Neurath's Boat

Getting at what's fundamental

I follow an interesting pro-Bayesian blog called "Overcoming Bias," which just recently had a post about reductionism. The post refers to the alleged fact that "there is only the most basic level - the elementary particles and fundamental forces." Now, I'm a great fan of reductionism (it has been some months since my dissertation was completed and accepted, but I haven't changed my mind about the central views I defend there yet). But the idea of a fundamental level is not necessary (or, I think, desirable) for a reductionist view. All of the benefits of reductionism come from accepting that there is only one world. The point of reductionism is to establish the unity of science, as some past advocates of reductionism have put it. But unity only requires that everything be linked to everything else, it doesn't require that there's some privileged foundation that all the connections flow through.

Insisting on a fundamental level saddles reductionism with unprovable metaphysics (as I ask in the comments thread, how do we know there is a basic level?) and also encourages misleading implications. The word "fundamental" sometimes means "most important," and those who make a big deal about the bottom level not infrequently seem to be misled into thinking that the bottom level (whatever they think it is) is fundamental in this sense as well, and not merely in the sense of just being the bottom.

PZ Myers stands up for philosophers!

Critics of intelligent design sometimes suggest that it ought to be discussed in philosophy classes rather than biology classes. A recent post at Pharyngula recognizes that intelligent design's total lack of intellectual content makes it of little more interest to philosophers than to biologists; it's so nice to see someone who isn't a philosopher recognize this point.

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Continuing to research evolutionary psychology

Helen Longino gave a talk at Brown a couple of months ago, advocating a pluralistic approach to the study of human behavior.  She condemned various reductionist approaches, including what she saw as crypto-reductionism.*  While her examples were specific projects in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, she tried to connect her criticism to the broader project of reductionism in the philosophy of science, and when I questioned her after the talk about which philosophers advocated the views she was describing (since I sincerely couldn't think of any; even philosophers like myself who call themselves reductionists have a very different idea of reduction than that she attributes to the scientists she criticizes), she made a reference to the "whole unity of science movement" as an example of these ideas being widespread in philosophy.  I found this unsatisfying, as the unity of science crowd were precisely the people who seemed to me to not have been making or encouraging any of the mistakes she criticized in her particular examples.

I still find her case that philosophers are sources of some of the bad philosophical ideas she criticizes dubious.  In my reading of evolutionary psychology I saw little evidence of the influence of any work in the philosophy of science (sadly, there was philosophical content, but it was blissfully uninformed by any work by philosophers, as I mentioned when I talked about Palmer and Thornhill on causation).  I'm sure I could have made the point much more sharply if I'd had more examples of my own of the sort of bad science she wanted to criticize, and to which her pluralism was supposed to be an alternative.  So I wish I'd read the evolutionary psychology material before her talk.  Perhaps I'll see her again.  Or, better yet, perhaps I should look up some of her papers and write up a paper of my own discussing these issues.

* Not her word, but it seems an appropriate one for people who constantly talk about complicated interplay between genes and developmental and environmental factors, and then provide explanations which are entirely or nearly entirely based on genes alone.

The science of A Natural History of Rape

There is a dramatic shift in Palmer and Thornhill's text, starting in chapter 3, and ending at the end of chapter 4.  This is the region of the book where the authors discuss the particular evidence they find most relevant to their theses about rape.  In this region of the book, they frequently mention issues which they think require more study, and make proposals for tests of their speculations.  Somewhat less frequently, but still notably (especially in contrast to the rest of their book), they mention data which seems to raise questions for their hypotheses.  The data that they mention in this portion of the book is certainly intriguing and suggestive, though it is quite unclear what exactly to conclude from it.

Since I had wanted not to hate the book, it having been recommended to me by someone I like and have some respect for, I felt very relieved when I started to get into chapter 3, and hoped the rest of the book would continue more in that tone.  This looked like science; sure, they were engaging in speculations, and their evidence was far from conclusive, but the phenomena of human behavior are extremely complex.  Making speculative claims and proposing further tests seems an entirely appropriate procedure.  Unfortunately, there are reasons to worry even about this part of the book.

I will not comment in detail about the quality of the data that Palmer and Thornhill present; I am not by any means an expert in their field.  Evolution, Gender, and Rape contains much discussion of their evidence by those with more knowledge of the field.  I found the essays in that volume of uneven quality, but some were quite good, and they often cited fascinating evidence and speculations of their own.  Some of the essays also raised serious questions about Palmer and Thornhill's methods of analyzing their data, which surely need to be examined; such issues represent the first problem with the more scientific part of Palmer and Thornhill's text.

The second problem is that it ends so quickly.  It constitutes roughly a quarter of the book, with the remaining 3/4 devoted to virulent and sometimes dishonest polemic against feminist social psychologists, as well as some very bad philosophy of science.

An obvious speculation is that they did not, in fact, have enough material to make a substantial book, and padded it out with deliberate attempts to provoke controversy (if this was their goal, they certainly succeeded).  The next question for my investigation of bias and methodology is whether the flaws in the science section show any sort of pattern, such that Palmer and Thornhill's motivations might have affected that part of the book as well; this question will require far more thorough investigation than I have so far done, so I probably won't be posting any more about this particular book for some time.  Which will probably be a relief to many.

Evolutionary explanations

So, evolutionary psychology is frequently criticized as reductionist, and many of its critics complain about the employment of evolutionary accounts for human social behavior.  In my dissertation, presently going through final revisions, I argue in favor of reductionism, and I extensively and usually approvingly cite Ruth Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, which advances an evolutionary account of thought and language.  So it seems that I ought to be predisposed in favor of evolutionary psychology.  For that matter, when I was studying at UCSB, I did one year have a roommate who was an evolutionary psychology grad student, and he was a nice enough guy.  However, I'm not actually finding myself all that impressed so far.

