Philip Kitcher has just published an article in the Atlantic about the relationships amongst different ways of apprehending reality, and the overemphasis that he thinks is being placed on scientific methodology in defining what it means to know something. Entitled “The Trouble with Scientism,” Kitcher explores what he thinks of as a mistaken concentration on scientific methodology to the exclusion of other approaches to an understanding of the human condition. You may notice that I am carefully trying to steer clear, as much as I can, of the expression ‘ways of knowing,’ for that has been a misleading way of speaking about the disagreements here, and it is the one that is most often turned to in the response of those whom Kitcher would call the acolytes of “scientism”. Taking my cue from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy I have usually taken it for granted that there is no substance to the claim that anyone takes scientism seriously — that it is, in effect, a pejorative way of speaking about those with whom you disagree, even though no one actually holds the position. According to the Companion:
In philosophy, a commitment to one or more of the following lays one open to the charge of scientism.
- The sciences are more important than the arts for an understanding of the world in which we live, or, even, all we need to understand it.
- Only a scientific methodology is intellectually acceptable. Therefore, if the arts are to be a genuine part of human knowledge they must adopt it.
- Philosophical problems are scientific problems and should only be dealt with as such. [814, qv. scientism]
I am now increasingly of the opinion, however, that there is a streak of scientism running through the gnu atheism, and that a number of gnu atheists whom I respect highly have adopted this position, committed to one or more of the above conditions.
This seems to be the case with Jerry Coyne. For example, in his response to Kitcher, “The trouble with “The Trouble with Scientism“,” Jerry quite explicitly says that all that is worthwhile in the humanities is what can be assimilated to the scientific method. All else is feeling. He puts it very clearly:
Who can look at a lily pond the same way if you’ve seen Monet’s renditions? And many of us are moved by Bach or Coltrane. But those aren’t ways of knowing — they’re ways of feeling.
And, although Kitcher does not really mention religion as a way of knowing in this context, Jerry makes use of the analogy, on a number of occasions saying things like:
I still maintain that real understanding of our universe can come only from using crude versions of methods that have been so exquisitely refined by science: reason combined with doubt, observation, and replication. As one of my commenters said last week, “there are not different ways of knowing. There is only knowing and not knowing.” I would add that there is also feeling, which is the purview of art. But none of this gives the slightest credibility to religion as a way of finding truth.
In general I agree with that sentiment. However, there is every reason to believe that something important is being left out. Not that people’s feelings can give us accurate accounts of what is “out there,” and possibly not that feelings can give us an accurate picture of what is “in here.” If I tell you what I am feeling, there is a sense in which you cannot correct me, even though you may suspect that my feelings are quite other than I claim. Crocodile tears are all too common a phenomenon to doubt that people frequently do deceive us about their feelings, or are themselves deceived.
However, there is a sense in which it would be wrong for us to exclude feelings from our knowledge of the world. This is probably why Richard Holloway, in that wonderfully weird and expressive book, Leaving Alexandria, in the end feels he has to retain something of the reality of religious feeling and its sequelae, expressing the conviction that those who miss out on what religious people are saying are missing out on something important about the human experience which, while it may not achieve the level of scientific knowledge, is still important for an understanding of being human. I know that a number of people who read this blog feel that I sometimes ride this particular hobby-horse a bit too much, perhaps out of an inertial sense that my life in religion was not wholly wasted, and that religion may still have much to teach us, much that, while it cannot be accommodated to scientific ways of knowing, nevertheless achieves the dignity of knowledge.
I think here of Hume, for example, who said that:
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. [A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.3 para 4]
In view of the close interconnexion between reason and feeling (passion) it would be surprising indeed if feeling provided no insight into (and therefore knowledge of) human nature. To take an oversimple example of the kind of thing I have in mind here, the following is a footnote about the role that emotion plays in knowledge, whether as biasing effect, or as possession of built-in knowledge (the quote comes from Robert Nozick’s Invariances):
… emotional responses may have knowledge built into them, knowledge we do not explicitly possess. Random variation over stable evolutionary time, which exceeds the lifetimes of many individual organisms, can produce emotion-behavior combinations that are advantageous (on average) for reasons that we could not have learned on the basis of our own evidence and experiences. [337]
The point here is that there are ways of understanding our humanity that are stored up in things like plays and novels, music and painting, sculpture and even, perhaps, in religion, without which we would be the poorer. Of course, none of this goes towards supporting religious beliefs, but it may have something to say about the value of some of the things that have been created by religion, traditions of thought and feeling without which we might well be poorer. This, certainly, is Richard Holloway’s point in a number of books since he has come to the point of finding himself unable any longer to consider himself a Christian (he calls himself a post-Christian). It has also been my point in a number of posts over the past year or more on this blog, where I have ridden my hobby-horse from time to time insisting that, while we cannot take theology seriously as a way of knowing, there is a residuum of knowledge in theology and religious practice that we ought not to lose simply because the conclusions of theology are one and all fictive.
