A debate on science and the humanities; Wiesltier takes on Pinker

The New Republic has truly hit one of the park recently by publishing this debate series. The importance of science in higher education in America is really being stressed right now. "STEM" programs and the desire to steer more students in that direction, is a political "new idea" that one can't escape as of late. The humanities have struggled for a while now and while education is important in the abstract, it is not unfair to question that value of having newly minted unemployed Ph.D. experts on Virginia Woolf join the unemployment line. These are not article to just fly through, there are many valid points and counter-points to consider. To me, a student should go with their heart and "a job" will come at some point down the road. A philosophy professor pointed that out to me once and from what I can tell from experience, that is very true. Enjoy!

Science is not your enemy by Steven Pinker

Leon Wieseltier's response on scientism

Science versus the humanities-round III

Interesting essays. Thanks for posting them. As far as “The importance of science in higher education in America is really being stressed right now…”, I’m not sure it’s stressed any more now than in previous decades. During the Cold War, America was obsessed with beating the Russians to the moon, and developing the best technology. If anything, science was stressed MORE in (for example) the 1960s than it is today. In fact, there is probably less optimism about science and technology today than there has been in a century. Pollution, global warming, the reduction of the fossil fuel supply (and more) have reduced our faith in the notion that science is inevitably progressive in terms of helping people lead better lives.

Unfortunately, the war between science and religious Fundamentalism has produced zealots on both sides. It doesn’t take a scientific genius to figure out that those who despise “religion” are disrespecting one of the “Humanities” (Aren't "Religion" Departments at Universities a "Humanity"?). If we are to conclude that religion is worthless because it is not scientifically testable, what are we to conclude about the other humanities? The virtues of poetry are no more scientifically verifiable than those of Christianity.

Faith in scientific reductionism is, I think, shakier than it has been for decades. We are moving from a modernist world, typified by grand, reductionist explanations in science, history and other fields, to a post-modernist world, typified by the rejection of master narratives, and their replacement with localized and contingent theories. The post-modernist critique of modernism seems valid; where we go from here seems problematic.

“What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?.” – Yeats.

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

We are moving from a modernist world, typified by grand, reductionist explanations in science, history and other fields, to a post-modernist world, typified by the rejection of master narratives, and their replacement with localized and contingent theories.

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Complete nonsense.

Scientists are more likely than ever to take holistic positions, which is an expansion of reductionism.

Thanks for the references to the Pinker and Wieseltier "debate." This debate is not at all new. Consider CP Snow's The Two Cultures. The debate had been going on long before that in Western society, though perhaps not so directly acknowledged as such, ever since empirical science began to be viewed as distinct from philosophy and religion, which is to say around the time of the early Renaissance. Nonetheless the early "debates" were quite serious with high-stakes consequences. Galileo came quite close to being executed as a heretic. Darwin was more fortunate mainly because he published in a much later time when it was not so easy to execute scientists, but I don't doubt that many of his contemporaries viewed him as a heretic and would not have much objected to his being hung or burned for his ideas.

Pinker makes an excellent observation that a majority of the great Humanist thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment were also "scientists." Indeed, what we today call "science" was formerly called "natural philosophy." It is a relatively recent phenomenon, due mostly to the modern academic schism between science and the humanities, that the majority of academics in the traditional humanities departments don't seem to have much detailed understanding of or interest in "science." The reverse is also true, but perhaps not to the same degree. This, as Snow discussed in The Two Cultures, may be due in part to the fact that the "language" of science, especially the "harder quantitative" sciences,
involves mathematics. Most humanities studies require an understanding of "common" language that most people learn to use quite effectively to express ideas without an special training of the type needed to learn mathematics. It's quite possible for an intelligent and verbally competent student to obtain a PhD in, say, English Literature or Sociology without any more mathematical competence than that required to get through basic High School algebra and geometry, and indeed even that is not absolutely required. Getting even a bachelor's degree in physics, engineering, chemistry, or even biology or psychology would be impossible without this. Nonetheless, it is true that there are quite a few otherwise intelligent scientists who know and care little about literature and philosophy and who are unable to express themselves clearly in common language.

