Table 1
Returning to this question of the political nature of the conflict (or non-conflict) between religion and science, in Thomas Dixon’s reply to Eric –
I stand by my emphasis on the political aspects of all of this. Claims about the nature of reality and who has the authority to discover and describe it, and by what methods, are questions about power, and thus political. I don’t say that the Scopes or Galileo cases were nothing but politics, but I do say they were political.
They were, but speaking broadly (as we are, because the subject is religion and science as such, not just particular incidents touching on religion and science), science is not inherently political in the way that religion is.
Science is of course contingently political, and the politics in question can be very interesting and significant and worth researching. Science as an institution and as a career is often very political. But science itself, science as such – the methodology, the epistemology, the actual work – isn’t and can’t be.
That’s not true of religion. Religion is inherently political in a way that science isn’t.
That’s because science has to check itself against the way the world is, and religion doesn’t. Science is about what is there whether humans can figure it out or not, and religion isn’t. (It claims to be, but it isn’t.)
Remember Carl Zimmer’s collection of scientists commenting on the NASA research? And Jerry Coyne’s post and the comments?
Now imagine that happening with a religious…assertion.
Nothing, right? The mind goes blank. There couldn’t be such a thing. There could be controversy and fuss, but it would all be just people disagreeing. It would be political. It wouldn’t be
1) Figure S2 shows that the -As/+P cells have an As/C ratio of about 1.5 x 10-5, while +As/-P cells have an As/C ratio of about 3 x10-5. -As/+P cells have a P/C ratio of about 0.005, while +As/-P cells have a P/C ratio of about 0.002. These are not very big differences. Furthermore, these data suggest that the cells actually contain more P than As under both growth conditions. However, Table 1 shows that -As/+P cells contain 0.19% As and 0.02% P by dry weight. These data are not consistent with the data shown in Figure S2. (By the way, since the atomic weight of As is 2.4x that of P, the molar ratio is actually 4 rather than 10. But the data are still not consistent with Figure S2.)
See? “Table 1 shows that -As/+P cells contain 0.19% As and 0.02% P by dry weight” isn’t political. Religious disagreements don’t have any “Table 1 shows that -As/+P cells contain 0.19% As and 0.02% P by dry weight.” Religion has a lot of time for politics because it spends no time on what Table 1 shows.
So both are political in some sense, but science isn’t ultimately political. With so many scientists watching each other’s every move, sooner or later the politics is going to be shoved aside by what Table 1 shows.
Agreed. Claiming the right to speak your piece about the contents of Table 1 is political, too, but that’s not exclusive to science.
On the other hand, religion is ultimately entirely about politics. There may be a few religious people on earth who have never used religion as a tool to get other people to do what they want, but that just means they have blindly swallowed the bait laid out by others.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Table 1 http://dlvr.it/BpR2H […]
Anyone who studies a bit of history and historical anthropology knows that the priestly classes in most all civilizations were either the same as ruling classes, or were in cahoots with them.
All we have to do is examine what large-scale public works projects (with or w/o slaves) involved building temples or burial sites for emperors and kings, in addition to grain storage sites. In many civilizations both were on the same premises.
There are a couple of issues with the way you seem to be defining political here that don’t map well onto how things actually work in various fields.
First, debates over the details of tables happens an awful lot in politics. Political reports generated so that our elected officials can decide what the best thing to do is contain a ton of those sorts of tables, and opposition to the policies involve disagreeing over tables in that way. Yes, the tables in politics are statistics about things like population sizes and opinion polls, but then science has a lot of statistics as well, even about similar things (well, okay, not usually opinion polls [grin]). To that end, science would look more like how politics is practiced than religion is, if that’s what it means to be political.
Second, there’s another field that wouldn’t use that sort of data or have that sort of disagreement (at least, not normally): philosophy. But that certainly doesn’t make philosophy political in any way, at least not as an overall field. And even political philosophy is hardly political in the way it would need to be to justify claiming it was all about politics.
Personally, I think that theology is philosophy, but some disagree. What everyone must agree with, however, is that theology is a lot more like philosophy than it is like science. That doesn’t make it bad, or mean that it’s more ultimately or inherently political than science is, anymore than that would make philosophy more ultimately or inherently political than science is.
Whenever disagreements matter, there will be politics. Theology, philosophy and science are all things that can generate disagreements that matter.
As a final note, perhaps from this talking about a clash between science and religion is misleading. Is it possible that instead we should be talking about a conflict between theology and science?
Verbose
Interesting, and telling, I think, that there is far less activity from Templeton on the ‘field’ of Philosophy and Religion.
Mark,
That’s because no one’s claiming that there are methodological differences between the two or that they are fundamentally incompatible.
That being said, that comment there was more aimed at internal disagreements, not necessarily interrelated ones. However, all of those fields can disagree at various times.
If there’s a difference, it’s that philosophy will listen to theology and science when the disagreements come in …
You’ve drawn the right distinction but I think it could be clearer. Lines of inquiry, the framing of debates and – regrettably – even results can be influenced by their social context. That doesn’t mean that “science” is political, as you say, but it does mean that the actual work can be. The actual work needn’t be very scientific.
*I* claim that a *useful* philosophy is incompatible with religion. One can create a philosophy that isn’t, of course, but then one is left with a philosophy which at best is indifferent to science, at worse hostile to it. And science (and hence also technology, especially the budding sociotechnologies) is an important engine of contemporary society, etc.
