I had thought that perhaps Jerry Coyne had tired of the issue of scientism, and could not be lured onto the field, but I was wrong. So much for that theory! For now he has put up on his website (Erinnern Sie sich! Es ist nicht einen Blog!) a new post entitled “Uncle Eric on Scientism,” which, in its quite evident challenge, reminds me of the lists, where one knight throws down his gage as a challenge to another, and then dares him to pick it up, and fight him in single combat. So here I am on my charger, having taking up the gauntlet, charging towards my opponent, my castellated keep looming ominously in the background.
Let’s get something clear at the outset. There is a tendency, in these arguments, simply to assume that science is the only form of inquiry that produces objective facts or truths, and if that assumption is the basis for the claim, and no evidence for it is provided, then the scientistic argument is circular. I am challenged to come up with other forms of knowledge or domains of knowledge, but my opponent, in this case Sir Jerry Coyne, has not yet provided conclusive demonstration that there are none. What the person who advocates what has come to be known as scientism seems to be claiming (I say “seems” because I don’t think this has ever been clearly defined) is that everything that constitutes knowledge is scientific, and all that remains is opinion. I’m not yet convinced, as I say, that a demonstration has been provided, and so far it looks suspiciously circular to me. Nevertheless, here I go, back onto the field, hooves pounding, my lance at the ready, the plumes on my helm streaming out behind me! Tally Ho!
Let’s look at Jerry’s definition of science:
I’m defining “science” as the combination of empirical observation, reason, and (usually) replicated observation and prediction that investigates what exists in the universe.
And as a first go, that’s not too bad. What he doesn’t say here, and what he must show, is that only what is arrived at by means of this methodology constitutes knowledge. He would also need to firm up what is meant by terms involved: ’empirical observation’ (for what constitutes observation is not obvious, for example, when we are talking about the “observation” of the Higgs Boson), ‘reason’, and even the terms ‘investigation’ (or ‘inquiry’), ‘prediction’, and ‘exists’, and so on. I don’t want to make this too complex, but there is a lot that is in need explication here, perhaps especially the terms ‘reason’ and ‘exists’ which are very contested concepts indeed. Now, my question is, once we have done this conceptual work, which is not a “combination of empirical observation, reason, and … replicated observation and prediction,” what is the result, knowledge or opinion? And notice, if we do not have some such account of what is going on here, it seems pointless to try to divide up the field in terms of knowledge and opinion.
For example, some conclusions in science are less well grounded than others. Some have not even been revisited for years, and much work is based on them. As new work is done, as Susan Haack points out in her book Evidence and Inquiry, there is shifting of the values of other things that are taken to be known. Some may even be subjected to radical revision, based on new information, and what “reason” is doing in this context is not altogether clear. Is it the case, as has been supposed, that reason here is deductive? We have an hypothesis. The hypothesis makes certain predictions that should occur when there is a specific relationship between other things. relationships that can be set up in an experimental setting, or can be observed under special conditions — as when Einstein’s prediction of the deflection of light because of the warping of space-time around a large mass (such as the sun) was confirmed in 1919 by two expeditions, one to West Africa, and another to Brazil, to observe light from a star during a solar eclipse. Do we now have undisputed knowledge?
Well, yes and no. It certainly gave the theory greater credibility; but the observations did not prove that Einstein’s theory was true, and could henceforth be accepted as a definitive piece of knowledge. The reason for this is quite simple. The confirmation of a prediction in fact depends on a logical fallacy, the fallacy of affirming the consequent, which means that nothing empirical is ever confirmed absolutely, as Hume had already pointed out in eighteenth century. But a theory can be disproved absolutely, for if a prediction made by a theory does not occur, then the theory is disproved.* Both of these can be shown by means of simple forms of the propositional calculus. Now, the question arises, if the propositional calculus can tell us that, does this telling constitute knowledge? It seems to me that it does. Not empirical knowledge, mind, but none the worse for that. And this is something that we can know before observation of any kind is made.
Perhaps I could just stop there, since this piece of knowledge about the propositional calculus and its application is an important aspect of scientific methodology. Mind you, it does not advert to anything which exists in an empirical sense, though as physics begins to map equations onto “reality” without any idea of how that reality “looks” — that is, without the clear possibility of empirical observation — Hawking and Mlodinow refer to ”model-dependent reality” – this seems less and less crucial to bare claims to possess knowledge. (All this, I’m afraid, is a bit rusty, since I haven’t done any philosophy of science or epistemology with serious intent for nearly forty years!)
So, lets go on to other types of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, remembering as we do, that scientific knowledge, although often very well founded indeed, does not achieve the kinds of absoluteness that guarantees any kind of timeless truth. That’s where the evolution (history) of science itself comes into play, for as our knowledge expands, what was once thought to be knowledge sometimes gets knocked off the shelf, to be replaced by a more complete or accurate account than was accessible before. Thus Darwin was wrong about a number of things, as was Newton, because they did not have the tradition or the technology that stands behind the biologists and physicists of today, which tends to relativise the scientific knowledge of the past. However, this should be an object lesson for us: that we should expect only as much certainty as the domain of inquiry allows. If we expected absolute, unrevisable knowledge from science, as Descartes did, then we would be disappointed, and might, in fact, despair of ever achieving knowledge at all.
But this is just where, it seems to me, my nephew Jerry goes astray, for he is using the word “truths” in a very different way than a scientist should. He is also forgetting that some kinds of knowledge are less certain than others. Also forgotten are kinds of knowledge that have greater certainty than the “truths” of science, namely the propositions of mathematics and logic. So when Jerry says, of moral knowledge, that this does not constitute knowledge, but mere dicta, we need to ask ourselves on what basis this claim is made. The word ‘dictum’ (of which ‘dicta’ is the plural) is an interesting one. It can mean either a saying, with emphasis on the fact that it is merely a saying, or it may indicate of some claim that it is a declaration having authority. I suspect Jerry meant it in the first, with the suggestion that I was using it in the second, way, with the additional point that saying something about value, while at the same time trying to give it the edge of authority, doesn’t give it any more truth value.
Let’s leave this aside for the moment, while my opponent’s horse takes a distinctly erratic course. Let me quote from my jousting opponent:
The problem with “objective” moral truths is much clearer in less clear-cut cases. Is it objectively true that abortion is wrong, or that a moral society must give everyone health care? You can’t ascertain these “truths” by observation; you deduce them from some general principles of right and wrong that are, at bottom, opinion. (Of course, some opinions are more well-founded than others, and that’s what philosophy is good for.)
In other words, Eric is committing here the very sin he decried (as I recall) in Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape: he is saying that there are scientifically establishable truths about ethics. And if that’s true, then let Eric tell us what those truths are—without first defining, based on his taste, what is “moral” and “immoral.” Let him give us a list of all the behaviors he considers objectively immoral.
Now, the second paragraph simply jumps to a conclusion — the horse has the staggers, perhaps. It is, in short, a non sequitur, since it does not follow, from anything that I have said, that an ought can be derived from an is. To oversimplify, Harris thinks he can jump from facts about human neurophysiology to facts about what we ought to do, and I don’t think we can make this jump. It does not follow that we cannot, however (though with less definiteness than either mathematics or the physical or biological sciences), determine what things are or are not good or bad, right or wrong. But I certainly did not say, and do not say, that “there are scientifically establishable truths about ethics,” though, clearly, what makes an act right or wrong is related to, though not reducible to, states of human beings or animals, or to things that are related to such states. It does not follow from this that there will be disagreements about what is or is not true in morality.
Let’s take the question that is asked: “ Is it objectively true that abortion is wrong, or that a moral society must give everyone health care?” First, let me say that I think there is something objective about our beliefs about what is right or wrong in the cases mentioned, though I would have spoken about a just society, not a moral one. Second, I think it is odd to focus on the fact that the objectivity of moral truths is less obvious in less clear-cut cases, for, after all, the objectivity of scientific findings is less obvious where there is disagreement too. However, to start with social justice, I would say that a society is more just when it more equitably provides conditions so that the life chances of individuals within that society are not hindered by disadvantages or improved by advantages for which individuals alone are not themselves responsible. I don’t think there’s much question about that. That does not spell out an entire social programme, but it does at least provide the skeleton of one. So, in fact, a more just society would provide public health care, though public health care might reasonably say, of someone who smokes, for example, that they are responsible for the likely outcomes of so doing. A more just society would not privilege rich kids over poor kids, as well. (I think Philip Kitcher makes such a proposal, that is, to even out the life-chances of individuals in every generation, so that no one is unjustly privileged or disadvantaged, in his book, The Ethical Project, which I have read but once, so far, and have not yet had time to reflect on more substantially. But such a system would, I think, make societies more just.)
