked to bring down people he thought were pompous. Some friends of his told me that he had gone too far a few times. I wasn't there those times. When I was there, I really relished his manner. He openly made fun of me often. But I made fun of him just as often.

There was an additional motivation on his part. Just as an idea discredited for two thousand years - the idea that the earth moves - can revolutionize science, the ideas from other cultures also have the potential to contribute to the progress of science. This implies that we should treat with respect cultures that differ from the Western culture, no only in spite of the admiration we feel for the Western advances made possible by science, but precisely because that respect will help maintain the climate of pluralism that is vital for the progress of our celebrated science (I explain this point below).

Therefore, the lack of respect towards the traditions of ordinary people - the "vulgar," as philosophers used to say - and especially the lack of respect prompted by an empiricist conception of science can lead to a very damaging intellectual arrogance.

Consider for a moment that until rather recently a person could end up in prison for practicing acupuncture (medical fraud); that in the name of "development" millions of women in the Third World were advised to stop breast-feeding their children and use powder milk instead (which of course they mixed with contaminated water on more than one occasion); and that in the presumably most advanced country in the world a high percentage of people are so obese they can hardly walk, thanks to a "scientific" diet - a diet officially sanctioned by the state - that forbids eggs (to which the human body is adapted) and emphasized, still emphasizes, refined carbohydrates (to which the human body is not adapted, which causes all sorts of physiological problems, obesity amongst them).

Feyerabend detected that sort of arrogance in the contempt that many intellectuals feel towards ordinary people, their beliefs and their traditional customs. That is why he made fun of intellectuals, shattered their "reason", and called them "fanatics" and "criminals" for creating suffering and misery in the world by imposing their abstract "truths" on everyone else. His reaction may seem exaggerated, but we must understand it in the proper context. In the first place, if a tradition has served a society well and has allowed its members to adapt well to their environment, we have no right to impose our truth on them, no matter how scientific and confirmed it may appear to be. In the second place, many of the intellectuals' abstractions, even if named "truth" or "justice", are the result of bad reasoning (which he demonstrated with many examples), while the valuable ones are so only within a limited practical context. His last (and posthumous) book, Conquest of Abundance, deals with this issue of abstraction in great detail.

PN: You have written (of Feyerabend) that "philosophy of science can well afford bold thinkers who are prepared to defend implausible ideas against all comers". What do you think motivated Feyerabend to "provide a service" in this fashion and why is it beneficial to the philosophy of science?

GM: He didn't do it to provide a service. He did it because he was too intelligent not to see the flaws, too honest not to point them out, and too imaginative not to conjure up alternative approaches.

My response to the Mill question below is relevant here too.

PN: How would you describe the relevance of Feyerabend's thinking today and his legacy for the future?

GM: The big philosophical problem about science was that the scientific method worked but we could not prove so: classical skepticism, Popper's efforts notwithstanding. Feyerabend came in and cleaned house: the so-called "scientific method" did not work; it actually got in the way of scientific progress (as defined by the empiricists themselves). I think this is a finding of the greatest importance, although not his only contribution. Philosophy cannot - should not - be the same after that, even though professional philosophers will keep on doing pretty much the same things for as long as they can get away with it. I am reminded of Romero's film "The Dawn of the Dead", in which the zombies go to the shopping mall to walk around and window-shop as they used to do when they were alive. Analytic philosophy no longer makes sense, in great part thanks to Feyerabend, but there you have it: a philosophy for zombies. But the zombies are still in charge, so who knows how Feyerabend's legacy will play in the years to come.

Philosophy of science also suffered, before Kuhn and Feyerabend, because it was a pseudo-mathematical and irrelevant game. With a few exceptions (e.g., Popper) it was practically unreadable. That was the way the philosophers of science liked it: it made them feel superior. They did "science" too, not just some mushy humanities. Philosophy of science should have had something to say to scientists, but the scientists could not make any sense of it. And if you did go through the effort, the rewards were far too small. In that respect things have improved quite a bit. It is now possible to find whole articles in philosophy of science written almost completely in English, or Spanish, or some other honest-to-goodness language.

In any event, his main legacy is a more humane and exciting understanding of science that ties philosophy to the practice of science, as I will explain in my response to the next question. It is also a legacy of respect for other people and other times.

PN: What would you consider Feyerabend's most important contribution and where do you think he erred?

GM: Somebody wrote in Nature that Feyerabend was the worst enemy of science. But, on the contrary, Feyerabend showed how complex and humane science is and ought to be. Of his many contributions, perhaps the most important is that there is no method or rule that can capture science completely. The most excellent idea about the nature of science has to allow exceptions. When we look at the history of science, we discover not only that the great scientists violated the methods proposed by the empiricists, but that they had to violate them, otherwise they would not have secured the great successes through which we know them today.

Until the publication of the work by Feyerabend and Kuhn, it had been generally supposed that scientific rationality consisted in behaving in accordance with certain methodological rules. And science was the shining example of human rationality. Those methodological rules were inductive, as envisioned by Newton. The philosophical problem was that even though we "knew" that such scientific method produced knowledge, we could not prove it. Karl Popper argued that the problem came from thinking erroneously that induction was the method of science. We just needed to realize that science was based instead on the method of trial and error. But Feyerabend's analysis of the history of science demonstrated that adherence to all proposed methods, from Francis Bacon's to Popper's, would impede the progress of science. To progress, then, science needs to act against method from time to time.

The reason is very simple. All varieties of empiricism assume that experience determines the worth of our scientific ideas. This assumption is presumably justified because through experience scientists learn directly what is written on the book of nature. For example, if all observers see a stone fall vertically, the vertical motion of the stone is an immediate or direct truth given by observation - an immediate truth with which our most profound hypotheses about the world must agree. If a hypothesis implies that the stone does not fall vertically, our observations, our experience will then refute it. Unfortunately for empiricism, as Feyerabend reminds us, the Copernican hypothesis claims that the earth rotates on its axis to give us the day-night cycle, and this claim is refuted by the vertical fall of the stone.

This was one of the main objections against Copernicus that Galileo confronted in 1632. If we let go of stone from a tall tower, we see it fall vertically, close to the tower, and touch ground next to the base of the tower. Let us suppose now that the earth rotates. If so, when the stone begins to fall, the tower continues moving as the earth rotates, and therefore (if we choose the direction conveniently) the tower is going to move a considerable distance before the stone hits the ground. The only way the stone can hit the ground next to the base of the tower is by moving in a parabola; but we all see it fall straight down instead. It is clear, then, that the earth cannot rotate.

What did Galileo say when confronted with such a clear refutation of Copernicus? Galileo refused to accept the verdict of experience. If the earth does not move, he said, the stone will surely fall straight down. But if the earth does rotate, the stone would have to fall in a parabola. The reason we see it fall vertically is that its motion has two components: one in common with the earth, the tower, and the observer; the other towards the center of the earth. But the observer does not notice the motions it shares (today, for example, we don't see the other passengers in our jet plane fly at 900 kilometers per hour). This is why it seems to the observer that the stone falls vertically.

What motion one accepts depends on the theory one favors. Insisting that the stone falls vertically presupposes that the earth does not move. That is, Copernicus' opponents assume the truth of what is in question - does the earth move or not? - when they declare the their experience is veridical (the stone does fall vertically). Their empiricist argument is no more than an instance of the fallacy of petitio principii [begging the question].

Feyerabend points out that the observer sees a phenomenon (the motion of the stone) and interprets it in a way that seems natural to him: the stone falls vertically. It is that natural interpretation of the phenomenon, but not the phenomenon itself, that contradicts the Copernican theory. Galileo dissolves the contradiction by offering a different way to interpret the phenomenon. Galileo gives us, then, a new empirical basis constituted by a theory of interpretation congenial to Copernicus' ideas.

These considerations do not imply that scientific hypotheses or theories always defeat the verdict of experience, but they do imply that such victories by theory are possible. This result implies in turn that all empiricist methodological rules must have exceptions. The reason is that such rules assign a higher priority to experience (over theory). We have seen, however, that the great scientific revolution would not have happened if Galileo had not violated such rules. Similar results can be expected in the majority of critical episodes in the history of science, as Feyerabend argues in his work. It bears emphasizing that it was not just a couple of hunches that allowed Galileo to take a short cut that led to the same findings that the patient use of method would have provided in the long run. Not at all. If method gives priority to experience, method would have forever closed the path to a point of view that could not be established without first defeating previously accepted experience. If, by developing a theory already refuted by experience, Galileo committed a sin against science and philosophy, we must then love not only the sinner but the sin.

Feyerabend rescued Galileo from the preposterous role of being the first and greatest hero of empiricism. By doing so, he allowed us to understand science very differently. In this contribution he did not err. He erred in his proposal that all traditions or ideologies should have equal standing. But eventually he realized that, as Marguerite von Brentano had argued, the Nazis and the Quakers would then have equal access to pursue their goals, even though one of the Nazis' main goals was to exterminate other cultures. He also acknowledged, though reluctantly, my criticism to the effect that a society has the obligation to teach its young the skills and the views they need to survive, and that in a world that depends on science that is what students will have to learn, not astrology or voodoo. He thus came to see that there were drastic limitations to his notion of the separation of science and society. So where he erred he changed his mind anyway. I think he also erred in his going away from relativism. Of course, the relativism he attacked in his later work was the caricature provided by analytic philosophers, namely that the truth, or the good, of an idea or action is relative to a culture or point of view. Relativism can be far more sophisticated than that. Nevertheless, given the range of problems he examined, it is remarkable how insightful he was.

PN: Feyerabend wrote often about Mill's famous essay On Liberty and how he had extended the arguments found in it. What was the extent of his debt to Mill in your opinion?

GM: Feyerabend points out that we are often unable to even discover important evidence against our favorite theories unless we consider seriously alternative theories that can propose and make sense of counter-evidence such as the compound motion of bodies in the case of the Copernican theory. Our science has, then, greater opportunities to progress if we accept a theoretical pluralism. This is the second important historical contribution made by Feyerabend, a contribution closely allied with his first. No matter how certain we may be of a theory, a scientist who fails to accept it and develops instead a different theory is doing science a favor. For as Feyerabend says, "We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit (and which may actually just be another dream-world)."

