Fuller Transcript
More Fuller. I’ve been reading the transcript (and so has Stewart, see his comments on I Employ Methods). It’s time to share.
A. Well, you might say as a philosopher I’m
professionally dissatisfied with all explanations that
claim to be final. And so there is going to be a
special suspicion sort of drawn toward the
taken-for-granted theories in any given discipline.Q. So you’re not saying that intelligent design
is the correct or the better explanation for
biological life?No, I’m not. I’m certainly not. They’re
not – they haven’t developed it enough to really be
in a position to make any kind of definitive judgment
of that kind…I want to see where
intelligent design goes, frankly. I mean, you know, again, it’s hard to make a judgment. But I do think
that when you get to a situation in science where one
theory is very dominant and so taken for granted that
people don’t even feel they have to, you know, defend
it anymore, then that’s kind of bad news
epistemologically, just generally speaking.
Well, it seems to me this (along with a lot of other places) is where the lack of expertise gets to be a problem. Which is no doubt why the plaintiff’s lawyer asked him about his expertise in some detail – got him to say No he’s not a scientist, not a biologist, not an expert on irreducible complexity, or on Behe, or on Dembski, or on complex specified information, not familiar with the textbooks that are being used, not familiar with Of Pandas and People. And this is where that shows up. The explanation doesn’t claim to be ‘final’. And then there’s the ‘it’s hard to make a judgment’. Well, yes, of course it is, because you don’t know anything about the subject! Therefore – therefore – you really ought not to be meddling in it. You ought not to be proffering your valueless opinions and hunches in a courtroom in a situation in which the vast majority of people who do know something about the subject think the side you are defending is utterly, bottomlessly wrong. That’s exactly why you should shut the hell up.
It says, Third, ID’s
rejection of naturalism and commitment to
supernaturalism does not make it unscientific. Did I
read that correctly?A. Yes…But I do believe that ID is open
to supernaturalism. But it’s not exclusively
supernatural, it’s just with respect to this
dichotomy.Q. But it has a commitment to supernaturalism
and to introducing it into the scientific community?[…]So if it’s not naturalistic, what else could
it be?Yes, but the thing here is, what
supernaturalistic boils down to — I mean,
supernaturalistic just means not explainable in the
naturalistic terms. Right? It means involving some
kind of intelligence or mind that’s not reducible to
ordinary natural categories. Okay?
So that’s the sense in which I’m using
supernaturalistic. I’m not saying, you know, they’re
committed to ghosts or something. See, I’m not sure
what exactly — but that’s how I — I understand
supernaturalistic in this fairly broad sense…Well, as not naturalistic, given what we
take to be naturalistic now in science. Because in
the past, things that we now consider to be
naturalistic in science were not regarded as such.
Right? So that’s the basic point I’m trying to make
here.
But that’s not supernatural, you fool. That’s ‘not discovered yet’ or ‘not understood yet’, which is a completely different thing. As surely you know! You an expert in the rhetoric of science – surely you know perfectly well what ‘supernatural’ means. It means above, beyond, outside natural, it doesn’t mean natural but not fully understood yet.
Q. The goal is to have a supernatural designer
considered as a possible scientific explanation?A. Well, it’s intelligent designer, and I think
the idea here is that intelligence is something that
cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes. Right? So
there is a sense in which the idea of intelligence
itself is taken to be somewhat supernatural here.
But ‘intelligent’ is just an adjective to apply to a process that, to the ID crowd, looks deliberate and planned and intentional – and ‘intelligent’ – instead of like a dull algorithm of reproduce, change, select, reproduce, change, select. But it seems pretty circular to take that adjective – ‘intelligent’ – that is the crux of the disagreement, and say that it’s something that cannot be ‘reduced’ to naturalistic causes. Why can’t it be, and how do you know, and are you sure you’ve looked hard enough? Maybe there’s some very ‘intelligent’ entity hiding somewhere that you just haven’t found yet. Go back and look some more and then come back – say in nine hundred years or so – and tell us what you’ve learned. In the meantime, get out of our school systems.
