In my last post I began speaking about something that is more important, I think, than people realise, and that raises all the thorny issues of the foundational nature of science, as well as questions about scientism, which I will interpret here as the belief that the only rational foundation for our beliefs is to be found in one or other of the positive sciences, especially physics, chemistry and biology. The social sciences, dealing much more intimately with questions of interpretation, while attempting to provide empirical foundations for their conclusions, are much more closely involved with questions of interpretation, and therefore to the kinds of uncertainty built into our interpretive conclusions. The reason this increasingly seems to me an important field for investigation is simply that some of the internet disputes that involve questions as to how we can underwrite our conclusions increasingly seem to give favoured status to the positive sciences as the only pursuit likely to provide the kinds of certainty we are seeking, especially when we are dealing with a widespread human pursuit that, on the face of it, seems simply to be swallowed up by interpretation, and to provide no point at which it touches down in any determinate way in human experience.
By referring to something that is simply swallowed up by interpretation, I am referring to theology, of course, but within the scope of that term may be included ethics (or moral philosophy), and philosophy itself, which, for many internet atheists, is assumed to be a largely useless pursuit closely related to theology, because providing almost nothing in the way of empirical (observational) foundations. And while most new atheists think (rightly) that it is possible to be good without god, very few seem to have an understanding of morality that distinguishes it from emotivism (the expression of feelings and personal preferences) and relativism, which makes the question of goodness without god largely irrelevant, since moral goodness can be reduced, without remainder, if emotivism is true, to subjective feelings of value.
At this point I want to quote something from a commenter on my last post, Daniel Lafave, not because, I hasten to add, I want to hold it up to ridicule, but because it expresses in a fairly narrow compass where I think some of our problems lie. He had just said, to do him justice, that philosophy has an important role in clarifying the theoretical conclusions to which scientists arrive, based on observational evidence, and that, without such clarification, observational evidence is (or at least may be) of little value. And then this:
The converse problem in philosophy is that too many philosophers think that philosophy has special methods of justification other than evidence, either intuition or conceptual analysis, by which claims can be justified independent of evidence. For some people this is what makes philosophy different from science. I think that’s just absurd. Intuition is just a word for a mental itch, and conceptual analysis at best just reveals something about our existing conceptualization but nothing about the world we are trying to study. The good thing is that this intuitionist perspective is slowly dying out in philosophy. Fewer and fewer people think their job can be done while ignoring evidence.
The problem here lies in the reference to “special methods of justification other than evidence,” and then the very rapid segue to what these methods might be, whether “intuition” or “conceptual analysis,” as though that exhausted the field. And this in response to a post in which I introduced the concept of “interpretive evidence,” because it has begun to seem to me that many of the disputes over “ways of knowing” are getting hung up at precisely this point.
The problem here is that the word ‘evidence’ does not provide us with criteria of what will count as evidence. Indeed, what will count as evidence will differ, depending upon what kind of investigation we are undertaking. I think that Daniel Lafave has in mind empirical evidence, the kind of evidence that can be discerned by the senses, and able to be repeated in systematic ways in the context of experimentation or observation. That is what I think he has in mind, but it is not what he says. There seems to be a sense that it is somehow obvious what constitutes evidence, and that, when we have it, we are somehow observing the world without the mediation of theory, what Ronald Dworkin in his book Justice for Hedgehogs calls “bare truth,” as though bare truths were simply “out there” in the world waiting to be observed and recorded.
The truth, however, seems to be otherwise. There are no “bare” truths to be observed, for we observe things always through a network of theory. As Kant says (and I’m not sure that I’ve got the words exactly): “Experience without theory is blind, and theory without experience is empty.” Or as some philosophers of science have said, it is interpretation all the way down. We never get to a level of observation which is not already somehow encapsulated in theory, and when scientists make new observations, and claim to have discovered new knowledge about the world, all the theories up to that point — since science is composed of sets of models (or theories) — shift (sometimes ever so slightly) to make room for the new information that is captured by that new knowledge (obtained by observation or experiment). Which, of course, I might add, is what makes creationist nonsense pure nonsense, since creationists do not engage with the theories, but think that their convictions are enough to eliminate the theories or models of science, in terms of what the sciences say makes sense, as a whole, a procedure which is quite simply absurd. You cannot shift the totality of science by sniping from the outside, because, when you try to do so, the models remain unaffected, and the truths of science remain intact.