Politics is informed by science much like theology and philosophy are informed by science. Because ultimately, truth (or reason) wins out long term than the opinion of demagogues, or that of an elite class or the masses (or in the case of philosophy–reality wins over pure thought). Of course we’re not talking rational politics when it comes to religion, that is the point I’m sure Ophelia is attempting to make. You could say that contemporary rational politics is becoming ‘scientized’ in attempting to find some objective foundation in policy making rather than in opinion.
Modern politics mostly works by authority (whether through dictatorship or through representative democracy), as does religion. Science doesn’t work this way, it doesn’t set up kings or an elite group of scientists to dictate theories, nor does it vote on which theory works best for science.
I think we’ve clarified things in this debate, so that the conflict is between reason and revelation (or authority). These are the exact same two positions that Thomas Dixon uses in his BBC programme The End of God? So it is not like he’s unfamiliar with the underlying problem between science and religion.
Having said all this, I am open to the possibility that reason itself has political consequences, that it stands for a kind of individualism over subjection. It may in fact be anti-political–if we are to understand politics as based in authority. Or it could be progressive or enlightened politics, a new kind of politics.
But for the sake of clarity, we need to understand the difference between science and religion in order to understand why there is an irreconcilable conflict.
I am conflicted about where I should post. I just put up a longish one in the thread started by my review of Thomas Dixon’s book. In fact, I may have confused the two threads, especially regarding the relationship between theology and philosophy. There is, actually, a philosophical theology, which considers arguments for the existence of god, and other philosophical aspects of religious claims, such as concepts of god, relationships between god and free will, the problem of evil, etc. Otherwise, theology is very different from philosophy, since it is not critical all the way down. At some point, biblical and historical theology, dogmatic theology, apologetic theology, etc., all take fundamental religious beliefs and truth claims about them as foundational.
I was quite taken aback a few years ago by something written by Richard Harries, then Bishop of Oxford (and now a noble lord), and reputedly liberal in his theology. In a book about Christian-Jewish relations entitled After the Evil (OUP, 2003), he said this:
I found this very disturbing when I first read it, because it undermines, in a sentence, all that liberal theology had been trying to do — that is, to produce a theology that could be in some way responsive to the world around us. But at that level, everything is referred back to the fundamental dogmas of the religion which can never be transformed by new knowledge. Religion is essentially dogmatic, and, because of that, inevitably political, for it can only retain power by making sure that those fundamental beliefs are widely shared and influential. It is no mistake, in my view, that the religious have responded so violently to the new atheist phenomenon, because religions know that they are vulnerable at the level of epistemology. It is very important to steer the conversation away from this level of discourse about religion. This is why they have not really addressed the epistemological issues of religious belief, which, however inadequately or adquately addressed by people like Dawkins, are right at the heart of the present conflict between religion and the scientific world view. Even amongst the religious, in places where there is reasonable freedom of thought and expression, this is rightly the dominant world view of our time, and the only one which provides any reasonable basis for shaping a world community. The attempts by religion to control the public conversation by issuing a veritable avalanche of books countering the new atheism, in which shrill and intemperate denunciations of new atheist stridency are the norm, is deeply political. As Grayling has pointed out, this intemperateness may represent the death throes of religion. If that is what it is, great dangers threaten, and we must be watchful.
Philosophy has struggled to find an epistemological underpinning, and has not always been successful. This is why there’s a lot of garbage in philosophy. In that way, theology and philosophy do have a lot in common — except that while philosophy struggles to establish a firm epistemological basis, theology(*) by definition will never find it, because it has firmly hitched it’s epistemological wagon to revealed truth, which is bullshit. (Philosophy has at times relied on revealed truth and other forms of Making Shit Up(TM), but it is not a foundational tenet — philosophy is redeemable; theology is not.)
(*) In this context, I am referring to the credulous sort of theology that seeks to define some sort of spiritual “truth” or parameters regarding spiritual truth. The brand of theology which would be more accurately termed “History and sociology of religion” is of course just fine in my book.
In any case, I think you are getting too hung up on the specific example of “Figure 1.” It doesn’t necessarily need to be a chart or a figure — that is just an example of an epistemological basis. Science includes a non-arbitrary mechanism by which to achieve agreement. Philosophy struggles with this, but it exists — logic, double-checking conclusions against the science, etc. Theology inherently relies on a mechanism where agreement can only be achieved arbitrarily (e.g. by papal decree, or some other authorized fiat). That is what we mean when we see it is solely political — not that it resembles political science, but rather that agreement can only be achieved through political dominance.
That reminds me distinctly of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, better known as the book-within-a-book in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I don’t have the text at hand, but Chapter III of Theory and Practice, “War is Peace,” discussed the totalitarian Oceanian government’s successful conquest of that very need to “check itself”—i.e., its pronouncements about the state of the world—”against the way the world is.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four presents this political issue as a very clearly epistemological one, and the climax of the book is in the long exchange between the protagonist, Winston Smith, and his torturer, O’Brien, on these epistemological issues. Circling back to our topic, physicist and (fairly Gnu-ish) atheist Steven Weinberg wrote a chapter in his anthology Facing Up called “Confronting O’Brien” stating a very Ophelia-like case.
@Verbose Stoic:
I think you might be a little confused by what’s meant by “politics” here (either that or I am). I don’t think we’re talking specifically about “the politics of late 20th century/early 21st century western democracies” which is what you’re talking about. This is a very limited, contingent TYPE of politics, certainly not the definition of it.