I'll explain one important difference between Millikan and the evolutionary psychologists I've read so far.  Millikan recognizes that there are many ways in which things can be reproduced, and central to her view is the point that selection can operate on things which are reproduced by any means.  So, for example, tools can easily be seen as produced via a complicated evolutionary process; in modern times, people buy tools because they perform various functions more or less well, and tools are manufactured because people are willing to buy them.  Tools that perform their function better sell better, so when manufacturers come up with a new and better tool, they start producing copies of that instead, driving the old, less good tool out of the market.  Tools obviously don't have genes, though they have a variety of constraints; a tool which performs better but requires much more expensive materials will not be selected for, and a tool may gain an advantage in the marketplace because machines specialized for more quickly and efficiently manufacturing that tool are already available, and alternate designs which couldn't be built using the same machines may be at a disadvantage despite performing their functions better.  And there are endless further complications (for example, legal issues or aesthetic issues may affect which tools can be sold and which are preferred by buyers; a particular tool's manufacturer may have deals with certain efficient distributors which give the tool advantages over tools made by other manufacturers independent of the merits of the tool).

Millikan thinks we should interpret beliefs on a similar pattern; we have evolved some machinery for generating beliefs, and one of the mechanisms of belief formation involves the ability to transfer beliefs to others and acquire beliefs by transfer from others through communication (indeed, Millikan thinks communicability is one of the criteria distinguishing beliefs from other kinds of states, though communicability with one's future self via memory may be sufficient for something to be belief-like, so animals are not necessarily excluded from having any beliefs whatever).  Selection pressures obviously function on the beliefs, and the exact details of the mechanisms surely play a big role in how easily various kinds of beliefs are developed and transferred, but there are plenty of other selection pressures.*

For example, and this is critical for one of my big worries about the evolutionary psychologists I've read, if a particular belief often leads to a quick death, its ability to spread to others is greatly reduced, as its advocates will have little time to pass it on.  Further, it is highly likely that observing the tendency of a belief to lead to death will produce a certain resistance to the acceptance of that belief, even if the exact psychological mechanisms by which people accept or reject beliefs presented to them in communication are not fully understood.  Thus, it is to be expected that beliefs which lead to swift death would be rare due to selection pressures on beliefs.  Beliefs which lead to swift death might also be rare due to selection patterns on belief-forming mechanisms; a belief-forming mechanism which can never form a rapidly self-destructive belief seems to have some advantage, and so it is possible that people should have genes which code for belief-forming mechanisms hostile to a particular self-destructive belief.  However, the fact that the self-destructive belief faces powerful selection pressures anyway means that the difference between having such genes and not having such genes is small (even those without genes specifically hostile to a particular self-destructive belief are unlikely to develop that belief because of the general features of belief formation and the selection pressures on beliefs, so those without the genes are at only a very slight, perhaps negligible, disadvantage).

Thus, it is an empirical question where the forces of selection have exerted the most influence in bringing about a particular behavior; selection pressures don't have to work on genes.  They certainly don't in the case of tools, which don't have genes, and beliefs undergo sufficiently rapid change that it is implausible that genetic changes could account for changes in belief frequencies.  Indeed, behavior in general is quite variable between times and cultures, in ways which seem plausibly responsive to selection pressures, but which change too quickly for the selection pressures to have operated on genes.

However, note that while great variability does tend to rule out the possibility of gene selection, less variability does not necessarily show gene selection; if selection forces are particularly strong, then a behavior transmitted through explicit instruction or imitation would be expected to be very persistent and to spread quickly and thoroughly, and if such a behavior first appeared sufficiently far in the past, it would not be surprising for the behavior to be universally or nearly universally taught and imitated by humans everywhere.

Evolutionary psychologists all, to varying degrees, concede that behavior results from a complex interplay of genes and environment, but it appears that in practice they focus almost all of their attention on genes.  So far, I have not been able to dig up much evidence in favor of this procedure.  Admittedly, we are presumably interested in all of the causes of human behavior, so evaluating selection for genes which influence behavior is certainly an interesting and worthy research project.  However, in some evolutionary psychology writings (such as A Natural History of Rape, the example I'm currently investigating), the evolutionary psychologists insist that genes are the most important factor, and that concentrating on other factors invariably leads to worthless results.  This does not appear to be the case, even on the basis of the arguments they themselves present.

* There are obviously connections between Millikan's account and the trendy notion of "memes," first proposed by Dawkins somewhat earlier than Millikan's book.  Millikan's account is much more detailed than most discussions of meme theory, and to my knowledge she has never adopted the meme terminology, but she is clearly in sympathy with the views of Daniel Dennett (and vice versa), and Dennett has recently jumped on the meme bandwagon.  I've avoided it because of the misleading implication of atomism, though arguably "gene," on which the term is based, is equally misunderstood when interpreted atomistically, so perhaps the lesson is that people should be wary of atomism rather than of a particular terminology.

Evolutionary psychology

"...Just what do they want?  You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world into the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development where man's intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and random coupling of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and thoroughly stupid) -- what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time?  Is it a secret, malicious, mean instinct to belittle man, which is perhaps unacknowledged?  Or perhaps a pessemistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green?  Or a certain subterranean animosity and racune toward Christianity (and Plato), which has perhaps not even passed the threshold of consciousness?  Or even a lewd taste for the strange, for the painful paradox, for the dubious and nonsensical in life?  Or finally -- a bit of everything, a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess, a bit of anti-Christianity, a bit of a thrill and need for pepper? -- But people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round humans and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp.  I am resistant to hearing this and, indeed, I do not believe it; and if it is permitted to wish where it is impossible to know, I sincerely hope the reverse is true, -- that these analysts holding a microscope to the soul are actually brave, generous and proud animals, who know how to control their own pleasure and pain and have been taught to sacrifice desirability to truth, every truth, even a plain, bitter, ugly, foul, unchristian, immoral truth -- because there are such truths."