Now, it’s at this point that the question of interpretive truth arises. First of all, science already deals with interpretive truth. New observations in biology, for example, which, let us say, call some of the accepted findings of biology into question, take place within the scope of the models in terms of which observations make sense. Since I know virtually nothing about theories in evolutionary biology, I can take, as an example of the kind of thing I have in mind, a recent article which claims that evolutionary theory is in crisis. (See John Dupré’s “Evolutionary Theory’s Welcome Crisis.”) It doesn’t matter, for my purposes, whether Dupré is right or wrong about the crisis in evolutionary theory. The point is that, from the point of view of theory, crisis must always be welcome in any case, for crisis means that the theory has to be expanded in order to accommodate new information; and as it does (that is, if Dupré is right), the rest of evolutionary theory will have to shift to accommodate the new information, and the models that are used to identify evidence as evidence will undergo change and expansion in the process. The end result will be that knowledge will increase and our understanding of the processes involved will be enhanced.
Now, it is just at this point that the question (and sometimes the accusation) of scientism arises. Daniel Lafave wants to say that we should restrict the term ‘scientism’ to its pejorative role as a term of abuse, and substitute, in the place where scientists are claiming the priority of scientific “ways of knowing,” the term ‘evidentialism’ instead. From the point of view that I am developing here, this would not really help, for the question of what constitutes evidence is to a large degree still dependent upon interpretation and model construction. The model-dependent realism that Hawking and Mlodinow highlight in The Grand Design as their particular way of accounting for their ontological commitments, is still an interpretation, a model in terms of which what will count as evidence is determined, and much as they might like to think that this is not a philosophical (or even metaphysical) commitment, the truth is that they do not have evidence for the model itself; for it is the model itself that determines what will count (for the model) as evidence. However, within those prescribed limits, science does deliver the goods, a kind of certainty and stability that other disciplines can only dream of. And even when they disagree, as Dworkin points out, differences of opinion in the sciences are “generally small compared to what [all scientists] think in common.” (155) And it could scarcely be otherwise.
But this does not make disciplines that depend more substantially upon interpretation completely different ways of knowing, where ascriptions of truth or falsity no longer apply. As Dworkin points out, the claim that whereas
scientific claims are true or false, interpretive judgments are something different … [--] sound or unsound, or more or less reasonable, or something of that sort. [151]
“These distinctions,” he points out, “are empty.” We could of course limit the use of ‘true’ and ‘false’ to scientific judgements, “[b]ut that stipulation would be pointless because we can claim no utility for it.” (loc. cit.) And then he goes on, in more detail, to say the following:
We cannot map the distinction onto any more familiar distinction by explaining, for instance, that “true” indicates objectivity while “most reasonable” indicates only subjectivity, or that “true” marks a cognitive judgement while “most reasonable” marks some form of noncognitive expression. [151-2]
On the contrary, both the expression ‘true’ and the expression ‘most reasonable’ signify a special kind of unique success, and though in each case the content may be different, both claims may rightfully be thought eligible to be accorded the accolade of truth, and to qualify, therefore, as objective.
This does not mean, of course, that the stability of the kinds of truth involved in each case is the same. Interpretive truths may be less secure, and, in a way very different from the judgements of science, their justifying goals and intrinsic goals merge. The justifying reasons for carrying out a particular scientific investigation are irrelevant to the conclusions reached, but the reasons justifying an interpretive inquiry are not independent of, and may bring to bear concerns which in fact merge with the intrinsic goals of the interpretive process. This happens in historical inquiry, for example, as is demonstrated with exemplary clarity by Richard Evans’ account of his participation in the defence of Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt against the charge of libel made by David Irving, who defended himself before Mr. Justice Gray against the accusation that he was a Holocaust denier, and a falsifier of evidence. As Evans shows in his book Lying about History: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, the reasons for addressing the question of the justice of Lipstadt’s accusation against Irving, merged seamlessly with the intrinsic historical interest of the understanding and interpretation of the events commonly brought together under the description “The Holocaust”, as well as with the goals and procedures of the historian’s craft. The book itself is a fascinating insight into how the particular interpretive discipline known as history functions to provide the truth about the past, and how that discipline differs, in important respects, from what is understood under the term “natural science”.
It is, in fact, the fudging of this distinction between interpretive and scientific discourse and investigation which largely vitiates many of the claims made by Sam Harris in his book, The Moral Landscape. Hidden in one of the first footnotes in the back of the book, Harris says that
[f]or the purpose of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between “science” and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss “facts” — e.g., history. … I think “science,” therefore, should be considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world. [fn 2, 195]
This merging of science and other forms of inquiry which “form” true beliefs about “events” tends to conceal the great difference between the methods of science, on the one hand – the word ’science’ usually understood in English in terms of what are often called the “hard” sciences of physics, chemistry, and, increasingly, biology – and interpretive disciplines like history, on the other, where much more than just “events in our world” are subject to exploration and interpretation. Indeed, the statement in which he forces these different kinds of inquiry into his Procrustean bed, so that, in some sense, he can make the claim that there can be a “science” of morality, is itself an interpretive move in the game of trying to understand what we know and how we know it, which cannot itself stand as a hard datum on the basis of which other things can be determined to be true or false. Without addressing the presuppositions included in what amounts to a foundational claim whose justification is never explored, and is thus more or less a cuckoo’s egg in the nest presided over by philosophy, an interpretive discipline for which Harris shows some contempt, his programme of creating a “science” of morality is hopelessly compromised.