Pinker is clearly a scientist who knows about literature and philosophy and who writes very well. Wieseltier apparently understands his field of study, and he expresses himself well, but it seems to me that he really doesn't understand either the language of science or how science "works." And he seems to me to be quite defensive about the "threat" that science presents to his field of expertise. He afraid that science will somehow subject the humanities to its hegemonic influence. To me this suggests that Wieseltier may be suffering from what in Pop psychology is called "low self-esteem."

Although I think that Pinker makes the better and more level-headed argument, it seems to me that he also exaggerates his case. For example, he says, in reference to empiric scientists, that:

By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics.

I've bolded the portion of this statement I disagree with. Stripping religious authorities of "credibility in factual matters" doesn't require that we invalidate religious (or philosophical) "claims to certitude on matters of morality." This particular statement by Pinker strikes me as a rhetorical cheap shot, and it suggests to me that Pinker, along with Wieseltier, although perhaps not so obviously, has his own axes to grind.

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

Complete nonsense.

Scientists are more likely than ever to take holistic positions, which is an expansion of reductionism.

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That doesn't seem to be correct. Doesn't "reductionism" refer to the process of trying to explain "complex" phenomena by seeking out
"simple" rules/mechanisms and extrapolating from these in a way that we can go from the "simple" to the "complex?" A good historical example
of this "reductionist" approach would include the way that the Copernican heliocentric view of the solar system explained retrograde planetary
motion, without the need for the geocentric "epicycles." Newtonian mechanics is certainly a "reductionist" approach to cosmology, in that it did a
good job of explaining a hodgepodge of astronomical observations based on very simple and ingenious mathematical/physical assumptions (Newton's
laws of motion and the gravitational equation). Indeed, Newton was able to derive the elliptical orbits of planets from his simple laws of motion and
the gravitational force, and thus explain Kepler's astronomical observations. This was quite brilliant, and in its day as remarkable as the verification
of Einstein's theory of relativity by astronomical observations during a solar eclipse...

"Holistic" scientific explanations are essentially limited to efforts to explain "complex" phenomena that we have been unable to explain by extrapolating
from "fundamental" principles that describe the behavior of the "parts" of material system. In such cases one is tempted to argue that the "unexplainable"
complex phenomena somehow "emerge" from the material system A good example of such a complex system would be the human brain, which is an organ
composed of well-defined neurons in a fairly complex structure (the brain). This structure is dimensionally finite (it fits within the human cranium). Nonetheless,
it is clear that this finite organ, composed of a finite number of interconnected neurons, whose physiological function is also fairly well understood, somehow
leads to what we call human "consciousness."

How consciousness "emerges" from this neuronal assembly is something that we have not been able to adequately explain, so far, in a "reductionist" way.

Because we haven't been able to explain consciousness by a reductionist approach, some folks have taken the "holistic" approach, which basically comes down to
a claim that "the whole is greater than the parts," and that the complex behaviors we can't explain by extrapolation from simple principles ought to be explained by something less "scientific," e.g. the mysterious emergence of the "unexplainable" phenomenon, say consciousness. Such an approach is more in line with religious belief than science.

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We don’t have to fantasize about this scenario, because we are living it. We have the works of the great thinkers and their heirs, and we have scientific knowledge they could not have dreamed of. This is an extraordinary time for the understanding of the human condition.

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this is a quote from the article.
I think whether we like it or not the human condition is appauling and has nothing to show for it.
there is no understanding of the human condition whatsoever. to look at it we think we have degenerated into a cave men and the wars still go on regardless of science.
the biggest fantasy is to think we have advanced thanks to it while in fact we have totally failed to make a difference to a normal day let alone a century.

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Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli

"By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics." - Stephen Pinker

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I thought this was one of Pinker's best points, among many good points.