And this, so far as I can make out, is precisely what Philip Kitcher is trying to say. For example, he begins his Atlantic article with the following words, which, I take it, are supposed to illustrate the kind of “knowledge” that is not accessible to someone making enquiries using scientific methodology:
There are two cathedrals in Coventry. The newer on, consecrated on May 25, 1962, stands beside the remains of the older one, which dates from the fourteenth century, a ruin testifying to the bombardment of the Blitz. Three years before the consecration, in one of the earliest ventures in the twinning of towns, Coventry had paired itself with Dresden. That gesture of reconciliation was recapitulated in 1962, when Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem received its first performance at the ceremony. …
Since the 1960s, historians have worked — and debated — to bring into focus the events of the night of February 13, 1945, in which an Allied bombing attack devastated the strategically irrelevant city of Dresden. An increased understanding of the decisions that led to the fire-bombing, and of the composition of the Dresden population that suffered the consequences, have altered subsequent judgments about the conduct of war. The critical light of history has been reflected in the contributions of novelists and critics, and of theorists of human rights. Social and political changes, in other words, followed the results of humanistic inquiry, and were intertwined with th reconciliatory efforts of the citizens of Coventry and Dresden.
Etchings on the West Front of the new Coventry Cathedral seen through the tracery of the ruins of the Old Coventry Cathedral (destroyed in the Blitz, September 1941
It must not be thought that this humanistic inquiry is the same as scientific inquiry, for it includes so much more than just the bare facts that can be verified by historians. It includes a deep emotional and moral understanding, a deep human understanding — and, yes, I would like to add, knowledge — of what Wilfred Owen called the pity of war, and how this affects those who are caught up in its unforgiving clutches. This is why I continue to say, despite some criticism, that there is more to things like religion and poetry than meets the eye, and that we will be poorer if we do not examine religion for those deeply human things that can be found there — things both good and evil. For though theology may be largely fictive, it does not for that reason fail of humanity. Religion is an entirely human creation, as Christopher Hitchens never tired of telling us, and one of the most notable things about Hitchens’ god is not Great is simply that the humanity of religion and its role in human life and society stands out boldly on every page. Hitchens mentions somewhere in the book that when he visits the holy places of the religions he shows respect. Entering a mosque he removes his shoes. This is a kind of respect that, despite his stringent criticisms of religion, he maintains even in the midst of his critique, for Hitchens took religion seriously as a human pursuit and creation. As a consequence, he realised that religions know a lot about being human, despite their failure to understand the very human origin of their beliefs. It would be a pity, as I have said before, and will no doubt say again, if we did not learn what the religions have to teach us about being human, in the course of which, allied to scientific ways of knowing, we should be able to devise much more human ways of living together than either religion alone or science alone can manage to accomplish. What we need is a new synthesis, one that accepts both the limitations of science and the fictive (yet deeply human) nature of religion, a synthesis in terms of which we can, perhaps at last, create a way of living that is focused where it should be, on this world, but one which, in being focused there, recognises that, for all its pretensions, religion was focused there all along, and did not know it. I think Kitcher’s concerns are real ones, and should be attended to with some care. The scientistic reductionism that is becoming more common amongst those who rejection religious forms of believing and life will, in the end, produce a warped vision of what it means to be human. We must be much more willing to listen to the ghosts of the past, and efforts that were made, misdirected as they may have been, to live life in prospect of a life to come, but were as concerned with life right here and now as any secular humanist could hope to be. Religion needs, as religion, to be defeated, but its insights into the human character (theological anthropology) and into ways of life coordinate with that character, biased as they may be, still, I suspect, have more to teach us than we are often ready to acknowledge.
Eric,
You have me dead wrong with this characterization:
“Jerry quite explicitly says that all that is worthwhile in the humanities is what can be assimilated to the scientific method. All else is feeling.”