This is why it is important for us to listen to philosophers like Philip Kitcher, whose New Republic article, “The Trouble with Scientism: Why history and the humanities are also a form of knowledge ,” raises serious questions about the self-sufficient nature of science to deal with the issues that face us. For Kitcher, the problem is that it simply leaves too much out of account, and by denying the rational nature of interpretive disciplines like history, literary and aesthetic criticism, ethics, and so forth, our ability to deal rationally and adequately with so many of the problems that face us is severely straitened and limited. That does not mean that commentators like Jerry Coyne, for example, do not take literature and music with great seriousness, for he clearly does. What it means is that, by failing to acknowledge a role for reason, and therefore for truth, interpretive truth, to distinguish it, if that seems necessary, from the type of truth to which science lays claim, the limits of knowledge are seriously impoverished, and the humanity, the humanness or humaneness, if you like, of our conclusions is threatened. The trouble with scientism, for people like Kitcher and Pigliucci (who also deprecates scientism), is that it tends to make science the only arbiter of what constitutes the truth. Here is how Pigliucci defines scientism:
Scientism. This is the pernicious tendency to believe that science is the only paragon of knowledge and the ultimate arbiter of what counts as knowledge.
The point that I hear both Pigliucci and Kitcher making is that to confine knowledge to the conclusions of science is to ignore so much that is simply, as Kitcher says in his New Republic article,
too large, too complex, too imprecise, and too important to be addressed by blundering over-simplification.
This is actually a matter which he has discussed in some detail in his book Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, where he addresses himself to the oversimplifications that happen when very complex human systems, interpretive systems, to stick with that term, are forced into a scientifically explanatory context without dealing adequately with the interpretive issues that inform them.
To take but one example, Kitcher takes E.O. Wilson to task for his naivety when it comes to his understanding of ethics, and his failure to take into consideration important dimensions of ethical discourse, apparently because he does not understand it:
There is no subtle new argument [writes Kitcher] for debunking ethical objectivity. Wilson reaches his conclusion by ignoring the serious alternatives. He ignores them because, apparently, he does not understand them. [426]
Nonetheless, Wilson goes on to make claims about providing “the physical basis of moral thought and considering its evolutionary meaning,” which will, he thinks, enable people to control their own lives. But, as Kitcher justly asks:
If there is no sense to moral correctness, then what exactly is meant by the claim that greater self-knowledge might place us in a better position to choose ethical precepts? [427]
The point is important. Wilson simply dismisses the serious alternatives to the kind of emotivism he favours, and, in doing so, empties of content any suggestion that there is a basis upon which control of one’s life can be premised, precisely the kind of interpretive understanding that he has already so quickly dismissed. And the point is that the interpretive context of human action cannot simply be ignored by over-simplifying the context in which decisions are made. It is this kind of impoverishment that Kitcher and Pigliucci are concerned about in their anxiety about scientism. It seems to me that some of this anxiety is justified, and should be taken with greater seriousness, especially by the new atheist community which, with some justice, emphasises the success of science in contrast to the failure of religion to provide foundations for its various beliefs in supernatural beings, revelations and guidance, but then includes as quasi-religious other aspects of the human project which include sources of knowledge and understanding which cannot so easily be subsumed under the rubric of science.
For the record, nothing that Dupree lists can even remotely be thought of as a “crisis” in evolutionary thought. It’s extending our knowledge of evolutionary theory, making the entire theory more robust, less simplistic, and more complete.
That’s not a “crisis” by anyone’s definition. That’s a feature of the scientific method, not a bug. He’s engaging in a little bit rhetorical flag-waving to make a point.
The basic tenet of evolution – Darwin’s idea of descent with modification – is very much still at the center of it all. Dupree is just listing other ways that modification might occur other than the very simplistic notion of Gene A being modified via “mutation” to Gene A’, which leads to alterations in the organism’s phenotype, which may (or may not) impact the organism’s fitness to pass that modification on to new generations.
I may be wrong but I think you have seized on the idea of ‘interpretive knowledge’ to try and escape the realisation that morality is relative, and the consequences that follow.
You have already said (and I agree) that the absolute morality of religion does not exist outside human society. Where does morality exist then? I suspect it exists, separately, in each persons mind. So although you and I might agree that genocide is wrong or slavery wrong, those are interpretive values or interpretive opinions or even interpretive shared opinions. They are not knowledge that exists outside the minds that hold them. After all there have been times when genocide and slavery were considered ‘normal’. There are also differing opinions around today that may become matters of ‘morals’ for the future – such as animal suffering or the size of a family – if there was some ‘absolute’ existence of morality outside individual human minds these issues would already be settled.