This second philosophical contribution of Feyerabend acts not only against Newton but also against the important tradition of Plato and Descartes, whose obsession it was to discover the correct path to unique truth. Century after century, generation after generation of skeptics sowed doubts about the path to truth suggested by this or that great philosopher. But Mill was the first important philosopher who rebelled against the goal itself. In his essay On Liberty, Mill argued that it does not favor society to force its members to accept the official point of view - no matter how certain it seems to be. By allowing the development of different points of view society profits, for if the official point of view is false, we gain the opportunity to replace with another that might be at least partially true. And if the official point of view turns out to be true anyway, comparing it with alternative points of view allow us to understand it better. Feyerabend's accomplishment in this area comes from extending Mill's philosophy to science. Science also profits by allowing the development of points of view different from the one that "agrees with the facts." And we find one of the best examples of how science profits precisely in the case of Galileo and his defense of the Copernican revolution.

Feyerabend's ironic sense of humor led him to proclaim anarchy in the philosophy of science and to suggest that "anything goes." But he never offered anarchy as a sort of anti-method method. Anarchy is the description that a traditional rationalist would give to the way science should be done according to Feyerabend, and particularly the description that rationalist would give of pluralism. It is that rationalist who finds it obvious that rationality consists in behaving in accordance with the rules of the method of empiricism. And it is that rationalist who recoils in horror at the "anything goes" attitude in science a la Feyerabend.

PN: How did Feyerabend influence your own work?

GM: He set the stage for the future development of philosophy. For example, if we could no longer say that science was rational in the traditional sense, could we still talk about science as a rational activity? My answer is "yes". A good deal of my early work developed a biological conception of science in which we could see that science was indeed a rational activity in a very straightforward ends-to-means conception of rationality. He first accepted my evolutionary relativism, but in his later work he argued against relativism on some very interesting grounds. I think he is wrong, but definitely worth replying to. He also pointed out to me a strong connection between Bohr's ideas and my biological approach to philosophy. This connection is becoming more and more important in my work. Another important influence is the notion that concepts and meanings are flexible and may change. We can see that in the history of the physical sciences and should expect it in our growing understanding of the mind as neuroscience advances (that is the main point of eliminative materialism). It also shows why analytic philosophy was doomed, since analytic philosophy relies on stable concepts so logic and argument may shine in all their glory. He was influenced by Wittgenstein in this last issue, but I think he goes well beyond Wittgenstein.

Incidentally, this is where the linguistic version of the infamous problem of incommensurability arises. Philosophers of science thought of explanation as logical derivation. And new theories explained their predecessors, which became special cases of the new theories. Science thus evolved by accretion. But, if we are strict about meanings, it seems that the meanings of scientific terms change when theories change. In that case, new theories cannot explain the old, for in the presumed derivation the meanings of some terms would vary from the premises to the conclusion. Philosophy of science then committed science to perennial equivocation. This was a big problem for philosophers, who tried to fix it by changing their theories of meaning. But Feyerabend pointed out that scientists should not lose any sleep over this issue, since they were very flexible and pragmatic about the meaning of their terms. I have argued that incommensurability is indeed a serious problem for empiricism, for it makes us realize that there is no common measure or standard by which to judge the worth of competing theories, as Galileo demonstrated. At any rate, "facts" do not provide such a standard, and this result is a dagger in the heart of empiricism. I have also argued that this problem is independent of theories of meaning.

Feyerabend's main influence on my work, beyond setting the stage for many of the problems that have concerned me, is his example of being honest and daring.

PN: What do you think is the relevance of the philosophy of science today? What are the main issues you are interested in?

GM: The field has become more relevant today, in spite of all the remarks made to the contrary by Feyerabend, and in great part because of his influence. One of reasons for the increased relevance is that Feyerabend and Kuhn showed us how important the practice of science is for philosophy. So many, particularly younger philosophers, even some who learned from their mentors that Feyerabend was a kook, now bring their philosophical energy to interesting controversies in the practice of science. Some of them have interesting points to make, and some times the scientists pay attention. This brings me to a second and related reason: we have done away with the silly formalist approach, at least in great part. So scientists can now read what philosophers say with some chance of understanding it. That allows them to respond to the philosophers. This in turn gives the philosophers the chance to say more pertinent things in the future.

I am not talking about a world-shattering movement here. But it is an improvement, and Feyerabend deserves a good part of the credit, in my opinion.

The journal Science recently compiled a list of 25 hard scientific questions, and I realized that about two thirds of them are questions that enter my own work in some way or another. Many of them are addressed at least briefly in my next book, The Dimming of Starlight: What is the universe made of? Can the laws of physics be unified? How does Earth's interior work? How and where did life on Earth arise? How far can we push chemical self-assembly? How hot will the greenhouse world be? And even: What can replace cheap oil and when? Some of the other questions I deal with in class and my take on them will be making its way into print slowly in the next few years: What is the biological basis of consciousness? Why do humans have so few genes? What determines species diversity? What genetic changes made us uniquely human? How are memories stored and retrieved? How did cooperative behavior evolve? What are the limits of conventional computing? Do deeper principles underlie quantum uncertainty and non-locality?

The reason these questions enter my work is that some of them have interesting philosophical consequences while in others there are philosophical comments worth making about the methodologies used by scientists to tackle them.

But of course you wanted to know about the main philosophical issues I am interested in. I want to explain how the brain of social animals, a biological organ, can make sense of the world. Using this approach I believe one can solve the main problems of the philosophy of science: the problem of the rationality of science and the problem of reality (does science give us the truth about the universe?). Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, but the biological revolution has not yet taken place for philosophy. Analytic philosophy, for example, has treated biology as an interloper in its (philosophy's) attempt to preserve what it takes to be the autonomy of philosophy (e.g., biological discussions of ethics commit the naturalistic fallacy, epistemology is prescriptive while biology is descriptive, etc.). So my job is to show that the so-called fallacies are not fallacious, that the only mistakes in reasoning are committed by the philosophers who discover them or who use them as the intellectual equivalent of slander. I see myself as clearing the philosophical rubble so that we may again have a worthwhile natural philosophy. I began this task in my Radical Knowledge in 1981, continued it in my Evolution and the Naked Truth in 1998, and will bring it all together in what I hope will be my best book on the subject, A Theory of Wonder.

I am also interested in showing very precisely why analytic philosophy is a dead end in every field: philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics, and especially philosophy of language, presumably its crowning glory. If I live long enough I should write it all up in a book titled Against Analysis.

PN: What projects are you currently working on?

GM: I am doing the final rewrite of The Dimming of Starlight: The Philosophy of Space Exploration. I am also doing a book in Spanish titled Variaciones sobre temas de Feyerabend ("Variations on themes by Feyerabend"). Right after these two I will finish rewriting A Theory of Wonder, which is my final commentary on the philosophy of science, and in which I give particular prominence to Feyerabend's work, all within the context provided by a biological approach to philosophy.

PN: In his How to defend Society against Science, Feyerabend was notorious for having given "three cheers to the creationists". What do you think of the current debate surrounding so-called Intelligent Design and/or Creationism and how do you see Feyerabend's writings on "the tyranny of truth" and the separation of science and society applying to this controversy?

GM: Scientists and other reasonable people are quite right in pointing out that there is no worthwhile science in creationism or in intelligent design. So in that sense they are also quite right in keeping those subjects out of the science classroom. Giving equal time to all points of view in the classroom is one of the aspects of Feyerabend's Science in a Free Society that I criticized most strongly (see my paper in Beyond Reason). Nevertheless, I think that, if it were done right, it would be a terrific idea to pit intelligent design against evolutionary biology. It would be quite interesting for the students too: this is the accusation that creationists either of old or of "intelligent design" garb make against the theory of evolution; this is the reply. Done right it would be a rout in favor of evolution. And we would have American students actually understand biology for the first time in the history of the country. Unfortunately, most Americans, even scientists outside of biology, have little understanding of evolution. The fundamentalists should be careful about what they pray for, since if it is done properly it would give them fits. And they would have only themselves to blame. They often have no idea what the theory actually says. All they can think of is that we don't come from monkeys and God already wrote down for us in the Old Testament when the world began. The rest is a bunch of very confused notions about evolution and science.

I am afraid that it would not be done right, though. I have this vision of high school teachers parroting Popperian inanities. Still, they could clear up a lot of misconceptions about the fossil record, the evolution of complex organs, and so on.

My final take is that it would be an excellent way to teach evolution, but that I would feel more at ease if they put me in charge of training the biology teachers.

PN: What advice would you give to laymen interested in Feyerabend's thought but put off by the hostile reaction it got?

GM: If they are that easily led by the nose, I don't think they would be too interested in Feyerabend's work. As for those who are curious, I think that reading about him in less formal environments (this one, for example) can be helpful. Several good books on Feyerabend have been published and will continue to be published, but they tend to be written for specialists, and thus laymen may not take to them. Perhaps the most accessible is The Worst Enemy of Science? Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend, an anthology that I edited for Oxford with John Preston and David Lamb. I think that Feyerabend's reply to critics in Beyond Reason is very enjoyable, as are many of his shorter essays. His main works are quite challenging because of the extraordinary level of erudition and his uncompromising irony, even though he was a very good writer. People can read his autobiography, Killing Time, though. That is a very readable book. I am writing my A Theory of Wonder both for the layman and the specialist. I hope I will succeed.

In any event, people should bear in mind that Feyerabend is one of the most exciting philosophers in a long time. He was very irreverent, but he was also very insightful. If you want to experience a true challenge to the philosophical tradition, Feyerabend is your man.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:36:38 +0000 7dcd340d84f762eba80aa538b0c527f7 Keith Jenkins: Rethinking History http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/keith-jenkins-rethinking-history-r41 Re-thinking History. His work has served to bring criticisms of traditional philosophy of history to the attention of the wider public, particularly with the intentionally-polemical stance he took in Re-thinking History. I was able to ask him some questions about his work and its motives.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2004)

PN: What was your original motivation for writing Re-thinking History?