I have a friend who's an evolutionary psychologist, and naturally I often make fun of her for it.  However, since I am interested in philosophy of science, and have long thought I'd like to do some work on the interactions of bias and methodology in the social sciences, I've started looking in detail at some evolutionary psychology, starting with books she's recommended.  The first I read was A Natural History of Rape, since controversial topics are certain to at least have accusations of bias flying around.   I must admit to having more than a little suspicion that it will turn out to be a fact about the evolutionary psychologists, as with the English psychologists Nietzsche talks about in my quote, "that historical spirit itself is lacking in them."  (Surely those quotes are appropriate, as one of Nietzsche's targets was the famous early blender of psychology and evolutionary biology, Herbert Spencer).  I don't feel quite ready yet to post any definite conclusions, but I certainly will be posting more about a positivist revivalist's perspective on evolutionary psychology shortly.

The evolution of normativity

One of the eternal problems of philosophy concerns the origins of normativity.  Where do oughts come from?  What makes it ever intelligible to say that something should be the case?

One common response is to invoke magic.  This response is disturbingly widespread, and that it is perhaps not surprising in this area, where other responses are so hard to come by.

Another common response is skepticism.  There really aren't any oughts.  Or we invent them in some way.  Skeptical approaches tend to be motivated by opposition to magical approaches; the magical approaches can't be right (a point I sympathize with), and there aren't any good alternatives, so there can't be anything here at all.

The problem with the skeptical approach is that normativity runs very deep.  There doesn't seem to be a way to talk about something so basic as beliefs being true or false without some notion of how beliefs ought to function, and whether they are or are not functioning as they ought.  Of course, some skeptics speak of inventing oughts rather than of their outright absence, but what counts as inventing an ought?  There is no apparent way to identify norms except by applying norms for norms.

I am myself of the opinion that the only way to break out of the circles of our understanding is via magic (and so that it can't be done, since I don't believe in magic), but skepticism involves an especially tight circle, and size matters when it comes to circles.  The bigger the better; coherentism and holism are better than localized self-justification.  And there is a candidate for broadening the circle and accounting for norms.  Evolution provides an account of goal-directed behavior which is independent of human invention.  There are still circles if evolution is taken as the origin of our goal-directedness (our knowledge of evolution depends on our norms of knowledge), but they're more like big coherence circles and less like little vicious circles.

Perhaps this explains why believers in magic are so opposed to evolution.  Evolution eliminates the need for magic at a very deep level, far more fundamental than the level of opposition between most scientific theories and most magical theories.  But, of course, there is no magic, and anyway invoking magic only introduces the problem of explaining the magicians, which will enmesh us in the same circularity problems we were trying to avoid.  The only real alternative to evolution is skepticism (or perhaps more reasonably agnosticism; we simply don't know where norms come from if they don't come ultimately from evolution).

Thoughts as biological categories

I didn't realize I'd gone that long without posting.  Anxiety about the job search distracting me, I suppose.  Anyway, I have been reading about the sociobiology controversy, and while I haven't reached many conclusions about the controversy itself, I have had a related thought which connects more to my dissertation.

Philosophy of Social Science

So, a reader asked for recommendations for works on the philosophy of the social sciences, and I have few enough readers that I suppose I should humor them.  Sadly, I don't know exactly what to recommend, which is another reason for posting on the topic; perhaps some of my other tiny handful of readers will have suggestions.  I've read a bit of classic stuff, such as Neurath's writings on the philosophy of social science.  Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is on my to-read list, though the last time I tried to read it I couldn't get past the introduction, which gives Eurocentrism a bad name (I'm not one of those "Western civilization is evil" types, of course; I'm a great fan of Western science, for example.  But Weber's enthusiasm for all things Western is positively embarrassing.   He goes so far as to praise European theology as being superior to that to be found in India or the far East.  Skeptical though I am of the value of being advanced in theology, I recognize that it is an area where there's such a thing as being more or less sophisticated, and I'm sorry, this isn't a contest Europe wins.  His praise of Western logic is also questionable; I think it is only with Frege that we clearly pull ahead in that area, and Weber was quite obviously not familiar with Frege.  Weber seemed to think Aristotelian logic was superior to the logic done in, say, India, which it quite simply wasn't).

However, the social sciences have of course changed greatly since the time of Neurath, and certainly since the time of Weber, and I don't know what current stuff is especially worth reading; nothing I've read has particularly stood out.  Perhaps I will have more to say shortly, though, as I'm reading a lot about sociobiology at the moment.  At least by the time I've struggled through some of the literature about that I may have some things to recommend against (besides Richard Miller, who was discussed in a few recent blog posts).

Re-reading of Kuhn complete

I had forgotten that Kuhn was such a brilliant writer.  Much easier to read than most philosophy.  Many of his observations are also fascinating, and naturally I agree with many of his conclusions.  The big sticking point for me is now, as it always has been, incommensurability.  I continue to believe that Kuhn fails to establish that different scientific paradigms are incommensurable in any strong sense.  It is, of course, not clear exactly how strong Kuhn intends the incommensurability between paradigms to be; in one place, he says things that make it sound very strong indeed, in another, he talks as if incommensurability amounted to little more than the obvious fact that two paradigms disagree.  This lack of clarity remains in his postscript of 1970, though the postscript, as many have noted, seems to lean toward the weak side; his notion that translation between paradigms is possible seems incompatible with the stronger senses of incommensurability that most of Kuhn's readers, both fans and critics, have usually attributed to him.

Still, my essential conclusion is this; if he means to claim incommensurability in a strong sense, his data doesn't establish it, and I know of no independent data which does.  If he intends a weak sense, his conclusions are not particularly novel (the strong incommensurability of paradigms is the only feature of his discussion not easily accommodated by the philosophy of science of, say, Carnap or Ernest Nagel).  Either way, I cannot see that the book deserves its reputation as itself a revolutionary work.