This is why I am critical of the phrase ‘different ways of knowing’. It is often used by people smearing the differences between objective provisional facts or theories produced by science, and the certainty of feelings arising from other interpretive methods.
This is not to say that those certainties of feelings are not extremely important for understanding how to live in your context, in your society, they are. But perhaps it explains why some people think it moral to carry out honour killings and others think it immoral. Their interpretations are different, their opinions differ.
I think it better (but tougher) to address the morals issue straight on – and say ‘In my opinion honour killings are not acceptable behaviour in this society’ rather than ‘Honour killings are immoral and wrong’. You can hope to have a debate about opinions and sway opinions. Absolute statements (founded in religion or not) just generate friction.
I think what lies behind scientific chauvinism is something my old philosophy prof thought his area desperately needed: practicality. In order to make philosophy practical, he emphasized the usefulness of a defensible method – one already clearly demonstrated by science – not for it’s specific interpretive conclusions that may vary over time according to new information but for its reliability to produce explanations that work for everyone everywhere all the times.
This achievement is not simply ‘another way of knowing’ equivalent to emotionally interpreting classic music but encompasses what is knowable by any common meaning of the word as it related to explaining the environment in which we live.
He did not get far with his peers but struck a harmonious chord (keeping to the musical theme) with his technologically advanced students to align cause with effect as it relates to philosophy and ready some thoroughly examined philosophical idea for the real world, for real applications, real therapies, real approaches that work. In particular, his ethics and morals classes were incredibly vibrant places (not to mention the only philosophy class with a ridiculously long student waiting list) of intersecting and interconnecting fields of study – utilizing the expertise of dozens of doctoral students from at least a dozen faculties – that made other philosophy profs very, very uncomfortable and even hostile.
If philosophy and humanities departments want to change their endangered species category and compete for students in the marketplace of ideas, then I see no better way than to wholeheartedly adopt the scientific method in areas left far too long in the death grip of impractical metaphysics. Yes, interpretive understandings matter, but they matter much more when they can be demonstrated to work for everyone everywhere all the time. In the quest for knowledge, it simply doesn’t get any better than that.
I’ve read through the article several times, and I find myself unable to fully understand the reasoning (which might become more clear over time) but of course, on the one hand I agree with the concerns Eric is raising, and I have raised myself, but on the other, I also agree with DiscoveredJ, that Eric is trying to save ethics in some normative objective way (probably via Kitcher’s progressive naturalism).
Yes, well, Kevin (#1), for the record, that is precisely what I said. Assuming that there were a crisis, it would not follow that this would be unwelcome news. It would indicate that knowledge was progressing. I didn’t think that Dupré’s idea of a crisis in evolutionary biology was true, but, even if it were, it would only presage an advancement in knowledge, not a calamity.
DiscoveredJoys, quite the reverse in fact. I have seized upon the idea of interpretive knowledge, first, because there is a sense in which all knowledge is interpretive, including science, and second, because I am quite sure that morality is not relative. It’s a strange thing that this seems to be the default position for those who think about ethics from the outside, that moral value must be relative; but when it is raised in ethics as a matter for discourse, it becomes quite clear that it cannot intelligibly be held to be relative. The claim to relativity is simply denied every time we make a value judgement and give reasons for it. Actually, to be honest, this is probably the strongest part of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, the way he savages relativism.
As for the points you make Tildeb, it seems that I have overdone it on the uncertainty and provisionality of interpretive knowledge, for interpretive knowledge has very definite practical implications, and does enlist knowledge from other disciplines in order to accomplish this. And sometimes the conclusions are not as provisional as I have suggested (but mainly for clarity). The point is that many of the things about which we have interpretive knowledge, such as politics or morality or more limited domains of ethics such a bioethics, we are dealing with incredilby complex social realities that encompass so many different observations, areas of expertise, and variety of viewpoints, that any comprehensive theory is probably going to oversimplify in unhelpful ways realities that have to be somehow grasped as a whole. And here is where interpretation comes in so importantly. In bioethics, for instance, we cannot even rule out questions of theology and spiritual fulfilment, for the people who are caught in the crosshairs of the discipline, so to speak, may indeed include, as a part of their own interpretive overlay, theological and religious views which cannot simply be dismissed in the context of how we understand those persons and how it is appropriate to act towards them in the context where these understandings are engaged, whatever we take the truth-value of those beliefs to be. So, in that context, it would be appropriate to bring specific theological expertise to bear in resolving ethical issues regarding a particular individual’s treatment.