KJ: I originally wrote Re-thinking History in the late 1980s (it was first published in 1991) because of what seemed to me to be the poverty of 'history theory' (even today a term that seems slightly odd though we readily enough accept 'literary theory' or 'critical theory' or 'social theory'). At the time most students of history had read—if they had read anything about 'the nature of history' at all—bits and pieces from texts by Marwick and Tosh, Bloch, E.H. Carr and G. Elton. And, compared with the theoretical work in adjacent disciplines/discourses at the time—in literature, sociology, aesthetics, politics, etc., these offered a massively impoverished understanding of how a discourse like history is the kind of fabrication it is—and has been. And so RH tried to both introduce students to ideas from these other areas and apply them to some of the key issues/areas in history.

PN: How would you explain the conclusions you came to in Re-thinking History to someone who had never considered historical theory before?

KJ: The conclusions I reached about history in RH were (i) that history was an aesthetic/literary genre such that it could not be an epistemology and that, therefore, the questions historians normally considered—the relationship of facts to values, of interpretation, of objectivity, truth, etc., were not much to the point if the object of their concern was not one capable of being reduced to epistemological (knowledge) claims. I thought and still think—that debates about 'history' are debates about meaning (i.e. ontological debates) and, of course, meaning (of the 'facts'; of this or that interpretation, etc.) escape facticity and interpretation. (ii) That all historical discourse is positioned—is ideological/political, and that, rather than avoid this obvious conclusion, one should make explicit one's own position... that is to say, there was a call for 'reflexivity' going 'all the way down'. (iii) Finally, I wanted students of history to be aware of the ideas of postmodernity and postmodernism and to encourage them to read 'postmodernists' (Lyotard et al) for themselves.

PN: What was the initial reaction to it, and was there a difference between lay and academic opinions?

KJ: The initial reaction from people like Marwick was openly hostile and I think—I still think—Marwick spoke and speaks pretty much for most mainline/professional historians who, whilst aware of 'theory', are still fairly immune to it if not openly hostile. But, nevertheless, RH was taken up in schools, colleges, universities (where its deliberately polemical style probably encouraged 'discussion') and, by the mid 90s probably figured on most 'reading lists' at 'A' level and undergraduate levels. But this has not, as noted, really 'filtered down' to the 'proper' history courses most students still do, and so it's difficult to judge its 'positive' impact.

PN: In an interview with Alan Munslow, you said that you "knew how intellectually backward the general condition of 'the discipline of history' was, and how rabidly anti-theoretical the academic pursuit of history was". Have these situations improved within history and how successful do you think Re-thinking History was in bringing about change or a more reflective attitude in historians?

KJ: I think my answer here echoes the one just given. There has been some 'improvement' since the early 90s (as evidenced by the increasing number of theory texts on the market) and, no doubt, in methods and historiography classes the nature of history is much more discussed. But the problem still remains of how far students have moved away from empirical approaches; of how far historical discourse is now fashioned and figured in highly effective, theoretical ways.

PN: How does the philosophy of history differ between regions, local or international? Is there a division between, say, analytic and postmodern approaches, so-called, similar to that some point to in philosophy between Anglo-American and Continental traditions?

KJ: The division isn't between, say, analytical v. post modern approaches but, insofar as 'the post modern' has had an impact, the development of interest is that of whether empiricism has been challenged and whether the aesthetic nature of historical writing has supplanted it... to some extent. And, insofar as 'continental philosophy' is linguistic and aesthetic and ontological (as opposed to factual, empirical and epistemological) then the 'history debates' do shadow continental philosophy ones—in general. For, in their particulars, the sophistication of continental philosophy is nowhere really replicated in current historiography.

PN: In the years since writing and re-issuing Re-thinking History, what developments have there been in historical theory? What would you include if you published another edition?

KJ: I have written a 'new' RH under the title of Refiguring History (Routledge, 2003). I was asked by Routledge around 2001 to write a new edition of RH, but I can't go back... The debates that were around in 1991 are not articulated in the same way today and so I thought a new book was better than an 'old book' updated. Nevertheless, Routledge still wanted a second edition of RH and so I agreed to this by adding to it an interview with Alun Munslow... but the text remains untouched. For those interested I have talked about all of this in the Munslow interview (in RH, 2nd edition 2003); in the Introduction to Refiguring History and in an autobiographical piece I wrote for the journal (also called 'Rethinking History') entitled 'After History' (Rethinking History journal, 3, 1, Spring, 1999, pp. 7-20).

PN: In the book, you wrote that "[t]heoretical discussions are still on the whole skirted by robustly practical practising historians...". Why are historians so reluctant to consider the theoretical issues?

KJ: I think historians are reluctant to consider theoretical issues because of the continued dominance of empirical and epistemological thinking. Historians don't like to be told that history is a fictive process; that a history is 'an act of the imagination'; that there is no such thing as a 'true history' (any more than there can be a 'true story') because truth—at the level of the text (as opposed to the text's singular statements) is just not an applicable concept. And so historians—who are impatient about any kind of theory let alone the kind of theory I might advocate—are particularly anti 'post modern' (or anti post-structuralist or post-feminist or post-Marxist or deconstructionist positions)... basically it problematices 'normal', academic/professional histories and so, understandably, it isn't welcomed.

PN: Do you think historical theory could benefit from being discussed in terms of the realism/anti-realism debate in philosophy generally? Can there be such a thing as anti-realist accounts of the past?

KJ: Anti-realism is not a position I (and as far as I know, no 'postmodern' historian as such) embrace. I/We are not at all anti-realist, but I/We are 'all', I think, anti-representationalist.

PN: In the book, you wrote that the difficulties in historical theory could—if properly understood—be considered "liberating" and "emancipating". Can you explain this briefly and comment on your critics' response to this possibility?

KJ: I think that, by the terms "emancipating" and "empowering" as applied to a reflexively held position, I meant—and mean—that a history that raises to consciousness its constructive apparatus can demystify (and defamiliarise) historical accounts that variously attempt to 'tell the story of the past in and for itself' and thus allow the development of critical positions to emerge that can then spread into other discourses and into 'everyday political life'. This may seem rather optimistic and I suppose it is, but I want students to have a critical purchase on as many aspects of life as possible so that they can then decide how to live the life they have. To be—insofar as this is every remotely possible—'in control of their own discourse'.

PN: What is next for you? Please tell us a little about your current projects and forthcoming works.

KJ: Since Refiguring History and the 2nd edition of RH (2003) I have co-edited and introduced (with Professor Alun Munslow) a new Reader for Routledge (The Nature of History Reader, 2004)... in the Introduction, Munslow and I reflect on many of the concerns raised in this 'interview'. I am now working on another Reader for Routledge co-edited with Dr Sue Morgan entitled The Feminist History Reader (probably out in late 2005/early 2006) and another book—also for Routledge—entitled Manifestos for History in which we have asked some 20 historians to write Manifestos for the kind of histories they would like—feel necessary—for the 21st century. This collection of essays is edited by myself, Professor Alun Munslow and Dr Sue Morgan, and should be out in late 2006. Apart from that I'm writing various essays for journals... for example an essay on J.F. Lyotard is due out in the journal Rethinking History in late 2004 and an essay on "History and Ethics" is appearing in the December 2004 issue of the journal, History and Theory.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:35:44 +0000 16c222aa19898e5058938167c8ab6c57 Aviezer Tucker: Our Knowledge of the Past http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/aviezer-tucker-our-knowledge-of-the-past-r40 Australian National University in Canberra (at the time of interview) but has previously worked in America, Europe and Asia and was then a lecturer in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen's University in Belfast. He resigned from Queen's after being subjected to blackmail and refusing to inform on colleagues; he recounted his experiences via The Prague Post in his articles Informing as a state of mind and Race to the bottom and readers are advised to avoid Queen's and particularly Cynthia MacDonald and Shane O'Neill. He is currently enjoying fatherhood and working on a book on political philosophy. He aims to obtain appointments in Africa and Antartica to be able to brag that he has worked on all the continents. He is the author of Our Knowledge of the Past (also available from Cambridge University Press). I was able to ask him some questions about this book and its implications.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2006)

PN: How do you understand the difference between History, Historiography and the Philosophy of History?

AT: History is composed of past events and processes. Historiography attempts to describe, explain and theorize parts of history. Most of history is unknown and unknowable because it did not generate information-preserving effects that survived to the present. Historians who write historiography infer propositions about the past from present evidence.

The philosophy of history attempts to gain knowledge of history that does not depend on empirical evidence, it attempts to by-pass historiography. Philosophies of history typically rely on idealistic epistemology, on intuitions of the essence of history. These intuitions may appear in the guise of "historical self-consciousness." Philosophers of history like Vico or Hegel believed they could gain knowledge of the historical process that resembles self-knowledge. They believed that as we have intuitive self-consciousness of ourselves, philosophers of history could gain knowledge of the past by becoming the self-consciousness of history. Since we can understand a living process only at its end, philosophers of history from Hegel through Marx to Fukuyama believe themselves to be living at the end of history. However, all existing philosophies of history have reflected the conflicting historical consciousness of their age, how they perceived the historical process. Yet, the historical process always goes on towards ends we cannot possibly fathom.
The end of history will always happen tomorrow and be accompanied by yet another philosophy of history....

PN: The subtitle of your book is "A Philosophy of Historiography". How do you conceive of marrying the two?

AT: The philosophy of historiography, unlike the philosophy of history, is a branch of epistemology that examines our knowledge of the past. As much as the philosophy of science asks how do scientists gain knowledge of nature by examining the relations between scientific theories and the evidence, the philosophy of historiography examines our knowledge of the past by examining the relations between historiography and historiographic evidence. As much as the philosophy of science begins by examining the successful paradigms of Galileo, Newton, Einstein etc., why and how they replaced previous paradigms, the philosophy of historiography examines the history of historiography to discover how an why new paradigms in textual criticism, comparative historical linguistics, historiography and evolutionary biology were established.

PN: In your book you distinguish between two alternative approaches to our knowledge of history that you call "historical skepticism" and "historical esotericism"? What do you mean by these?