Abortion raises some difficulties, but not so many as is often supposed. While the religious value human life equally, no matter what its kind or quality, or at least claim to do so, they do this on insufficient, or, one might justly claim, bogus grounds, based largely on their belief in an infinitely wise and powerful valuer. Other than that, it seems to me, there is only one person who counts with respect to decisions regarding the continuation of a pregnancy, and that is the pregnant woman. No one should have veto power over a woman’s decision in this matter, for this is a life decision for a person, and no one should be able to decide, irrevocably, for another person, regarding the course of her life. Of course, once the foetus is viable, the moral ground may reasonably be thought to shift, at least slightly, but not, for example, if the only way to save the woman’s life is to destroy the foetus.
Having said this, however, it seems to me that there are, quite objectively, reasons for action, or reasons which should deter us from action. Certainly, gratuitous harm to another person is simply wrong, and it sounds odd to me to have this dismissed as simply a subjective belief or opinion. The same goes for the contrary. An act of gratuitous kindness, other things being equal, is a good. That some people do not live according to reasonably based moral principles does not reduce those principles to subjective opinion. Some people, for example, many Muslims, as well as some Christians, value women less than they value men, believe that women are in need of male control and invigilation, and deserve to be physically assaulted if they do not act as they are required to by the men who control them. This is either a cultural practice with a history, but no obvious moral foundation, or it is based, more likely, in religious beliefs for which unsubstantiated claims are made. In either case, the lives of both men and women in those societies could be improved by the application of a few rules concerning respect for human rights. And if it is said that rights are simply social creations, I have no problem with that, but it makes them no less real, nor does it show that they are just a matter of opinion. After all, institutions like armies are social creations, but it would be foolish not to recognise their reality.
In addition to this there are other kinds of knowledge claims that are not based upon theory construction, experiment and observation and confirmation or falsification, that is, that knowledge claims that do not constitute scientific knowledge. There is knowledge of art and the effects of different techniques and materials. There is cultural understanding of the part that art and architecture, literature and music play in the life and vitality of a society, that are is not based simply on observation and confirmation, but more broadly on what may be called interpretation. But it seems odd to say that none of this can constitute knowledge, even though it is not the kind of knowledge that science provides. This is why Kitcher began his New Republic essay on scientism, “The Trouble with Scientism,” with precisely this kind of cultural understanding and knowledge, by invoking the example of the commemoration of the bombing of Coventry and Dresden. Simply to deny that there is knowledge involved here is to make the scientistic claim circular, unless a non-circular reason can be given for dismissing such knowledge claims.
Now I have given examples of several types of knowledge, scientific, mathematical, logical, moral, cultural, etc., and we could add more, including the kind of knowledge involved in knowing a language, knowing a person, knowing how to ride a bike, knowing music theory and performance, knowing what it is like to climb Everest, knowing what it is like to be in love, and we could go on and on, obviously. The verb ‘to know’ has a multitude of uses, and some of it constitutes quite straightforward examples of knowing something about the world, including the social/cultural world, literature, music, music theory, art, art theory and history, history itself, and on and on through all sorts of domains of knowledge, of which it cannot be said that empirical evidence alone would be sufficient warrant for the claim to know. Which leaves me with the question: Why is it thought so important to confine the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘know’ to scientific ways of knowing alone, important as, in very truth, that way of knowing is? It seems to me that this would impoverish us intolerably, and I wonder why anyone wants to do it?
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*This, by the way, is why Karl Popper used falsification as the basis of marking off meaningful empirical statements from nonsense, instead of using the idea of inductive confirmation, for nothing is absolutely confirmed, but it can be absolutely disconfirmed or falsified. What we consider to be the most reliable scientific knowledge are theories and hypotheses that we have repeatedly tried to falsify, and which have withstood those tests.
I have no doubt that science is the only such form of inquiry — provided that one broadens ones meaning of “science” so that it includes all methods that produce objective facts and truths.
Having participated in some discussions of this, it seems to me that the proponents of scientism are doing precisely that; then are interpreting “science” so broadly, so inclusively, that every reliably way of producing objective facts becomes part of what they consider to be science. And that make the discussion little more than a rhetorical game.
I think you have given examples of different ways in which the word ‘knowledge’ may be used, without giving an example of what that knowledge is, but I think you are simply wrong to use the word ‘objective’ with some of those ways. Unless, of course, you are also using ‘objective’ in different ways too. In which case you are not saying very much beyond your personal preferences.
When people talk about art, music and literature, they often focus on “is it good or bad” and not what it represents. Art, music and literature describe things, concepts, and ideas and they need be objective if more than the creator is to share in the work. Colors and forms, tempos and tones, and words and grammar provide information we can relate to our own experiences. Sometimes we need someone to translate and interpret, but this is no different than what need be done for science to be understandable. Science can also be “good or bad” – can have qualitative aspects just as art, music and literature do.
It is not clear to whom DiscoveredJoys comment is addressed.
I am surprised at the picture of a knight dressed for combat and the word gauntlet as a metaphor for a challenge. Surely these differences can be discussed without reference to armed fighting or dueling.
Although I don’t think it will resolve anything, I would like to offer the definition of science that Larry Moran used in his talk at Eschaton: science is a way of knowing based on evidence, healthy skepticism, and rational thinking.
As much as I would like to substitute literature for science in this definition, I realize that isn’t possible.
Putnam, Finkelstein, and other philosophers of physics claimed in the 70′s that logic was also empirical, contrary to your assertion—and they further argued that in fact the logic of this world, at the quantum level, is not that of the propositional calculus you used. If logic itself is empirical, score a point for Jerry!
Lou,
I am not sure Putnam feels that way now. Nevertheless, quantum logic fails, in at least one respect, in that there’s no convincing quantum-logical defense of the value-definiteness thesis. If you follow Putnam’s logic you end up with absurd conclusions.
Also, Putnam acts as if there is some neutral place outside logic from which to decide to adopt a certain logic. There isn’t and it is a serious logical misunderstanding if one thinks there are ‘logics’ from which to choose, as Kripke pointed out.
However, I will admit that Putnam could be right, but, strangely, if Putnam is right it leaves a baffling possibility that logic could be both empirical and not empirical. Perhaps, more precise, there could be a quantum logic that is empirical and a classical logic that is not.
Whether Putnam is right or wrong the persistent difficulty in understanding quantum mechanics has been understanding what it means for the world to have the structure that the mathematics seems to attribute to it. So, maybe we will never fully grasp the world’s logical structure.
Regard
Before going on to say anything more on these issues, let me just assure Veronica that the knight in armour, and the martial imagery were just a joke. Now, having just returned to my computer after a hiatus (for several reasons), I will address myself to the issues invoked. I need to do a bit of “homework” first! I will mention one thing. Michael, you speak about art, literature and music as being good or bad, not as representing anything. Two things. First, the claim that something is a good thing of its kind is already, if it can be justified, to know something that is not based scientific methodology. Second, I recall speaking to a musician about the theme music in the series Band of Brothers, and how evocative it was. He immediately explained this in terms of (now I know nothing whatsoever about music, so don’t take this as coming from my friend) being due to his use of an iterated minor fifth (or something like that — someone else will be able to fill in the blanks occupied by the words ‘minor fifth’). The same thing could be said about literature and its effect, to speak about a GM Hopkins poem, for example, and explain what Hopkins meant by “sprung rhythm” and the kinds of effect he was striving for by the use of it, and how it is exemplified in some of his poems. While it depends, obviously, an things like our perception, our feelings, etc. — there are only so many ways by which we have access to the world — it seems a bit of a stretch to speak about our knowledge of these things in terms of scientific methodology. If all that is being said is that we do not have access to things transcending the senses and reason, then we could do this without reducing all our knowledge to scientific knowledge. But I do need to look a bit more seriously at philosophical logic, the nature of analyticity, and so on, before coming back to the issue in more detail. One thing that needs to be addressed also is the nature of objectivity. It seems that people are defining objectivity in terms of the existence of external, identifiable objects, though intersubjectivity would be sufficient to establish that something is objective in the required sense of making something true. However, I must also look more closely at that.
It has been an interesting discussion.
As much as Dr. Conye is reluctant to call non-empirical endeavors knowledge, I do not get the feeling that he holds them with distain or dismissively. So even if he may be a dictionary “scientism-ist” in the way Eric describes, I do not really see any big problem with it. At the very least, I do not consider this a problem the way other inquisitors of scientism would have us believe. I think we are quite justified in holding science above other forms of knowledge, even if we do not restrict our language. We need not discard arts or math, even if they are not to be called knowledge.
I was a bit confused in the discussion of morality, in that it seems like to establish moral truths Eric only pointed to a lack of detractors. Specifically:
The assertion “gratuitous harm to another person is simply wrong” also smacks of assertion by lack of objection. This is a legitimate enough approach, but it puts quite a damper on the idea that such truths are in fact absolute and not relative.
Isn’t something that is purely a social creation more or less an exercise in conformity, and thus more a matter of opinion than an absolute? I can see how large scale conformity can acquire more traction than “just opinion”, but it does not seem to cross the threshold of being absolute.
The more I think on it the more I come to believe that there can be no true absolutes for humans, who are finite in their abilities to reason and observe. Perhaps I am being too narrow in my use of the word “absolute”, but it seeks unlimited utility from limited beings.