Politicians in modern democracies use scientific means of gathering data because their political legitimacy depends on the voting public, and they need to know what the voting public wants in order to craft their political image and messaging appropriately. Note that the voting public might want AGW to be false, in which case scientific marketing technique could be used to convince a politician to adopt the unscientific position that AGW is false. This is all contingent fact about a peculiar brand of politics. If we had an absolute monarch, his political legitimacy would not depend on public opinion about AGW and he wouldn’t have to do marketing research using scientific techniques. A politician could base his campaign on the results of a Magic 8 ball instead of scientific market research and he wouldn’t be any less of a politician, probably just a less effective one.
Just generally, “politics” is used here (I think) to describe matters that are decided by consensus rather than by facts. In that sense, it’s not very much like science at all, which is used to describe systems that try to establish facts regardless of consensus.
Reality is a little more complicated. Political systems need information about the world, so they must employ some scientific reasoning. Appropriate methodologies for deciding the truth of claims aren’t always obvious, so science must employ some politics in terms of delimiting what properly scientific research is. But what makes science “science” as opposed to some other sociological phenomenon is its obsession with truth regardless of opinion, and what makes politics “politics” as opposed to some other sociological phenomenon is its obeisance to consensus without regard for material fact.
Philosophy doesn’t have a matter of fact, and so it is intensely political, in contradiction to what you said. Whether a particular thesis counts as philosophically interesting largely comes down to the biases of the person you ask. Dennett probably wouldn’t find any kind of theology philosophically interesting but he does find a lot of properly scientific neurobiology and empirical psychology philosophically interesting. A religious philosopher might see empirical science as not at all philosophically interesting, but think that theological analyses of free will and consciousness are interesting. Whether your dissertation has an acceptable thesis is a function of who your advisor is — that’s a pretty clear sign that your field is a political one.
Compare to religion, where matters of what to believe, what texts should be considered sacred, what interpretations of those texts are acceptable, who to believe in the event of a theological debate — these are all settled by consensus (or tradition, which is essentially a consensus that includes dead people). That is to say, religious matters of fact are decided by politics rather than by facts about the world. As I mentioned before, reality is a little bit messier than this — the RCC did eventually catch up with the whole heliocentrism thing, for example — but the primary methods by which things are decided in the RCC and pretty much any other church are political methods.
Like Ophelia’s saying (I think), the part of science that makes it science instead of some other sort of activity is the fact that scientific truth claims AREN’T decided by politics (though in practice, politics always wedges itself in somewhere). On the other hand, religious truth claims are, as far as I can tell, all decided by politics (and a disagreement over a truth claim often leads to a religious schism).
Okay, I basically agree with your reply to Verbose Stoic, but I’ve gotta draw the line at this comment. I’m pretty sure that you could say that about every field.
@14:
You’re right, of course, and that’s the sense in which science is political — ultimately, whether an argument counts as “scientific” depends on what department heads in that field think about the argument.
The only sense in which I can make sense of “philosophy” as something distinct from both science and religion (i.e. the way VS used it) is by using it to mean “academic philosophy,” otherwise there’s no distinction to make, simply because “philosophy” is too broad. If it doesn’t mean “what philosophy professors do” then I don’t know what it means. So I interpreted it as “what philosophy professors do,” which is actually pretty political. But then, science professors also engage in politics.
So I guess I just don’t understand the comparison VS was trying to draw between “religion,” “science,” and “philosophy.” That can only be cleared up by VS being explicit about what he means by “philosophy” in this context.
Verbose
Yes, but I said that – I said there is politics in science. My point is that it isn’t inherent in, or central to, science, in the way it is to religion.
Ophelia,
Yes, I know … but my point was not that politics is inherent in or central to science, but that based on your example you have no reason to claim that politics is more central to religion/theology than to science. What we all formally call politics asks that sort of question all the time, and that which pretty much everyone agrees is not inherently political — philosophy — hardly ever asks that sort of question, and certainly not more so than religion/theology.
…………asks what sort of question?
Dan L.,
“Just generally, “politics” is used here (I think) to describe matters that are decided by consensus rather than by facts. In that sense, it’s not very much like science at all, which is used to describe systems that try to establish facts regardless of consensus.”
But both religion/theology and philosophy decide things by facts, rather than consensus. If they clash with science, it’s entirely over what counts as facts, but in their own way they’re all aiming at achieving actual facts, not just facts by consensus.
“Philosophy doesn’t have a matter of fact, and so it is intensely political, in contradiction to what you said. Whether a particular thesis counts as philosophically interesting largely comes down to the biases of the person you ask.”
Um, no, not really. To use your example, Dennett may not find theology interesting, but if he was working in it he’d have to consider the positions taken. Philosophically interesting is, in fact, an objective view in philosophy, and something you have to argue for. When a philosopher says that something is not interesting, they really mean that it isn’t meaningful, either to the concept being discussed or the problem/argument being considered, and they are held accountable for that view. To take the example further, Dennett often doesargue that zombies are not interesting wrt the consciousness debate, but he can’t — and doesn’t — just stop there: he shows why they don’t address or misinterpret the main issues in consciousness. While his biases may come into play, his biases must be justified in philosophy.
