Author: Ophelia Benson

A little more on the question of skepticism and complacency and how and whether it is possible to have one without the other. What I think is that it could well (of course) be that we are all complacent around here, but that JS’s account of his special powers experience and our reception of it doesn’t really show that. I don’t think it can show that, in the nature of the case. Something else might show that, but I don’t think this particular offering does. I think the reason it can’t is the one I’ve already indicated, as have others: there are too many perfectly legitimate reasons to be skeptical of it and too few legitimate reasons to be credulous about it for it to count as a symptom of complacency that we made some skeptical points. One of the biggest objections, as both Ian and Nicholas pointed out in comments, is to the reliance on the sense of conviction beforehand, combined with getting the answer right. It seems to me so obvious and so likely that getting the answer right would instantly work retroactively to intensify the sense of conviction beforehand, that I think it would be far more complacent to ignore that possibility than it is to take it into account. In short, I don’t see why it is more complacent of us to question that than it is of JS to rely on it. He has a witness, of course, as he points out, but the witness can’t be a witness to the intensity of his conviction beforehand. The intensity of conviction and the witness are thus two completely separate items of corroboration or attempted corroboration, and the one can’t strengthen the other. I think JS has been using them, perhaps implicitly, to corroborate each other, but they can’t.

So I don’t see where the complacency comes in, and I’m curious about it. But it’s occurred to me that JS may be doing a sort of test run, or perhaps more like a training run. It has to do with what he said in the HERO interview –

I’m not comfortable with consensus, so I think if it turned out that the kinds of views that B&W advocates became mainstream and taken-for-granted, then I’d have to adopt alternative positions. This isn’t just bloody-minded contrarianism; I think there is value in dialectical engagement. It inoculates against the possibility of a smug complacency over our truth-claims.

It may be that he’s treating B&W as a place in the world where in fact the kinds of views it advocates have become mainstream and taken-for-granted, with the result that he has had to adopt alternative positions – ‘adopt’, remember, in the sense of argue for, or perform, or make a case for, as opposed to actually believing in. So – the whole exercise may have been an exercise in adopting alternative positions in order to inoculate us against smug complacency over our truth-claims. The trouble is, I think it would have done the job a lot better if he’d had a more convincing case; if he’d had a case where we would have had fewer objections to make. I still take the point that his account could be exactly right, and that something rare and difficult to research did happen, and that it is a bad thing if naturalistic methods can’t find that sort of thing out; but I also still don’t see what the alternative is, if we’re not simply to start believing anything and everything.

Carl Sagan has an apposite comment in ‘The Burden of Skepticism’:

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

Those two modes of thought are, I would say, not just in some tension, but in a great deal of tension. So – la lutte continue. The simultaneous, tense struggle against both complacency and credulity. Aux armes, citoyens!

Here’s a little information. Amazon says, irritatingly, that Why Truth Matters is ‘usually dispatched within 5 to 8 weeks’ – but it doesn’t mean it. The publisher looked into it and discovered that Amazon has an automated system whereby if they temporarily run out of copies of a book (because of a sudden spike in sales, for instance) their system automatically reverts to 5-8 weeks, even if they have an arrangement with the publisher that supplies them directly so that they get new supplies in 24 hours. No amount of pleading from the publishers, apparently, can shift this odd and unhelpful way of doing things. Well, thanks! Discourage customers, why don’t you! So the point is, it’s not really going to be 5 weeks before they send copies, it’s going to be the usual few days, or just one day. Ignore them when they say it will be fifteen years.

No thanks, no more religious politics, we’ve had more than enough, in fact we’re likely to be sick on the carpet any minute now.

Michael Kazin cites the historian D.G. Hart’s argument that religion is “inherently useful in solving social problems because it yields moral guidelines that inevitably generate both a concern for justice and the welfare of all people.”

Susan Jacoby takes that ludicrous remark down, but I want to do some taking down too. Religion yields moral guidelines that inevitably generate a concern for the welfare of all people? Meaning a concern for the welfare of all people here on this earth as opposed to in God’s pretty summerhouse? How does that explain the caste system then? Or persecution of witches? Or the institutionalized inequality of the middle ages and well after? Or does concern for the welfare just mean a worried look and a furrowed brow now and then, and nothing else?