I do find rather remarkable, however, Egbert’s claim that I am “trying to save ethics in some normative objective way.” I don’t think that’s an issue here. There is a strong sense in which ethics is objective, without question, and the suggestion that it is viciously relative, as some people want to suggest, while almost the official position of undergraduates when they begin to study ethics, is simply self-immolating. We cannot even begin to make sense of social reality unless we think of values as, in some important sense, objective. Even the suggestion that our moral values are relative is a statement in ethics for which there must be justification, and it is not easily justified. To suggest, for instance, that it is wrong, say, to torture babies for fun, is not just a personal preference. Why would anyone want to suggest that it is? To suggest that it simply depends upon a completely arbitrary preference whether it is right or wrong to torture babies just for the fun of it? That is unintelligible, and social life couldn’t even get started on this basis. I don’t need to “save” ethics in some “normative objective way.” It just is objective, although we may disagree over the extent of what is normatively objective in this way. But to suggest that there is no sense in which values are objective is simply to make society impossible, as Hobbes recognised so clearly when he spoke about what he took to be man’s natural state: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
I think there is a tendency to model a complex system by adding and subtracting factors to get a result that mimics the observational data collected and then conclude that this is how the system actually works. When in reality, it is one way the system could work. For instance, a geocentric model of the solar system with epicycles makes pretty accurate predictions, but is not how the system actually works.
While scientists are often overconfident in regards to their models explaining reality, I found Kitcher hopelessly confused on methodology. Perhaps it is just the nature of a short article.
First he seems to think that if an explanation can be found at one level, then explanations can’t be found at lower levels or even higher levels. He uses the example of John Arbuthnot and sex-ratio deviation at birth in humans to claim that a population-level explanation is “better” than an individual- or cell-level explanation. Sure there are emergent properties, but those properties emerge because of the interactions at lower levels in the hierarchy.
Then toward the end of the article, he basically says that history and the humanities use the same methods as science – just that the systems are more complicated by human culture. If they are the same, then how can scientism be incorrect?
Eric, I wonder how many in the atheist community believe values are objective? I think we have reached the fundamental problem of the atheist mentality.
Reblogged this on Secularity.
Certainly humanities like history do not have the luxury of a controlled laboratory environment, but this does not mean they are wholly unscientific. We must scale back our certainty when forced to trust the accounts of ancient historians, but there are many forms of evidence that can inform us to what accounts can be trusted and what most likely really happened. Similar accounts of an event from multiple sources, accounts of things we know to be physically impossible by our current understanding of physics, established credibility of authors in other accounts, known biases in accounts, all of these are logical and evidenced based even if they do not meet the gold standard of a laboratory experiment or clinical trial. Good investigation of humanities uses scientific methodology as best it can within the inherent limitations. I see no reason to invoke a new “way of knowing” in order to justify them; we just have to accept that the conclusions of the humanities are generally fuzzier in nature. We need not be so obtuse as to reject them entirely because they are less certain and do not create laws as unbending as those of “hard” sciences.
I too must chime in and admit I also remain a moral relativist. This does not mean anything goes, it just means I do not bother to object to things on strictly moral grounds. I like to skip straight to the consequences and dodge the often fruitless discussion of what is actually moral and what is not. “Condom use in Africa will prevent the spread of disease, prevent unmanageable family sizes, and prevent suffering” is far better than “condom use is not immoral”. Discussion is far easier in the former than the latter, mostly because there are concrete evidences that can be pointed to.
I have found that the application of absolute forms of morality mostly end up being exercises in placing your own particular moral code ineffably above all others. It is no coincidence that the aspect of absolute morality being defended is always a part of the defender’s own moral code. I also suspect that calling someone immoral is a sneaky way of calling them evil, which ends up being a character attack that does not contribute to logical discussion.
Eric,
We should start by figuring out what interpretation is. One sense of interpretation is one that scientists often use. When they talk about “interpreting data”, it seems to be refer to a process of inferring causes or regularities from the observations. But they are interpreting observations, not texts. It’s only real relation to “meaning” is meaning in the sense of natural meaning, where smokes means fire.
When we usually talk about interpretation, however, we are talking about interpreting texts. In interpreting texts, we’re not generally inferring the causes of the text, other than perhaps in the sense of inferring what mental states of the author caused the existing text. What are we doing when we interpret a text? I would argue that interpreting a text is making a claim about the semantic properties of the text. And when someone does interpret a text, they bring to bear evidence that is relevant to determining what those semantic properties are. If someone is a literary theorist, lawyer, historian, or some other person who interprets texts on a regular basis, that’s what they do. They make arguments based on properties of the text in order to claim it has certain semantic properties. That’s arguing from evidence. People may disagree about what evidence is relevant and what the evidence shows, but that doesn’t mean it’s not justification by evidence. So, I don’t think that interpretation falls outside the scope of justification by evidence or why it constitutes a different way of knowing.
I also don’t think it’s right to characterize the social sciences as centrally concerned with interpretation. Economics doesn’t interpret texts, it studies human economic behavior. Psychology only interprets texts in the trivial sense in which subjects verbal responses are used as evidence of underlying mental states. Some social sciences are concerned with texts, but as I argued above, that doesn’t take interpretation outside of the scope of justification by evidence.