Now you KNOW that’s not true: I love and value literature, art, and music, and “feeling” is an enormous part of this value. I don’t denigrate the arts nor think for a moment that everything of velue there can be assimilated to the scientific method. My comment on Monet, for instance, explicitly assigns value to a nonscientific aspect of the arts.
Really, it’s almost as if you haven’t paid attention to anything I’ve said about the arts, much less about my (nonscientifically based) love of them.
cheers,
Jerry
As I’ve commented previously, scientism in the strong sense is the self-annihilating view that only scientific claims are meaningful or have value, which is not a scientific claim and hence, if true, not meaningful. Thus, scientism is either false or meaningless. Jerry uses the weak sense of term, the broad view that the methods of the natural sciences and its single epistemology allows reality to arbitrate what’s claimed to be true about it rather than other kinds of claims imposed upon it. In this sense, this method of honest inquiry – honest in the sense that reality rather than some other metric determines what’s true about it – should be applied to any subject matter that can yield satisfactory and reliable natural explanations for phenomena.
Against this understanding, the Companion’s very loose definition is not helpful with its false comparison only to the Arts… but still infused with this stealthy notion of meaning and value. Yet every single one of us exercises this kind of ‘scientism’ when we seek to apply knowledge about phenomena to phenomena.
For example, a plumbing problem is not understood and addressed by any other way of knowing except in terms of how plumbing actually works in reality. Pretending some kind of bias is exercised against Art when knowledge about plumbing is applied to plumbing is philosophical foolishness. Examining emotive human responses to a plumbing problem and exploring them further by song and dance are all well and good if we were interested in exploring human emotive responses in the various forms of artistic expression but delving into metaphorical meaning and value of these artistic responses does not produce knowledge applicable to the principles at work in functional plumbing. If you call a plumber to address a plumbing problem who arrives at the scene equipped only with a bassoon and a small dance ensemble, then you have every right to insist that ‘scientism’ is the only appropriate approach for the plumber to follow.
By all means. I guess, though, that I’m a little troubled by what seems to be your propensity to invoke knowledge when you are talking about undertstanding, e.g.,
The implication, to me, is that a deep emotional and moral understanding is somehow inadequate.
I think that you misunderstand, as Jerry points out, and seem to blend at least two different things together. That art and feelings are valuable does not mean that they are knowledge. And they are not. They have no epistemology, and thus no way of differentiating between the true and the false, between the known and the not-known, and therefore fail as forms of knowledge.
I don’t know if Nozick was speaking strictly, but I submit the idea that “… emotional responses may have knowledge built into them, knowledge we do not explicitly possess”, is false. It may be that emotional responses have truths “built into them”, but if we don’t actually know what they are, then they don’t qualify as knowledge. Jerry is right in saying that it is only by using the tools of science (intended broadly) that we can hope to discover what actually is true or false in our emotional understanding and thus have some claim to knowledge.
I should emphasize that because something is not knowledge does not make it valueless. Emotional understanding might even lead to knowledge. Problems only arise when some area that doesn’t partake of knowledge (say religion) attempts to make knowledge claims.
I too find myself balking at the idea that emotional responses can really be considered a form of knowledge in and of themselves. This is not to say they have no value or should be ignored, but to qualify as knowledge an idea has to inform us on objective observable phenomena. Emotions and stories do not do this except in a very narrow sense.
I would never call for the end or neglect of the arts or humanities. Neither would I wish all the religious tales to be destroyed or kept from anyone who would want to read them. In rediscovering music from my childhood for my infant son, I was struck by Big Rock Candy Mountain. You can learn quite a lot about a person when they describe their version of paradise. Arts and various humanities, and even religions, can inform us a great deal about people. The problem is that the religious want to abuse this and apply emotions and stories where they simply do not belong. I suppose emotional responses and various humanities can qualify as knowledge about what people think and feel, but they must come to an abrupt halt anywhere else unless accompanied by traditional scientific rigor.
If “other ways of knowing” were not so frequently abused, I would have no qualms about granting the title of “knowing”. There are many things in which there is only one way of knowing. No amount of emotional responding is going to inform us about electronics, planetary motion, the origins of life, or the beginnings of the universe. In those cases science is the only game in town. If people were able to keep these things straight there would be no need for this discussion.
The issue, of course, is that the term is only trotted out by those who are either theistic or accommodationist. And it’s used by those people exclusively as a pejorative in order to set up a straw man.
