Faithful reader and cherished
friend M. Flint has a couple of comments on
my last post. I think the argument
is interesting and important enough to devote a new post to it.
Here is how I described Leon Wieseltier’s
position in
his anti-Pinker, anti-scientism argument in The New Republic, from
my reply to Ms. Flint’s opening comment:
Wieseltier speaks not of scientists or the scientific
community, but of science. He is clearly trying to limit the domain of topics
into which science can legitimately inquire. This strikes me as wrong headed,
for Aristotelian reasons. If you ask what a human being is, both a materialist
scientist and a poet can offer answers: a cloud of molecules and a soul at odds
with itself. These answers are not in opposition because they interpret the
question in different ways. Occasionally, there will be intersections between
their intellectual trajectories. What is the role of neurotransmitters in the
capacity for love? Wieseltier wants to discourage such encounters. I think we
should encourage them.
Ms. Flint replies in turn:
I read Wieseltier quite differently. In my view, he was not
arguing so much that science should not ask questions about certain topics, but
instead that it should not smother out other disciplines. He takes issue with
the scientific community trying to make every great thinker into a “scientist”
and thinks that the humanities have some claim to greatness. I think that that
view is fair. As I read Wieseltier’s
article, it seems to me less like he is arguing that science should not ask
questions about certain topics and more like it could not provide certain kinds
of answers.
We do indeed read him
differently. Regarding the minor point,
Wieseltier complains thusly:
Pinker’s essay opens with the absurd, but immensely
revealing, contention that Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Smith were
scientists.
I am not sure that any of these
thinkers would recognize the contemporary division between science and
philosophy and I think that Rousseau’s place on this list is dubious as he was
a vociferous critic of the modern view (while being resolutely modern!). At least the first three, however, were
certainly representatives of the world view presented by modern science.
As for the major point, here is
Wieseltier:
What von Mises and Diamond—and Pinker—deny is that the
differences between the various realms of human existence, and between the
disciplines that investigate them, are final. For these scientizers, they are
not differences in kind; they are differences only in appearance, whereas a
deeper explanation, a scientific explanation, will expose the underlying
sameness. The underlying sameness is the presumption of scientism. The
scientizers do not respect the borders between the realms; they transgress the
borders so as to absorb all the realms into a single realm, into their realm.
They are not pluralists.
I am grateful to Wieseltier for
telling us how to describe partisans of “scientism” without calling them scientists. I don’t know how to interpret that except as
a claim that there ought to be sharp borders around the kinds of questions
that scientists are allowed to ask.
A similar argument is made by Dave
Pruett at the Huffington Post.
The violations of science's domain by religion are numerous,
well known and egregious…
Science's infractions are subtler but equally damaging to
the human spirit. During an enlightening lecture in 2000 by religion scholar
Huston Smith, I began to appreciate how science infringes on religion's domain.
Smith thoughtfully distinguished science from scientism. The former is
an investigative protocol; the latter is a religion, complete with dogma.
Science is a formalized procedure for making sense of the world by studying its
material properties, perceived through the awareness of the senses, albeit
senses heightened by modern marvels such as the electron microscope, the Hubble
Space Telescope or the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Scientism (or scientific
materialism), on the other hand, adds to science a statement of faith: The
universe is only material.
Moreover, given the spectacular successes of science over
the past three centuries, it is more than fair to acknowledge that science
represents a powerful way to learn about the world. But scientism ups the ante:
Science is the best (or only) way to make sense of the world. In
short, scientism is to science what fundamentalism is to religion: cocksure and
inflexible.
I disagree with Pruett’s
description of science, which I think is hardly limited to material
properties. However, what he calls
scientific materialism is a very well established philosophical position going
back to the ancient Greek atomists and such thinkers as Anaxagoras. I think that materialism is absurd but I see
no reason why any philosopher or scientist is guilty of a boundary violation by
believing in it and arguing for it. I am
sure that Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett think that science is the best way
of making sense of the world and I know that neither thinks it the only way of
doing so. However, if either did believe
that, they would only be pushing an extreme position on a certain spectrum of questioning. The history of philosophy is full of such
arguments. The proper response is to
respond to the arguments by arguing in turn; it is childish to demand that the
scientists get their muddy boots out of the parlor.
Rather than continue to argue
in the abstract, let me offer an example.
Most people of faith in these United States seem to be thorough going
dualists. They believe that the soul is
a second, vaporous body somehow attached to the physical body. That vaporous body is the home of our
thoughts, passions, and moral responsibility.
At death (and perhaps
occasionally before that event) the soul detaches itself and floats away. I am fond of pointing out that this view is not
Biblical. I think that it is opposed by
the view presented in the wee books at the end of the New Testament. I also point out that it is not the view of
any major church that I know of. The
Christian churches have always insisted on the resurrection of the body.
Does science have anything to
say about this? I have argued in
these pages that it does. The famous
split brain experiments have shown that when the corpus callosum is severed (as
it is in a radical therapy for extreme seizures), the two halves of the brain
can no longer communicate with one another.
Something observed solely by the left eye and transmitted to the right hemisphere
of the brain cannot be named; for naming is the province of the left
hemisphere. This is odd from the
perspective of Cartesian dualism. If
there is a unified soul somehow involved in two-way communication with the
physical brain, why can’t it get information from one side to the other?
That is a case where science,
strictly confining itself to scientific questions, can speak to a very robust
and centuries old philosophical/religious question. That it comes down on the side of the New
Testament is interesting. It is
precisely this sort of thing that seems to bother the critics of “scientism”. If this is a boundary violation, I plead
guilty.
