Author: Ophelia Benson

  • L.A. Book Festival

    There was a tiny local skirmish in the ongoing battle between scientists and their various critics, teasers and self-appointed scourges a few days ago at the Los Angeles Book Festival, which was shown on the defiantly uncommercial tv channel Cspan. The critic was one Jeffrey Schwartz, who made a bizarrely impassioned, over-emphatic near-oration on the perils of ‘scientism,’ the putative belief of scientists that only what can be measured is real and that science claims it knows everything worth knowing. Schwartz spoke fervently about the importance of inner experience (do a lot of people dispute that nowadays? Isn’t behaviorism kind of, like, over?) and claimed that it too should be treated as science, that there were ways (not specified) of making it measurable and reproducible, and that it’s very very important. (Odd – he’s against scientism and yet wants science to encompass inner experience and inner experience to be made measurable and reproducible – isn’t that kind of ‘scientistic’ itself?)

    The other panelists were David Baltimore, John Maddox, Timothy Ferris, and Brenda Maddox, and they all disagreed with Schwartz, though Ferris also thanked him for making the discussion more interesting than it would otherwise have been. Ferris also advised Schwartz not to try to get published in Nature, to which Schwartz replied, laughing a good deal, that he had tried, several times, and been rejected. John Maddox was the editor of Nature for many years, and he did indeed seem particularly unimpressed by Schwartz’ comments. He wondered how one would go about making inner experience measurable and reproducible, and he pointed out that there are many things science doesn’t know yet, such as how life began and how the mind works. Timothy Ferris talked about seeing a panel of scientists line up to ask hostile, probing questions of researchers and remarked that one would wait a long time before seeing that happen at a panel of theologians. In short it wasn’t much of a victory for the anti-science team.

  • Not New but Too Good to Miss

    Critical theory grad student gets a little overwound, deconstructs Burrito Bandito.

  • Interview With Daniel Dennett

    Meaning doesn’t need magic, good ideas spread better than bad ones, reflection and choice matter.

  • Neurotheology

    Happenings in the brain interact with what we already know and want.

  • Bigger, Realer America

    I generally do my best to ignore political commentary and rhetoric, especially of the right wing variety, because all it does is annoy, not to say infuriate. But once in awhile I bump into some by accident, and it’s invariably even worse than I had imagined. A few evenings ago for instance I tripped over some absurd person on tv (and not even on Murdoch’s Fox channel, but on Gates’ msnbc) ranting about those liberal elitists who dare to disagree with President Bush. That’s the definition of elitism? Disagreeing with Bush? Because…what? Bush was born in a mud hut? Bush is the twelfth child of Mississippi sharecroppers who got where he is today by sheer force of brains and talent? Bush wouldn’t know an elite if it sat down next to him and thanked him for eliminating the estate tax? Is that how that is?

    And then last night I heard Geoff Nunberg on Fresh Air discussing a piece by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal that was even more ridiculous, not to say downright sinister in places. All about the ‘stunning’ patriotism of good old ‘bigger and realer’ America.

    American journalists still fear that, being called biased in favor of America. So do intellectuals, academics, local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants, and leftist mandarins of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities. For all cities have them. But there was always another America, and boy has it endured…They came from a bigger America and a realer one–a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality.

    It gets even worse, with a lot of drivel about the pope, but I’ll spare you. I’ll spare you so that I can give myself plenty of room to look at Noonan’s sly, nasty, and frankly sick-making rhetoric. Note that intellectuals and clever people are from a smaller and less real America than the one those other, Good people inhabit. Note that cities are bad places. And note (if you can without turning pale and having to rush for a basin) the cheerleading for religious feeling and ‘Bible study’ and…sports-love? and…mom-love? mom-love?? Philip Wylie where are you when we need you. Chatting with Norman Bates, probably. And then of course the clincher. Normality. Ah yes. Normality. Because of course all those other, bad, wicked, urban, eddicated people with their mandarin leftism and their fear of patriotism, they are not normal. They are weird. Odd. Strange. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, abnormal and perverted and sick.

    And there is, again, the question of why it is intellectuals who are mandarins, whereas overpaid CEOs who pocket huge bonuses while cutting the pay of their workers are the salt of the earth. There is the even more pressing question, do Republicans never talk loudly in restaurants? I’m not absolutely sure that conforms to my experience of the world. There is the slightly Talibanish air of the desired bigger America – religious feeling and Bible study? One wouldn’t have been enough?