The limited, and often conflicting, definitions of welfare promulgated by various religions were very much on the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they deliberately omitted any mention of God from the document and instead ceded supreme authority to “We the People.” The framers did not write, as they might have, “we the people under God” – a phrase that would have prevented angry debates in state ratifying conventions over the Constitution’s unprecedented failure to acknowledge a divinity as the source of governmental power.

They didn’t write that, but you’d never know it to hear a lot of people talk now. And it keeps getting worse.

Americans have always been a predominantly Christian people (overwhelmingly so at the time the Constitution was written), but the founders established a secular central government. Today, religious conservatives are wreaking havoc with that glorious paradox, and they are aided by liberals intimidated by the vilification of secularists over the past twenty-five years. Still worse, many liberals have thrown in the towel and accepted the right-wing premise that there can be no morality, and no exposition of moral issues in the public square, without reference to religion.

They’ve thrown in the towel and the bathmat and the shower curtain and the bathroom door. They have surrendered, man. I’m getting way impatient waiting for the tide to turn.

Then again, JS has clarified his point a little, and it does seem like a point worth making.

…the kind of naturalistic worldview that most
materialists embrace, and the scientific methodology that goes with it,
rules out of court my kind of experience as a datum to be explained.
Therefore, if my kinds of experiences do exist, and if they also have
naturalistic explanations, they’re never going to be discovered, because the
“it must be a coincidence because it could be a coincidence” response or the
“ah but the testimony is necessarily suspect” response are both
unfalsifiable.

Again, I thought that was common knowledge – but maybe I was wrong to think that. I thought it was common knowledge that the inadmissability of personal experience rules a lot of important material out of court, just as literal legal standards rule a lot of genuine evidence out of court. I thought it was common knowledge that science errs on the side of caution and that that necessarily closes off a lot of important, interesting, and perhaps valid evidence. Anyway, as JS says, it’s not something to take lightly. No, it’s not. There should be research on weird stuff like his experience. I thought there was, but I don’t know that for a fact.

Meanwhile here’s the FT making his point for him.

Peer review is a bulwark against cranks, crooks and incompetents. But too much reliance on peer review carries its own dangers. Every profession defines its own concept of excellence in inward-looking ways. Successful academics learn how to trigger the buttons that win the approval of referees…A further step down a well defined road wins easier acceptance than a deviation from the beaten track…Big advances come through the paradigm shifts and peer review makes this difficult. The line between the crank and the genius is sometimes a fine one and may only be apparent after time has elapsed.

It’s interesting that Matt Ridley said much the same thing in his contribution to the Kitzmiller article here.

There is one sentence that troubles me…: `Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community…’ My concern is…about scientific consensus. In this case I find it absolutely right that the overhwelming nature of the consensus should count against creationism. But there have been plenty of other times when I have been on the other side of the argument and seen what Madison called the despotism of the majority as a bad argument. On climate change, for example, I used to argue fervently that the early estimates of its likely extent were exaggerated, that the sceptics raising doubts should be heard and answered rather than vilified. Yet this minority was frankly `bullied’ with ad hominem arguments. Again, the reaction of many environmental scientists to Bjørn Lomborg’s splendid and thought-provoking book was to pour scorn rather than assemble counter evidence. Scientists are no better at coping with disagreement than anybody else.

So what’s the difference? I agree with the scientific consensus sometimes but not always, but I do not do so because it is is a consensus. Science does not work that way or Newton, Harvey, Darwin and Wegener would all have been voted into oblivion. Science must allow for minority views. Intelligent Design is wrong because it is dishonest, not because it is outvoted.

Consensus blocks new discovery, they both point out. Okay. We’ll try to guard against that.

The discussion of special powers seems to have ended, but it raised some interesting epistemic issues, at least I think so; so I’ve thought about them a little more. I think there was a basic, unresolvable problem at the center of the discussion in that JS’s experience was (naturally enough) very convincing to him, but (also naturally enough) not at all convincing to anyone else except perhaps me, and not all that convincing even to me. I think JS didn’t make enough allowance for the fact that there was simply no reason at all for B&W readers to take his account at face value – although he seemed to have made allowance for that, in that he said he’d expect readers to be skeptical; but then he also seemed not to have, in that he called readers’ replies complacent and the outcome predictable. (‘Predictable’ is a tricky word. It can be just straightforwardly descriptive – or it can be a pejorative. Perhaps it was just predictable in a factual, neutral sense that readers would ask skeptical questions about JS’ account; then again perhaps it was predictable in the sense of tediously unimaginative.) To put it another way, I think he’s making a reasonable and interesting point, but I think the account of the weird experience doesn’t have the argumentative force that he appears to think it does or should. It is, as I said, somewhat more convincing to me than it has any reason to be to other readers, merely because I know him and thus know that he’s not, for instance, some giggling hacker playing a joke. On the other hand, knowing him undercuts my willingness and ability to be convinced as well as aiding it, because he has told me of so many jokes of his that rely on sustained deception. And that’s his doing, not mine! So charges of complacency are misplaced.