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Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli

I've bolded the portion of this statement I disagree with. Stripping religious authorities of "credibility in factual matters" doesn't require that we invalidate religious (or philosophical) "claims to certitude on matters of morality."

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You've reversed the logic. Pinker isn't saying that we must "invalidate religious claims to certitude on matters of morality" before we can strip "religious authorities of credibility in factual matters". He's saying "religious authorities now have no credibility in factual matters", and this "invalidates their claims to certitude on matters of morality".

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Originally Posted by cacian

I think whether we like it or not the human condition is appauling and has nothing to show for it.
there is no understanding of the human condition whatsoever. to look at it we think we have degenerated into a cave men and the wars still go on regardless of science.
the biggest fantasy is to think we have advanced thanks to it while in fact we have totally failed to make a difference to a normal day let alone a century.

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I think we will not know if science has been an overall good until "the end of humanity". If nuclear war breaks out, or terrorists release unstoppable Smallpox variants, or climate change destroys us, then you can say "science was bad." If there's a billion years of peace, and humanity spreads through the galaxies, and we avoid the sun swallowing us up, then we can say, "science was good". Science gave me a good living, was quite good fun, paid me well, protected me from Smallpox & other nasties; on a personal level, science has been good.

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

I think we will not know if science has been an overall good until "the end of humanity". If nuclear war breaks out, or terrorists release unstoppable Smallpox variants, or climate change destroys us, then you can say "science was bad." If there's a billion years of peace, and humanity spreads through the galaxies, and we avoid the sun swallowing us up, then we can say, "science was good". Science gave me a good living, was quite good fun, paid me well, protected me from Smallpox & other nasties; on a personal level, science has been good.

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I don't know I would say prevention would rule and logic must prevail and science would nothing to do with it.
I won't preach to science to make me feel better. I am better if I know what not to.

Reductionist, "scientific" theories about history and culture were "modernist" (I think, although it doesn't really matter what we call them, as long as we agree on the terminology). The classic example would be Marx, who (it seems to me) had a dramatic influence on the shape of the 20th century world. He clearly wanted to create a modernist, reductionist, "scientific" approach to the study of history and culture. Indeed, Marx was one of the founders of the modern fields of "social science". His approach was “reductionist” in that he thought the political, religious, and cultural structures in a society could be explained by (reduced to) the economic infrastructure of the society.

Marx is not the only example. Mid 20th century anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict approached the study of human culture by looking at the impact of culture on personality (and vice versa). Using a Freudian approach, they thought that the child rearing customs influenced adult personality, which was expressed in cultural institutions. For example, societies in which fathers were remote, authoritarian figures for young children (as in Freud’s Vienna) would tend to have religions with remote, powerful, male Gods. To the credit of the scientific approach, the “culture and personality school” of anthropology was falsified by scientific research – the massive Human Relations Area Files (cataloging cultural traits around the world) showed that, no, child rearing customs were NOT closely correlated with cultural traits. Other attempts at reductionist explanations of culture (Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, or the structural-functionalists) have also lost some cache.

What’s the result? Far from emulating the hard sciences, the social and cultural sciences have moved closer to the humanities: toward history, for example. This seems to cast doubt upon Wieseltier’s contention that academia worships at the altar of science. It also supports my contention that we have lost some of our faith that science will inevitably promote human happiness and well-being.

In addition, if (as The Atheist pointed out, albeit rudely) holistic (‘emergent’) scientific approaches are winning favor in the hard sciences, this supports my position (as Nick points out, modern “emergence theory” approaches in science are not reductionist, or, at least, are less reductionist than other approaches).

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Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli

That doesn't seem to be correct.

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Well, you can only follow the money, and NASA and CERN seem to be signalling that the search for Einstein's theory of everything is still well under way, and you can't get less localised than that.

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Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli

How consciousness "emerges" from this neuronal assembly is something that we have not been able to adequately explain, so far, in a "reductionist" way.

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Crikey, I often wonder what people will do when that is done and dusted, because consciousness and abiogenesis are about the two last places people have to say "Oooh, science can't explain that!"