    But most of all there is the horrible blinkered narrowness of it, the suffocating parochial smallness, and the disgusting message to the readers: stay as sweet as you are, be little, don’t try to be more, don’t leave, don’t learn, don’t become curious, don’t expand, don’t aspire. Just stay right there in your healthy, vibrant, religious world and never change, or else you will become abnormal and unhealthy. This is particularly repellent coming from someone who herself writes for the Wall Street Journal and other big city publications. She seems to be having an interesting and (sort of) intellectual life, so why all this sneering, why the attempt to discourage other people from broadening their horizons beyond dear mom and the garage? If Peggy Noonan, former White House speechwriter and now columnist for the WSJ, is not a mandarin, who is? Intellectuals and academics? Please.

    I wonder how long this is going to go on before all those bigger realer Murkans start to see through it. Start to wonder why it’s intellectuals who are the elitists and mandarins, while rich people are the salt of the earth. Why buying and selling elections and allowing lobbyists and corporate lawyers to write legislation is perfectly fine but disagreeing with George W. Bush about anything is corrupt mandarin city behavior. But then I would wonder, wouldn’t I, because I’m just a sick abnormal citified mandarin myself. Where’s my Bible…

    A different, and very minor point that Nunberg made in his commentary is that Noonan uses a rhetorical device in this piece that is more popular with rightists than with leftists. It is that string of ‘ands’ (and Bible study and garage bands and). It’s called polysyndeton. This interests me because it’s a device I use a lot myself, as a friend and editor of mine likes to point out. It could even be said, he hints, that I overuse it. I am now more convinced than I was. I looked it up in a literary dictionary, which said that Hemingway ‘was particularly addicted to this device’ and that ‘in the more extreme instances of his pseudo-biblical style (ouch!) it becomes the equivalent of a verbal tic’. Oh dear.

  • Nonpseudoarchaeology Fights Back

    Alternative archaeology argues by attacking skeptics rather than answering their questions.

  • Public Health Science Supplanted by Ideology

    ‘Family values’ trump science and evidence under Bush administration.

  • Who Else?

    Of course, the Sugar Lobby is exactly the right group to tell the WHO whether sugar is healthy or not, having no financial interest in the matter.

  • Gays and Lesbians Denied Human Rights Protection

    What of inalienable rights in a world of cultural relativism?

  • Anti-Science and Pseudo-science

    Loyalty, deference and solidarity replace rational thought and evaluation of evidence.

  • Back and Forth

    Child-rearing has been a site of fashionable nonsense for at least a century.

  • Robotic Reactions

    Mush-headed sentimentality and reluctance to think about religious motivations prevent clear thinking after September 11.

  • Statistics? What Statistics?

    Crime figures go down but three out of four people still think they’re going up.

  • Deep in Denial

    David Aaronovitch says much of the Left considers America far worse than Saddam’s human rights record.

  • Interview With Steve Jones

    A conversation about gender, sex, males as parasites, and dinner parties.

  • Oh That’s Who Likes Goddesses!

    Saddam Hussein ‘wrote’ a ‘novel’ and, er, borrowed a painting of a ‘goddess’ for the cover. Very spiritual, she looks.

  • Diplomacy

    There was an interview with John Brady Kiesling on Fresh Air last night. He is the former mid-level diplomat who wrote a letter of resignation shortly before the war in Iraq started. The interview was both interesting and depressing, though not very surprising. Kiesling thinks nation-building and democracy-establishing in Iraq will require far more money and attention than the US has any intention of bestowing on them, that the tensions between Kurds and Shiites are going to be even worse than Saddam was, that the US has thrown away the good relations with Europe that the State Department has spent years and the efforts of people like Kiesling building up, and that the US fails to realise how much it benefits from the UN.

    His dissent is all the more interesting in that he is not an across-the-board anti-interventionist. In fact he was one of a group of twelve diplomats who wrote a document in 1994 urging the Clinton administration to intervene in Bosnia to prevent the genocide there. The administration in fact did listen and did change its policy, and Kiesling and the others won an award from the American Foreign Service Association for ‘constructive dissent’. He is neither a pacifist nor an ideologue, he is apprently in fact someone who learns from experience, observation, evidence and other such bits of the world around him that don’t always agree with our preconceptions or wishes. He is correspondingly unimpressed by the president who doesn’t share that ability. He was more explicit about these criticisms in an interview in Salon recently [the interview is premium content but can be read after watching a brief and not-too-revolting advert].