And that straw man is destroyed in the vain hope that somehow it props up one of two untenable concepts.
1. That religion is a valid epistemology. That it provides real truths.
2. That religion does not conflict as an epistemic approach with that of the scientific method.
The issue, then, is not whether scientism is valid or invalid. It’s just another way to use a false dichotomy logical fallacy. IE: If scientism is false, therefore Jesus is real.
All of William Lame Craig’s arguments are of this type. Either god gave us morals or we’re all snarling wild beasts who will broil the children. Either god designed the universe with us in mind, or there’s no point in living a happy, productive life, so you might as well shoot yourself. And on and on.
greg: I think you’re using a nonstandard definition of “knowledge”.
If I say, “Justin Bieber is the greatest singer ever”, that provides some knowledge of my subjective beliefs on the subject of music. It also provides you with knowledge that I’m a complete and utter moron who has probably never heard a decent singer in my life.
All of that’s knowledge. Just not empirical.
I hope I am not double posting, my first attempt seems to have disappeared.
I too find myself balking at the idea that emotional responses can really be considered a form of knowledge in and of themselves. This is not to say they have no value or should be ignored, but to qualify as knowledge an idea has to inform us on objective observable phenomena. Emotions and stories do not do this except in a very narrow sense.
I would never call for the end or neglect of the arts or humanities. Neither would I wish all the religious tales to be destroyed or kept from anyone who would want to read them. In rediscovering music from my childhood for my infant son, I was struck by Big Rock Candy Mountain. You can learn quite a lot about a person when they describe their version of paradise. Arts and various humanities, and even religions, can inform us a great deal about people. The problem is that the religious want to abuse this and apply emotions and stories where they simply do not belong. I suppose emotional responses and various humanities can qualify as knowledge about what people think or feel, but they must come to an abrupt halt anywhere else unless accompanied by traditional scientific rigor.
If “other ways of knowing” were not so frequently abused, I would have no qualms about granting the title of “knowing”. There are many things in which there is only one way of knowing. No amount of emotional responding is going to inform us about electronics, planetary motion, the origins of life, or the beginnings of the universe. In those cases science is the only game in town. If people were able to keep these things straight there would be no need for this discussion.
It’s perfectly obvious Jerry isn’t scientistic because of his cat delusions. Also Kevin might be a sixteen year girl in love with Justin. The interwebs is a very strange place!
We can often be surprised by our own brains with an answer to a seemingly insoluble problem coming from “out of the blue.” We have found that “clearing our mind” through sleep, fatigue, fasting, drugs, listening to music or poetry, looking at art, or meditation can often enhance this action. Like any other human activity sometimes its works, sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes we embellish it by bringing in fairies, angels and gods. Even so, we still need to try these ideas out against the “real world” to make sure they actually are solutions. Perhaps one could turn this into a methodology, but it doesn’t get you to “religion as a way of knowing” like some would want.
I will look forward to reading Kitcher’s The Ethical Project, as soon as I can get around to it.
I have grown disillusioned recently, thanks to being censored off RD.net, and so I am in rather a toxic mood with my fellow atheists, whom I view as still too immature and naive to organize themselves into a political force. The appointment of Edwina Rogers at SCA only confirms in my mind that power makes people stupid.
Eric, I fully support your contrariness, but I don’t believe religion is of any value, unless understood as literature and fiction. Literature is my first love, and it is among artists that I find more fellow-feeling than with rationalists and intellectuals, whom come a close second.
However, I do agree that there is something missing among the gnus, or the atheist movement, whether it’s respect for human dignity or equality, as yet I do not know, I only know that I am still an outsider.
I rarely visit anymore…because of the censors.
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Even Greta Christina just put me on moderation. It’s getting difficult to voice one’s opinion in the atheist movement!
What struck me about the response to Kitcher’s piece was that virtually nobody addressed the question of the arts themselves and what they might be, but instead went straight, and doubtless with a sense of relief, to talking about the ‘humanities’, by which they meant literary criticism, art history, history in general, archaeology, musicology, etc, largely, I suspect, because those are easier to deal with, since in main their methods are those of rational enquiry, as in science, and so are academically respectable (I remember the story of the Oxford or Cambridge don who is supposed to have said when the question of taking on Vladimir Nabokov as a lecturer came up, ‘A novelist teaching literature! We should never ask an elephant to teach zoology, I hope.’ Or something along those lines…). It may be also that most of the responders are academics, and so assume that academic matters are somehow all there is. Richard Holloway’s book is an absolutely wonderful and generous book, and I am so glad、Eric, that you introduced me to it.