The commenter on my previous blog post also mentioned Feyerabend, who is of course often grouped with Kuhn.  I don't know when I'll get around to talking about Feyerabend.  I am rather a fan of his work, but examination of his writings faces a difficulty not encountered with Kuhn; Feyerabend is a self-conscious practitioner of rhetoric, while Kuhn certainly seems to be always trying to say what he means.  This obviously makes interpretation of Feyerabend's claims more difficult, as one must distinguish between what he intended to seriously advance as true and what he presented for merely rhetorical purposes (not that this is a sharp line, of course, but that just makes things even harder).

Who is "the positivist?"

I am continuing to use the break afforded by Thanksgiving to re-read Kuhn, partly in response to a recent comment on the blog, but more in response to a friend who protested enthusiastically when I recently dissed Kuhn.  Final conclusions await my completion of my re-reading, but I note that Kuhn makes reference to the philosophy of science of "the positivist."  I am unable to determine exactly who this character is.  It is certainly not Carnap, or Neurath, or Schlick for that matter.  Even Ayer doesn't fit very well, though he may be the closest fit (if so, the allusion to "early Logical Positivism" is quite inappropriate, of course).  Rather, "the positivist" seems to be some horrible Frankenstein's monster, constructed by blending together mostly the worst elements of Schlick, Popper, and Ayer (Popper, of course, not even having been a positivist).

So, one preliminary criticism of Kuhn; he seems determined to impose a Whiggish, progressive narrative on the history of the philosophy of science, as evolving from a positivist conception toward the sort of philosophy of science he favors, which seems to fit the history of the philosophy of science even more poorly than he claims such views fit the history of science.

The Authority of Science

In this post, I am going to discuss a certain kind of skepticism about science which has at least some defenders.  I will try to examine this skepticism as sympathetically as possible in the course of explaining why I reject it, but since it is a position I reject, I'm sure I will not be entirely successful in fairly representing the position.  I certainly welcome input from those inclined to endorse the views I am rejecting.

So, being one of those bleeding-heart types, I'm very concerned about the excessive power and the misuse thereof by those who have undeserved privilege due to being, say, of European ancestry, male, possessing inherited wealth, citizenship in a wealthy country, or what have you.  The kinds of illegitimate privilege are legion, and I have issues with all of them (as I suppose do most; the conservatives for the most part differ from me in either denying the existence or the illegitimacy of the privelege).

Those who can understand and employ the tools of the scientific worldview, broadly understood, also enjoy a certain kind of privilege.  The deliverances of science are viewed as having a certain kind of authority.  Since the scientific worldview has made the most dramatic advances in the West, it is natural to have some suspicion that part of the authority of science is parasitic on the illegitimate authority built on Western arms.  Also, in the past science was mostly practiced by men, so it is also natural to wonder if the authority of science is connected to patriarchal authority.  Certainly the different kinds of privilege often feed into one another.

Nonetheless, I view the authority of science as legitimate, and in a tradition which certainly includes Rudolf Carnap, possibly Immanual Kant, and likely many modern figures (this seems to be the view of Louise Antony),  I view science as more of a help than a hindrance to liberal causes.  I wonder what P.Z. Myers thinks of these issues; it's always useful to get the input of scientists on issues of philosophy of science.

Modern science largely evolved from Western traditions of rational inquiry, being founded to a great extent on Greek philosophy and mathematics and having evolved from there mostly in Europe and in places colonized by Europeans.  This is not entirely true, of course; influences on Western philosophy and mathematics from India and the near East are certainly under-appreciated, but addressing those injustices would be a topic for another post.  Despite its Western origins, science claims a kind of universality.  However, it seems to me that this universality is importantly different from the intended universality of some other institutions.  The universal (Catholic) church, for example, wishes to impose itself on all (not saying Catholics are worse about that than other religions; they just have a convenient name for serving as an example here, and of course a high profile and relevant history).  Universal science, on the other hand, wishes to incorporate all, and seeks to adapt itself to understand the unfamiliar.

That science seeks to be universal is part of its claim to authority; it seeks to absorb or replace other attempts at knowledge.  The reason it is actually granted authority is not merely because it makes such a claim, though; many claims to authority are ignored.  Neither does the association of science with Western middle and upper class men fully account for the authority of science.  The track record of science has at least as much (I would say probably much more) to do with the authority of science.  It produces extremely useful results, and there's extensive evidence of the accuracy of the deliverances of many sciences.

Of course, privileged elites try to gather all power to themselves.  Not only has science obviously been a source of power for Western elites, by giving them knowledge of great use in manipulating the world, but Western elites have also tried to use the authority of science to legitimize doctrines favorable to them.  Over the centuries, allegedly scientific proof has been given of the superiority of whites (cranial studies in the 19th century, some fringy sociobiological efforts in this century (The Bell Curve, etc.)), the naturalness of patriarchal structures (endless studies on sex differences have exaggerated results and rushed to genetic explanations whenever they found a hint of differences matching patriarchal stereotypes), and the impossibility of any alternatives to capitalism (of course, some of the evidence of the effectiveness of free markets is quite legitimate, but the standards of what counts as effective often favor the interests of the already rich, and when economists simplify their models in the interests of workability, they suspiciously often choose to ignore factors most likely to suggest problems with the capitalist orthodoxy).

The defense that one should not blame a tool for the use to which it is put is not always legitimate; we are rightly skeptical when Gorgias tries to insulate himself from any criticism on the basis of the behavior of his students.  But it seems to me that there is not any ground for thinking these results reflect badly on scientific method.  In the case of examples such as those I give, it's possible to give quite damning internal (based on scientific rules) criticisms of the privilege-favoring results.  Science has rules, even if they evolve over time and we philosophers of science have a lot of trouble specifying them.  The elite try to set up rules that favor themselves, but the main value of science even for the elite is as a source of power, and its power depends on its accuracy, so even the elite prefer rules that produce accuracy.  Elites always think the rules are for the little people, so by and large they have preferred to simply break the rules when it suits them (as happens in the problem cases mentioned in the previous paragraph), rather than constructing rules they don't need to break.