Turning to the idea of “facts of the matter”, I think you’re wrong. You are mistaking the fact that in philosophy whether or not there is a fact of the matter is a valid question for there simply being no fact of the matter. Philosophy — uniquely — can question pretty much everything, even whether there are any facts at all. But that itself must be argued for, and I don’t know of too many philosophical fields that have actually concluded that there is no fact of the matter about their field.
“Compare to religion, where matters of what to believe, what texts should be considered sacred, what interpretations of those texts are acceptable, who to believe in the event of a theological debate — these are all settled by consensus (or tradition, which is essentially a consensus that includes dead people).”
This doesn’t seem true of, at least, theology, since they have to argue for their interpretations and it’s rarely simply settled by fiat. They rely no more on consensus than any other field, it seems to me. Ultimately, they argue for and have debates on their views in pretty much the same manner as philosophy does, and philosophy does not settle any questions on the basis of consensus and tradition (and, in fact, doesn’t settle questions at all).
Religions do end up settling questions, at least for what the members should believe, and in a very real sense that’s done by appealing to the supposed authorities, but as per Kuhn science isn’t any better at that; ultimately, theories in science get replaced when enough schools stop teaching the old theory and start teaching the new one. There are still behaviourists around, for example, but most advisors and professors will not promote or support papers talking about it, and so it is at least on the back-burner.
Ophelia,
Table 1, your example from your own post.
No religion doesn’t. Of course it claims to, but it doesn’t. “In their own way” isn’t a good enough bridge to get over the gaping hole where evidence for “facts” should be.
James,
“Philosophy has struggled to find an epistemological underpinning, and has not always been successful. This is why there’s a lot of garbage in philosophy. In that way, theology and philosophy do have a lot in common — except that while philosophy struggles to establish a firm epistemological basis, theology(*) by definition will never find it, because it has firmly hitched it’s epistemological wagon to revealed truth, which is bullshit. (Philosophy has at times relied on revealed truth and other forms of Making Shit Up(TM), but it is not a foundational tenet — philosophy is redeemable; theology is not.)”
I’m a bit confused by this because:
1) I’m not aware that philosophy has ever relied on revealed truth, and anything like MSU; in some sense people do “make things up” but that in and of itself gets challenged directly.
2) Philosophy isn’t struggling for an epistemological underpinning; they’ve pretty much rejected that as you know it. Philosophy rejects no data or methodology a priori, and accepts all methodologies and being potentially useful, but one must always argue for the relevance of that data or methodology to what’s being talked about. Philosophers don’t say that science can’t do morality because it’s science and not philosophy, and morality is the proper domain of philosophy, but instead argue vehemently — amid opposition from other philosophers — that science’s methodology just can’t deliver what’s needed. So it looks like philosophy is struggling with an epistemological underpinning only because philosophy rejects the need for such a formal underpinning.
3) On theology, you reject revealed truth, but that wouldn’t be philosophically tenable. You’d have to prove that revealed truth is, in fact, “bullshit” and not the way to go about studying religion. Ultimately, at that point you’ve drifted away from any discussion of politics and are arguing, at least, over how to go about getting facts, which is a different debate altogether. And is also belied by the fact that a ton of theologians use strong philosophical arguments to justify their theology. So that theology is hopeless must be an overstatement, since to the extent that it relies on philosophy it could not be hopeless if philosophy is not.
Eric,
“Otherwise, theology is very different from philosophy, since it is not critical all the way down. At some point, biblical and historical theology, dogmatic theology, apologetic theology, etc., all take fundamental religious beliefs and truth claims about them as foundational.”
Actually, philosophy isn’t critical all the way down, or else it would be solipsistic and there’d be no positions in philosophy. While it questions everything all the way down, ultimately it stops itself from just asking if there is anything at all by taking certain foundational claims and running with them.
Theology need not take any foundational claims at all. The theology of a specific religion will, but that’s no different, say, than starting from an empiricist or rationalist or realist viewpoint and building from there, even while knowing that the underpinning isn’t proven.
Ophelia,
“No religion doesn’t. Of course it claims to, but it doesn’t. “In their own way” isn’t a good enough bridge to get over the gaping hole where evidence for “facts” should be.”
To me, this seems to be you saying more “They think they’re going after facts, but they’re doing it wrong and so won’t get them”. Which is not an unfair claim, but doesn’t support the “religion is all politics” claim that started all this.
It’s also not uncontroversial, because some equate “evidence” with “scientific evidence”, and other fields — like philosophy — disagree that all meaningful or useful evidence is scientific.
Verbose, “religion is all politics” is not the claim I made.
Ophelia,
Change it to “religion is inherently political”, then, since that’s a direct quote of what you said. Your last point, I claim, still doesn’t support that contention.
Yes, by all means change it to something I did say as opposed to something I didn’t. That’s all I ask. I think it’s a pretty minimal request.
I claim that it does, so there.
[citation needed]
This is faulty logic. If I say my perpetual motion machine relies on a combustion engine, are you forced to choose between “neither combustion engines nor your perpetual motion machine are hopeless” vs. “both combustion engines and your perpetual motion machine are hopeless”?
Anyway, I’m stunned that you think at no point has mainstream philosophy ever relied on Making Shit Up(TM). I don’t mean to demean philosophy — there are excellent philosophers out there, and it can be a very worthwhile endeavor. But clearly, Making Shit Up(TM) (shit that sounds superficially plausible, but is really based on absolutely nothing with any referent in reality to speak of) has been a major — and regrettable — part of philosophy since its inception.