Of course there is such a streak. But it would be a mistake to make too much of it. It might be partly a matter of how scientism is being defined. If we look at that definition you provided from the Oxford companion, it begins with “The sciences are more important than the arts for an understanding of the world …” But that’s far to broad to be useful. Yes, the sciences are more important to me. But I don’t assume that they are more important for everybody. The expression “more important” has a subjective component. I suspect that streak of scientism is mainly because many of the most outspoken gnu atheists come from the science side of the two cultures.
As for the second criterion in the Oxford companion, I don’t personally know any scientist who believes that. Many might believe that as applied to the problems of studying the natural world, but not for other disciplines. When I have been on faculty promotion and tenure committees, I have noticed that the humanities try to model their own P&T procedures on those from science. I find that puzzling, because I don’t think it fits very well. And I doubt that scientists have forced that on them. I suspect there might be a bit too much physics envy in the humanities.
One thing I would add- first person experience which conveys a “sense of humanity” through “plays and novels, music and painting, sculpture and even … religion” is engulfed by science in one important sense- each of these human experiences has a corresponding scientific description which it is equivalent to.
It just so happens that it’s easier for us humans to understand and navigate a succession first person experiences, than, say, a table of molecule-by-molecule descriptions of the same. If we somehow had a more intuitive connection to the latter, our art might be expressed through tables of molecule-by-molecule descriptions of the most beautiful states of affairs.
I may be wrong, and perhaps I’m reading too much into a sort of theme Eric has been presenting for a while, but I suspect he is really talking about the absence in gnu atheism geared towards gaining wisdom… in the sense of learning how to engage life in all its various guises with appreciation for all its characters and live it really well (authentically) – an undertaking my religious friends say is helped by their faith communities…. regardless if the shared tenets are true or not.
Eric, I am not very good at this and I tend to fall to examples too much AND I love Star Trek! So, let me describe an episode with the old (Kirk/Spock) crew (that I have made up).
They beam down to a new planet. They are greeted by some “heads of state” and officials of great import. They are taken on a tour of the planet. They are shown a community of people, artists, making great art. These artists are often interviewed about their “experience” as artists, what it “feels” like: You know a bit of psychology, sociology, and anthropology mixed. They are then lead to a group of people who are “writers”. Same thing: These people, the “writers” are interviewed, and their life and experiences are documented. On and on with a variety of groups of people.
You can probably guess where I am going. As usual, Kirk breaks away from the tour to explore. He then comes across another group of people being watched, studied, interviewed and such: These people are allow to “live” their lives but are “forced” to be addicted to meth. Or coke, or whatever. There are many of groups where people are “forced” to experience horrible things.
You get my point: Are all experiences important? Do they all have something to offer? Is there “knowledge” in them all? Likewise though not for the same reasons: Why is the religious experience important for humanity (your version is “we will be poorer” without these experiences). As you also know, that is Dawkins’ point when he talks about the “awe” and “grandeur” of science: Why can that not be a better experience? Or if we steal from Dennett: Why is the religious experience one “worth having” over others which do not come with its (considerable) baggage?
(Finally, I am not so certain Hitches is really an ally here: He called North Korea a “religion” and I can not imagine he would be respectful. While he was alive he took aim at the worst of them, but if it were possible for him to have seen their end, he would have continued (IMHO) onto the more “liberal” or nice versions: Religion poisons everything.)
We’re predisposed to favor narratives, even though they’re as ill-suited to explaining art as they are to nature. Early audiences used to argue about the “meaning” of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, attempting to discern an underlying narrative in a fairly abstract musical experiment. Religion and its surrogates are intuitively convincing to the extent that they offer narratives placing us at the center of the universe, the focus of God’s attention, the heroes of our own lives.
Science offers us something else, a particular sort of reliable knowledge which isn’t available by other means. Claims to “other ways of knowing” are suspect because they don’t offer the same sort of practical knowledge. There’s also the issue of the social sciences, which so far haven’t been as successful at delivering dependable results as the natural sciences, not least because we ourselves are the subject of scrutiny and change our behavior as the result of our research.
Tildeb said some of this better, and the mention of plumbing reminded me of something said about the composer Philip Glass. They were glad when he started making enough money from music that he could stop working as a plumber, because his joints always leaked.