Beautiful elucidation of why Fuller should keep his trap shut (and thanks for the pointer to my comments). But why has none of that shown up in the reports? They’re all variations on “Sociologist testifies ID is science” and “Fuller accuses science of being monolithic” and the stories uncritically reflect the thinking behind that kind of headline. Where are the headlines saying “Overcaffeinated tooth fairy ripped to shreds in cross-examination while trying to justify ID in schools”?
Because the reporters don’t know? Or because they are obliged, or think they are obliged, to be ‘impartial’ and ‘even-handed’? Or both?
The ACLU report was pretty good though, I thought.
But the thing is massive. It’s hard to report on all of it. I’m having a hard time even reading all of it – all of just one day, I mean. And when I do read it, it’s hard to select. There’s so much nonsense – selection is difficult. That could be part of the reporters’ problem too.
Which is another reason Fuller should have just shut up.
But that’s how ID keeps winning – the oxygen of publicity and ‘impartial’ reporting.
Arrggh.
“But why has none of that shown up in the reports?”
Because reporters need to be “objective”, and in order to be “objective” you must give both sides equal time and try to avoid saying anything unpleasant (crackpots are people too, you know). Besides, science and the philosophy of science are hard and boring topics, about which we know very little and care even less, so it is better if we focus on personalities (but not in any mean, nasty way) and opinion polls and horse-race predictions. Then we, the simple but fairminded reading public, can make up our own minds (hey, this is a democracy, buddy!) about the matter by automatically splitting the difference. Because everyone knows that the truth always lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong.
Well, just because the press can’t do its job, that won’t stop me from affectionately remembering him as “Steve Fuller of Shit Than All the Other Witnesses Combined.”
Right you win this week’s award Stewart!
Gosh, er, golly! I’m, so, wow, I’m speechless. What a humbling moment. I would like to thank the Academy, but my Sally Field impression is all rusty. Let this be a lesson to you, Karl, about what democracy is really all about. Who woulda thort that a kid without no kollidge larnin’ could rise to such heights? I would have a theory about this, but I’m not sure I have enough A4 paper in stock right now. Is this one of those awards where they take it away from you if they catch you doing drugs or taking your clothes off for reasons other than showering? And best of all, I now have the one thing Steve Fuller will never have on his Brittanica-length CV.
I don’t think this has been linked to yet (apologies if I’m inadvertently duplicating effort), but since we all appreciate good comedy, this is a nice example of how precisely the Dover shenanigans are imitating it:
http://www.slate.com/id/2128755/
Fuller’s lack of knowledge in the field whose experts he studies leads him to commit the same mistake as Cargo Cultists ( from http://www.physics.brocku.ca/etc/cargo_cult_science.html :
“In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land”).
Fuller observes what scientists do and then thinks that anything that recreates the forms of activity he observes must be science. “The form is perfect” ergo it’s science.
There may be something in the cargo cults analogy, but I’ve realized that the structure of his “arguments” reminded me of Eve Garrard’s “Occupational Hazard” piece back in June, or rather, what she points out in it. There it’s about the selectivity that causes Israeli violations to be singled out above and beyond identical or worse violations by other countries (“Israel’s occupation is thought by most people to be illegal, or more illegal than other similar ones, or to be the occupation that’s really morally objectionable, the one that’s worth selecting out for distinctive punishment”). Similarly, Fuller never gives a good reason for why he thinks ID should be treated better than other unproven theories, though almost everything he says in the cross-examination is pleading that this – and only this – be given an extra-special chance to prove itself. Go back to Garrard’s model (if you see what I’m getting at) and you can then extrapolate what he doesn’t say: there are a lot of people who believe this, and that’s why an exception should be made. He does say how much he’s against scientific elites determining what’s true and the flip-side of that is to make it all more democratic. Whether it’s true matters less than whether it’s widely believed and because he’s concerned only with the relative power structures involved in scientific orthodoxy and admits to knowing very little about the actual issues, it is completely natural for him, as a leading intellectual, to follow the herd. Except he’ll never call that particular spade a spade.
the idea here is that intelligence is something that cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes.