I find this discussion frustrating because I really don’t have time to dig though all the philosophical issues to the point where I’m fairly confident that I understand enough of it to have a thoughtful opinion. I do note that I referred to these as philosophical issues, which, if accurate, means that JAC is engaging in philosphy when he states that “science,” as broadly defined by him, is the only path to “knowledge,” as defined by him. As best I can tell offhand, he may well be right IF you’re willing to stick with his broad definition of “science” and his arguably narrow definition of “knowledge.” I suspect (but apparently don’t “know”) that there are at least two reasonable and succinct responses that really amount to objections to his technique. “The related philosphical issues are more complicated than that suggests.” and something that more or less follows from the first, “So what? Where can we go with this?” I also suspect that it’s really just intended as another basis for telling religion to stuff it, which I suspect makes it just like the free will discussion.
Eric, I think I have poorly framed my argument; I do think art, music and literature represent things. The fact that I can write a poem and others can understand its meaning indicates to me that it is objectively representing something.
Michael, that is my sense also — not, of course, that you had poorly framed your argument, but that there are other cases in which we can rightly claim to know other than the propositions of science. In one sense, even the propositions of science are questionable as paradigm cases of knowledge, since they are always subject to revision.
Anthony Paul, I have said all along that Jerry is doing philosophy, even when he least thinks so. In other words, his claim that only science produces knowledge, if it is a truth claim itself, subverts itself, because it is not itself a scientific claim, and cannot be justified by theory, iterated experiment and observation. I agree that the philosophical issues around the issue of the real and truth, etc., are very complex. That is one reason why I think the rather casual scientism that Jerry espouses is something bought on the cheap. Nor do I see a reason for it. I do not think we need maintain a strict scientism in order to fend off the arguments of the religious (though of course I could be wrong), but it does not seem to me that trying to define religion out of existence is a very helpful way to go.
John K. I wonder what you mean by this:
What it means is that doing harm to another requires justification, and I think it true, just as it is reasonably thought to be true that kindness, other things being equal, is a good.
However, warning signals go off for me when you say:
I never suggested, nor would I ever want to claim, that we can find moral absolutes. And since we can’t get to scientific absolutes either, this should not negatively affect the issue of the truth of propositions about moral right or wrong, good or bad. If atheists claim that they can be morally good without god (as they do), what is it that they are claiming? If they are claiming no more than that they can have moral opinions too, and act on them, the religious might well suggest that this is not enough to go on, that they were thinking of some way of establishing that certain things are good or bad — I would add, though the religious might not — other things being equal. So, for instance, when atheists use the argument from the Euthyphro, asking the question whether God’s commands make X good, or that God commands X because it is good, are they just pretending that, after all, there is something good? The religious believer, hearing someone say that morals are only a matter of opinion, and not of truth of falsity, might well respond with the question whether atheists have really provided a response to the religious objection that without god there can be no reality.
In addition to this, John K, trying to suggest that Jerry’s scientism is basically harmless, it seems to me that it is not, if it be not true. People could easily say that religion is harmless, though entirely a matter of myth. They might even say that it is beneficial, although entirely a matter of myth. It seems to me that truth is more important than this, and I simply do not think that knowledge claims can be restricted to the propositions of science, and that kind of intellectual imperialism is not helpful to our understanding of the world and human life. That is my concern.
I might just add to my last comment that the discussion here shows the importance of philosophy, quite aside from anything else, for the concepts that we are using here are very complex, and the clarification of them is important, if we really want to understand what we are saying. And as I read more deeply in philosophical logic, as I am doing at the moment, not having done so for nearly forty years, I am reminded, once again, of just how complex these issues are. It would be unfortunate, I think, if the nonbelieving community got the idea that these matters are easily and quickly dispensed with, for the religious are always ready to do very complex logical and metaphysical speculation. It may all be able to be countered, as some atheists have quite competently pointed out, but it should not be thought that we can do these things on the cheap.
Veronica,
If that’s a direct quote, then he’s changed his definition; it used to be “empirical, skeptical and rational”. The change to healthy skepticism looks like it might be a good change, which adds clarity, but talking about “evidence” just confuses things unless he has a clear criteria for what counts as evidence.
Now, in response to his definition of science, I’ve always carved out everyday reasoning and philosophy as being different ways of knowing that don’t fit it. Everyday reasoning is not skeptical; it tends to believe until given a reason not to, while skepticism withholds belief until given a reason to. And philosophy is not empirical because a lot of its questions are not the sort of questions that descriptive/empirical data can weigh in on. But as I commented on Coyne’s original post, we do have things that we know in philosophy, even if we don’t have all the answers. (The is/ought distinction and that positivism is self-defeating, for example).
I was setting up my case against moral absolutes. Your assertion that such a moral value was “simply wrong” was put forward as a point without contention. This is a very valid thing to do in a discussion, people must agree on various terms in order to have a productive dialog. It only becomes a problem if you want such a value to be absolute. As it turns out you seem to agree there are no moral absolutes, so in the end I was arguing against my own misconception of your position.
I have trouble thinking of morals outside a visceral reaction. Harming children horrifies me, so I am eager to call that goal immoral. Beyond that, I have little justification. It is not difficult to find other humans who have a similar attitude, so we can simply agree and move forward to implications and effectively stopping that kind of behavior. This kind of exercise is a lot like using a language, so it seems like there can be quite a few moral systems that are very different from each other, much like there are different languages. Is this moral relativism? Perhaps. I would also add that just because another language exists I am not entirely obligated to use or respect its use, so I am not arguing that anything goes. (I realize just now I have gone quite a bit off topic here, do not feel obligated to instruct me in moral thinking or embark on the enormous topic of morals in general.) By contrast, no amount of emotional attachment is going to change the result of an experiment, so scientific results have a vastly greater claim to approaching absolute truths than moral discussions ever can.
The arts and humanities do not really seem to be under siege by narrow minded scientists. The idea that paintings are never going to tell you things about how the world works the way physics will does not seem all that controversial, really. Many scientists will still go the galleries even if such visits do nothing for their profession. Do you have examples of scientism fundamentalists oppressing other forms of knowledge, beyond misnaming them? Science knowledge is just better knowledge, in a variety of ways. Emphasizing its exceptional position in the realm of knowledge still does not strike me as all that harmful. If Dr. Conye or others are doing harm beyond vocabulary, I would like to know about it.
On a small aside, I have always considered Euthyphro something of an ad absurdum on theistic frameworks, which would not really require the wholehearted acceptance of the concept of goodness (or a god, for that matter!). Even if we were to grant god and goodness, such a god could not be the sole author of such goodness via command.
I just started reading, and haven’t made it far yet. But this bothers me enough to comment:
“…but my opponent, in this case Sir Jerry Coyne, has not yet provided conclusive demonstration that there are none.”
Demanding proof of the negative? Come on, Eric, you know that isn’t how it works!
Well, yes, gbjames, in the sense of proving the non-existence of something you might be quite correct, but he should at least be able to say why the examples of knowledge I have proposed — math, logic, history, literary criticism, art criticism, playing of instruments, operating equipment, a language etc. — are not knowledge. If he just says, well, only science is knowledge, then that is basically circular. If, however, he points out the conditions for anything to be considered knowledge, and he has so far only waved generally in the direction of anything like that, then we may be closer to an answer. The point is that the basis for claiming that something measures up to what he considers knowledge is a necessary factor here. It can’t simply be allowed to be merely vaguely illustrated by pointing generally in the direction of scientific method. So, it’s not quite demanding proof of a negative, but more specification of what constitutes knowledge, and I think I have pointed to some things which might justly be considered knowledge that are not caught by a definition of knowledge in terms of scientific method. So, I think you should be less troubled than you are.
I must let Jerry speak for himself, of course. I suspect he’d say, and I’d agree, that saying (for example) “history is knowledge” is not a helpful way to phrase things. History is a discipline that may be done in a scientific way (“science defined broadly”, as Jerry would say) or it can be done unscientifically, as we see done by “historians” like David Barton who just makes it up. Revelation as History, you might say.
I’m thinking you are using a definition of “science” that is much more restrictive than Coyne would. Logic and math are tools which science uses. They are not themselves forms forms of knowledge. Logic in the absence of checking your evidence is not going to produce a lot of what I’d call knowledge. As for literary criticism and and art history, I’d say the same thing I said about History in general. If it is done scientifically (again… broadly defined), you may end up learning something about the universe. If not, you may feel good, but I don’t think you’ve gained much knowledge.
Now… I must read the rest of the post.