AT: Skepticism argues that there is no knowledge of the past. Whatever consistency we find between historiographies is the result of factors external to historiography, such as political or economic interests. Esotericism claims that there is knowledge of the past, but it is impossible to know how successful historians obtain it. Historiography then is a practice like cooking that cannot be reduced to a set of instructions. I argue that skepticism and esotericism are implausible because they cannot explain the history and sociology of historiography as well as the kind of internal account I develop. Skepticism cannot explain the uniquely heterogeneous broad consensus on parts of historiography. The totalitarian reduction of all opinions to political or economic interests cannot explain why historians of widely different, indeed conflicting, interests and identities agree on so many historiographic propositions. I develop an alternative account that explains better this consensus by shared theories and methodologies concerning the transmission of information in time that may seem trivial yet are incredibly fruitful. I do not like the undemocratic and elitistic implications of esotericism. If knowledge of history is the preserve of an obscure elite that benefits from long apprenticeships with older masters, they cannot be criticized by the unwashed masses who may not have been touched by expensive genius, but can examine the evidence just as well. I think that it can be shown that esotericism is false by presenting explicitly the actual theories and methods that historians use and teach, as I do.

PN: In recent years there has been a vigorous debate on the nature of historiography. Why did you consider it necessary to provide a scientific approach to historiography?

AT: I argue that a part of historiography is indeed scientific in the sense that it offers highly probable propositions of all kinds (descriptive, explanatory, theoretical) about the past, and indeed has been so for about two centuries, since the breakthroughs and paradigm founding in textual criticism, comparative linguistics and historiography. I also argued that other parts of historiography, marked by sociological fragmentation into schools, are less than scientific.

It seems to me that much of the debate has been marked by over-simplifications and inattention to either historiographic practices or contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. Both sides overemphasized in my opinion the significance of historiographic texts in comparison with historiographic research and practice. Both sides imported to the philosophy of historiography theories and methods of interpretation that were originally developed for and fitted other disciplines at other times and I do not believe quite fit historiography. I do not think that either side would finish reading Our Knowledge of the Past feeling smug or vindicated. I think they need to go back to the drawing board and produce a more sophisticated, complex and above all sensitive to the practice of historiography and its history versions of their original positions. I do hope the debate will go on. It is an important debate and it can potentially flash out many interesting things about historiography.

PN: In the section on the theory of scientific historiography, you rely on Bayesian probability theory to develop a method of comparing explanations. Can you explain briefly what it involves?

AT: The three most common lies are: The check is in the mail, if you sleep with me I'll divorce my spouse and, among academics, "I'll be brief." I'll try to be brief, then:

I use an interpretation of Bayesian theory that is closest to the one Elliott Sober developed to account for the inference of common cause, though it differs from Sober in several crucial points. Let me try and explain it informally:

The task of historiography is to offer the best explanation of the evidence. The evidence consists typically of two or more units of evidence like texts, languages, testimonies, species, genomes, or cultural practices that are similar in certain respects. I will use here as an example, two very similar exams that are handed by students to their teacher and deserve a perfect score, to simplify the argument and connect it to everyday experience. I believe that the inference of historiography from evidence proceeds in three stages:
First, we ask whether the similarity between the units of evidence is more likely given some common cause, or given separate causes. For example, if two or more students submit very similar exam essays, it is far more likely that there was some common cause than there were separate causes. It is highly unlikely that the students came up independently with exactly the same words in the same order. The same is true of texts in biblical criticism and classical philology or of testimonies in historiography. However, if the exam is in logic or mathematics, two identical, perfect score, exams, are more likely given separate causes, given that the students wrote answered the exams independently of each other because there was a single correct or best answer to each question. Likewise, similar biological traits that convey adaptive advantages such as wings or fins or human behaviors like agriculture, language and fishing may develop independently of each other, from separate causes because they are the best solutions to shared types of problems.

Second, if we are able to establish that the similarity between the units of evidence is more
likely given some common cause than given separate causes, we need to distinguish five possible causal nets, and find which is the best explanation of the evidence:
  • A single common cause caused the similarity between the units of the evidence; for example, both students copied the same textbook.
  • Several common causes affected the evidence; for example, the students copied a textbook, an encyclopedic entry and a Website.
  • One or more of the units of evidence affected the others; for example, one student wrote the exam and the others copied his text into their notebooks.
  • All the units of the evidence affected each other; for example, all the students co-authored the exam together.
  • Combinations of 1 or 2 with 3 or 4.
Distinguishing between these five possibilities, finding which one is most probable, requires further analysis of the evidence and/or the discovery of new evidence. For example, the teacher who is certain there was plagiarism but wishes to discover the culprit(s) may consider whether the language of the similar essays is too grammatically and syntactically perfect, sophisticated or mature for students, which would decrease the probability of 3 & 4 above, and vice versa. The teacher may consider if the students could communicate during the exam with each other and whether they are friends. If the style of the exam is typical of one of the students and he has been a significantly better student than the others, the third option is most likely etc.

Third, once the historian draws a likely causal map, a genealogic tree of information transmission, it is possible to try to infer the actual properties of the various units on the map. In our example, if stylistic or conceptual discontinuities in the text point to multiple common causes, the teacher may attempt to infer which parts of the exam resemble the style of an encyclopedic entry and what this entry may be, and which resemble more paragraphs in a text book and which text book it may be. If the teacher has access to a good library, she may try to match books and encyclopedias with parts of the text of the exam.

If we look at the history of textual criticism, comparative linguistics and evolutionary biology, we will see that they follow these three successive stages of development, though some do not have sufficient evidence to advance to the next stage. For example, comparative linguistics is capable of proving that the similarities between the Indo-European languages are too numerous and detailed to be the result of separate causes. The Indo-European languages are connected in a causal net. However, there is insufficient evidence to favor either the hypothesis that there was a single proto-Indo-European language from which all other Indo-European languages descended, or that there never was such a language, only a group of unrelated languages, spoken by peoples who lived in close proximity to each other and therefore progressively influenced each other's languages until they became quite similar, as in the "wave theory of language." In historiography, however, typically stage one is quite easy, and often stage three is achieved as well.

I consider this part of Our Knowledge of the Past to be the most significant, in proving that the philosophically significant disciplinary distinction is not according to the subject matters of the disciplines, between human and natural sciences, or according to their way of describing the world, between nomothetic and ideographic sciences, but between the sciences that infer common causes tokens and the sciences that confirm hypotheses about types of causes. The sciences that infer common causes tokens are the historical sciences, historiography, both of humans and of nature, comparative linguistics, textual criticism evolutionary biology, and probably parts of geology and archaeology as well.

PN: One of the main criticisms of Bayesian approaches is the difficulty in assigning prior and conditional probabilities. What problems do these pose for your thinking and for historiography in general?

AT: Though historians, unlike biologists who infer phylogenies, do not use explicitly Bayesian formulae, I think that the Bayesian model I developed above is the best explanation of the history and sociology of historiography, of the actual practices of historians.

Though historians do not plug in precise quantitative values to the Bayesian variables, they do make comparative more/less estimates of the values of the Bayesian variables: In the present stage of historiography, when there is a broad network of well-corroborated beliefs about the past, it is fairly easy to estimate the priors of many hypotheses, according to whether they fit everything else we already know about the past. Historians typically estimate the likelihoods of the evidence given competing hypotheses by examining the information chains that should connect past events with present evidence. I argue that this examination of information chains is the main professional activity of historians. The theories that historians typically develop and use are about the voluntary and involuntary mutation and decay of information in time.

Since I argue that accepted historiography must offer a better explanation of a broad scope of evidence than existing alternatives, it is not necessary to prove any absolute quantitative probabilities, merely that one historiographic hypothesis is considerably more probable than an alternative one.

PN: Throughout your book you are keen to emphasise the similarity between your scientific historiography and the methodology used in evolutionary biology. Can you explain the parallels?

AT: Natural and human historiographies attempt to infer descriptions of events and processes from similarities between units of information preserving evidence. Units of evidence may be species in evolutionary biology or documents, testimonies and material artifices in human historiography. The inference of common causes in historiography and evolutionary biology follow the same three stages outlined in my answer to question 5. The difference is that in evolutionary biology the historical evolution of the system is identical with the transmission of information over time. When evolutionary biologists make a phylogenic inference, they trace the evolution of species from present similarities among genome sequences through fossil evidence to an ancient ancestor. Historians of society also infer sections of the evolution of society from information preserving evidence in the present. But the information preserving causal links they study are not identical with the evolution of society; historians are interested in causal-information chains that generated documents or material objects, not the present state of society.

Historically, whether or not Darwin knew about and was influenced by comparative historical linguistics before introducing the theory of evolution (Darwin's cousin and brother in law was a philologist), the British educated public had known and had accepted Darwin's methods of inference of natural history before they read his books. The educated British public had already accepted scientific genealogical trees of languages. The imperial encounter with the languages of the Indian sub-continent induced interest in the Indo-European hypothesis. Those who accepted that inference had already accepted Darwin's method before he even introduced it. Darwin used comparative linguistics as a heuristic analogy several times in his writings to explain his new ideas to an audience that had already been familiar with the new achievements of comparative linguistics.

PN: In the conclusion you remark that historiography attempts to provide an analysis of the past via the best explanation of the available evidence. You add that "[t]he most that historiography can aspire for is increasing plausibility, never absolute truth." How does this understanding of historiography differ from what we typically think of history?

AT: Parts of historiography have such a high level of probability that ordinary people frequently consider them as facts, rather than well-confirmed hypotheses or theories. For pragmatic purposes of orientation in the world this works just as well. However epistemically, George Washington is an extremely well confirmed and useful hypothesis that explains a wide scope of evidence, not a fact. The Renaissance is a very useful theoretical concept that was introduced in the late nineteenth century by Burckhardt.

PN: You are critical of both traditional historiography and the arguments of skeptics. In what ways are the two inadequate?

AT: The skeptics cannot explain, cannot make sense of, the uncoerced, large, and uniquely heterogeneous consensus of historians on the Rankean paradigm, its methods and results. The skeptics are better positioned to explain what I call the traditionalist part of historiography, where historiographic schools interpret inconsistently vague large scope theories ad hoc to explain a narrow range of evidence. Still, though traditionalist historiography, associated sociologically with historiographic schools, cannot claim a scientific status, it is nether reducible to political or economic interests, nor indeterminate. Though the evidence is insufficient in some cases for discriminating between several competing traditionalist historiographic interpretations of school theories, the evidence is sufficient for rejecting quite a lot of hypothesis that do not fit it. Consequently, I argue that traditionalist historiography is neither determined, nor indeterminate, but underdetermined.