In what way is the concept of Platonic Forms anything other than Making Shit Up(TM)? Seriously, I’d like to hear it… Props to the ancient Greeks for actually trying to reason out their world (as opposed to relying on authorial fiat), but the vast majority of it, they were just making it up as they went along…
Oh come on Verbose, philosophy wouldn’t end up in solipcism if it is critical all the way down. There are all sorts of ways of getting out of solipcism. I don’t see the problem. Which reminds me of story of the woman who wrote to Bertrand Russell saying that she did not understand why there were not more solipcists! There is, of course, philosophy which begins from programmatic beliefs, like Thomism, but that is not, properly speaking, philosophy. When Alvin Plantinga says that belief in god is properly basic, he has just stepped over the threhold into theology.
James Sweet, regarding making shit up (whether trade marked or not), of course, philosophers make shit up, but I am surprised that you should pick on the forms, since univerals have always been a bit of a problem for philosophy, and Plato’s was an early attempt to say what the problem was. Philosophers can learn as much from their mistakes as scientists can.
Eric, IANAPhilosopher, so my reaching for the forms was as much out of ignorance as anything else. If you asked me to name as many examples as I could of “examples of philosophical concepts that everyone will recognize”, I don’t think you’d run out of fingers on which to count them :)
And anyway, I know it’s not fair, but I like to pick on Plato/Socrates because people still have a tendency to turn to the ancient Greeks as if it was cutting edge philosophy, despite, as you say:
(emphasis mine, of course)
Anyway, you are far more qualified than me to cite examples of philosophers just making shit up. The point I was trying to make to Verbose Stoic — and you can help me out here, because I realize I was making my point in a somewhat clumsy and ignorant way — is that some of philosophy relies on stuff that is just made up and so is no better than theology when it comes to relying on authoritative fiat; but that also some of philosophy relies, at least in part, on things which are non-arbitrary.
Re: Solipsism… Maybe this is also reflective of my amateur status as a philosopher, but I have remained unpersuaded by all of the arguments which seek to pull us back from the brink of solipsism without resorting to axioms. So in that sense, I would basically agree that we need a little “epistemological jumpstart”, which is arguably nothing more than a set of arbitrary assertions, in order to get anywhere.
But I don’t think it’s fair to call that “political”. The required axioms are so simple, so intuitively reasonable, so difficult to object to… and without them, the world becomes rather boring. I have no problem with applying the idea of parsimony here. A worldview that requires a handful of very modest axioms, along the lines of “shared reality exists” and “inductive reasoning usually works”, cannot be equated to a worldview that requires huge numbers of axioms, or extremely immodest axioms like, “Jebus is Lord” and such.
In any case, if anyone would care to point me to more satisfying answers to the problem of bootstrapping ourselves up from solipsism, I’d be interested. I find (my naive understanding of) Popper’s proposed solution to the problem of induction to be circular reasoning, and I myself am more or less content to resolve the problem of induction with a shrug: If we don’t assume that inductive reasoning is valid, we can stop talking right now (because I would have absolutely no evidence on wish to assume you were reading the same words I was writing). And I like to talk, so… I’m willing to assume inductive reasoning is valid, just because the alternative doesn’t just suck, the alternative is useless.
This is perhaps the most awesome post I have seen here yet – “Religious disagreements don’t have any “Table 1 shows that -As/+P cells contain 0.19% As and 0.02% P by dry weight.” Religion has a lot of time for politics because it spends no time on what Table 1 shows.” Indeed!
But also yes, pity that the word politics invites so much misunderstanding and nitpicking. Bottom line: people can be idiots, and pretend to use sciencey arguments while ignoring table 1. In religion, there is not table 1 in the first place, so there is no argument to be made at all. It is a complete no-starter.
Re solipsism:
Yes, I have heard from a philosopher that the problem of induction basically means that it is not rational to presume that the sun will rise again tomorrow just because it did so the last 1.4 trillion days. If anybody actually believes that and lives their life that way, they will get a cookie from me.
I am not a professional philosopher, but I see this problem as already assumed within the meaning of language, and so to even ask the problem in the first place makes no sense. Philosophy assumes language in order to ask philosophical problems.
1. Religion/theology does not decide things by facts. If theology decided things by facts, original sin would be thrown out the window because it’s not based on anything factual.
2. Historically, when a philosophical field starts to decide things by facts, we call start calling it a “science.”
As far as philosophy goes, I’ve already stated that you’re being far too vague about what you mean by “philosophy.” I don’t see the bright glaring lines delineating the different aspects of human inquiry the way you do. Please provide some indication of what map you’re looking at.
“Compare to religion, where matters of what to believe, what texts should be considered sacred, what interpretations of those texts are acceptable, who to believe in the event of a theological debate — these are all settled by consensus (or tradition, which is essentially a consensus that includes dead people).”
Bu theology DOES settle questions; this is obvious from the fact that there is such a notion as “heresy.” You can have the wrong theology, which means there’s a right theology. But how do you GET the right theology? How do you confirm that it’s the right theology? By agreeing with the Pope or whoever else is in charge, that’s the only way. There’s no facts about the world that can tell you if your theology is right or wrong. It’s completely disconnected from the world of fact.