I also don’t understand what the discussion about “bare truth” shows other than that Ronald Dworkin is a terrible, sloppy philosopher. We always have to keep clear the distinction between truth-bearers and truth-makers. Truth-bearers are the things that are true or false, and truth-makers are the things that make the truth-bearers true. I’m perfectly willing to grant that truth-bearers exist within a theoretical framework, but it’s an illogical leap to infer that the truth-maker therefore exists within a theoretical framework. The concept “electron” is embedded in a theory, but electrons aren’t embedded in a theory. They exist independently of our theorizing or anything of our theories.
First of all, John K, I’m not sure that I’m invoking a “different way of knowing”, and whether it helps to talk in those terms, though there is no obvious reason why not. For instance, while it is true that history depends upon empirical evidence, there is no reason to call it “scientific”, for it does not fall under the canons of the sciences. Empirical evidence can serve all sorts of useful purposes, some of them having nothing to do with scientific confirmation as such. The extension of the word ‘science’ to cover disciplines in the humanities is, to a large extent, a product of English, which does not distinguish, as German, for example, does, between Naturwissenschaften (that is, the natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (that is, the humanities). And whether history depends upon empirical evidence or not, the interpretive activity which is an essential aspect of history is not based on that evidence in the same way that scientific knowledge is related to empirical evidence and the outcome of experiments or systematic observations. It’s not just less exact in its conclusions, or “fuzzier”, as you say, but a different kind of arguing to reasons. And this applies, too, to conclusions in literary appreciation, and other forms of aesthetic judgement. There is no reason to assimilate these things to science when they are not at all scientific in the sense in which that word is normally used.
As to morality and relativism. What you are saying is that morals are not relative, but you find it easier simply to go direct to consequences (a form of moral consequentialism), rather than to speak in terms of value. That’s fine for some things, but you must be aware that there is a long tradition of moral argument about consequentialism, its problems, and ways around those problems. To suggest, though, that you are a relativist is simply false to the position that you have taken. Consequentialism in morality is a perfectly respectable position, and it is not relativistic.
As for moral absolutism, in general the only absolutists around are those who base themselves on religious premises pertaining to the commands of a god, or those whose philosophy may be thought to have been derived — like Kant’s — from that source. Not many people who use reason to justify morality are prepared to support absolute prescriptions or prohibitions.
As for your question, Egbert, we know that Sam Harris is not a relativist, that atheist philosophers like Kitcher or Pigliucci are not relativists. It is even arguable, as I have suggested, that relativism is not a defensible postion. I do not think we have reached, as you suggest, the fundamental problem of the atheist mentality. I’m not sure that I understand what you mean by this.
Daniel Lafave, your comment is going to cross mine, because I see that it has just come in on my other screen, but I think I’ll bring this comment to a close at this point, and address yours at a later time.
“As for your question, Egbert, we know that Sam Harris is not a relativist, that atheist philosophers like Kitcher or Pigliucci are not relativists. It is even arguable, as I have suggested, that relativism is not a defensible postion. I do not think we have reached, as you suggest, the fundamental problem of the atheist mentality. I’m not sure that I understand what you mean by this.”
This is all a lot to take in, but I can’t believe you said that you believe in objective moral values! That tends to change everything. It’s not that I am shocked that you are, it’s that I’m shocked that it hasn’t really come up before.
As for Harris, Kitcher, Pigliucci, I’ve not idea where they stand on morality, but I’m assuming they’re making similar errors if they do. It is clear Harris just makes huge assumptions without thinking it through. You don’t seem to realize that by believing in objective morals, that makes you a moral absolutist, no different to religious fundamentalists. That’s a rather shocking discovery.
Eric, I really enjoyed this piece. I’m very sympathetic to what you are talking about. I also think you are right on the money when it comes to moral relativism. Simon Blackburn has a good argument against moral relativism which I found really interesting. Moral relativism just not deal with, in a realistic way, the fact that people have actual moral disagreements. If two people are arguing about (to use Blackburn’s example) whether fox hunting is morally acceptable, then they have a disagree and its a real disagreement. It totally not helpful for the relativist to say that it’s right for one person and wrong for the other person because they doesn’t actually solve anything. Here’s the conversation with Blackburn about this: http://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/2007/08/simon-blackburn.html
Once we start talking about how our values and actions are better than other values and actions, we really have given up on moral relativism. We may not think that there are mystical moral truths out there that we can find, but we’ve decided that something is better than something else.