Thus, I am inclined to think that science has a history of misuse only because it's such a powerful tool, and so many have sought to employ it for their ends.  It further seems to me that the power which can be obtained from science can be used by anyone.  Indeed, when the elite break the rules to advance their own doctrines, they are reducing the power of science as a tool for themselves; they are undermining its advantage in accuracy.  If, as liberal social critics, we're sticklers for the scientific rules, we can get an advantage because we'll have the full power of science.  It's a slight edge, but we need everything we can get.

Since the scientific rules are endorsed by the elite, when they break those rules, they're cheating.  It's not always easy to catch them, or publicize it when they are caught, but exposing cheating is one of the ways of undermining the authority of the elite.  It's useful to have standards the elite can violate in order to make such criticism possible.  Similarly, since the scientific rules are endorsed by the elite, results which are problematic for them (e. g. evidence of how the elite suppress wages below what a genuinely free market would produce, as discussed by Adam Smith of all people) can nonetheless be presented as having authority.  Again, the elite will cheat, and claim that rules were violated when they were not (the studies of deaths in Iraq by Roberts et al. , commonly referred to as the Lancet studies in popular discussions, provide a good example of this), but again, it can be useful to make sure they have to cheat, because then there's the possibility of exposing that cheating.  Thus, being a stickler for scientific accuracy in our own research not only gives us access to the power of science, it provides rhetorical weaponry for the battle against the elite.

The only argument against this that I can see is that following rules always restricts one's freedom of action, and the struggle against the forces of privilege is too difficult to deprive ourselves of any option.  I cannot see much force to that; if we abandon the authority we can derive from science (and the same may apply to the moral authority we can derive from some ethical restrictions on how we conduct our battle), and make this a struggle of naked power, I can only see disastrous consequences.  The current elite are the elite because they're very good in struggles of naked power; to shift the battle to such ground seems to be attacking them where we're weakest and they're strongest.  Further, a struggle based on naked power, if it succeeds, will surely only produce another tedious repetition of the historical pattern of old elites being replaced by new elites which are as bad or worse.

However, as I said at the outset, I'm probably not being fair to the science skeptics.  I welcome any commentary from that quarter.

The politics of objectivity IV

The last topic I want to look at is value freedom.  There is a long tradition in the social sciences, as in science generally, of excluding value judgments from our investigations.  In Miller's example, it would be impermissible to explain the fall of the Stuarts by appealing to Stuart injustice (though widespread belief that the Stuarts were unjust could figure in an explanation of the fall of the Stuarts).  Moral features are not to be used in explanations.  Miller identifies Max Weber as the originator of this view in the social sciences; this is surely oversimplified, as the view is surely implicit in earlier theorists than Weber (Adam Smith, anyone?) and adopted by people not much directly influenced by Weber, but Weber is of course pretty huge in the history of the social sciences, and did emphasize this point.

This is not to say that evaluations should play no role in investigations.  Obviously, values determine what scientists will choose to investigate, and it would be absurd to try to do science without allowing values to play that role.  Investigating the prevalence and spread of some terrible disease, or the responses to stress of some material commonly used in constructing human artifacts, not only does but should get vastly more attention than ever more precise measurements of exactly how many grains of sand there are in a particular cubic meter of a Saharan sand dune (to borrow an example from Ernest Sosa).  What other than human values makes the former more worthy than the latter?

However, it is very important, according to the tradition, not to allow values to lead one to cook the books, as it were.  If a scientist feels it would be good to get a particular result, for some reason, and the data doesn't seem to point that way, fudging is generally considered unacceptable.  Richard Miller suggests that this is too closed-minded.  His example involves anthropological investigations of non-white cultures around a century ago.

According to Miller, some anthropologists of the time were highly motivated by opposition to then nearly universal and unquestioned racism, and actively searched for evidence of cultural sophistication in non-white cultures in order to provide a counter to racist inclinations.  It's important to be very careful about what this shows; if they set themselves the task of looking for sophisticated cultural patterns, that's perfectly compatible with Weberian standards.  They only violated the rules if they did or would have fudged the results if their data had turned out to be negative.  Did they do this, and should they have?

On the empirical question of whether they did, I have no clue.  On whether they should have, I say absolutely not.  It undermines their credibility.  Creating an atmosphere in which fudging data is tolerated for any reason undermines science generally.  Further, tolerance for any kind of cheating is going to benefit the entrenched interests more; there are more people willing to cheat for them.  A zero-tolerance policy on cheating immunizes those opposed to the entrenched power structure from being criticized for cheating (sure, their critics will find other ways, or just lie, but while it's idealistic to suppose the truth always wins out, it is an advantage to have it on your side), and also avoids charges of hypocrisy when the radical critic attacks research favoring the status quo for failing to live up to standards of objectivity.

In Miller's own example, simply setting the question, simply deciding to investigate the cultural richness of non-white cultures, already helps the cause of radical politics.  To bring this back to my positivist revival theme, the positivists favored meticulous value-freedom in the social sciences and very careful attention to logic and methodological issues at a time when the social sciences were dominated by Marxists.  Those of Marxist inclination would, of course, be inclined to investigate how the existing capitalist ruling classes maintained power, what conditions were actually like for the poor, what obstacles existed to the poor improving their circumstances, and so forth.  Objectively investigating questions like that would naturally produce results which would be of benefit to those engaged in radical politics.  Again, injecting bias into the investigation beyond this choice of subjects would undermine the benefits of doing carefully chosen objective investigations.  So it seems to me that the positivists were probably taking the optimal stance from the point of view of advancing their radical political agendas in emphasizing objective science and careful methodology.

Of course, just as encouraging particular lines of research can advance political agendas, so can discouraging lines of research.  Furthermore, encouraging one line of research can ipso facto end up discouraging other lines, since the resources available for research are limited.  So, for example, the radical critique Miller makes of contemporary economics, that its obsession with things like GDP growth is politically problematic, seems to me to be likely well founded.  Injecting bias into the investigation of economic problems is not the solution, though; the solution is to find ways to encourage unbiased investigation of more relevant phenomena.