PN: Why do you claim that in some respects "the philosophy of historiography is a philosophy of liberation from the tyranny of the present"?

AT: Though the philosophy of historiography is a sub-field of epistemology and is not political, it has some political implications. I only hinted at them at the end of the book. Many social and political conflicts have been perpetuated by non-scientific historiographic interpretations. Typically, these historiographies tell a story of group victimization by another group, imply the responsibility of the other group for whatever misery has befallen the favored group since the victimization and the obligation of the current generation to right the historical wrongs and vindicate their ancestors. These are the kind of historiographic stories that both sides to conflicts in places like the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, etc, tell their children. These stories perpetuate these conflicts by teaching young people to hate and repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. If one holds, as the skeptics do, that all historiography is fiction, there is nothing that can be said to prove such stories false. At most one can preach to both sides to listen and understand each other's narratives and be tolerant and respectful of them, hardly an effective means for ending such conflicts. But if we recognize that parts of historiography offer probable knowledge of scientific quality, it is possible to say that some historiographic narratives are plain false or quite unlikely in comparison with their scientific alternatives. It is possible then to tell young people that the historiographic narratives their elders taught them are false or improbable and offer no basis for them to kill or be killed.

For example, Israelis and Palestinians fight over the "graves of the patriarchs" in the town of Hebron. The evidence for the presence of these graves in Hebron is from a verse in the book of Genesis and a tradition that originated in the Roman period. If we examine the evidence from Genesis in its linguistic and textual contexts, we may conclude that the best explanation of this verse is a dispute in the fourth century BCE over the exact borders of the Jewish province in the Persian Empire. To establish a claim to the then disputed town of Hebron, the editors of the then young bible probably added this verse. Further consideration of the architecture of the graves in Hebron suggests that the best explanation of the oldest part of that structure is that "the graves of the patriarchs" are the graves of Edomite sheikhs from the first few centuries BCE. Scientific historiography can then tell both sides that they are not fighting over the graves of their patriarchs, but over old Edomite bones.... Further, if Abraham and Jacob existed, it is highly unlikely that they were buried together, since the Abraham stories all take place in the territory of what would be the kingdom of Judea, while the Jacob stories all take place in the territories that would become the kingdom of Israel. Abraham's god is Jehovah; Jacob's God is Elohim. The best explanation of these differences is that Abraham and Jacob were originally the mythical ancestor fathers of different tribes. After the kingdom if Israel was destroyed in the eighth century BCE and the Judean kingdom assumed the claim to the Israelite territory and heritage, the two narratives were combined to unite the mythical ancestors of both ethnic groups as the patriarchs of a united nation. If Jacob existed, he was probably buried somewhere much north of Hebron.

Just as false are some narratives of irresponsibility. Scientific historiography can tell
neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers that their narrative is not just ugly and vicious, but also plain false. The weight of the evidence is that the best explanation of the material remains in East Europe, the Nazi documents, and the testimonies of survivors is that there was indeed a Holocaust. The Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust.

I am reading now a book on Czech historical memory (Francoise Mayer, Les Tcheques et leur communisme (Paris: Editions de l'ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 2004)). According to the author, Czechs tell themselves a story of national victimization and irresponsibility: Czechoslovakia was destroyed following the British and French betrayal in Munich in 1938. The Communist take over in 1948 was caused by the Soviets with the cooperation of Czech and Slovak young Communists who blamed the West for 1938. The native liberalization of the Prague Spring in 1968 was again crushed by external forces following the Soviet invasion. This story exempts the Czech from self-examination. Contemporary and former dissident Czech historians argue that it is true that Britain and France betrayed democratic Czechoslovakia in 1938. But the mechanized Czechoslovak military could have attempted to match the German military in case of war, unlike the Polish cavalry that fought the Germans tanks in 1939. Czechoslovakia fell apart before it was occupied following the discriminatory policies of the Czech majority that alienated the Slovak and German minorities. The Communist coup of 1948 was indeed carried by a well-organized Communist minority. But it did not receive substantive Soviet support, and the democratic majority could have resisted it had it been sufficiently united and determined. True, the invasion of August 1968 and the following repression were the faults of the Soviet Union, but from late 1969 to late 1989 all the political repression was carried by Czechs and Slovaks against Czechs and Slovaks. Consequently, scientific historiography can tell Czechs that their elders and ancestors have partial responsibility for their sad half century between 1938 and 1989 and examine critically their political culture, rather than just blame outsiders for all their misfortunes.

In a philosophical context, contemporary historiography can say that the story John Locke told about first appropriation in the second treatise on Government is a fairy tale. Genetic evidence proves that by 10,000 years ago all the continents have already been settled by hunters-gatherers. The last piece of global real estate to be first appropriated was New Zealand, about 1500 years ago. Prior to the last 200 or so years, almost all transfers of real estate involved involuntary appropriations. Therefore, first appropriation historical theories of property rights can justify just about nothing. An article I wrote on this topic entitled "The New Politics of Property Rights" will be published in the last 2004 issue of Critical Review.

Scientific historiography can then liberate us from living the lies that others tell us and even from the lies that we tell ourselves. The liberating power of scientific historiography can be effective on a personal just as much as on a national level. To take a personal example: One of my great-grandfathers, Nisan-Zvi Gwurtzman, was murdered in the Holocaust, probably, given the established fate of other Jews who lived in his last place of domicile, in the Maidanek extermination camp in eastern Poland.

As I was growing up, I was told stories of his religious piousness, moral uprightness, intellectual vigor and business acumen, all models for me to emulate. My family also inherited his library. It included the kind of religious books that a pious man would have been expected to own. But it included also books about professions and businesses: One book had instructions on how to make fizzy light drinks. Another explained how to produce perfumes. The dates of publication of the books were a few years apart. The latest book, from the late twenties, was about how to perform circumcisions (how to be a Mohel in Yiddish).... In the early thirties, after obviously a short career in the penis-chopping business, that great-grandfather of mine emmigrated together with my grandfather and his wife to what was British Palestine, so much for the astute businessman. The next obvious question was: If he got out of Europe in the early thirties, how and why did he die in the Holocaust back in Europe? One unit of obvious evidence is the grave of my great-grandmother, his wife, who died in Tel Aviv in 1936. So, obviously in 1936 they still lived in Palestine when my great-grandfather became a widower. Then, I needed more evidence that required pressuring some older members of the family to testify. The historiography that emerged out of their reluctant testimonies was that the lonely widower was offered a match back in Europe, to marry the widowed mother in law of one of his older sons. In the late thirties (sic!) he took a boat from Palestine back to Europe to remarry, leaving his library behind for me to examine four decades later, so much for his sharp intellect. In the process, he abandoned my young grandfather in Palestine, sickly, penniless, and without an education or a profession, so much for the moral uprightness. My abandoned grandfather found then a dominant older woman to care for him, who became my grandmother.

These circumstances also explained a few things about the character of my late mother who grew up in a household with a dominant older mother and a weak, sickly, indeed helpless and dependant, father who died in his mid-fifties. When I pieced this family historiography together a couple of decades ago I found this to be a liberating experience, not because I invented an alternative story to the one I was told during my childhood, but because I had good reason, evidence, to doubt the story I was told and to support an alternative historiography that offers a better explanation of the evidence. This revised narrative liberated me from the myths of my immediate ancestors and allowed me to adopt a more critical approach to people who were more human than saintly.

PN: Why do you think practicing historians should be concerned what philosophers of history have to say?

AT: I do not think that the actual practices of historians are often affected by what they think or learn of them. Still, I think that historians are interested, like the rest of us, in becoming self-conscious of their practices. Most significantly, historians distinguish, often without reflection, legitimate historiographies from illegitimate ones; for example, Nazi revisionism, Bolshevik fabrications and Nationalist forgeries. I think it is valuable to set clearly the conditions that distinguish historiographies that reflect the strong emotions of those who invent them, from evidence based scientific historiography.

PN: How do you answer the objection that philosophers do not understand what goes on in the work of historians?

AT: Some philosophers indeed did not and do not; their work indeed should be ignored. In relation to historians, the old New York joke about two psychiatrists who meet on the street and say to each other "You are fine, how am I?" is appropriate. Practitioners, scientists, historians or lawyers, rarely gain through practice the kind of abstract
self-consciousness that can lead them to self-knowledge. Outsiders must observe them from without to understand what they actually do and what it means. That is why we need philosophies of science, historiography or law. It is helpful of course if the philosopher-outsider has some practical experience of what practitioners actually do and is familiar with relevant analytical skills. Bad philosophies of historiography, positivist or post-modernist, applied to historiography models that had been developed elsewhere and did not quite fit historiography. That led to the perception of irrelevance of philosophy on the part of historians. But the problem was not with the field, but with the particular approaches that have been dominating the field. The solution I attempted to develop in Our Knowledge of the Past is to start with a study of the history of historiography and then construct a philosophy of historiography that attempts to offer the best explanation of the history of historiography.

I believe that the history of historiography is the empirical-evidential ground that should unite and decide between competing philosophies of historiography. I would expect any philosophy of historiography that is better than the one presented in Our Knowledge of the Past to offer a better explanation of the history of historiography.

PN: How can your work be developed further?

AT: In Our Knowledge of the Past I discussed only textual criticism, comparative linguistics, historiography and Darwinian biology. I left out the history and philosophy of Geology, Archaeology and Genetics. I suspect that the models I developed will be applicable to these disciplines as well. There is also much more to be written about the history and philosophy of biology and linguistics.

Another implication of the elucidation of the scientific historiographic method is the criticism of philosophies that violated these methods. There are several philosophical debates that originated prior to the introduction or spread of scientific historiography, and somehow managed to maintain their "prehistoric" character to this day. I mentioned earlier my criticism of historical theories of property rights that originated with the prehistoric fairy tales of John Locke about original appropriation. I also applied scientific historiography to criticize the contours of the current debate about Hume's Of Miracles as prehistoric in my article "Miracles, Historical Testimonies, and Probabilities" forthcoming in the October 2005 issue of History and Theory. Earlier, I subjected Saul Kripke's theory of proper names to the same criticism in "Kripke and Fixing the Reference of 'God'" in International Studies in Philosophy, 34-4, 2002, 155-160. The concept of tradition, as used often by hermeneutic philosophers and social scientists, is very problematic as well. I made a few notes about that at the end of chapter four.
Conversely, historiographies that exceed the limits of evidence or violate the rules of inference of common cause from similar evidence must be criticized as well.