That’s silly. Scientific theories, even the ones that ultimately get overturned, come with their own justifications. Science is about how you get the answer, not the answer you get, and learning how to get the answer is clearly a much better guide to reality than anything from religion, which is inevitably an arbitrary answer to a meaningless question. Science is objectively better at telling us about the world…i.e. what to believe…than religion is. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
You guys like to beat up on behaviorism, I get the feeling you don’t really understand the idea behind it. Hint: it’s common in science to treat a mechanism whose operation you don’t understand as a black box, simply for the sake of making any progress at all.
VS:
If you do end up getting back to me regarding what you think of as “philosophy,” bear this in mind: I don’t see any objective criteria that can be used to differentiate philosophy and science as distinct fields. Obviously, from a historical perspective, science is an offshoot or outgrowth of western philosophy. As far as I can see, the distinction is made for the purposes of administrative and pedagogical convenience.
So from my perspective, science IS philosophy, specifically philosophy that actually constrains our expectations of what is possible in our universe. Another way to put it is that science is philosophy that actually contributes to knowledge instead of chasing awkward phrases in circles. When your line of inquiry lacks the constraints required by science (essentially, the constraint is that your question should predict two different worlds that you can compare against what actually happens depending on whether the answer is “yes” or “no”) you can’t be sure that it’s going anywhere useful.
That’s not to say philosophy isn’t useful as a playground for ideas, but consider: the western world was engaged in philosophy for 2000 years before it started to make an impact on standards of living, and even then only because it had developed into something that was starting to look like science.
Finally, if you want to argue that science isn’t a real source of knowledge about the world, you should do so in a venue that doesn’t depend on a global network of interconnected computing machines that were made possible only by the application of EM and solid state physics to real-world problems.
Eric,
If you’re being really critical — or skeptical — all the way down, it does lead to solipsism, and there’s no nice way out of it. Appealing to Occam’s Razor means appealing to entities directly, and solipsism has the least entities. You can try to appeal to more complicated notions of “simple”, or to notions of less axioms or to notions of parsimony, but none of those really have the power to suspend the skeptical objections. The best you can do is what James suggested; essentially say that it doesn’t matter. But that’s starting from a fundamental principle. And as you then go up the chain, you find other positions that have similar starting principles to define that position.
About the best you can say is that philosophy isn’t generally satisfied with those foundational principles, and they’re always open to challenge and new attempts at justification.
James,
I’ll be mixing and matching a bit here, so bear with me:
“The point I was trying to make to Verbose Stoic — and you can help me out here, because I realize I was making my point in a somewhat clumsy and ignorant way — is that some of philosophy relies on stuff that is just made up and so is no better than theology when it comes to relying on authoritative fiat;”
Philosophy never relies on authoritative fiat, because nothing gets accepted or settled on the basis of authority in philosophy, and to be honest not much gets settled at all. That’s the basic problem I’m having with a lot of the positions here; the assignment of philosophy to being determined by authority when nothing could be further from the truth. Science settles — at least temporarily — far more questions by appeals to the relevant authorities than philosophy does. When philosophers cite or teach Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume or Descartes, it’s not always and not usually to say that you should agree with what they say, and most often it is to disagree with them.
“But clearly, Making Shit Up(TM) (shit that sounds superficially plausible, but is really based on absolutely nothing with any referent in reality to speak of) has been a major — and regrettable — part of philosophy since its inception.”
I’m not sure how philosophy differs from any other field — including the scientific ones — in that regard. Anyone in philosophy that MSUs will get listened to … and then taken apart. Philosophy is rather nasty at taking apart good ideas, so it’ll be even harsher on bad ones. But I suspect the real problem here is over “nothing with any referent in reality to speak of”, and what you mean by that. You probably mean “empirical”, and philosophy, yes, doesn’t rely on that. But that doesn’t in any way mean that they MSU in any way that anyone should care about. Philosophy is not science, and it’s proud of that.
Now, onto theology. To me, the Ontological Argument is an example of a pure philosophical argument, aimed precisely at the philosophical method. So is the Cosmological Argument. The Argument from Design is a little less clear depending on how much people who do science want to claim as science. Thus, theology relies on philosophy at times quite heavily, and if it leans further into the philosophical it should be able to take advantage on what philosophy can use to get itself out of the problem you claim it and theology have so that theology can do it, too. That, then, was my point there.
Dan L.,
Let me start at the end. Yes, I agree that science is, in fact, a philosophy, but not the other way around, for the same reasons you cite. But I do think you can distinguish philosophy from science by the fact that science is more limited and more specific than philosophy. There’s a specific scientific method that philosophy in general does not hold itself to, and that’s how you can distinguish science from philosophy. What makes philosophy philosophy is, in fact, the lack of any methodological commitment as it searches for the truth.
“Another way to put it is that science is philosophy that actually contributes to knowledge instead of chasing awkward phrases in circles.”
But it was philosophy that created science in the first place, and the precise sort of philosophy that you call “chasing awkward phrases in circles”. Ultimately, here, you show that you simply don’t understand philosophy at all.
“That’s not to say philosophy isn’t useful as a playground for ideas, but consider: the western world was engaged in philosophy for 2000 years before it started to make an impact on standards of living, and even then only because it had developed into something that was starting to look like science.”
It’s been engaged in it a lot longer than that, and it’s credible to argue that all things of use came from philosophy, since that’s what people were doing when they invented mathematics and science and political systems and everything worth knowing. Philosophy, by definition, is engaged in learning stuff. All kinds of stuff. That it’s subcontracted out some of that doesn’t mean that you can claim that it didn’t do any of that and so was useless.