The politics of objectivity III

Richard Miller also condemns a form of reductionism he calls methodological individualism.  This is the doctrine that all group behavior can be reduced to the behavior of individuals.  In one sense, I think individualist reductionism has to be right; surely groups can only do things via individuals doing things.  This does not, however, mean that there is no value in studying groups as such, and Miller thinks methodological individualism involves a stronger form of reductionism which not only says group talk can be reduced, but largely advocated abolishing group talk.

One of Miller's examples of what's wrong with methodological individualism involves attitudes toward slavery in the American South.  He claims that around 1820, there was a dramatic change in such attitudes.  Prior to that point, there was a widespread feeling that slavery was a problematic institution, perhaps necessary for now but something that would eventually die out.  From 1820 on, the southerners became much more inclined to think that slavery was actually a good thing, because it exerted a civilizing influence on the blacks.

Miller argues that this shift occurred because of technological changes; the cotton gin made a form of slavery-based agriculture extremely profitable.  However, of course none of the southern slave owners would have admitted that this was their motive, and Miller suggests that there is no reason to think they were being disingenuous in giving other motives.  Miller concludes that understanding what happened requires looking at the interests of the slave-owning class, rather than focusing on the motives of individual actors.

I find this particular argument stunningly weak, all the more annoying for the fact that I happen to agree with the conclusion.  Economists, surely the worst offenders when it comes to methodological individualism, do not in any way require that the self-interested motives of the agents they hypothesize be consciously pursued.  They don't care about psychology.  And analysis in terms of the self-interest of agents, with self-interest largely inferred on the basis of what people actually pursue, has a good record of success in providing economic explanations.  It is not at all obvious that this pattern of individualist explanation is not adequate to the case Miller describes.  You're welcome to read his actual work, of course, but I don't recall him including any additional detail in the case which would block this response.

Nonetheless, there are clearly anti-individualist theories (not necessarily non-reductivist, but theories that insist on examining groups as groups).  No doubt they are the kinds of theories Miller is interested in.  It is overwhelmingly plausible that the upper classes have class consciousness, and always have had.  Plato thought so.  Marx (obviously) thought so.  Nietzsche thought so.  Adam Smith even thought so.  Pretty much every historian I'm aware of thought so.  The explicit writings of the upper classes themselves support the hypothesis that some kind of group loyalty is an important motive in the behavior of members of the upper classes.  Really anybody who isn't a political libertarian seems to have noticed this.

It is also arguable that the lower classes have often had class consciousness, and of course Marxists of Miller's type would tend to argue that part of the reason modern capitalist institutions get away with so much inequality is because they do a good job of undermining the class consciousness of the lower classes, fragmenting them into mutually hostile groups.

It is quite plausible that any group which is successful and powerful must have mechanisms for encouraging group loyalty, various rewards for supporting the club and punishments for betrayals of the group.  While investigating exactly what those mechanisms are is, of course, a fascinating project in itself, for an old, well-entrenched group, they're likely to be quite diverse and complicated.  Thus, for some purposes it may be more useful to just study the group, noting that it engages in purposeful behavior and that the interests of the group sometimes explain the behavior of individuals more perspicuously than trying to tease out all the little incentives that cause a particular individual to act in the group's interest in a particular case.

This pattern of explanation again particularly makes sense for powerful groups that are effective at perpetuating themselves, and so it seems natural that this form of explanation should work better for ruling classes than for lower classes (which seems to be the pattern in historical explanations).  Still, whether this sort of group-based approach to explanation is overall desirable is clearly an empirical question.  I'm inclined to think this form of explanation probably is desirable, but Miller's example, and his discussion of it, are woefully inadequate to establishing that fact.  Much more wide-reaching investigation, a much greater variety of examples, and ideally examination of a variety of disciplines would be needed to establish that claim.

Which, incidentally, brings up a quick bleg.  Anybody know of any good recent work that's been done in this area?  I'm sure somebody must have a better discussion of these issues than Miller.

The politics of objectivity II

I mentioned in my previous post on this topic that Richard Miller was one of my foes on the issue of politics and objectivity.  He discusses the issues in this book, among other places.  Three dogmas of the social sciences which Miller sets out to slay are the ideal of value freedom (most relevant for our purposes), methodological individualism, and the Hempelian covering-law model of explanation.

To take them in reverse order, Miller rejects the Hempelian covering-law model of explanation in favor of a causal model.  Hempel's model is, uncontroversially, quite oversimplified and does not work in many cases.  Many of us still think it's a useful model, and that one of the best ways of proceeding is to describe this model, describe its problems, and try to understand specific cases in the philosophy of science by applying the model and keeping alert to the known ways it can break down (many introductory philosophy of science books endorse essentially this approach, either openly or implicitly in their practice).  Miller's criticisms are actually a lot weaker than the standard set.

He complains that the covering-law model does not account for the fact that an explanation may be judged satisfactory even if there's no very general law that would account for it.  In one of his examples, he notes that a historian may successfully explain a counter-revolutionary uprising in one region of 18th century France by appealing to a clerical monopoly on access to outside sources of information, even if such a clerical monopoly on outside information did not produce counter-revolutionary uprisings in 9th century Japan.  Conversely, he notes that an explanation may be unsatisfactory even if there is a law that would account for it.  Though being appointed by doddering old coots of heads of state is reliably connected with people becoming heads of government, that Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg would, according to Miller, be an inadequate explanation of his seizure of power if the Nazi's support among the German economic elite would have resulted in their eventually seizing power regardless of Hindenburg's actions.