PN: What are you working on currently? What will your next projects be?

AT: I have been working recently on a couple of projects in political philosophy and theory, one on Democratic theory and practice with my ANU colleagues John Dryzek and Robert Goodin, and one on a theory of post-totalitarianism on my own. I expect to return to the issues I raised in Our Knowledge of the Past next year, once the current projects are complete. I would like to write a philosophical historiography of the historical sciences in several volumes. I plan on writing it "backward" start with the volume on contemporary genetics and end with a volume on Biblical criticism. I'll be forty in the summer, so I probably have enough time to write this grand history of the historical sciences.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:33:01 +0000 9b72e31dac81715466cd580a448cf823 Stephen D. Snobelen: Newton Reconsidered http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/interviews/stephen-d-snobelen-newton-reconsidered-r39 University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a founder member of the Newton project and author of many fascinating papers on Newton's alchemy and religious thinking. I was privileged to be able to ask him some questions about his work on Newton.

- Interviewed by Paul Newall (2005)

PN: How and why did you first become interested in Newton?

SS: Like most people, I first learned about Newton as a child. Unlike most, I also learned relatively early on from a historical book on radical dissent in the early modern period that Newton was privately a passionate lay theologian and prophetic exegete. Although this book didn’t offer much detail, the information was striking enough that it stayed with me. I read this book several years before I began my undergraduate training. However, it was not until I was well into my undergraduate History degree that I began to study Newton’s religious beliefs for myself.
There were several starting points. First, I wrote an undergraduate honours thesis on Socinianism (an early modern antitrinitarian movement that emerged in Poland) and included a short section on Newton. Second, I wrote two upper-year papers on early modern millenarianism. Again, Newton featured in these studies. Third, I wrote two other undergraduate papers entirely on Newton and the recovery of his religious faith and how this faith related to his natural philosophy (science).

Also very important was my encountering during my undergraduate years of the work of James Force and the recently-deceased Richard H. Popkin. These two scholars (Force being Popkin’s quondam PhD student) wrote a series of wonderful papers on Newton’s theology proper and the relationship between his science and his religion. Popkin and Force (the latter is still busy working on Newton and Newtonianism) showed me just how exciting and intriguing this field could be. I was smitten! Their papers provided a model early on for my own work on Newton. It was a great pleasure to meet both of these fine scholars in 1998 and work with them on publishing projects related to Newton and early modern millenarianism.

Coincidentally, in 1991, while I was partway through my undergraduate degree, Chadwyck-Healey released the majority of Newton’s unpublished papers on microfilm. This microfilm collection included most of Newton’s theological and prophetic papers. This, along with the work of Popkin and Force, helped initiate a flurry of activity in Newton studies — particularly with respect to Newton’s theology. Having just begun to take an academic interest in Newton, I was poised to take advantage of this treasure trove. Timing is everything!

When I went on to study for my MA in History at the University of Victoria, I choose to work on a subject that related to the popularisation of Newtonianism in early eighteenth-century Britain. It was at this time that I formally added to my interests in history the history of science. I owe this in part to my supervisor Paul Wood. Thus when I applied to Cambridge in 1996, I chose the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. It was while at Cambridge (1996-2001), when I completed an MPhil and PhD in HPS and worked as a research fellow in the same field, and during which time I had rich archives at my disposal, including many of Newton’s original manuscripts, that I began to do serious work on Newton’s theology, prophecy and the relationship between his science and religion. It was a matter of making hay while the sun was shining. Although I’m always conducting new research, I still to a certain extent rely on research I did during those years.

While at Cambridge I completed an MPhil thesis on Newton’s heresy and a PhD thesis on William Whiston, one of Newton’s natural philosophical and theological disciples. I worked under Simon Schaffer, who in 1980 completed a PhD thesis on Newton at the same institution. I also began to network with Rob Iliffe (Imperial College, but a former student of Schaffer’s at Cambridge) and Scott Mandelbrote (then of Oxford, now of Cambridge), both of whom had caught the Newton bug a few years before I did and were already producing excellent work on Newton’s theology. In 1997, the year I began my PhD, and with a gentle nudge from Rob Iliffe, I started work on transcribing some of Newton’s theological manuscripts held at King’s College, Cambridge.

PN: Why was Newton a "heretic"?

SS: During his own life time, Newton was a heretic from the perspective of orthodoxy. His study of the Bible and church history had convinced him that the orthodox version of Christianity that emerged in the fourth century A.D., represented in Anglicanism and Calvinism and especially (from his point of view) Roman Catholicism in his own time and context, had strayed from the original purity of first-century Christianity and had become hopelessly corrupt. The chief heresy of the orthodox church was the doctrine of the Trinity (for Newton, it was the orthodox who were heretical, while he saw his own views as orthodox in the sense of original Christianity). To put this in perspective, the doctrine of the Trinity is widely recognised as the central tenet of orthodox Christianity. So Newton wasn’t merely chipping away at the edifice of traditional Christendom; he was destroying its chief cornerstone. Not that Newton’s (mostly private) efforts should be seen primarily as destructive. Newton saw his own biblical and historical researches as part of a recovery of the purity of the primitive faith of Christianity.

Why did Newton believe the Trinity was unbiblical? There are several reasons. First, he did not find the doctrine in the Bible. Not only was the term “Trinity” invented years after the closing of the New Testament canon, but Newton could find nothing approaching a formal doctrinal declaration of the Trinity in the Bible — something many modern scholars will affirm. Instead, he believed passages such as 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 and 1 Timothy 2:5 taught that only the Father is God in the absolute sense, while Christ is the Son of God, but not “very God of very God”, to use the language of the Nicene Creed. 1 Corinthians 8:6 reads: “But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him”. Like other non-Trinitarians of his age and today, Newton took this verse to teach that the One God worshipped by the ancient Israelites is the Father alone, not Father, Son and Holy Spirit as in the Athanasian formulation.

Why did Newton believe the Trinity was a corruption? Concluding that the Trinity could not be found in the Bible (a conclusion he came to in the early 1670s, around the time he turned thirty), Newton also looked in the annals of ecclesiastical history to find out when it was introduced. His research confirmed that Hellenising churchmen introduced Platonic language and “substance talk” to Christianity in the third and fourth centuries. This “substance talk” led to the conception that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united according to “essence” or “substance”. Newton had astutely observed that the Bible speaks about the Father’s unity with the Son as a unity of will, not substance (see John 10:30 and 17:11, 21-22).

In part, Newton was rediscovering a Hebraic conception of God, in which God is described according to his activities and his relationships with the world and His people. This discomfort with the belief that we can know the essence or substance of things resonates with his science, as does what could be called his phenomenalistic understanding of God and Christ. It was Newton’s firm belief that Christians should avoid speculative extrapolations from biblical doctrine and the introduction of foreign ideas to it, both of which can lead to error, and stick with the descriptive accounts of God and Christ found in the Bible.

But it would be a mistake to characterise Newton’s heresy only in terms of his denial of the Trinity. Newton also rejected the immortality of the soul — another litmus test of orthodoxy — which he similarly found to be unbiblical. Instead of natural immortality, eternal life for Newton was obtained through bodily resurrection. On this point we see another example of Newton rejecting a Hellenised Christian doctrine in favour of a thoroughly Hebraic idea (for the doctrine of natural immortality owes much to the post-biblical superaddition of the conception of the Platonic soul to biblical language). To support his “mortalist” conceptions of the human, Newton turned to passages such as Psalm 6:5, Psalm 115:17 and Ecclesiastes 9:5,10, all of which speak about death as unconscious oblivion.

On top of these “heresies”, Newton came to believe that the Bible does not teach a literal personal devil or literal personal demons (he had no trouble accepting literal angels). His view on Satan is very similar to the teaching of Judaism that Satan is not a personal being, but rather a personification of the evil inclination (yetzer ha-ra) within the human heart. The demons of the Synoptic Gospels, Newton concluded, were not meant to be taken literally; instead, the language of the Bible here is accommodating itself to the sensibilities of the common people, just as Newton believed it does when it describes the apparent motion of the sun. For Newton, the demon-possessed people whom Jesus healed were simply mentally or physically ill. It would be a mistake to see Newton’s rejection of a personal devil and personal demons as an example of incipient rationalism, however. Instead, these conclusions were the result of his biblicism and, likely, his strong monotheism that rendered belief in supernatural evil beings a threat to the unchallenged sovereignty of the One God Whom he worshipped.

PN: What were the difficulties associated with being a Socinian - or antitrinitarian in general - in Newton's day? Can you explain what the two involved?

SS: What Newton was doing was dangerous. Denial of the Trinity was illegal in Britain until 1813. The last person burnt at the stake in England for the denial of the Trinity was in 1612, only three decades before Newton’s birth. Antitrinitarians were seen as arch-heretics by the Anglican establishment. It was partly for this reason that Newton largely kept his antitrinitarianism to himself. Similarly, denial of the immortality of the soul and a personal devil were viewed as extremely radical doctrinal moves in Newton’s day. For many, denial of the Trinity, the immortality of the soul and evil spirits was, ironically, tantamount to atheism — even though these denials are also associated with positive teachings (the Oneness of God, the resurrection and strict monotheism). Because of the civil and ecclesiastical laws against such forms of heresy, Newton would have lost his position as Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge if he had publically revealed his heresies while serving in this capacity. We can be absolutely sure of this because Newton’s successor at the Lucasian Chair, William Whiston, was ousted from Cambridge in 1710 precisely for denying the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. So the stakes were very high indeed.