So, to a couple of specific questions.

But it is a lovely example of precisely the kind of complacency about explanations that I think is a worry where you have a whole load of people who are committed to more or less the same worldview that people are so keen to explain away this stuff by invoking coincidence, when it seems perfectly possible that there might be other mechanisms at work that we either don’t yet understand, or that we understand but will always be epistemologically in the dark about in these situations (e.g., the possibility that you’ve both seen a magazine cover).

But why is that complacency rather than just good practice? Or, what is the difference? Why isn’t it reasonable, rather than complacent, to consider what seems to be the most plausible explanation first? We do that all the time (so in that sense I suppose one could say it’s complacent, but since it also gets the job done, who cares? I mean, maybe it’s complacent to brush one’s hair with a hairbrush rather than with a sock, but it does save time and effort). When we can’t find our wallets, we don’t instantly leap to the conclusion that a space alien came in and stole it to buy linoleum for the chateau in Perth Amboy, do we. We try the more likely scenarios first, and only then check out the space alien possibility. Sure, sometimes routine and habit prevent us from looking for and finding more thrilling possibilities, but the more thrilling possibility isn’t always the epistemically best one.

The thing is though that this is precisely the explaining away that I both expect, and think is undesirable. Basically, it’s a move that relies on the fact that one can never have direct access to the content of other people’s minds, in order to render said contents inadmissible as data in scientific explanation…But if one automatically retreats to those positions in order to explain away phenomena that are troubling for the naturalistic worldview, then that simply confirms the charge that motivates this posting.

Yes and no. Or yes but it can’t be helped. Because the alternative is just plain dumb credulity – for everyone except the person or people who experienced it. As I said Tuesday, I just don’t see any way around that. Since we can’t have direct access to the content of other people’s minds, and we know that, we can’t refuse to entertain the possibility that people who tell stories of Weird Experiences are wrong or joking or lying or misremembering or exaggerating or distorting or all those. If you make it a rule to refuse to entertain such possibilities, you find yourself buying all these bridges you don’t want and don’t have room for. There’s no way (that I can see) to get past that. I get that it was overwhelmingly convincing to JS, and I do find that interesting, and I don’t dismiss the idea that it was some rare natural phenomenon that hasn’t been mapped yet; but I can’t just decide to be as convinced as he is. That would be fatuous. It was his experience, it wasn’t anyone else’s. It’s just a fact of life that X’s experience is not as convincing to any not-X as it is to X. So I consider it unfair to call it explaining away, or a move, or automatically retreating. I just don’t see what else sane people can be expected to do, other than beam happily and throw their brains out the window for the squirrels to eat.

I said this on the subject in comments on Tuesday, and I still think it’s right: “There’s an interesting issue here, because the trouble is, this business of being skeptical and cautious about accepting personal testimony on blind faith is both a valid methodological rule and an evasive tactic. It can be either or both at any given time, and there doesn’t really seem to be anything that can be done about that. That’s true in courtrooms too. Evidence can be entirely true and still be ruled out as hearsay. Objections can be (and are) evasive tactics but still raise valid points. I take myself to be not automatically dismissing your account in order to avoid questioning naturalistic views, I take myself to be raising perfectly valid objections to accepting your account on faith – but of course the upshot is the same (except that in fact I do believe your account, but that’s for largely non-epistemic reasons).”

So I don’t think it’s complacent to be more skeptical of someone else’s experience than the person who had the experience is, and I don’t think it’s complacent or (reprehensibly) predictable to ask searching questions about it. I think if we did anything else we might as well forget the whole thing, re-name this site ‘The Bide-a-wee Home for New Age Woollies’, and talk nothing but nonsense from now until curtain-time.