But why wouldn’t you call knowing about the structure of valid or invalid arguments knowledge? It’s not what you’d call knowledge, you say, but you have to give a reason for not doing so. Why is it not knowledge? Why is the knowledge of calculus not knowledge? I simply do not understand this peculiar use of language. You may define science as broadly as you like, but it won’t include some of the fascinating detail about how life in the trenches in WW I relates to English literature, and to the evocation of rural scenes, and various other things pointed out by Paul Fussell in his remarkable book The Great War and Modern Memory, a fascinating study of the various ways in which the Great War influenced modern culture, which is a mixture of history, anthropology, literary criticism, etc. But why should studying this sort of influence, which required an incredible amount of knowledge, to begin with, and a sensitive ear and eye for the cultural exemplifications of the Great War’s influence, and the interpretive work that accompanies it, not count as a particularly valuable compendium of cultural knowledge and understanding? There is no reason for supposing that knowledge, as such, should be confined in the way suggested, except that it evinces a high valuation of science and its achievements. And while, wonderful as they are as a human cognitive achievement, confining the attribution of knowledge to science simply doesn’t make sense. If you want to do this, and say something like, “I know this is peculiar, but I want to honour science in this particular way, by limiting what I will call knowledge to science and related disciplines,” well, that’s fine, but what you and Jerry seem to be doing is something quite different: to say that, peculiar as it is, this just is what we mean by ‘knowledge’. And I don’t think that is true.
“In addition to this there are other kinds of knowledge claims that are not based upon theory construction, experiment and observation and confirmation or falsification, that is, that knowledge claims that do not constitute scientific knowledge. There is knowledge of art and the effects of different techniques and materials.”
I don’t think this is actually true, at least not in how I think you intend. How do you determine the effects of different techniques and materials in art in the absence of observation? Do you just divine that the use color and form in Munch’s “The Scream” produce an alarm response in the viewer or do you check with viewers to find out. If you don’t do the latter then you aren’t really gaining much knowledge beyond “I feel alarm when I look a that painting”. But even that is little bit of an experiment: look at the wall and observe the result.
“Knowledge of art and the effects…” is not an alternate way to gain knowledge. It is just another bit bunch of knowledge gained somehow. And if not by observation, etc. (science, broadly defined) then by what? The alternative is, I think, just making it up. Revelation.
verbosestoic
No, I didn’t put quotations around Larry Moran’s definition because I scribbled it down while listening to his Eschaton talk. I realize that the definition I offered is slightly different than the definitions on his blog, Sandwalk.
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Michael Fugate
Understanding the meaning of a poem is subjective rather than objective and understanding a poem does not mean that one knows what it means or knows what the poet intended it to mean. That’s why literary critics differ about poetry and literature.
Veronica, why is understanding the meaning of a poem (purely) subjective? We can discuss it, disagree about it, refine our interpretation of it, be wrong about it: all of the above. While we have a subjective response to poetry, music, art, etc., it is not simply subjective, for we have disciplines which talk about art, music, and literature, etc., with sophistication. I used to have a friend, many years ago now, who saw the humour in music. I could not myself notice the wit, but composers sometimes, I have been led to believe, are witty, and we can (if we know enough about music) know about it, and respond appropriately to it. Some of this kind of interpretive activity may be hot air, but all of it? I doubt it. Indeed, I am sure that is not correct, for I have done quite a bit of it myself, and believe that I have conveyed with some sensitivity and accuracy the meaning of various pieces of literature. Of course, the fact that we check with each other, find out what each other’s responses are, is what gbjames and others would use to assimilate literary criticism to science, but that, I think, is simply a determination to be circular. For much of this is not simply empirical information, but the result of interpretive processes. I enter the lists about this kind of thing, but it seems to me, largely, a pointless exercise, for even those who speak of knowledge as scientific keep extending the boundaries to include other kinds of knowledge which they say, by their understanding, and by extension, may be give the accolade of science. I think it is all rather pointless, but the pointlessness has a purpose, to privilege science above all other forms of knowledge, and that, I think, is not only false but seriously misleading as to the nature of knowledge. Yes, science is a vital and very remarkable cognitive achievement, but it is not the only cognitive achievement, and while some people think religion is included in this, I think that is wrong, but we don’t need to redefine all knowledge as science in order to show this.
Is just talking about our reactions to a poem knowledge? Are you making this case, Eric, because you think that us “scientismists” (can I use that word?) don’t value anything that isn’t knowledge?
Just because I am unwilling to describe my reaction to Verdi’s Requiem as “knowledge” doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate it. I do. It has a profoundly moving effect on me when I listen to it. But that’s not knowledge. It is an emotional reaction to an art work.
I can gain knowledge _about_ it by using the tools of science (broadly defined) to learn about Verdi, the man, the world he composed in, his musical and intellectual influences. If I listen repeatedly I can detect patterns that I missed on my first listen. That stuff is knowledge. But I gained it by investigating the world, verifying (indirectly mostly) as best I can that what I learned is actually accurate. When I’m listening, I’m learning the artwork. I’m not really learning a lot about the world outside the artwork. It isn’t telling me anything about (for example) what to expect in the fictional afterlife.
Veronica, If the author of a poem is the only one who understands its meaning, then what is the point of writing poetry?
Maybe I should weigh in, being a composer. Yes, composers are often deliberately humorous in their compositions. In the first movement of Beethoven’s 3rd symphony, for instance, there is a famous place where, after a huge development of the materials of the piece, he comes to the point in the piece where, according to the formal conventions of first movements of classical symphonies, the opening themes of the piece are to be recapitulated. At that point he has the 2nd horn play the first few notes of the first theme as a solo, as though the horn player miscounted rest and jumped the gun on the rest of the orchestra.
In order to get the joke, you have to know various things about formal conventions, orchestration, stereotypes of the mental capacities of brass players, Beethoven’s propensity to do unexpected things with these, etc. All of these things are knowledge, but I think that although there is listener interpretation involved, the background knowledge is itself dependent upon observation — one requires knowledge, gained from observation, to ascribe a reasonably high probability to the notion that Beethoven intended it to be a joke.
There are further things that might be said. It’s not hard, given a little musical training, to know that this movement is in triple time (and to guess 3/4, if one is familiar with other conventions), and if one has perfect pitch, one can tell that it is in E-flat major. Where it gets interesting is that music theorists differ on what the arbiter of such a prediction should be.
Most people would say “look at the score and see how Beethoven wrote it,” and would ascribe some kind of ontological status to the properties contained in the score: the music is in E-flat major and is in 3/4 time because that is how Beethoven notated it. On the other hand, some theorists treat “the score” as just one of many possible theories of the piece. For instance, one could “fix the same facts” in music notation by writing the musical events out in A-major and in 5/4 time, and this score would in fact be a worse theory of the piece than the score written in E-flat major and in 3/4 — the latter score would describe the events of the piece more efficiently, and would comport better with the formal music theories at play in the early 19th-century German-speaking musical world. But again, arriving at this knowledge depends a great deal upon observation.
This comes up quite often in composition lessons: often a student will get his/her notation wrong relative to the combination of intentions they have about the music and the constraints of the notation and performance practice in play. For many people it seems utterly impossible for a composer to be wrong about his/her own score, but the best answer is to consider that the score is a set of instructions for performers, and the end product is determined a great deal by the form of the piece. Another way to say this is that if Beethoven had written his movement in A-major and in 5/4 time, but with exactly the same musical events, it would just confuse the musicians who have to play it, because it would sound all the world to them like a piece in E-flat and 3/4: it would be difficult to play it as an A-major 5/4 piece. The composer can be mistaken about the best way to notate something given an imagined end result. Itw ouldb el ikea ne ssayistw hob elievedt hisw ast heb estw ayt ow ritea ni ntelligibles entence.
Let’s take natural selection – a scientific concept.
It can be described mathematically with ps,qs Ns and ws
It can be described verbally using fitness, variation, heritability, and gene frequencies.
It can also be described metaphorically like Darwin did with his wedge analogy.
Are all three knowledge?
Michael, the ‘point’ of writing poetry is the same as the point of writing music, or writing novels, or writing screenplays, or painting, or sculpture; to feel good about one’s own achievement and to entertain other people. Which is perfectly valid and worthwhile, both for the creator and for those people who are entertained.
Whether they are informed or not is immaterial.
“Are all three knowledge?”
Nothing can be ‘knowledge’ until it gets into a brain. But if all three variations allow a person hearing them to do something that they couldn’t do previously, then yes, they are knowledge, although they may be knowledge that is quickly forgotten. If they merely evoke a vague feeling of comprehension that has no practical expression, though, or produces assertions and claims that are just plain wrong, then they are no more ‘knowledge’ than the ‘knowledge’ of God’s love that so many theists claim to have.
I think I take exception to this whole thing, but I actually suspect you mean this in a way that I’m not picking up on.
I think of my compositional work just as much a kind of musical research as art — composition is a means of exploring what kinds of musical structure is possible. I’m pretty sure that this is a kind of knowledge, but it is a knowledge about music, not about “what music is about.”
Perhaps this kind of work falls under “feel good about one’s own achievement,” but I don’t think so. In any event, the last 60-70 years of music theory has become increasingly technical, and it has imported lots of work from math, philosophy, and the sciences.