Newton’s form of antitrinitarianism, while aligned with an array of supporting biblical texts, can be loosely described as Arian. Arianism is a fourth-century Christology in which Christ pre-exists his birth in Bethlehem and is perhaps of “similar” substance to the Father. In my view, Newton gradually moved away from the more overt implications of Arianism in coming to reject any sort of substance talk (at one place in one of his manuscripts he chastises both Athanasian Trinitarianism and Arianism for introducing metaphysics into Christianity) to focus exclusively on a unity of will between God and Christ. Arians, it is true, also talked a lot about this unity of will, but it seems possible that Newton’s apparent interest in seventeenth-century Socinian Christology softened his Arianism in the later decades of his life. The Socinians (some of whose books he owned, and one of whom Newton actually met personally in 1726) believed that Christ began his existence at his birth by Mary and rejected any sort of substantial relationship between Christ and God. A sign that Newton was at least contemplating the Socinians’ slightly more radical (although, to the Socinians, more biblical) Christology comes in his later theological manuscripts, where he implies that Christians who believe in Christ’s pre-existence should find fellowship with those who don’t.

PN: Why do you think there has been an emphasis on Newton's so-called scientific papers to the neglect of his considerable writings on religion and alchemy?

SS: It’s partly Newton’s fault. Newton kept his theological and alchemical papers secret from all but a few of his closest friends. When he died, his relatives, realising the explosive nature of the manuscripts, kept them from public view, despite the fact (and probably partly because of the fact) that antitrinitarians like William Whiston were clamouring for their publication. Add to this the fact that throughout the eighteenth century a series of secular apologists created an image of Newton and his science as iconic of rationalism, and it’s easy to see why the world for years had no idea that Newton was a heretic, a prophetic exegete and a practising alchemist. Until they were sold at Sotheby’s in London in 1936, Newton’s collateral descendants kept the theological and alchemical papers under lock and key, only occasionally allowing historical researchers to examine their contents.

After the 1936 sale, which was in many respects disastrous for Newton scholarship (at least temporarily), most of the manuscripts circulated for years in private hands before the majority of them eventually settled in academic libraries. Nevertheless, until the 1991 release of most of Newton’s scientific, theological, alchemical and administrative papers on microfilm, accessing these manuscripts was difficult and in some cases impossible. The recent accessibility of the manuscripts is the main reason why the study of Newton’s theology and alchemy is only now beginning to flourish. Added excitement is created every so often when some of the few scattered sheets in Newton’s hand remaining in private collections come up for auction. Small though they are, these documents continue to add to our knowledge of Newton’s theology and the relationship between his theology and his science.

PN: What is the relationship between Newton's work in these areas and his scientific studies? What was the extent of their interdependence or can the two be separated in his thinking?

SS: Newton’s theological views related to his natural philosophical work at several levels. In my view, Newton’s theology and his natural philosophy can be distinguished in certain ways, but were never completely separate. First, Newton was stimulated by his religious beliefs to study nature. Like his contemporary the alchemist/chemist Robert Boyle, Newton likely saw himself as a sort of high priest of nature. This religious stimulus to work in natural philosophy, which can be termed an example of a weak relationship between science and religion, did not directly shape the specifics of the content of his natural philosophy. But there are many examples of what can be called a strong relationship between Newton’s science and his religion, namely examples where Newton’s religion helps shape the cognitive content of his natural philosophy.

Newton was an advocate of natural theology and thus saw the study of nature as revealing the creative hand of God. This commitment to natural theology can be found briefly in the first edition of the Principia (1687) and more extensively in the later editions of the Principia and the Opticks. Several specific examples of interaction are worthy of mention. Newton was keen to avoid what he saw as the major pitfall of the Cartesian mechanical philosophy (which he believed was prone to atheistic extrapolations) and in particular the lack of a role for spirit (in the Cartesian system, spirit is non-extended and thus cannot be the subject of natural philosophy). Newton, in a certain sense, went in the opposite direction, attempting to construct a natural philosophy that led inductively to God and conceiving a view of the universe in which God’s spirit is infinitely extended. God’s omnipresence (associated with God’s spirit) for Newton helps to explain the universality of gravity. Newton only hinted at this in his General Scholium to the Principia, while in private he was much more sanguine. Similarly, Newton’s concept of absolute space and time relate to his notions of God’s infinite extension in space and his infinite extension in time. Interestingly, in conceiving of God filling time on the analogy of God filling space, Newton seems to have moved towards a conception of time as a dimension.

There are other examples. There appears to be some sort of relationship between a series of rules of prophetic interpretation Newton penned in the 1670s and the Rules of Reasoning that took shape in the three editions of the Principia. It is certainly the case that Newton often advocated the use of similar empirical methodologies in his interpretation of Scripture and his interpretation of nature. An inductive heuristic method is one way that Newton’s study of the Bible is linked to his study of nature. It is also the case that Newton made distinctions between the absolute and relative in both his theology and his natural philosophy. In the case of the former, he distinguished between absolute and relative meanings of the word “God”, contending that Christ was God only in a relative sense, taking the title God (as he does in a handful of occasions in the New Testament) in an honorific rather than ontological sense. The Father, on the other hand, Newton believed was God in an ontological and absolute sense. In his natural philosophy or science Newton distinguished between absolute and relative, time, space, place and motion.

These examples and others are explored in some of the recent scholarship on Newton, including papers that I have recently published and am about to publish. The profound relationships Newton saw between his theology and his natural philosophy can be explained in part by his commitment to the concept of the Two Books, the idea that God wrote two books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. Newton saw both these books as “written” by God. Believing this, he could conceive of no disunity between them.

PN: What were Newton's eschatological and prophetic views? How widely known were these in his day?

SS: Newton was a premillenarian in his eschatology. Simply put, this means that he believed that Christ would return to establish a thousand-year reign with the saints on earth. The “pre” in premillenarian refers to the time of Christ’s second coming (parousia) with respect to the establishment of the Millennium or Kingdom of God on earth. Like other premillenarians, including Joseph Mede of Cambridge (who had almost single-handedly revived premillenarianism in the English-speaking world in the early part of the seventeenth century), Newton found support for his eschatology through a literal but sophisticated interpretation of such prophetic books as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation. Newton believed that the Battle of Armageddon (Revelation 16:16), the return of the Jews to Israel, the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and the fall of apocalyptic Babylon (the Trinitarian Church, manifested most fully in the Roman Catholic Church), would occur around the time of the second coming of Christ. He also believed that the true Gospel would only begin to be preached successfully shortly before this period. This was one of the reasons why Newton did not actively preach in his own time. He believed the time of the end was still at least two centuries away.

The restoration of primitive Christianity in the place of corrupt, institutional Christianity is but one of several positive visions Newton had for the future. He also believed that Christ would establish a worldwide Kingdom of God on earth and that this Kingdom would bring about peace and prosperity of the world’s inhabitants. Based on his reading of Old Testament and New Testament prophecies, he believed peace would prevail between nations, within the animal kingdom and between wild animals and humans. The Jews would be restored to their land Israel after centuries of captivity. Jerusalem, now a city of contention for the world and the three monotheistic world religions, would become the capital city, as it were, of this worldwide Kingdom. For Newton, Christ is to be King of this Kingdom and the saints (whom Newton would have identified as the righteous) are to reign over this Kingdom with Christ (Revelation 20:4-6). An important prophetic passage that spoke to Newton of this coming Kingdom of peace is Isaiah 2:2-4, where the prophet Isaiah says of the nations that “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not life up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4). This evocative vision of international peace evidently also appealed to the former Soviet Union, which donated to the United Nations in New York a statue of a man beating a sword into a plowshare and bearing this quotation from Isaiah.

Much fanfare has surrounded recently public revelations that Newton predicted the end of the world in 2060. Although this international news story helped bring Newton the prophetic exegete to the attention of the world in a dramatic way, Newton did not predict that the world would end in 2060. The date 2060 represented for him one of the possible dates when the events of the second coming would begin to take place. The date was scribbled on a scrap of paper and was never meant for public eyes. Ironically, although Newton was passionately against setting dates for the time of the end, he himself was opposed to the public setting of dates, principally because he believed it brought ridicule on the Bible when human interpreters failed in their predictions. Newton believed the genuine fulfilment of prophecy would serve as a powerful argument for the existence of God and the inspiration of the Bible. I have elsewhere written in more detail about how Newton came to the 2060 date and how this date fits into his prophetic scheme.

Only Newton’s closest followers knew about his prophetic and millenarian views during his lifetime. Some idea of his interest in prophecy was made available to the public when a small portion of his prophetic writings were released in the Observations upon the prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John in 1733. But the writings published in this work are mostly bland and insipid when compared with some of his early prophetic writings, some of which are laced with his heretical theology. Nevertheless, within some Protestant circles some of Newton’s prophetic ideas were known through this book. It is still respected and quoted by certain Protestant prophetic exegetes today. Most of these, however, are either unaware of Newton’s theological heresy or carefully choose to ignore it. Notwithstanding this, Newton through this book played a minor role in the rise of literal prophetic interpretation in Protestant fundamentalism — an interesting irony considering the use to which Newton was put by Enlightenment thinkers.

PN: Why did Newton conclude his Principia Mathematica with the General Scholium? Why was he concerned to attack monotheism at the close of a work that we tend to think of as starting or playing a vital role in the so-called Scientific Revolution?

SS: The first edition of the Principia published in 1687 contained only one reference to God (in a statement of natural theology) and one mention of the Bible. Newton, for various reasons (some of which are obvious and others that haven’t yet been fully worked out), wanted a much more robust statement of natural theology in his second edition of 1713. This came in the General Scholium, a sort of appendix that he added to the conclusion of the Principia. With his editor Roger Cotes’s new preface, which contained vigorous appeals to the natural theological utility of the Principia, Newton’s greatest work was now positioned as a work that supported natural theology. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the popularity of natural theology in Newton’s lifetime and his evident devotion to it.

What is more surprising to those unfamiliar with Newton’s thought, and even to some who are, is that Newton would want to “encode”, as it were, a polemic against the Trinity in the General Scholium. But this he did. It was crucial that he present this polemic indirectly, since open denials of the Trinity were illegal and because he didn’t believe in casting his pearls before swine, to use the biblical expression. Thus, the General Scholium is constructed a bit like a Russian doll, with outer layers that are accessible to all (these include the natural theology and the biblical descriptions of God), and inner layers that can be penetrated only by the elite amongst his enemies and supporters (this includes the implicit attack on Trinitarian scriptural hermeneutics).