To summarize this argument of Miller's, sometimes an explanation is acceptable even if it's not very good because it's the best we can do, and sometimes a good explanation isn't good enough because it's possible to do better.  How these obvious points are supposed to show that we need Miller's causal account of explanation (which I won't bother to try to summarize, as it's never stated very clearly) rather than Hempel's model is, to put it mildly, unclear.

Geographical distribution of species

I suppose there are bigger things for me to be concerned about; as an atheist, I find it deeply disturbing that more than 90% of the world disagrees with me.  But in many cases imaginary friends seem to be harmless.  The considerably smaller number of people who believe in creationism or "intelligent design", the new trendy version of creationism, worry me a lot more.

In general, I have a naive faith in the Humean, and not only Humean of course, notion that rational people should proportion their belief to the evidence.  Here the history of evolutionary theory seems to tell a very clear story.

Hume himself trifles with something like an evolutionary theory in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, pointing out that in a universe where randomness reigned, anything able to sustain itself would likely come to be, and be perceived as, what's normal.  But, of course, theories of evolution were not to get their best support for another century.

Darwin rested his assertion that evolution must account for the diversity of species that we observe primarily on the basis of the geographical distribution of species, my title for this post.  I have certainly never seen an argument from any creationist or intelligent design theorist to explain why God would have wanted the exact distribution of species we see in, say, Madagascar, or of course Darwin's own example of the Galapagos islands.

Because the geographical distribution of species was utterly incomprehensible on any theory other than some kind of evolution, Darwin was sure that evolution had to be the story.  Never mind that in his time there was no account of how parents could pass on traits to their descendants in the way that evolution required; he was sure, on the basis of his data, that it had to happen somehow.

Indeed, the data was quite overwhelming.  But we modern people don't need to rely on that.  Watson and Crick, almost a century after Darwin, showed how traits do get passed on from parents to their children via DNA.  This process of passing on DNA ends up being exactly what Darwinian theory requires; it resolves all of the difficulties that Darwin himself was unable to cope with.  Darwin's conviction that something must do what evolution requires has been incredibly forcefully vindicated.

So modern opponents of evolution are opposing not only the (utterly overwhelming) evidence Darwin himself appealed to, but also the (even more decisive) evidence of subsequent generations of biologists and biochemists.  I suppose I am an outsider, as a philosopher, but I can't help but agree with those who equate the rejection of evolution with the rejection of heliocentrism or gravity.

Canadians are funny

I'm still not posting enough of my own these days, so in the interests of not leaving this blog totally inactive, I must link when I find something this good elsewhere.

An inappropriate link

I don't know why I sought this out; with thanksgiving dinner only a couple of hours off, killing my appetite seems inappropriate.  However, it was also fairly entertaining, and it's always good to find more ammunition for the war over intelligent design that has mysteriously flared up again recently.  Hopefully I will have forgotten some of the parasites by the time the turkey is served.

Intriguing experiment

I am, of course, on record as endorsing the DUH hypothesis as an account of the origin of life, but I try to be open minded and adjust my beliefs in light of new evidence.  Recent data provides new support for the rival Flying Spaghetti Monster hypothesis.  I may have to reconsider my position in light of this remarkable new research.

Blegging

I will be teaching an intro level philosophy of science course in the spring, and I need to figure out a text or texts to use.  I've never taught a course like this before, so I really have no idea what's good (I seem to remember being subjected to a book by Giere when I was an undergrad, but I also seem to remember it being hopelessly dull).  Any of my readers have any suggestions?

Bush on intelligent design

I have been talking about intelligent design recently, but I haven't posted specifically on W's comments on the issue, because I guess it's the sort of thing I expect from him and anyway I don't have much to add that hasn't been said.  That hasn't actually changed, but I did locate this amusing item that perhaps deserves more publicity (so why am I posting it here?  Well, a couple of people read this, I think).

I'm all for teaching DUH
in America's schools!

Atheism and evolution

One theme which often comes up in the debate over evolution is that the anti-evolution side insists that evolution is anti-religion, while the pro-evolution side insists that evolution and religion have nothing to do with one another, so religious people should leave evolution alone.  Strategically, there may be some merit in this argument.  Certainly it is a fact that most of those who believe in evolution are also religious, so it's not as if believing in evolution requires you to reject religion.

However, I think there is a problem with claiming this total disconnect between the issues of religion and evolution.  The main reason I am an atheist is because, when I look around at the universe, it doesn't particularly look like the sort of thing which has been designed by an intelligence for some purpose.  Now, of course this is not a conclusive argument; intelligences are capable of having all sorts of strange purposes, and an intelligence capable of creating a universe would presumably be capable of having purposes far beyond my understanding.  But, while it's always necessary to remind ourselves that we could be wrong, this shouldn't preclude us from accepting what our best evidence seems to be telling us, and in this case what that evidence seems to be telling us is that there's no God out there.

If this is a reasonable way of thinking, then evolution is not actually irrelevant to the issue of theism vs. atheism; obviously, the pattern of life on this planet is one of the things which appears considerably more comprehensible if one assumes there's no God pulling the strings.  Certainly it's hard to see why the God of any of the major religions wouldn't have done lots of meddling, and yet to all appearances life has developed over time in ways completely explicable by evolution, with no signs of meddling whatsoever.  So, it seems to me that the anti-evolutionists are, kind of, right; evolution provides a reason not to believe in God (though, sadly for their cause, it provides a good reason).

The obvious response to this is to push the faith line, and say that belief in God has nothing to do with the evidence.  I suppose there are some who would take that line, but I fear there are too many who retreat to this position when the going gets tough, while normally insisting that their beliefs about God are as reasonable as can be.

Subjectivism and Realism

While I apparently have some philosophical readers, I expect that my last two substantial posts might have bored any readers who came here for politics.  This post will not return to politics directly, but will address an issue often raised in the context of political debates.  I want to talk about ethical subjectivism (sometimes people use "relativism" to refer to the same thing) and ethical realism, and eventually connect that to larger philosophical issues.