Daniel, the first thing that I must say in response to your comment is that the concept of meaning is so much more complex than you suggest, so that “natural meaning”, as in “smoke means fire” is a very limited sense of what we can possibly mean by ‘meaning’. Interpreting observations in science is not interpreting “natural meaning”, but interpreting observations in the context of their meaning relative to theories or models. What do these observations mean in relation to the model or theory in the context of which alone they have meaning as scientific observations? I’m not a philosopher of science, but interpretation of the meaning of observations would have to be in relation to some frame of reference of this sort.
Interpretation, though, as this shows, is not only in terms of the interpretation of texts. For historians, the interpretation of physical evidence may be in terms of an overall conception of what the evidence is being taken as evidence for. Take the use of Bills of Lading as used by Raul Hilberg in his magisterial three volume The Destruction of the European Jews. Although, for instance, the Belzec camp left no records of the people who were murdered there, the railway bills of lading offer an insight the traffic in human death to those who are able to see the significance, and so interpret correctly, what happened, what lies behind the incredibly mundane reality of the evidence.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-aAwsJjJxY&w=420&h=315%5D
You say:
But interpretation is not based simply on a text’s sematic properties. This is not the only evidence that can be discerned within a text. But it takes interpretive insight into the significance of texts, and their implications for other conclusions regarding the events and the significance of events in history (say).
The next issue concerns the social sciences. Let’s take this one example:
Well, yes it does, but it understands human economic behaviour within fairly narrow bounds, assuming that people will act, not altrustically, but self-interestedly. In other words, the limits of interpretation are established beforehand, and the accuracy of the outcome of economic calculation depends upon the justification for that interpretive restriction. Indeed, interpretation is not at all limited to the interpretation of texts. For interpretation extends to all sorts of things that are not texts. The interpretive significance of the Great War (WW I) and its implications is not confined to the interpretation of texts about the Great War, though it certainly includes that as an important part, but it consists also in an interpretation of events, and what their human significance, what their impact on individual human beings was, or may be thought to be. We have textual evidence for that impact, of course, but we also have wider cultural implications that can reasonably be assigned to the experiences of those engaged in those completely inhuman, disastrous circumstances. One of the obvious effects of those experiences was to make the next war more likely, because, as Churchill often said about a cross channel invasion, the fears of the kind of murderous stalemate remained a part of the psyche of those who had taken part in the inhuman slaughter on the Western front.
Regarding the ‘bare truth’ it would probably be better simply to have said you don’t understand it, rather than to jump so quickly to the conclusion that Dworkin is a sloppy philosopher, of which nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, what I say about Dworkin is, and can only be, a very unsatisfactory approximation to what he himself has said much more clearly, as goes for any interpretation of a philosopher’s position. But, second, science, according to Dworking, provides the possibility of bare truth, in a sense, without interpretation, which gives science a solidity which other kinds of knowledge do not provide. This is the sense in which, say, Jerry Coyne can say that evolution is true, without qualification. Of course, this can also lead, as Dworkin says, to “a very deep, irrmediable kind of mistake,” (as when the ether was thought to be something as reliably established as any other discovery of physics), but also to a “confidence that there is truth to be had.” (155)
I’m not sure that I understand your distinction between truth-bearers and truth-makers — I can see that you want truth-makers to exist in some sense entirely divorced from theories or models, and I am not sure that we ever get that luxury. From the standpoint of the theory, of course, what the theory confirms, when evidence confirms the theory, is that the particles said by the theory to exist really do exist, in some sense, independently of the theory. But of course we never can stand quite outside the theory, so the point of the claim that they exist in this way is really in question. I understand what is meant by the word ‘evolution is true’, and it would, in a sense, be true, even if no one was around to know it, but, at the same time, the theory itself is only ever an approximation to the way things “really” are, and never manage, as Kant said, to describe things as they are in themselves. However, they are as close to reality as we can get just now, and so they truly exist in the sense that the theory says that they do. This is the bare truth, and it is not accessible in so many other realms, which are accessible by means of interpretation alone.
I should add that I am starting to think outside of my comfort zone, but I think, for all that, that I can stand by what I have said so far.
I wonder if we are talking about different forms of ‘moral objectivity’? If not, then I am at a loss for I don’t see where the ‘objectivity’ comes from. It seems obvious to me (but I could be wrong) that morals reflect the behavioural expectations of different human societies, their histories, and their environments.
As for relativism not being defensible, there are some philosophers who argue differently. The Wikipedia article on Joseph Margolis seems particularly appropriate to the subject matter of the posts, mentioning scientism, relativism, and interpretation. I’ll have to read more about him (thanks Eric).
This particular quote from Wikipedia struck me:
DiscoveredJ, I don’t label myself ‘moral relativist’ because it’s another misinterpretation of my own moral or individual affirmation of life, however I do think there are plenty of excellent contemporary philosophers from both America, and Europe, that are working through the nihilism of our time, of which John Gray is one that I often point out.