Newton attacks the Trinity in the General Scholium in several ways. First, he argues that the term “God” is a relative word like “Lord”. By this he means that “God” as a term does not automatically denote divine essence or substance, but that the term primarily derives its meaning from its relations, as in “God of Israel”. For Newton, the term denotes dominion and power, not essence and might. The unmentioned but implied heretical corollary to this is that when Christ is called God, as he occasionally is in the New Testament, this does not mean that Christ is God in substance, only that he takes on the title of God as his representative. To support this implied conclusion, Newton cites John 10:35 and Psalm 82:6, which refer to Israelite magistrates being referred to as “God” or “gods” because they represented God on earth. Elsewhere in the General Scholium, Newton deftly suggests that God is unipersonal (a heretical conclusion, since in the Trinity God is tripersonal). He also boldly states that we don’t have any idea of the substance of God. Not only does this resonate with Locke’s phenomenalism, but it is a swipe against Trinitarians, who claim they know enough about the substance of God to conclude that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are consubstantial beings. In rejecting substance talk when applied to God, we see a biblical phenomenalism that parallels his phenomenalism in physics.

Why attack the Trinity in a work of natural philosophy? Apart from the likelihood that Newton derived a sense of satisfaction in countering the Trinity in a public text and getting away with it, it is likely that Newton wanted to lend his support to other antitrinitarians, who had published much more explicit arguments against the Trinity. Chief among these was Samuel Clarke, who published his antitrinitarian Scripture-doctrine of the Trinity only a year before the General Scholium was released. It also seems likely that Newton equated the feigning of hypotheses in natural philosophy (such as Descartes’ fluid vortices, attacked in the very first line of the General Scholium) and hypotheses in theology (such as the doctrine of three consubstantial persons). In fact, it appears that Newton saw himself as working to effect two reformations: one in natural philosophy and one in theology. The two reformations come together in the General Scholium. How can we be certain that Newton wrote a coded attack on the Trinity in the General Scholium? We can be sure because when the language of the General Scholium is compared with identical language in his private manuscripts, the more explicit private manuscripts can be used to interpret the meaning of the public text. And so it is that what many consider to be the single most important book in the history of science ends with a theological attack on the central doctrine of orthodox Christianity. Who would have thought?

PN: Newton is often considered one of the instigators of the Age of Reason. Why is this view mistaken?

SS: It’s not entirely mistaken; but it is very misleading. Newton’s mathematics, physics and optics, along with his scientific method, were used by the apologists of the Enlightenment (particularly those in France) to help found the so-called Age of Reason. But to use Newton in this way there was much they had to leave out of the picture. In part, this wasn’t their fault, since so little was known about Newton’s theology and how this theology underpinned his science. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the French philosophes created Newton in their own image as a icon of rationality. Newton’s firm belief that his natural philosophy would ultimately lead to a knowledge of the God of Israel would have been scandalous to these thinkers. In some cases where these image-makers knew about Newton’s theology they contended that Newton turned to theology only with old age and after a mental breakdown, thus preserving the “sanctity” of the Principia. But this contention doesn’t wash. Newton’s manuscripts (most of which we can date fairly accurately) demonstrate that Newton was up to his eyeballs in theology and alchemy for a decade or more before his began to work on his revolutionary Principia. What’s more, it is now clear that some of Newton’s preexisting theological and alchemical ideas actually helped inform some aspects of his natural philosophy or science. I’m sure that if some of the more atheistic philosophes had know what we know today, there would have been more than a little weeping and gnashing of teeth.

PN: In your writings on Newton you have made a distinction between the exoteric and esoteric meanings in his work. Why did he make such a demarcation and how did he achieve it?

SS: In his theology, Newton liked to distinguish between open and closed levels of knowledge. When discussing biblical doctrine, he spoke in terms of a distinction between “milk for babes” (simple aspects of doctrine understandable by all) and “meat for elders” (the weightier matters of doctrine, accessible only to the theologically astute). He had similar ideas about mathematics and natural philosophy, commenting at one point in his life that he wrote his Principia only for able mathematicians rather than “little smatterers in mathematics”. One can call this a form of intellectual elitism and in part it is. But it is also similar to, and perhaps related to, similar forms of epistemological dualism in the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and in alchemy. As with some other advocates of epistemological dualism, there was for Newton a social corollary in that he believed that the esoteric layers of knowledge could only be penetrated by the adepts. In his religion and in his natural philosophy, Newton saw himself as a member of a small remnant class who possessed the truth.

PN: What is the Newton Project and what is your involvement with it?

SS: The Newton Project was formed in England in 1998 as an effort to transcribe and make available the literary output of the “other” Newton, Newton the theologian and alchemist. Harvey Shoolman, Rob Iliffe and Scott Mandelbrote laid the early groundwork. I was also involved from the very beginning since I was working on Newton’s manuscripts and already networking with these gentlemen. I remain active in the Project and serve on the Editorial Board. Many of my transcriptions can be found on the Project website. The Project obtained funding in 1999 and after that the work began in earnest. Rob Iliffe is the driving force of the Project, which is based at his institution, Imperial College, London. Our original goal was to put the theological manuscripts online to make them available freely to scholars and the rest of the world. Since the original inception of the Project, the scope has broadened to include the scientific work of Newton as well. In 2003 I founded the much humbler Newton Project Canada to serve as a focus for Newton transcription work in Canada. The NPC is a sister organisation to the NP-UK, and most of the transcriptions carried out under the aegis of the NPC will ultimately end up on the NP-UK website.

PN: What other projects are you working on?

SS: Despite my enthusiasm for Newton and my passion for unravelling his complex thought world, I am engaged in other research projects. I work on early modern religious heresy, including antitrinitarian doctrine and biblical scholarship. Early modern millenarianism and prophetic interpretation is another interest of mine. I have carried out research on the popularisation of science in the early modern period. I do some work on science and religion in the nineteenth century and, partly because I teach two courses on science and religion at King’s College and Dalhousie University, I have begun to explore the current relationship between science and religion. I am interested in issues relating to the presentation of science in the contemporary media (and teach a course on this subject). Although it doesn’t directly relate as much to my current academic work, I also maintain an interest in biblical hermeneutics.

The Newton Project Canada under my direction is producing electronic editions of Newton’s Chronology (1728), Newton’s Observations (1733) and the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (1717). As for my current writing projects, I am continuing to research and publish papers on aspects of Newton’s theology, as well as the interaction between his theology and his natural philosophy. The largest project is a book I’m writing for Icon Books that is tentatively called Isaac Newton, heretic: alchemy, the Apocalypse and the making of modern science. I am also involved in the organisation of a major Newton conference slated for Israel in late 2006. This conference will bring together scholars who work on Newton’s theology, alchemy and natural philosophy for the first time.

PN: What can studying Newton teach us about contemporary issues?

SS: I’m a historian; I never think about the present! But seriously, there is much contemporary value in the recent scholarship on Newton’s theology. To begin with, for the first time ever the wider world is beginning to gain an appreciation for the full spectrum of Newton’s career. This is important partly because it helps correct a problem that has plagued the history of science for decades. Until recently, historians of science have tried to recover modern scientists in historical figures such as Aristotle, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. But these men weren’t scientists and would not have been called scientists by their contemporaries. As for Newton, he was a natural philosopher and natural philosophy included in many cases the discovery of God in nature as well as elements we today would associate with the Arts. In other words, the precursor of science was broader in scope than modern science.

Religious believers and religious scientists today might take comfort in the knowledge that one of the greatest figures in the history of science was not only a believer, but also a believer in the interconnectedness of theology and natural philosophy. But there is something here for non-religious people as well. Newton was convinced that natural philosophy should have a moral dimension. Many observers of science, as well as many scientists themselves, have argued that science has for too long lacked a moral compass. In this regard, the results of the work of the Manhattan Project come to mind. On another note, Newton’s passionate belief that natural philosophers and theologians must humbly submit to the empirical method is something from which those who study Nature and Scripture can learn a great deal.

At its most fundamental level the new research on Newton is about presenting a more accurate and a more holistic picture of the man. He wasn’t simply a rational “scientist” coldly working through his calculations. He was a man engaged in a range of activities, embracing both of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”, the Sciences and the Arts. Today science and the humanities often seem far removed from each other. When we examine the career of Isaac Newton, we examine the career of a thinker who represents a time before these two fields of human endeavour drifted apart. Since Newton is a central figure in the emergence of modern science, understanding Newton better helps us understand the roots of modern science better.

PN: What has investigating Newton's thought taught you about history and its methods?

SS: The study of Newton and his historical context has taught me a lot about the importance of empiricism in historical research. One must not go to the historical sources with a preconceived idea of finding, for example, a modern scientist in the early modern period. Such preconceptions distort the historian’s data collection and his or her conclusions. It is impossible to avoid beginning with a present-centred perspective, because we all live in the present. But as much as possible we must avoid historical anachronism and attempt to extract the past from the sources in an inductive manner. When we do this with Newton it becomes immediately apparent that earlier depictions of Newton as a sort of positivistic scientist are widely off the mark, even to the point of silliness. We must drawn our lessons from history, not impose them on it. At the same time, historians have to be aware of a host of other types of bias and be willing to submit the conclusions of our research to the critical review of our scholarly peers. Finally, we must never lose sight of the possibility — or likelihood — that in the decades to come our own research may appear incomplete. This awareness should inject a degree of humility to our work.

PN: Imre Lakatos wrote that "Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind." What is your view of the relationship between the two?

SS: One must not study the philosophy of science in a vacuum, just as one should not study philosophy or the history of ideas without a firm sense of the historical context. Similarly, the sophisticated methods available in philosophy of science and philosophy provide aids to the study of the history of science and other aspects of history. Thus, a scientist might want to study Newton’s scientific method without regard to the historical context that helped shape this method, but philosophers of science and historians of science are keen to examine such things as Newton’s scientific method in the various contexts in which it was situated. My own research has pointed to the importance, inter alia, of the theological context, even for the methodological and cognitive aspects of Newton’s natural philosophy or science.]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:26:33 +0000 5737034557ef5b8c02c0e46513b98f90