I disagree completely with the notion, because we can display with complete accuracy how the brain works, and it's a pretty short step of logic and evolution to explain consciousness. It only gets difficult if you can't accept that there is nothing special about it. It seems all magical and wonderful to be self-aware, but in reality, it's no big deal.

The time to worry about scientific explanations of human consciousness will be when you are able to prove that other animals aren't equally as conscious as humans.

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Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli

.... the "holistic" approach, which basically comes down to
a claim that "the whole is greater than the parts," ...

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No. Holistic simply refers to the whole being sum of its parts. The word is often hijacked by paranormalists and charlatans to signify something more than the sum, which is why I quite like the word, but in a scientific concept, it is just using 1 = 1.

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Originally Posted by cacian

this is a quote from the article.
I think whether we like it or not the human condition is appauling and has nothing to show for it.
there is no understanding of the human condition whatsoever. to look at it we think we have degenerated into a cave men and the wars still go on regardless of science.
the biggest fantasy is to think we have advanced thanks to it while in fact we have totally failed to make a difference to a normal day let alone a century.

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I find it hard to disagree with that sentiment, but have to condition it with advances in medicine.

That's why it helps to think we're the sky-daddy's pet species and he doesn't give a damn about us killing off most of the species alive. See, if I believed that stuff, I'd be scared to hell by Jesus' bit about sparrows. I'm sure he had something to say about wars as well...

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

Far from emulating the hard sciences, the social and cultural sciences have moved closer to the humanities: toward history, for example.

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I'm glad you pointed that out, because it's time those sciences recognised what an abject failure that has been, and there is an urgent need to go the other way - return to hard science, demand evidence and give away the absurd idea that they are progressing.

Nowhere is that better exemplified than psychology, which has managed as recently as 20 years ago to embrace the concept of recovered memories, destroying countless lives, but also in the new, sooper-improved DSM this year, still classes gender dysmorphism as some kind of deviation from the "Norm!"*.

And as Cacian noted, advances in social science in figuring out a way to teach people that killing each other isn't cool hasn't gained a lot of ground either.

*I just felt, with all the scare quotes (thanks Hitch!), I should at least use one set. Plus, it gave me the chance to legitimately (I think) use 4 punctuation marks consecutively.

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Originally Posted by The Atheist

I'm glad you pointed that out, because it's time those sciences recognised what an abject failure that has been, and there is an urgent need to go the other way - return to hard science, demand evidence and give away the absurd idea that they are progressing.

Nowhere is that better exemplified than psychology, which has managed as recently as 20 years ago to embrace the concept of recovered memories, destroying countless lives, but also in the new, sooper-improved DSM this year, still classes gender dysmorphism as some kind of deviation from the "Norm!"*.

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None of these things have much to do with social sciences moving toward the humanities. The humanities (literature, history, philosophy, etc.) simply look at the facts from a different angle than the sciences. Some scientific approaches to social and cultural studies have been enlightening (linguistics and economics spring to mind), but others have been less enlightening (the "culture and personality" school, for example). Science is as science does. If a "scientific approach" to history is unenlightening, that doesn't mean we should abandon studying history. Indeed, it doesn't mean we should abandon ATTEMPTING to study history scientifically. It just means that our attempts thus far have met with limited success, and other approaches may be more enlightening.

To use Nick's example of consciousness -- it's likely that we will one day be able to discover things about consciousness in a useful, reductionist manner. Until then, we must muddle through as best we can without such an explanation. But that doesn't mean we should abandon attempts to discuss consciousness in philosophy. The map is not the territory. Science is not reality -- it's just one way of looking at reality.

Beware that the scientists at Cern do not call it The Particle of God, neither do they claim that it is what God used to create the so-called universe. Plus the chief scientist in charge of producing the collision says that the setup lasts not even one fraction of a second. It is the Idiotic Illuminati that are going around saying that they have 1/4 gram of the stuff hidden in the Vatican. The chief scientist at Cern has said that it is impossible. Plus that if the stuff existed as such in actuality, it would have the power of 10 kilotons, close to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which was 13 kilotons.