It seems to me that the view that ethical principles are objective is not nearly as problematic as is often argued.  There's a view of how objective ethical principles can be discovered which has long been a part of the utilitarian tradition and which is, so far as I can tell, now held by many in other ethical traditions.  We can view our ethical intuitions, our judgments about particular moral cases, as data, and we can try to construct theories which serve to explain and unify those judgments.  It is difficult to see anything in such a procedure which is more problematic than the way we proceed in the sciences, by treating our observations as data and constructing theories to explain those observations.

Of course, people don't all agree about the data, but that's true in science as well.  Some phenomena are extremely difficult to observe, and some people simply have disfunctional sense organs.  Further, treating ethics on a par with science in this way certainly doesn't rule out reform; our scientific theories sometimes lead us to reject some of our observations, and likely a good moral theory will similarly entail some revision of what we count as reliable moral judgments.  Similarly, disagreement about what theory really does best explain the data is not much of a disanalogy; there is widespread agreement in some sciences about some issues, but certainly not in all sciences about everything.  If ethics is similar to science, it's surely similar to a science in which we haven't made much progress, but that's a far cry from an argument that there's nothing objective in ethics at all.

Still, having said all this in favor of the reasonability of ethical realism, I do not endorse that position myself.  It seems to me that everything which might make us think ethics is objective can be adequately handled by some kind of Humean view.  If what's right is determined by our individual feelings about things, that does not eliminate the need for ethical investigation and debate; very often, our feelings concern what outcomes we desire, and it can be very difficult to determine how to bring about or avoid particular outcomes.  It is unclear that productive ethical debate very often includes much more than that.

Of course, it is philosophers who worry if subjectivism accurately characterizes ethical debate.  The more common worry outside the seminar room is that if ethics is just a matter of our feelings, doesn't that mean whatever feels right to someone is right?  But surely lots of horrible things we don't want to endorse feel right to all sorts of bad people.

Partly, I think this is already answered by looking at the need to evaluate not only our feelings about outcomes, but the empirical questions of how those outcomes can in fact be brought about.  That doesn't resolve the whole issue, though; likely some people act in ways we'd want to condemn because they have fundamentally different feelings, not because they disagree about the methods for bringing about particular outcomes.  However, even in those cases, I'm not sure how badly off the subjectivist is.

It is often emphasized by ethicists that ethics is supposed to be a practical endeavor; the goal is to figure out the right way to live, and encourage people to follow it.  So I think it is instructive to ask, as a practical matter, what can be done about people with fundamentally different feelings.  Hume said sympathy was the most fundamental feeling relevant to morality; consider someone who lacks that, a sociopath.  To be consistent, it seems a Humean must say that when such a person engages in theft, say, or murder, they are in a sense not acting wrongly; their feelings don't oppose the actions they are taking.  But this sense is not very important to how the rest of us should deal with a sociopath.  Surely we need to defend ourselves; that the sociopath considers his actions justified is irrelevant to our concerns.  Many possible options are available, such as prison or simply killing the sociopath.  I have never been able to determine why anyone would think subjectivism rules out dealing with such problems in the same ways as other moral theories would recommend.

If I can't see where the problem is for the subjectivist view, it should come as no surprise that I equally can't see the advantage for the objectivist view; they are two sides of the same coin.  Sure, on the objectivist view the sociopath is just wrong about some moral facts.  But as far as the practical matter of how to deal with him, I can't see how that helps in the slightest.  Does anyone really think a sociopath could be brought around by being subjected to Kant's proof of the categorical imperative, or Mill's arguments from Utilitarianism?  Mill didn't think so; indeed, even for much easier cases he had doubts about how much could be done for the sufficiently morally confused.  That was why he emphasized early education so much.  And of course Plato, to take another prominent ethical objectivist, clearly believed that there were hopeless cases; part of the point of Gorgias and of book I of Republic is that Callicles and Thrasymachus are just such hopeless cases (and in the case of Thrasymachus, we're also shown how to deal with a hopeless case.  Thrasymachus is treated as a wild animal, pretty much how I say a Hume-style subjectivist should view a sociopath).  The practically available options are pretty much the same, either way; if someone's moral outlook is just too fundamentally off, you're pretty much left with brainwashing or violence as a response, whether you think that the outlook being off involved factual error or distorted feelings.

Because of this absence of any practical difference, I tend to favor subjectivism simply because it seems to make less extravagant claims.  However, the absence of a practical difference means I also don't think this issue is very important, certainly not nearly as important as some of the debates over it might have led one to believe.

I claimed I'd try to link this to larger issues, but I think this post is already pretty long, so I'll do that very briefly.  It is my suspicion that objectivity in general, at least in the deep metaphysical sense many philosophers intend, is not of any more value than the objectivity in ethics I discuss here.  So, in the end, I agree with Bentham and Mill that ethics is something like science, but not for the same reason.

A very strange thought experiment

I've been looking at Lewis recently, due to a summer reading group.  I might post about our fascinating discussion of Lewis on chances at some point, but thinking about the Lewis view of laws of nature brought to my mind a thought experiment which I believe I first heard from Lewis and which I always found quite amusing (some will doubtless take this as proof that I am a horrible judge of what's amusing).

Apparently this comes from Tooley.  Imagine that it is true that all of the fruit in Smith's garden is apples.  Further, this situation is quite robust.  Plant an orange tree in Smith's garden, and it either produces apples, or it produces no fruit.  Try to bring a banana into the garden, and it turns into an apple.  Lemons simply vanish upon approach.  Grapes are repelled by an irresistable force.  Suppose that all efforts to find an underlying cause or mechanism for the behavior of Smith's garden are unsuccessful, but that while the means are miscellaneous, the effect, that no non-apple fruit is ever present in the garden, is exceptionless.  I'm not sure what Tooley does with the thought experiment, but what I'd like to know about the case is this.  Is there any point at which it becomes reasonable to conclude that "all of the fruit in Smith's garden is apples" is a fundamental, basic law of nature?