The ways in which writing and studying music could be construed as a scientific enterprise in some sense was a really pressing topic in the mid 20th century. For a small taste, here’s a short passage from a 1965 article by Milton Babbitt (“The Structure and Function of Musical Theory”):
ANY ‘kind of musical structure is possible’, if you just mean producing a sequence of sounds. But if your assessment of what’s ‘possible’ includes taking into account the reactions of other people, then presumably you are looking to gratify them in some way — or perhaps to horrify them for your own gratification. And whether you succeed is an empirical issue, Even if you are your only audience, it’s still a matter of observation, surely, that tells you what ‘sounds like’ music and what doesn’t. ‘Musical theory’ as I understand it is just a way of attempting to describe and predict what ‘sounds good’ and distinguish it from what doesn’t.
I’m not denying that there can be learning associated with a particular cultural experience; you can learn about Norse mythology from Wagner’s Ring cycle, for instance. But the connection is contingent, not necessary; experience and knowledge acquisition are not synonymous, no matter how deep and rich and satisfying the experience may be.
Well, maybe this isn’t the space to get into this, but no, it’s not the case that ANY kind of musical structure is possible, just as it’s not possible to naively define certain kinds of sets without leading to contradiction or antinomy (e.g. Russell’s paradox).
If you were to say “write me a piece that has these features,” it’s possible that the features you cite might actually be incompatible with each other. And sometimes this works out in really counterintuitive ways (I’ll concede that these are usually deductive problems rather than empirical ones, so “discoveries” in musical structure generally work the same way as “discoveries” in math, but none the worse as real knowledge).
There’s a great deal else that can be learned from Wagner’s Ring cycle — for instance (forgive the music theory jargon — this is why this isn’t the place for this kind of discussion), Götterdämmerung ends in D-flat, after a long journey through other keys (with lots of “third relations”) and a sequential transformation of themes associated with Brünnhilde, Valhalla, and the Ring itself.
It’s an open question whether this passage will succumb to the kind of music theory that explains the events of, say, a Mozart quartet (which will be applicable to the musics of Bach through Brahms, roughly*). It’s a great passage to use to test various theories of tonality to see if they are capable of covering and accounting for the things that led Wagner to make the decisions he did. It’s not just about what “sounds good” — it’s about what combinations or sequences of material can cohere, and in what way. If a theory that has been shown to work with Scarlatti’s music does or does not apply to Wagner’s, you’ve learned something about musical possibility, or at the very least, about the musical similarities and differences between Wagner and Scarlatti.
————————
* The best theory of tonality is, in my opinion, Schenker’s; just google “Schenkerian theory.” When formalized, to a first approximation it resembles generative/transformational linguistics, and there are lots of theorists who team up with cognitive psychologists to find out whether these kinds of hierarchical musical structures are “instinctual” or “learned,” and to what degree this is influenced by language modules. This is important because the group theory behind these pitch structures is only possible with a very restricted class of musical sounds, and there are some for which any attempt to build analogous structures with other sounds will just not work out.
Matt, this seems like a deliberate retreat to obscurantism. I say ‘sounds good’, you say ‘coheres’. But since, physically speaking, ANY combination of sounds can be made and heard at any time, distinguishing those that ‘cohere’ from those that don’t seems to me just a back-handed way of appealing to subjective judgements based on aesthetic reactions.
If musicologist A says ‘Yes, that coheres’, and musicologist B says ‘No, it doesn’t', how do they resolve their differences? Is there an objective standard of ‘coherence’ they can appeal to? Or like Eric’s poetry-readers, are they eternally condemned to ‘know’ different and contradictory propositions?
OK, here’s an analogy. I might have the physics wrong, so bear with me, but I think you’ll get the gist.
Imagine a room full of air with several currents. You take a snapshot of all the air particles in the room, recording each particle’s position and velocity (to within the limits of uncertainty — this doesn’t have to be exactly accurate). Then a millisecond or so later (I don’t actually know what the relevant time interval would be), you do the same thing. Thus, each particle has five data points — a unique label, position A, position B, velocity A, and velocity B.
Then you randomly shuffle the list of data for the particles, and give it to two scientists to analyze.
The first hypothesizes that something interesting might be found by looking for correlations in particle position, and sure enough, he notices that change in position is correlated highly with initial position — particles that are close to each other tend to have similar first-difference velocity. He also decides he can look at relative density by position and infer pressure differences that might indicate a sound wave propagating. In short, he can give a rough picture of the emergent dynamics of the system.
The second scientist hypothesizes that something interesting might be found by looking for correlations in particle velocities from time A to time B, but to his disappointment, he finds that the first-difference acceleration has little to do with initial velocity, and declares that therefore there is no picture in the data to be found at all.
There is an absolutely huge number of ways to group and analyze the list of data. If scientist A says “Yes, there is an emergent large-scale structure to this data,” and scientist B says ,”No, there isn’t,” how do they resolve their differences? Is there an objective standard of “coherence” they can appeal to? Is any analysis of the data only valid by appealing to subjective judgments based on aesthetic reactions? If you had to choose, which one is a better explanation of the data?
There are a list of standards that one might point to (simplicity, scope, conservatism, etc.), and there are going to be similar standards for music theory (some theorists think they’re the same standards as the scientists’). If you have a theory that subsumes the events of an entire piece and shows how music from the beginning has a predictable structural relationship to music 5 minutes later, and another theory that works great for the first three bars of the piece and fails for the rest, we’re going to say that the first one is objectively a better theory, by our intersubjective standards.
(I’m sorry for the long posts, you all… I should probably quit — everyone bristles a little when others don’t take their line of work that seriously)
I’m not sure quite how this relates to my question, but the point here is surely that both scientists are working with measurable properties of the air molecules, and if the second scientist doesn’t ‘get it’, the first scientist can show them the data regarding these properties and pass on the knowledge that he or she has deduced.
Appreciating music or poetry, though — to refer back to Eric’s example — is not just a matter of passing on information that A happens to have and B doesn’t. If I like The Waste Land and you hate it, it’s not because the words you read off your page are different from the words I read off mine, or because you have different facts in your head than I do. It’s quite possible that I could pass on to you every single piece of information I regard as important in appreciating the poem, and you could still say “Meh — I don’t like it”. Claims like ‘The Waste Land is a profoundly moving poem’ are meaningless without a reference to who it is that the poem is supposed to be moving. And the same is presumably true of music.
You’ve obviously trained your musical perceptions so that you can rate music rapidly, reliably and consistently, and defend your ratings. But what you’re rating is surely the properties of an interaction between music and a human brain, not a property of the music itself. It’s not surprising (as some people seem to think it is) that such interactions tend to produce similar results, because we are after all very closely related. But — to take an extreme example — if humans all disappear on December 21st, the question of whether any new music produced after that date — by computers, say — is ‘coherent’ becomes meaningless, since there is no-one left for it to be coherent TO.
I think this is the crux of where we disagree. We do have different facts in our heads. If you are able to recognize a reference to Shakespeare, a pun on an English idiom, or some kind of formal device in the poetry that I am just oblivious to, you have gleaned more facts from the data of the poem than I have. For what I’m trying to get across here, the question of whether or not someone enjoys the work or finds it “profoundly moving” is totally secondary to how the work of art is put together. I’m far more concerned with an artwork as a work of thought than as something to get jollies from.
Music analysis often works exactly the way you’re describing with the two scientists. One person doesn’t “get it,” and the other shows them the musical data and how to parse it and overlay a structural interpretation. Whether either one actually likes the work is irrelevant to the question of whether the analysis is good.
Two scientists can argue about the dynamics of a galaxy without worrying about whether either of them finds the galaxy beautiful — it just doesn’t matter.
‘…the ‘point’ of writing poetry is the same as the point of writing music, or writing novels, or writing screenplays, or painting, or sculpture; to feel good about one’s own achievement and to entertain other people. Which is perfectly valid and worthwhile, both for the creator and for those people who are entertained.’ But you do not, Corio, sound as if you believe what you are saying – at least, what comes across is that, for you, the arts are a self-indulgent activity to which you feel superior, and consequently you can have the satisfaction of condescending to artists. Do not scientists also feel good about their achievements? And if you seriously believe that, say, Shakespeare’s motive in writing ‘King Lear’, Milton’s in writing ‘Paradise Lost’, William Byrd’s in writing his masses and motets, Beethoven’s in writing his quartet, opus 132, Schubert’s in writing his piano sonata no. 21, Mikhail Bulgakov’s in writing ‘The Master and Margharita’, Paul Celan in writing ‘Todesfuge’, Primo Levi in writing what he did, was the trivial one of feeling ‘good’ about their achievement, I think you owe it to us to explain why you think this way. How do you know this? Have you ever bothered to talk to a genuine artist about his or her work? Have you ever bothered to acquaint yourself with the work of a good critic of the arts? Do you really want to indulge in this ignorant philistinism? I am reminded by your attitude of the irritation, not to say fury, that Montaigne aroused in Descartes and Pascal, both of whom tried to condescend to that splendidly various, wise, honest and hard-to-pin-down gentleman. Matt is absolutely right to assert that music (and plays, poems and novels, etc) have objective structures that can be discussed; interpretation is certainly not an arbitrary activity, or a matter of arbitrary likes and dislikes. The arts involve knowledge in all sorts of ways, but it is not the institutionalised knowledge that is science. And leaving aside the arts, there are bodies of knowledge such as ‘folk biology’, which obviously does not rise to level of science but is nevertheless often surprisingly (to some people, though not to me) accurate – if you are a hunter or a gatherer of plants for food then you need to know quite a lot. I remember a few years ago an argument in the comments to one of Jerry Coyne’s articles about scientists honouring native informants who had introduced them to new species by using their names when naming those species: a few commenters, scientists to a man as I recall, said, no, native informants and helpers shouldn’t be so honoured since they weren’t scientists; the implication, it seemed strongly and shockingly to me, was that there was no reason to show courtesy to ignorant savages. The Enlightenment had certainly not penetrated in all its aspects into these people’s minds.