Radical Christians deny the results of humanities research when it provides legitimate insight into homosexuality, bullying, women’s rights, consequences of war and religious strife, etc. One must have a sense of empathy in order to engage with such research. That same sense of empathy can deter people from dismantling religion for the sake of their society, but it is clear that religion legitimizes strife. Without religion, radicals would be forced to defend their bigotries with purely political means such as fascism or communism which offer no self-justifying moral framework.
“If I tell you what I am feeling, there is a sense in which you cannot correct me, even though you may suspect that my feelings are quite other than I claim.”
I spent several years suffering from an undiagnosed thyroid deficiency, during which I experienced great despair and anxiety. I attributed this to getting old, to global warming, to a number of other causes, until my condition was diagnosed and treated, whereupon it became clear to me that what I had been ‘feeling’ was the biochemical effect of inadequate thyroid. But at no time during the experience did my feelings seem in any way unnatural or alien to me. Rather my perception of the world shifted to ‘explain’ the reasonableness of the feelings. So I can assure you that ‘feelings’ are no more incorrigible than any other source of information.
But otherwise I can only echo what others have said: if I want to be amused, or moved, or inspired, I will seek out appropriate stimuli in art or literature; if I want or need reliable knowledge, I will go for preference to a discipline which uses the methods of science. People looking for information don’t go to Shakespeare, and people who want a good belly-laugh don’t read A Brief History of Time. So what?
I don’t think I am using a non-standard definition. The traditional standard philosophical definition of knowledge has been “justified true belief”. This is not entirely sufficient, but the problems arise out of what is to be considered sufficient justification. Which is the central point at issue, really: for some methodology to make actual knowledge claims, it must have a way to distinguish justified claims from unjustified claims (alternatively, to distinguish ‘knowledge’ from non-knowledge or truth from untruth).
Further, your example seems considerably less than conclusive. If you say you believe X, then that provides some justification for the knowledge claim that “you believe X“, because (at least generally) people’s statements about their beliefs are truthful. The claim is a revisable one, of course, since not all such statements are truthful; if there is reason to believe otherwise, then the knowledge claim would be unjustified. The same sort of thing holds for your second statement, although in a more complex way.
As Jerry Coyne notes in his posting on the subject, where there are possibilities for actual knowledge in artistic/humanistic fields, “even those endeavors derive from observation, and are subject to testing and verification.”
Jerry,
I apologise for getting back to your comment so late, but I had a number of unexpected problems with my Spring project yesterday — last year it was building some patio furniture, this year window coverings — and had to attend to an order that had got all screwed up. And then suddenly the temple of my specs broke off, and I had to take some time trying to gerrymander a temporary way of holding things together. Now I really look like nerd!
I’m sorry if you thought I was saying that you had no appreciation for the arts or music, for I do know better than that, and would never dream of questioning your commitment to the value of culture. It would have been unforgivable in me to have brought that into the slightest question.
No, the point that I wanted to make — and possibly made it badly — was that Kitcher had, after all, something on his side. I didn’t want to help myself to Pascal’s point about the heart having its reasons which reason does not know, but I have done it now. What I was trying to say was along those lines. I always have the feeling, when people simply dismiss theology out of hand, for example — as I know you do not do, because you have read a lot of it — that they are missing the human dimension of theology. This is brought out clearly in a few books by Richard Holloway — and Don Cupitt is a good source too. And the point I was trying to make is that we cannot simply assimilate the word ‘truth’ to the products of science. Nor am I speaking only of the knowledge in these fields (as Greg suggests just above) that can be derived from these sources by means of observation, testing and verification, in the way that science does. Tildeb mentions wisdom in this connexion, and I suppose this will do as well as anything.
Science is a an especially potent source of knowledge about the world because it delivers specific conclusions about how the world works, insofar as we are dealing with physical, chemical and organic systems to which we have scientific access. But Kitcher is speaking about something else. As he says:
There are, in other words, human systems of which we have to take other than critical notice. Is this knowledge? I would like to say that it is, even though it may not constitute a body of systematic and confirmable facts about human beings. To quote T.S. Eliot:
At any rate, when I quoted you I was not in any sense suggesting that you do not appreciate the arts or find the valuable, for I do know better than that, and I hope you cannot find in what I wrote any such dismissal. What I am suggesting that the dichotomy between knowledge and feeling (which you do state) is not so impermeable as you seem to suggest, and that feeling is an essential part, and sometimes the greatest part of some of the most important knowledge (or understanding). Science has almost totally monopolised the word ‘knowledge’, so it is a bit difficult to say what I want to say, but if I were to use the word ‘knowledge’ instead of the less precise words ‘wisdom’ and ‘understanding’, I would say that there is a kind of humanistic or existential knowledge that is vital to us, and that is in danger of being lost, as knowledge is, if you like, scientised. Certainly there are confirmable and verifiable aspects of such knowledge, but some of it is like Pascal’s reasons of the heart, and we would be the poorer without it.
