Month: May 2009

Russell Blackford also says why Fish is wrong.

It is, of course, true that the grounding of any knowledge claim will eventually run out. If somebody does not accept our basic assumptions about what forms of argument are cogent and what counts as evidence, we can not convince her of anything that she does not want to be convinced of. For that reason, it’s true to say that there is no argument about anything that is effective in persuading all comers, no matter how fanatical or even insane…[W]hile our various chains of inference cannot be justified all the way down to all comers, it does not follow that none are better than others. Chains of inference don’t need to be justified all the way down. In fact, the very idea is incoherent. But some can be justified down into claims that no sane person would deny.

Fish left that part out.

Science’s methods are continuous with the ordinary methods of reasoning that we use in day to day life, but made more rigorous in various well-known ways, to make up for the ubiquity of circumstantial evidence and heavily theory-laden reasoning. Religion is simply not in this position. When we say that it relies on faith, we don’t just mean that it eventually depends on assumptions about what counts as evidence and what counts as cogent reasoning – assumptions that can’t be proved without relying upon them, because they count as our standards for what can be proved or evidenced.

Fish left that part out too. Fish is unserious.

Massimo Pigliucci says why Fish is wrong and silly.

[T]he problem lies with Fish’s cheap rhetorical trick: Stanley seems to think that once one has refuted the naive logical positivist view that human beings can adopt a purely objective viewpoint and grasp reality for what it actually is (a position that in philosophy has been abandoned since the 1950s, by the way), voilà, all knowledge has ultimately been shown to be a matter of faith…It is simply not true, as our friend cavalierly maintains, that “once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.” And the reason this is not the case is that there are more than two options on the table. True, facts don’t speak for themselves, and evidence is such only within a particular conceptual framework, which itself depends on certain assumptions. But the framework and the assumptions don’t need to be arbitrary. In science, they are not (contrary to postmodern literary criticism).

The web of scientific knowledge is reliable, Pigliucci says, because it works; one can keep examining particular threads, and pulling them away if necessary, without destroying the whole web.

As always in the case of postmodernism, a perfectly reasonable and potentially interesting idea (the non-independence of facts and theories, which was not discovered by postmodernists) gets blown out of proportion to justify an insane conclusion (that science is the same as religion, or that reason and faith are on the same epistemological level), a conclusion that very likely the author himself does not believe. A famous quip by philosopher Bertrand Russell comes to mind: I wish that all philosophers who do not believe in the existence of walls would get into a car and drive straight into a wall (any would do) at a speed proportional to their skepticism concerning the existence of the wall itself.

To finish, Pigliucci tells Fish off for the childish last paragraph in which he reports that somebody wrote a piece that started ‘Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins?’

Stanley Fish is back.

Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions…that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

Yes yes yes, but it doesn’t follow that any and all assumptions are reasonable and sane and that therefore any old evidence is good evidence as long as it ‘comes into view in the light of’ some assumptions.

Then there is a swerve into a new topic, the fact that some people who commented on his previous musings on God claim that religion is too optimistic. Fish knows better than that.

The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent, and the struggles of faith, the dark night of the soul, feelings of unworthiness, serial backsliding, the abyss of despair.

Really?! Nothing but doubt and dissent? So the religions he knows do not include any of the majors, which are about considerably more than doubt and dissent? If the religions he knows are about nothing but doubt and dissent, he must be acquainted exclusively with very peculiar very tiny minority religions which hardly anyone is aware of. His post on the other hand seem to be about ‘God’ which usually refers to a character with some connection with the familiar and well-known monotheisms.

Brian Leiter asks Does the NY Times Not Realize That Stanley Fish is Philosophically Incompetent? Jason Brennan has an interesting comment:

Nicholas Shackel has a fun paper in Metaphilosophy called “The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology.” Among other things, he describes the method of “Troll’s Truisms.” The idea is that postmodernists like to express radical claims about reality and rationality, but when pressed, retreat into trivial claims no one disagrees with. Shackel gives Fish as an example of someone who does this.

I actually saw Fish perform this maneuver in person. A student group had him out here (to Brown) a few years ago. He spent 20 minutes saying that there is no objective reality, etc.–all the typical twaddle and poppycock. When some student criticized postmodernism, Fish berated the student, and then said that postmodernism is nothing more than the simple claim that all our beliefs are mediated by concepts. I was stunned.

Yep. Susan Haack calls that ‘the bit where they say it and the bit where they take it back.’