I’ve certainly got left behind in this discussion, and it seems to have prospered very well without me. One of the things that I think needs to be stressed is the idea of knowledge somehow being “about the world”, and therefore, in essence, somehow scientific. But of course our knowledge is of the world. To respond to a Verdi opera is to have a human experience. To speak about that response to someone else, and begin to firm up some things about the structure of the music, the significance of the words, and how, working together, these provide the underpinnings for the experience, is already to begin to know something about the world. To continue on to expand in more detail about the “meaning” of the story, and its significance for the time at which it was written, brings into play the contemporary social/political/cultural setting, and may say a great deal about it. This would constitute knowledge not only of the music itself, but of its wider social location and its relationships with other contemporaneous events. There is the suggestion that Verdi was a radical, perhaps even a revolutionary, so we might be able to detect a political resonance to his work, in addition to its function as entertainment and story telling. My point is that this knowledge — which, of course, is about the world — what else would our knowledge be of — is not scientific knowledge, and there is no reason for calling it so. The kinds of experiences, and their intersection with political-social reality, are of course about the world, and particularly the human world, and can include very subtle yet complex references to social and political realities, plus expressions of support for specific possibilities and preferences. To try to reduce this complex of art, social comment, political action to science seems, to me anyway, trying to force something into a domain of knowledge where it does not belong, and I cannot see any reason for doing it. Indeed, it seems to me to be an impoverishment of what it means to know. Of course, widening the possibilities of knowledge like this will inevitably give some comfort to religion, for they might think they see room in there for religious understanding as well, and in one sense, as I have said before, they will probably be right. For religions have talked a lot about the nature of being human (theological anthropology) as well as about morality, and in the process of trying to fit the scriptural message in with a more reasonable and humane morality, many theologians may be seen to contribute to a deeper understanding of human possibilities. That is a matter for discussion. However, I don’t think they will succeed in their major claims, and will have to be content with seeing religion as a purely this world avocation, and of no significance for any but those who seek to involve themselves in it. My point is simply that what we know and how we know is a very complex process, and includes far more than the propositions of science and their confirmation, important as science is for human progress and well-being. But for the uses of science we will have to understand our humanity in another way. Thus the importance of other types of knowledge, more free-form, less conclusive, yet still, for all that, valuable ways of knowing about ourselves and our possibilities.
Along with those few comments, there are such rich possibilities in what Another Matt and Tim Harris say above about the way music can be understood, about humour in music, about the structure of music, and, as Tim Harris says:
This is what I have been trying to say in a number of different ways, but Tim says it better, and Another Matt’s point of view as a composer is of great significance here. It scarcely does to dismiss either he or Tim are saying by trying to squeeze all knowledge into scientific shape, just because — and there is no doubt about this — science happens to be the most reliable form of knowledge about the world that has been yet achieved. But to take that as the paradigm of knowledge itself seems to me to be seriously misplaced, and to devalue other forms of knowledge that play a vital role in our understanding of ourselves and the world, as well as contributing to the vitality and richness of our cultural life. I simply do not understand why anyone should set out on such a quixotic and destructive adventure.
The most powerful objection to scientism is the law of non-contradiction. This law is not discovered by science, and is actually a necessary presupposition of any coherent thought whatsoever, including all scientific inquiry. It is not discovered by any empirical observation or experiment, because any inference from any empirical phenomena presupposes its truth. At best, it is discovered by pure reason, and it would be a perverse abuse of the term “science” to say that the truths of pure reason are “scientific”. And if that is true, then it necessarily follows that there are truths that are known independent of science, which means that the claim that the only knowable truths are due to scientific inquiry is utterly false.
There are things that are much more concrete than those I’ve described. Say I play you a piece, and 30 seconds in I pause it and ask you to identify what pitches were sounding at that moment.
Some musicians are able to do this just by listening — they have “absolute pitch.” Others will be able to do it if you tell them what pitch(es) the piece began on — they have “relative pitch.” Some musicians are able to do it only with certain kinds of music — e.g. music written for their instrument, or music that has one kind of structure but not another. Some of them will know the piece and remember what happened at that point in the music, without being able to make such identifications for pieces they don’t already know. Most people just don’t have the training to do it at all.
In these conversations we have often brought up the distinction in German between “wissen” and “kennen” — the two verbs which translate to “know” in English, with confusing consequences. When I said “some of them know the piece,” I’m pretty sure that’s in the “kennen” sense — the sense in which I know the back of my hand or my grandmother.
But notice that “kennen” sometimes overlaps with, and sometimes depends upon “wissen” kinds of knowledge (I’ll use the word): if I “know San Francisco” (kennen), presumably I know all sorts of facts about San Francisco (wissen) that allow me to assert my familiarity with it. I will need to know geographical facts, facts about the location, menus, hours, and price range of various restaurants, facts about transportation, weather, etc. Most of these things will have become knowledge through observation, but it’s not clear to me whether this entails that this is also “scientific knowledge.”
The simple question “Do you know the new Camry?” will have very different meaning with a different associated web of “wissen”-sense beliefs, when uttered by an average driver, a Toyota salesman, or a mechanic, and much of this will depend upon whom the question was directed to. And it’s not immediately clear to me whether “kennen” actually reduces to a complex web of “wissen” in all cases.
Maybe another thing worth discussing is Ryle’s distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing that” — I can know how to ride a bike or drive a car or use a web browser (knowledge how), without knowing anything about the mechanical features of these instruments that make them work (knowledge that).
I wanted to address this from dguller briefly:
I think most “scientismists” would claim all the relevant logical laws as an inherent part of the scientific method. I think I’d be convinced by the argument that this law doesn’t count as “knowledge,” but is more an assumed technology that helps us gain knowledge.
There are other controversies, though. Let’s say I prove a novel theorem in some branch of mathematics — have I found new knowledge or not? It feels like discovery because I’ve had to work really hard to deduce the result, it took a lot of time, there were many working hypotheses that had to be thrown out. Yet, my result was “really just” inherent in the accepted axioms and logical rules, so in some sense I’ve already accepted the result of my proof by accepting the axioms and rules.
I don’t see how this question about knowledge can go without running up against Quine’s treatment of “analytic” and “synthetic” in his famous Two Dogmas of Empiricism essay.
I seem to be seeing people talking past each other.
It seems to me the debate runs around the idea of truth and knowledge. For scientists, a pragmatic definition is of use. Truth is conditional and knowledge is provisional. We always await new data. Philosophy, on the other hand, seems to set up as a goal, a notion of absolute knowledge and absolute truth. Unfortunately for philosophers (for whom I have the utmost respect) the arguments around absolutes is simply unpragmatic. Science is a limited view focusing on physical reality assuming philosophical realism. It is so effective in human experience that you have to be a philosopher to take exception. Other kinds of “knowledge” or “truth” whether from literature or visual arts tend toward emotional reward at understanding associations and connections which were not obvious. We read Shakespear and
Sorry, hit a bad key. Continuing… We read Shakespeare and find we now understand human relations seemingly better than before. Well fine, maybe we do. But, maybe we don’t. Are there insights in Shakespeare that now make no sense in light of new scientific discoveries about human nature? Not to denigrate Shakespeare, but, hey, he was only human.
Matt, I’m quite happy to agree that there are many different types of knowledge, represented in the head in many different ways. I’m not suggesting that all knowledge has to be expressible in words or propositions. But I continue to insist that the only valid way of determining WHETHER something is or is not ‘knowledge’ is to have a look; in other words, to empirically investigate some real phenomenon. Do I know how to ride a bike? Looking in my brain for neural structures won’t tell you: putting me on a bike and seeing if I can travel forwards will. Does Hobbes’s Leviathan contain genuine information about how to conduct responsible government? Let’s set up a government on Hobbes’s principles and see if it works. Is it reasonable to John Cage’s piece 4:33 as ‘coherent’? Let’s ask a bunch of musicologists and see what they say. We all know many cases where people think they have knowledge but are wrong: my sole point is that if we want to find out whether someone’s belief that they have knowledge is correct, we have to examine empirical evidence from the real world. There simply is nothing else.