Eric,
I still don’t see what interpretive evidence is that isn’t empirical evidence. I just don’t see how interpretation isn’t a species of empirical evidential justification, where the subject of study is a text rather than an organism or a subatomic particle. When I make claims about a text, it’s a matter of pointing to empirical evidence about the text, and empirical evidence outside texts that supports my conclusions about its semantic properties. I worry that a lot of this attempt to discover what makes certain disciplines “non-science” is an attempt to find alternative ways of knowing that don’t exist. What non-scientists who want to produce knowledge should be doing instead is show how their methods are really empirical evidence-based as well. That they aren’t fundamentally different from science after all. I’m somewhere in the middle of this debate then, because I think “scientism” is both right and wrong. It’s right in that empirical evidence is the sine qua non of epistemic justification, but I don’t think that science has a monopoly on empirical evidence.
Unfortunately I may currently not have the mental energy to really understand this and the previous post in all its details, but I still feel uncomfortable about saying that there is an evidential and an interpretative dimension to truth.
To forestall misunderstanding, I am definitely in agreement with the position that philosophy and math produce knowledge that is not scientific knowledge, so I am not a proponent of “scientism”. I merely argue that the first two provide a different type of knowledge in the sense that they show what must logically be true or false regardless of what the actual, specific universe we inhabit is like. To repeat what I wrote on Sandwalk, in Euclidean geometry the diameter and circumference of a circle have a specific relationship to each other even if the universe does not contain a single example of an actual circle, anywhere (math); omnipotence is self-contradictory and thus impossible (philosophy); a married bachelor is self-contradictory and thus impossible, regardless of how many people are or are not married in the universe (philosophy). Sometimes you can also arrive at knowledge with thought experiments instead of laboratory experiments, although that obviously has a good understanding of empirical facts as a prerequisite.
But what I think is crucial about knowledge – a true, justified belief – is that it is (apart from, well, true and justified) objective and universally valid, i.e. people using the same methodology and the same data in good faith must be able to invariably arrive at the same conclusion. And I am just not sure how the interpretation that a certain piece of music “has forward energy” can be considered as universally valid in this sense as the conclusion that water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one water atom or that 11 x 1.5 = 16.5. How do you decisively demonstrate to Spufford that he is mistaken about this piece of music? And if you cannot, beyond “I just know it”, is it then knowledge?
While the methodologies of the various sciences and the humanities do differ, and do produce results with varying degrees of confidence, I do like Harris’ idea that it should all be considered of a piece. They are all each in their own way part of a tapestry. “…A larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world.” The key word there for me is “effort.” For something to be considered a source of knowledge, there must at least be some effort to get it right. An attempt to verify one’s assumptions whenever possible. Embrace the spirit of critical thinking and objectivity.
The important thing to acknowledge is that faith, which determines truths upon the strengths of convictions, stands apart from that great human effort. It’s unlike those other disciplines in fundamental ways, ways which makes it fundamentally incompatible with them. Priests often throw around the word “truth” in a manner which displays complete contempt for the entire concept of it.
Er, “and one oxygen atom”, obviously. Sorry.
I always find it useful to compare morality with language. Both develop within communities, both are inculcated at an early age, both are subject to drift, both vary from one in-group to another, both have fuzzy boundaries which often make it difficult to define whether or not a particular usage is ‘correct’. Yet nobody argues, as far as I know, that learning a language is somehow making discoveries about the real world, or that there must be an ‘objective’ language which we can somehow investigate in the way in which we can investigate the physics of solid objects.
I find it as hard to imagine a language in which the word meaning “me” is twenty syllables long as Eric does to imagine a morality in which torturing babies for fun is regarded as a good thing; but that’s just because of the way in which language has evolved and the purpose that it serves — directly for communication and indirectly for survival. If we regard both morality and language — and art, and music, and literature, for that matter — as various types of tools developed ultimately for the survival and welfare of a relatively homogenous species, it’s not surprising that we find strong commonalities across different cultures. In fact that’s exactly what we would expect. But that’s not evidence of a ‘objective’ component, any more than a hammer handle shaped to fit a human hand is ‘objectively’ better for banging in nails than one with a star-shaped cross-section. It’s better for HUMANS, that’s all.
Isn’t that enough?
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How about we tone down the example just slightly, and talk about blowing up a buss full of children, instead of torturing babies? How different is that? Certainly, there are people that think this is, in some cases, the ‘right thing to do’. By taking its ‘wrongness’ as axiomatic, you will never understand those people. The justification for understanding ethics as viciously relative is (a) empirical evidence such as the ‘true story’ I just described, and (b) a motivation to actually understand reality. There is no reason to think that no understanding can be gained, or that ‘social life couldn’t even get started’ with different axioms.
You suggest ‘scientism’ is discarding a lot of useful knowledge. I believe this is exactly how the scientific method demonstrates its value. I’d rather not build on knowledge of which I am only 95% confident.