Very strange though, I seem to have come full circle. I took an undergraduate degree in English literature, and then switched to philosophy for an MA, then went on to do a PhD, a program which I had to leave because of serious and unexplained (at the time) cerebral dysfunction (all down to allergies as it turned out), and in the meantime went into the priesthood. But when I left English for philosophy I was told that that was just as well since I always treated literature as a vehicle for ideas anyway! Now here I am putting in a plug for precisely the kind of thing that I tended to slight so many years ago!
Cheers,
Eric
Maybe we need a ‘humanities’ version of gnu atheism.
Eric:
Yes, of course that is knowledge.
I often express my disagreement with the view that knowledge is a body of facts. I think that is obviously wrong. My mathematical knowledge is not a body of mathematical facts. My scientific knowledge is not a body of science facts. My real world knowledge is not a body of real world facts.
To me, this seems obvious.
So here we are discussing Kitcher’s criticism of scientism. But Kitcher is a philosopher. And it is the philosophers who insist on identifying knowledge as a body of facts. Could anything be more scientistic than epistemology?
But surely it is ideas, not facts, that constitute knowledge.
Is that even true? It is not my experience. If anything, I find scientists more likely to think that “knowledge” means something broader than mere facts. I tend to think of scientists as requiring that their students take lab classes to gain knowledge that cannot be acquired by mastery of facts.
What might have almost monopolized the word “knowledge” is technology, what with the use of terms such as “knowledge base”.
It seems that this is what neurology and cognitive science attempt to answer.
No, J. Quinton, I do not think that this is what neurology and cognitive science attempt to answer, and I suspect, though I do not know, that it is not accessible to science.
What do you think goes on in cognitive science? Do you think that studying how the human mind works will be unable to yield what makes us fundamentally human, why we are religious, why we like art, etc.?
Very good. I agree with this.
Now – explain how we go about “examining religion for those deeply human things that can be found there” without using “science”. You’re talking about something empirical – something that exists in the world. The human created social construct known as religion. How do we “examine” it without using science? As soon as we start applying any kind of empirical study to religion as it actually exists, you’re using science.
If you have a way to examine what religion is that doesn’t involve an empirical study of religions that actually exist, I’m all ears. I’d love to hear it. You can of course apply the tools of philosophy to religion, but if you’re applying them to religions that don’t actually exist it doesn’t tell you anything about the human elements of religion and if you ARE applying them to religions that DO exist then you’re doing science of the sociological flavor. (The same is true of mathematics – you can apply the tools of mathematics to whatever worlds you want to conjure up and while you’re doing math, it won’t tell you about THIS world. But if you apply the tools of mathematics to empirical data about the real world, then you’re doing science).
I think you must be talking past us, because I really, really do not see how you can gain actual knowledge about what religion can tell us about the human condition without studying religions empirically. And if you’re doing empirical studies, then you’re doing science.
In these discussions it’s necessary to make two distinctions. First, between truth-apt things, like claims and beliefs and things that are not truth-apt, like emotions, artistic expressions, much of literary interpretation, music, etc… and second, between the context of discovery and the context of justification. The following principle seems right to me.
(*) Claims and beliefs are justified in virtue of their relation to evidence.
If (*) is all we mean by “scientism” then “scientism” is arguably true, but (*) is compatible with the idea that there are human activities not directed at producing true claims and beliefs, and also with the claim that people can discover true claims and beliefs through processes unrelated to evidence, such as reading works of fiction. However, in whatever way a claim or belief about the human condition is arrived at, its justification is still based on its relation to evidence. To that extent, scientism is true.
Sorry John K. Your comments, for some reason, got caught up in the spam filter, which was certainly way off target this time, having caught a number of good things in its web. Usually, I can just let it go, and visit it occasionally, but I see I am going to have to pay closer attention to it.