I have seen this used as an argument for the existence of a god. There is a book based on a variation of the argument: C.S. Lewis’s dangerous idea : a philosophical defense of Lewis’s argument from reason by Victor Reppert.
>Similarly, Fuller never gives a good reason for why he thinks ID should be treated better than other unproven theories…< I don’t think the problem with the ID thesis is that it is “unproven”. >it is completely natural for him, as a leading intellectual…< Fuller a leading intellectual? Sez who?
Fuller does have a final explanation.
When he hears the word science he reaches for his Kuhn.
Allen,
We have no argument about proven or unproven theories and if you think I’m the one who thinks he’s a leading intellectual, you must have missed all my other rants the last couple of days. Why did you cut the quote there and not continue with “to follow the herd”? I think he and the people who put him on that witness stand, at least, consider him a leading intellectual. I don’t think it’s possible to consider anyone who follows a herd to be an intellectual at all, let alone a leading one. I do find it hard to believe, however, that he’s as stupid as he plays in the cross-examination. I think he’s being sneaky as hell. I think he knows just what he’s doing when he says ID is science and not religion. All that difficulty in giving clear straight answers when under fire and suddenly wanting to know just what it was he said earlier (trying to weasel out of having called ID’s failures “damning”), I perceive all of that to be about one thing: he knows very well that the cause he’s trying to aid in that courtroom is one that violates the law of the country he comes from but no longer lives in, but he doesn’t care about that. He supports it anyway and one of his main tasks is to persuade the law that ID is something other than what it really is in order to get around that hurdle. OB is certainly right that he has no business being any kind of expert witness, but that particular observation only relates to the obvious surface level of him admittedly not knowing much about the real issues at hand. But he knows all that; his job is to hoodwink, to play along with the idea that he is relevant and make statements that mask the truth about ID and its intentions while sowing the maximum amount of suspicion and mistrust about the way science works. Don’t let those teeth fool you; an innocent he ain’t (I just saw “Curse of the Were-Rabbit” and I still have choppers on the brain – sorry).
Good one, Kiwi D.
“I think he’s being sneaky as hell. I think he knows just what he’s doing”
This is why Norm Levitt and Paul Gross wrote that book, and why Alan Sokal did his hoax, and why Meera Nanda wrote her book. This stuff isn’t always just laughable nonsense – these guys do real harm. And they ought to know better.
Steve Fuller should be squirming in shame.
Lifetime achievement award goes to the amazing Kiwi Dave for that awesome witticism/pun. I’ll be passing that one off as my own in conversation.
On the other hand – not that I want to defend Fuller (perish the thought!), only that it seems plausible – another possibility for the difference in morning and afternoon (direct and cross) testimony is just the psychological difference between talking to the ‘friendly’ lawyer and talking to the ‘hostile’ one. It’s probably just generally true (isn’t it?) that witnesses are more or less cautious depending on which side is questioning them.
I’m quite sure you’re right that that’s a part of it. But when one looks at documents like the Wedge (which the court allowed) or the pathetic charade by Buckingham to avoid it coming out that he used the word “creationism,” it becomes even clearer than it ever was that most people on the ID side know very well that ID really is nothing but a Trojan Horse for creationism. That’s what I mean when I refuse to believe Fuller is completely stupid. Maybe he is one of those believers who can’t get his mind around the concept of a non-believer, therefore non-believers are all just believers of a different kind, but I can’t get my mind around the notion that Steve Fuller is one of the only people on the ID side who isn’t aware of the dishonest strategy he’s helping them pursue.
Yeah. No argument there. I meant psychological thing might be part of the reason – only part.
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Rugby players spend a lot of time physical training Compared to other form of sports.I have read the
Rugby laws mentioned on this site. It’s a gripping sport which targets the grip strength and the active mindedness of a player. American football and rugby league are also primarily collision sports, but their tackles tend to terminate much more quickly. For professional rugby, players are often chosen on the basis of their size and apparent strength and they develop the skill and power over the passage of time. In modern rugby considerable attention is given to fitness and aerobic conditioning as well as basic weight training.