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

None of these things have much to do with social sciences moving toward the humanities. The humanities (literature, history, philosophy, etc.) simply look at the facts from a different angle than the sciences. Some scientific approaches to social and cultural studies have been enlightening (linguistics and economics spring to mind), but others have been less enlightening (the "culture and personality" school, for example). Science is as science does. If a "scientific approach" to history is unenlightening, that doesn't mean we should abandon studying history. Indeed, it doesn't mean we should abandon ATTEMPTING to study history scientifically. It just means that our attempts thus far have met with limited success, and other approaches may be more enlightening.

To use Nick's example of consciousness -- it's likely that we will one day be able to discover things about consciousness in a useful, reductionist manner. Until then, we must muddle through as best we can without such an explanation. But that doesn't mean we should abandon attempts to discuss consciousness in philosophy. The map is not the territory. Science is not reality -- it's just one way of looking at reality.

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Thanks for your comments. That's precisely what I was saying about the failure, so far, to come up with a compelling reductionist explanation for human consciousness. We know that the brain, which fits inside the space of our crania, is somehow responsible for our ability to be conscious and think. We also know a lot about how the cellular components of the brain function individually and how they are connected to each other. And we have all sorts of scientific equipment and techniques to observe and test the behavior of the brain. Despite all this, we have yet to come up with a scientific theory to explain how this finite structure, the brain, allows us to be conscious and think.

What we do have are a few more or less plausible hypotheses that attempt to explain how the human brain permits consciousness. Some of these hypotheses come from folks who work in the neurosciences and other fields of modern science. Rose, for example, attributes consciousness to quantum "uncertainty" phenomena that arise from the electrochemical nature of the synaptic connections between neurons. He refers to this synaptic uncertainty as "The God of the Gap." It's a catchy idea but unfortunately it doesn't allow one to see exactly how this synaptic quantum uncertainty, even if it really exists, leads to human consciousness. Such explanations are, in fact, "holistic" in nature. They have nothing of the scientific testability of the quantum mechanical physics they refer to. They are no more scientific, despite their reference to modern physical ideas, than were the ideas of de Chardin, who tried to correlate the "emergence" of human consciousness with structural (i.e. material) "complexity." Chardin, unlike Rose, didn't refer to quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle. He just believed that "complexity" was something that somehow correlated to "consciousness." And I think that he was probably correct. Our human brains are more complexly organized than those of other animals, and we clearly have more complex behaviors than do these other animals. Chardin may have been onto something. Nonetheless he (and his more recent and more scientifically sophisticated followers) have not come up with an intellectually compelling explanation for how, exactly, consciousness "emerges" from our brains.

I look forward to someone coming up with such an explanation. In the same way I look forward to someone coming up with a good explanation for abiogenesis, which is another scientific "mystery" that requires explanation and which, like human consciousness has yet to be adequately explained. These are indeed two scientific "problems" that I hope we will one day be able to solve. They are certainly what ought to be considered great scientific mysteries. Anyone who is clever enough to come up with a good hypothesis to explain these mysteries would be worthy of our highest praise.

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Originally Posted by Nick Capozzoli

... the failure, so far, to come up with a compelling reductionist explanation for human consciousness. We know that the brain, which fits inside the space of our crania, is somehow responsible for our ability to be conscious and think.

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I agree with you about there being no compelling reductionist explanation for human consciousness. Indeed, I'd go further and say there is no compelling explanation for human consciousness, reductionist or otherwise. But I think that reductionist explanations have a better grip on explaining thinking. For instance, chess computers can now beat the world's best chess players and I think it's reasonable to say they are better thinkers when it comes to chess. Isn't thinking, mostly, a logical process, and can't that just as well be done by machines? But are chess computers conscious? That I don't know. I kind of doubt it, but maybe that's just my human bias.