Eric, I’m running out of ways to keep saying the same thing, so let me try it as a conversation:
E: Verdi’s music contains political overtones!
C: What, even for someone profoundly deaf?
E: Well, no, not for someone deaf, but for people who can hear it.
C: So someone who had never heard any Western music would gain political knowledge from listening to Verdi?
E: No, they would have to be familiar with Western music.
C: What if they were familiar with Western music but knew nothing about politics?
E: Well, obviously not them.
C: So just WHO are these people who can hear political overtones in Verdi? Is it a circular definition: ‘People who hear political overtones in Verdi’s music can hear political overtones in Verdi’s music’?
E: Of course not. People with a certain kind of background, certain kinds of training…
C: ALL of them?
E: No, a certain proportion of them.
C: But that’s an EMPIRICAL claim, isn’t it? What you’re actually saying that a certain proportion of certain types of people can detect political overtones in Verdi’s music. That’s just as scientific as the claim that, say, 20% of urban white college graduates have tried cocaine, and we can investigate it in just the same empirical way — by asking them. If we ask, say, ten thousand people from your group whether they can hear political overtones in Verdi’s music, and they all answer ‘Yes’ then we have confirmation that your claim is true. If they answer ‘No’ then we have confirmation that it’s false. Inasmuch as your claim means anything, it’s a claim about what people in a certain group will do or say in certain circumstances. And that’s certainly ‘scientific’ — in fact there are several sciences based on that very phenomenon.
Doing your homework for you, Corio (the internet is not without use):
‘In the 19th century, against the background of growing movements for national liberation and unification, interest developed in national or folk music. An aspect of Romanticism was the rise of national schools of music which inspired the various independence movements. There are thus clear affinities between Chopin and Polish nationalism, Wagner and German nationalism, Verdi and Italian nationalism, and so on. Moreover, in the years leading up to 1848, opera in Italy became a focus of dissent, with opera houses flashpoints for political unrest. In Verdi’s early phase, the late 1830s and 1840s, many of his operas can be interpreted as allegories for the Italian struggle against the Austrians and other foreign oppressors. Of these early works, the most famous is Nabucco (1842), about the captivity of the Jews in Babylon. Its chorus of the Hebrew slaves, ‘Va Pensiero’, became virtually the anthem of the national movement. Buoyed by the enormous success of Nabucco, Verdi wrote 13 operas in eight years, several of which profoundly stirred popular nationalist consciousness. In 1847 a near riot was sparked off by a performance of I Lombardi.
‘…Don Carlos is perhaps Verdi’s classic treatment of politics and personal life. The four leading characters, Philip II, his son Don Carlos, Queen Elisabeth de Valois, and the liberal Marquis of Posa have both public and private lives.
‘In each there rages a conflict between political obligations and personal feelings. The revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule is seen as the point of departure for the modern struggle for freedom, whether national, religious or individual. It also contains Verdi’s most unreserved condemnation of the Catholic church.’
You might think, in connexion with the chorus from Nabucco, of such negro spirituals as ‘Let my People Go’, and also of the way Olivier exploited Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’ as a call to patriotism in the Second World War. Interpretation and understanding in the real world take place always in a vast, complicated and ambiguous context – rendered more ambiguous by the fact that in certain periods being too explicit about your politics might well be dangerous (Osip Mandelstam died because of a poem about Stalin); many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays probably had political implications in their time to those who were sensitive to such things that are pretty well lost to us; teasing out such political implications is a task for scholars, and there was in fact a very convincing case made back in the Thirties, as I recall (I cannot remember the woman scholar’s name), that Hamlet is about, in a riddling way, the matter of who would succeed Elizabeth I – something, I feel constrained to add to forestall a sneer, that was of the utmost political importance since if there was not a smooth succession the possibility of civil war and worse was strong. In the last century, Ernst Junger’s ‘Auf den Marmorklippen’ (‘On the Marble Cliffs’, 1937) is an extraordinary political allegory of Hitler’s rise to power, but so written as to make it difficult to pin the author down. Have a look at the history of censorship.
As for John Cage and his 4’33”, like Marcel Duchamp with his signed urinal at the Armory exhibition, he was drawing attention to the way in which context (concert halls, museums) may give to things that are not usually considered art the status of art. Cage also, with his interest in Zen Buddhism, wanted to encourage people to be more open and sensitive to the world – since the ambient sound is different at every ‘performance’ of 4’33”, the ‘piece’ can never be the same. As a matter of fact, I am not greatly interested in either Duchamp’s or Cage’s provocations, but there we are.
Another matter is this: the arts, in Milton’s words, are ‘more simple, sensuous and passionate’ than, say, philosophy or science, but your suggestions about taking art out of any kind of context at all in order to find out ‘what’s really there’ do not strike me as likely to lead too much of interest (though certainly there is interesting work being done with respect rhythm and the brain, etc, but you don’t seem to be talking about that sort of thing – although you seem not to have any real interest in or understanding of the arts, you seem to be chiefly interested in putting them down); what alarms me is that you seem to be wholly unaware of what a huge and complex edifice science is, and the degree to which understanding some scientific theory involves a huge amount of both implicit and explicit knowledge.
But, enough…
But just one more thing: works of art may be ‘political’, and intended to be so by its creator, but the force of this political quality will vary from age to age and from place to place. We can recognise the thirst for freedom and justice expressed in the chorus from Nabucco, but it is not going to send us out on the streets, I think. But one can imagine a situation in which that chorus might again send people out on the streets – a fascistic EU putting Italy under its heel, for example. Nabucco as a political piece would, however, be unlikely to have much efficacy in the non-Christian world (they have different stories to draw on) or outside Italy.
Yes, this is one of the big themes in 20th century Western music — how much can we say is “in the music,” and how much do we have to believe the listener “hears into it?” Stravinsky was famous for saying that music was incapable of expressing anything at all, except musical content. The short version of what he means is that if you were to listen to, say, Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, without knowing it’s about Don Quixote a priori, there’s literally no translation protocol that will reliably deliver that content. Ditto with the “political overtones” in Verdi.
Neither is there a predictable way to infer whether a piece is supposed to express “happy” or “sad” emotions just by listening to it — you have to have been trained to recognize tokens and idioms and associate them with emotional content. If you don’t believe me, listen to Carnatic music and try to guess what emotion is supposed to be being expressed. This really isn’t any different than having to learn what “dog” refers to — there’s nothing inherently “doglike” about the word, and its semantic meaning is only by convention.
And yet, in music, as with language, there are many systematic grammatical constraints. In principle I could train a person who has been deaf since birth to write a piece that, when played, sounds reasonably like a Bach chorale (people program computers to do this as well). They would not have what anyone would consider an “experience” of the music, and yet because of the syntactical composition rules they followed their music would have structural features which someone who has never heard music before could learn to recognize just by studying it.
This is much like, when Ms. Hoover says “It’s a perfectly cromulent word!” on The Simpsons, we can infer that “cromulent” has to be an adjective because of its syntactic placement, and it’s a bit of structure that is in the sentence and would be inferable by a Martian who took it upon itself to train itself in English. As English experts, we can even contextually infer that it’s supposed to mean “acceptable.”
I think that the apparently Platonic or essentialist phrase “structure … in the sentence” I emphasized above could in principle be cashed out in more materialist terms, but I think doing so would distribute that structure over space and time, involving the evolution of language in general and English specifically, the facts of various individuals’ learning, and so forth. I think these are some of the things that Corio might be alluding to, but I stand by “structure in the sentence” if one allows concepts like Dennett’s “intentional systems.”
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About Cage – 4’33″ is one of a set of extremely rigorous pieces where he composed a set of constraints for how a piece would progress, and then he would use a chance device (dice, I Ching, it doesn’t matter so much) to pick a path through those constraints. Imagine it this way — say there are 3 events in a piece (there are probably more in practice); you plan to “fill” those events with “content” based on rolls of a 6-sided dye. You compose six possibilities for each of the 3 events such that the six possibilities for event 2 are syntactically well-formed continuations of each of the six possibilites for event 1. This way each of the 216 possible pieces that your dice rolls will pick out will be well-formed according to the constraints you’ve laid out ahead of time.
If you allow “silence” as one of the possibilities for each event, one of those 216 pieces will be a piece with all silent events. This is 4’33″ — it became a kind of aesthetic statement that took on lots of other philosophical connotations. Of course, nobody listening to the piece could possibly infer any of the constraints that created it, but someone who was able to pull back and take it as a “section” of a group of other pieces taken as a small oeuvre could possibly infer it, especially if the scores were available for study.