Take the areas of epistemology and ethics. These are probably two areas where philosophy is still the only real game in town, and they’re both very important and very difficult. It’s no wonder that there haven’t been any quick answers there, but it’s also hard to say there’s been no progress and no impact on the world from those areas.
“Finally, if you want to argue that science isn’t a real source of knowledge about the world,”
I don’t think I’ve ever actually argued that. Care to provide the quote? I may have suggested that it’s more arbitrary and authoritarian than people are claiming here, but my main point is not that it isn’t a real source of knowledge, but that philosophy and theology can be as well.
“1. Religion/theology does not decide things by facts. If theology decided things by facts, original sin would be thrown out the window because it’s not based on anything factual.
2. Historically, when a philosophical field starts to decide things by facts, we call start calling it a “science.” ”
Both of these depend greatly on what you mean by “facts”. Science, philosophy and theology do not agree on what the limits of what can be called “facts” are, and philosophy and theology are closer on that than science is to either of the others. But note that science is far more limited than the others on what it will consider facts, which may not be to its credit.
“But how do you GET the right theology? How do you confirm that it’s the right theology? By agreeing with the Pope or whoever else is in charge, that’s the only way.”
No. There are always tons of scholars who are not “in charge” in the right way who make theological claims and argue for them, and have to convince the others to agree. Just like in any field. Even the Pope, in general, cannot just say “Believe this”, but must say why. Most religious people don’t delve into the theology, but then most people don’t delve into the details of the science when they learn it or use it either. You are vastly and unfairly underplaying the intellectual work that goes on in theology, work so stringent that theologians like Platinga, Augustine and Anselm are used in philosophy, independent of their direct theological concerns. You really need to read more theology and philosophy, it seems.
“Scientific theories, even the ones that ultimately get overturned, come with their own justifications.”
So do theological and philosophical theories. The justifications in those fields are just different than the ones in scientific fields, which doesn’t mean they have none.
“You guys like to beat up on behaviorism, I get the feeling you don’t really understand the idea behind it. Hint: it’s common in science to treat a mechanism whose operation you don’t understand as a black box, simply for the sake of making any progress at all.”
Behaviourism was committed to far more than a temporary “treat it like a black box” treatment of those things. It was committed to that being the only way to scientifically study those things. At any rate, though, that’s irrelevant to my point: it’s fallen out of favour in psychology and you can’t do it unless you can find an advisor who accepts it. Whether right or wrong, that doesn’t help the cause of science in claiming to not have that sort of problem with theology and philosophy do.
Verbose,
Could you be a good deal less verbose? I think you’re mostly blowing smoke, and you’re taking up a lot of space to do it.
I don’t understand why skepticism should not be applied to Occam’s principle as well, but leaving that aside for now, it actually says something to the effect that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. Once you do away with the necessity to explain phenomena, you might as well posit that there are NO entities. That’s one fewer than solipsism. That might not seem satisfactory to you (or Descartes), but to get out of it you have to admit that the necessity to explain observations sometimes trumps the principle of minimizing the number of entities.
windy,
The claim of solipsism is that it can explain everything realism can without having to posit any entity other than yourself. It would even explain why you act as if there are more entities than yourself with the “illusion” claim. It’s harder to do that for the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” claim, but yes indeed some do apply skepticism to that and find it lacking. But all of this is predicated on “I can explain all phenomena you want explained with at least one less entity than you have”.
That’s not explaining, that’s handwaving.
You don’t know “the precise sort of philosophy that [I] call ‘chasing awkward phrases in circles.'” You don’t know me from Adam, and you don’t know what I know about philosophy, its history, and the specific history of science.
Besides that, you’re simply wrong. It’s not correct to say “philosophy created science” in the first place. Philosophy is not a conscious agent that creates things. Science isn’t even the sort of thing that is created. I’d love to discuss the history and philosophy of science with you, but not if you’re going to be this sloppy — or presumptuous about my philosophical acumen — from the very beginning.
That’s your definition and I’m not constrained to abide by it, especially since I think it’s completely useless. If “doing philosophy” is synonymous with “being engaged in learning stuff,” why not just use the word “learning”? If philosophy means anything at all, it doesn’t mean anything in particular and my original complaint about your over-broad use of the word stands.
Take the areas of epistemology and ethics. These are probably two areas where philosophy is still the only real game in town, and they’re both very important and very difficult. It’s no wonder that there haven’t been any quick answers there, but it’s also hard to say there’s been no progress and no impact on the world from those areas.
“Religions do end up settling questions, at least for what the members should believe, and in a very real sense that’s done by appealing to the supposed authorities, but as per Kuhn science isn’t any better at that; ultimately, theories in science get replaced when enough schools stop teaching the old theory and start teaching the new one.
I don’t think anyone here doubts or argues that science as practiced in the real world ends up looking like any other sociological phenomenon, with tests for membership and status based on the current consensus about the content of the field. What’s being claimed is not that science as practiced is not susceptible to dogma, but that it’s better at overturning wrong dogma in the long run than is any system of thought that isn’t checked against empirical results. Also, the barriers to entry for heterodox thinkers are MUCH lower in the academic sciences than in any church, which means that rejecting dogma in the sciences bears a smaller professional penalty than rejecting dogma in a religious context. In the long run, dogmatic scientists get proved wrong. In the long run, dogmatic clergy become pope. Don’t you see the difference?