But Verdi was a composer of operas, not of ‘absolute music’, and operas – at least in his time – are not so fundamentally different from plays (the first ‘operas’ – Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’, for example, which I have directed here in Japan – constituted an attempt by the people of the Renaissance to revive Greek tragedy) and were often based on well-known stories, such as that of the exile of the Jews in Babylon; it is because of the stories that Verdi chose to tell that his operas had political implications in his time. – implications that almost certainly he intended The political implications of absolute music, if any, will necessarily be far more accidental (though not in cultures that forbid music-making for religious reasons, or which forbid certain kinds of music for national or other reasons – the ban on ‘Jewish’ and ‘degenerate’ music in Nazi Germany, the ban on ‘bourgeois’ music in Stalin’s Russia which caused Shostakovich so much grief and also led him to find ways of covertly standing against the authorities in his music; as for Stravinsky’s remark, it depends how you define ‘musical content’ – ‘The Rite of Spring’ is certainly not some purely innocuous, purely ‘musical’ work. And, Corio, if you want to look into the work of someone who has devised interesting (and scientific) ways of examining questions of value, meaning and reception in the arts, then I recommend the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
Another Matt:
I think most “scientismists” would claim all the relevant logical laws as an inherent part of the scientific method. I think I’d be convinced by the argument that this law doesn’t count as “knowledge,” but is more an assumed technology that helps us gain knowledge.
This simply begs the question about what should count as “knowledge”. And if logical laws can count as knowledge, then the fact that science cannot discover them, because it presupposes them, necessarily means that there are truths that science cannot discover.
Let’s say I prove a novel theorem in some branch of mathematics — have I found new knowledge or not? … Yet, my result was “really just” inherent in the accepted axioms and logical rules, so in some sense I’ve already accepted the result of my proof by accepting the axioms and rules.
The problem with that response is that one can use the same argument against all scientific discoveries. They were really “inherent” in the empirical phenomena being observed, and so by accepting that there are patterns and regularities in nature, one has “already accepted the result”. The only real difference is that the truths of mathematics and logic are truths of pure reason, and the truths of science are truths of the combination of the structure and rules of pure reason and empirical observation and experimentation.
Tim, I agree with almost everything you said (and dammit, I love Monteverdi).
Stravinsky’s remark is interesting, and I don’t think most people take it the way he meant it. Imagine this — you get someone who is not a trained musician but who is very familiar with Western music written up to 1910. Then you have them listen to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Five pieces for orchestra, without telling them which is which, and see if they can tell which of the two pieces depicts a woman who is chosen to ritually dance herself to death. This person may be able to tell that one of the pieces is Russian and the other German, but I’d say the odds of finding which one is the programmatic piece are just a little better than chance. Now imagine the task is, “determine which of these two pieces is programmatic, and describe the programme,” our listener is doomed no matter his/her training. The listener might be able to pick out all kinds of interesting features that relate it to other music and so forth, but the task we’ve given them is all but impossible. This is what Stravinsky was getting at — there’s nothing in Western music that allows one to convey this kind of precise semantic content in music; generally the best it can do is vaguely evoke.
PS — here are the two pieces:
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring
Schoenberg, Five Pieces for Orchestra – I-III and IV-V
dguller, good points. I have two comments, and then I’ll be done with the thread.
First:
The standard definition of knowledge we hear these days is “justified true belief.” Something like the law of noncontradiction has to be assumed — in fact, our notion of “true and false” changes drastically if we operate without that law. It seems to me as though the most basic logical laws and axioms simply cannot be justified because they have to be assumed. I suppose it’s a minor quibble whether or not we therefore deny them status as “knowledge,” but for the purposes of the “scientism” argument, you may as well say that science requires “thinking,” and therefore science can’t be the source of all knowledge because “thinking” is prior to it and can’t be discovered by it.
And still, the law of non-contradiction has the chance to stand or fall based on evidence — we value it so much that we’re much more willing to change nearly everything else in our theory of the world to accomodate it.
Second:
This only has the chance to be true if the Laplace Demon is doing the observation, which is to say only possibly true if one has all the physical facts. We don’t have that, so we are epistemologically bound to creating tentative theories to structure observed data, and there is likely an infinity of ways to do so for any given dataset. Science has grown many principles to sort through them, such as Occam’s Razor. Some people would say that these principles are prior to science and that science depends on them, so it could not have discovered them, while other more radical empiricists might say that accepting Occam’s Razor isn’t accepting a piece of knowledge, but is instead just provisionally employing a technology that has seemed to dependably help organize data to make it easier to understand for our epistemically limited species. In principle, it could be that science discovers these principles scientifically, by observing what has “worked” in the past, and employing it in the present — some would say this is circular, while others (who are wary of first principles) would say it’s the only way to bootstrap our knowledge-gaining enterprise.
I don’t quite know where I fall on this, except to say I don’t think it’s very useful in any case to make a hard and fast distinction between science and philosophy — they are, as it were, highly overlapping magisteria.
Cheers,
Matt
Another Matt:
It seems to me as though the most basic logical laws and axioms simply cannot be justified because they have to be assumed. I suppose it’s a minor quibble whether or not we therefore deny them status as “knowledge,” but for the purposes of the “scientism” argument, you may as well say that science requires “thinking,” and therefore science can’t be the source of all knowledge because “thinking” is prior to it and can’t be discovered by it.
First, the point is that the LNC is a necessary truth, and science only deals with contingent truths. Therefore, it simply cannot address the LNC’s truth at all due to its necessary nature. Again, to assert that only the contingent truths of science count as “knowledge” is simply to beg the question. The bottom line is that the contingent truths of science exist upon a bedrock of necessary truths that science presupposes to be possible to begin with. I see no reason why the necessary truths of which the LNC is a prime example should not count as knowledge. It makes perfect sense to say that one is justified in believing that “not-(p and not-p)” is necessarily true.
Second, you are correct that thought itself is a presupposition of any kind of inquiry, including scientific inquiry. After all, science tries to accurately represent how reality works by virtue of internal representations, of which thoughts are the principle example. And what it ultimately comes down to is that science has a number of metaphysical presuppositions that are simply taken for granted by it in order for it to be possible at all. As such, science cannot justify these principles other than appealing to their outright necessity for its own possibility. It would be just trying to justify justification. You have to assume that justification is valid in order to justify it. Or like coming up with a reason to use reason. And if this is correct, then scientism is necessary false.
And still, the law of non-contradiction has the chance to stand or fall based on evidence — we value it so much that we’re much more willing to change nearly everything else in our theory of the world to accomodate it.
It cannot “fall based on evidence”. You cannot have evidence without the LNC, and thus it is impossible for any evidence to overturn it without resulting in incoherence. Otherwise, you would have to count utter incoherent nonsense as a kind of evidence, which is ridiculous.
This only has the chance to be true if the Laplace Demon is doing the observation, which is to say only possibly true if one has all the physical facts. We don’t have that, so we are epistemologically bound to creating tentative theories to structure observed data, and there is likely an infinity of ways to do so for any given dataset.
None of this is relevant to the point that I made, which was that the fact that X is implicit within Y does not mean that any effort to discover X cannot count as new knowledge about Y.
Science has grown many principles to sort through them, such as Occam’s Razor. Some people would say that these principles are prior to science and that science depends on them, so it could not have discovered them, while other more radical empiricists might say that accepting Occam’s Razor isn’t accepting a piece of knowledge, but is instead just provisionally employing a technology that has seemed to dependably help organize data to make it easier to understand for our epistemically limited species.
But even saying that demands that one take a standpoint outside of the epistemically limited perspective, which falsifies itself immediately. One cannot say that all truths are relative, because that truth cannot be relative, but rather must be an absolute truth. If the statement that “all truths are relative” is itself relative, then there is no justifiable ground to assert it.
In principle, it could be that science discovers these principles scientifically, by observing what has “worked” in the past, and employing it in the present — some would say this is circular, while others (who are wary of first principles) would say it’s the only way to bootstrap our knowledge-gaining enterprise.
First, that would be like a metal detector inferring that all of reality must be metal, because that is all the detector can detect. After all, the metal detector can say that that assumption has “worked”.
Second, you would have to explain what it means for something to “work”. I presume that you mean that science works, because it has a history of accurately and successfully representing and controlling empirical reality. And that’s fine, but if you want to say that if X is necessary for Y to work, then X is justified, then you are stuck with a lot of problems. For example, if that principle is valid, then a religious believer could be justified in their belief in God to work by assuming an eternal afterlife. And they could just say that there is an afterlife, because that makes religious belief “work”. They could also argue that the Bible is true, because the Bible says it is true, and you would be helpless to refute them.
Third, one cannot justify presuppositions by the method that requires those presuppositions to be possible. That is a logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (i.e. If X, then Y. Y. Therefore, X). All of science would be based upon a logical fallacy, which is not very encouraging. To justify X requires something higher than Y, and only not-Y would affect the truth of X by virtue of modus tollens.
I don’t quite know where I fall on this, except to say I don’t think it’s very useful in any case to make a hard and fast distinction between science and philosophy — they are, as it were, highly overlapping magisteria.
I think that it is better to just lump it all together into human inquiry, which operates with both rational reflection and empirical observation, sometimes focusing more upon the former, and sometimes focusing more upon the latter, but ultimately all tying together into an organic whole.