Examples, please.
My understanding was that the Pope is infallible.
You need to demonstrate the utility of theology before I’ll accept your assertion. There’s far more information out there than any one human being could ever hope to assimilate, and theology is very low on my list. Again, a few examples might convince me, but merely proclaiming “it is so” won’t convince me.
But those “theories” are based solely on textual evidence from holy texts. To buy into the applicability of theological theories, you have to buy into the specialness of those religious concepts and texts on which they are based. And there is no evidence or philosophical argument to support the specialness of, for example, the Christian bible.
In the 50’s, this was true: it was the only way to study those things. And a lot of important empirical research on learning and cognition was done by behaviorists. This research is still cited by modern researchers using more modern methods.
What are you talking about? It is inherent to science that hypotheses are provisional and can be overturned. It’s not a problem at all; on the contrary, it’s one of the reasons that science has so much more utility in discovering truths about ourselves and our world than theology or philosophy do.
Sorry for the length, OB. I’ll try to break down future VS posts and answer more succinctly.
They’re actually areas where philosophy has made very little progress, from my perspective anyway. Utilitarian ethical models are obviously wrong, as are morality-based models of ethics. In my opinion, the lack of progress in understanding what actually motivates human behavior is the fault of trying to derive ethics from first principles. Another way of saying it is that I think the lack of progress (or progress in unpromising directions) in the study of ethics is that it follows a philosophical mode of inquiry rather than a scientific (empirical) one. I personally believe that understanding human behavior will progress much more quickly only if it’s made more rigorously empirical.
We’re in a similar position with epistemology. There’s very little consensus about what knowledge is precisely. Even if there was something of a consensus though, it’s not clear how we could test it, short of some new insights in neuroscience. There’s not even much consensus among philosophers of science why science works in the first place, though few would argue that it doesn’t (or that it’s no better at finding truth than “religion” whatever that would mean).
I short circuit the epistemological question with Bayes’ rule, which is as much a mathematical result as a philosophical result. It’s only a few hundred years old, and its development was intertwined with the historical origins of science. Of course, Bayes was a Presbyterian minister, but that hardly makes Bayes’ theorem a religious concept.
The problem, of course, is that philosophy, to the extent I know what you mean by the word, can discuss endless different schemes for justifying ethics or knowledge as the case may be, but it’s not capable by itself of determining which schemes are correct or closest to correct. For that, we need some feedback from the real world. In other words, we need empirical sciences for ethics and epistemology to do any useful work on those topics.
Philosophy, to me, seems like the theoretical part of the sciences without the experimental part. Philosophy is great at generating hypotheses, and since it’s less restrictive than the sciences, one has greater freedom to generate more interesting and more heterodox hypotheses within philosophy than within science. But just generating hypotheses doesn’t do you any good unless you can determine which are valid and which are not. So what’s special about science, and why it really does have more epistemological bite than any other field of human inquiry, is because it has this two-step structure: generation, then elimination. Science came into being essentially when people realized that the elimination step is as important as the generation step, if not moreso — that’s why we see rigorous scientific work following on so closely after the first statements of empirical philosophy.
Dan L.,
I’m only going to address the last comment, in the hopes of being shorter. Besides, discussions work better with actual examples.
One problem with your view is that you seem to be claiming that philosophy can’t or doesn’t appeal to the “real world” in settling questions. This is false. It certainly does, but it doesn’t do so exclusively nor does it always consider that always useful. I’m not sure what you mean by the “real world”, so let me presume that it’s the sort of empirical study that science does. For both morality/ethics and knowledge, whether and how to appeal to that sort of thing has been an issue for years. Sam Harris, for example, when he argues that science can do morality is making a philosophical argument in a long tradition of philosophical arguments about that. The issue, though, is the old normative/descriptive distinction, which leads to your second problem.
In terms of morality/ethics (and probably in terms of epistemology) you’re criticizing philosophy for not providing a good account of human behaviour, which to me implies what people actually do. But in these fields, philosophy isn’t that interested in that. It wants to say how people should act to be moral or to know things, not how they go about it now. As an example, imagine that psychology proved that men thought rape was morally okay. Would you think that that made it such? Probably not. So what grounds would you appeal to to show that it wasn’t? Philosophy is after the latter, not the former, so that it takes little interest in directly explaining human behaviour doesn’t count against it … and it is hard to see how the sort of scientific explorations done into human behaviour will ever get to the latter, although it’s a big issue in philosophy right now if it can.
I don’t see any reason to think Utilitarianism obviously wrong — although I think it is wrong — by either criteria, since a lot of people really do act Utiliarian a lot of the time. And if you mean using probability when you refer to using Bayes’ theory in knowledge, you’re ignoring that that only deals with justification, which is only part of the triumvirate (belief, truth, justification) that philosophy has already established, and only counts as a possibility because epistemology has already eliminated the need for certainty in knowledge.
Ultimately, though, I can’t see any reason for thinking that philosophy never tries to test its hypotheses. It has all sorts of mechanisms for doing that. It just doesn’t always use empirical methods, but also counts things like thought experiments and possible worlds to test and prove concepts. But it uses those because sometimes you just can’t get empirical methods about the “real world” that can solve your problem, and it itself questions when you can or can’t use them. It’s different from science, but sometimes that makes it really the only game in town.