    But what I’ve discovered from the people who’ve searched me out is that there seems to be this incredible unhappiness in the traditional American internationalist foreign policy community that the president, just out of ignorance and ideology, is taking apart what these people had built through careers…Since he is not intellectually equipped to understand why such a huge part of the world could have these negative feelings about us, he’s looking for a simple answer…a president who apparently tunes people out if they disagree beyond a certain point.

    Butterflies and Wheels is all about not letting our preconceptions and wishes, our entrenched positions (as my colleague says) and even our loyalties, get in the way of our ability to notice and understand things like changing circumstances, complicating factors, evidence, competing goods. Kiesling mentions the notion that loyalty may be over-valued in this administration.

    So much of the debate in the United States is not a debate over interests, but a debate over loyalty; are you loyal to the president or not? And put in those terms, the sort of pack mentality does prevail. I guess you could argue that the good of the group requires solidarity in the group, even though that solidarity leads the group to do something insanely stupid.

    I have to agree. Particularly, loyalty to someone who is not intellectually equipped, who looks for simple answers, who is both ignorant and ideological (what a godawful combination), who tunes people out if they disagree with him beyond a certain point. Those may be good qualifications for some kinds of work, but they simply aren’t for the line of work Bush II had the conceit and temerity to think he was fit for.

  • Then Again

    Or maybe the WHO is not over-reacting to SARS after all.

  • Anti-realism – what’s at stake? An interview with Jonathan Rée

    There is a certain caricature of philosophers which has it that they spend
    their time arguing about whether things like tables and chairs exist. This is
    just a caricature, but nevertheless there is an element of truth in it when
    it comes to the debate about realism and anti-realism. Put crudely, realists
    – or, more precisely, external realists – think both that the world exists
    independently of our perceptions of it and thoughts about it, and that we can
    reliably know about the world. Anti-realists, for a variety of reasons, doubt
    both these propositions.


    The philosophical debate about realism and anti-realism – which involves arguments
    about, for example, sense experience, language, and the nature of knowledge
    – is complex and esoteric. However, in recent times, as Jonathan Rée
    points out, it has found more public expression in the concern that scientists
    have about the way that their endeavours are treated by the humanities.


    In fact, this is a long-standing concern. It was in 1959 that C. P. Snow gave
    his famous lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, in which he expressed dismay at the
    division between the arts and the sciences, and the hostility with which the
    practitioners of each viewed the other. It appeared to him that ‘the intellectual
    life of the whole of western society… [was] increasingly being split into two
    polar groups.’ This he considered both culturally and politically damaging.


    More than forty years on, the divide and hostility remain. These came to the
    fore a few years ago in l’affaire Sokal. Inspired
    by what he saw as the obscurity and ambiguity of much post-modernist writing,
    the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed the journal Social Text into publishing
    an ostensibly serious article on ‘postmodern physics’ that was in fact a clever
    parody. He followed this up with the book Intellectual Impostures, jointly
    authored with Jean Bricmont, which was sharply critical of the work of some
    of the most fashionable names in the humanities. His motivation, he said in
    The Philosophers’ Magazine, had to do with challenging the rise in a
    ‘sloppily thought-out relativism’ and with exposing ‘the gross abuse of terminology
    from the natural sciences in the writings of French, American and British authors.’


    Sokal is not the only scientist to rail against the shortcomings of the humanities.
    Twenty-eight years earlier, Peter Medawar had warned in Science and Literature
    that he ‘could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against
    the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement
    has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their
    profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear.
    What a preposterously silly idea!’ And Richard Dawkins, in a review of Intellectual
    Impostures     in the journal Nature, encourages people to ‘Visit the
    Postmodernism Generator [http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern]. It
    is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically correct
    nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read…Manuscripts
    should be submitted to the "Editorial Collective" of Social Text,
    double-spaced and in triplicate.’


    It is in the context of these vituperative exchanges that Rée, over
    the last few years, has published a number of essays and articles, which argue
    that the ‘Science Wars’ are based more on misunderstanding than on real disagreements
    about the status of scientific knowledge. Why, I ask him, is he relatively unmoved
    by the clash between the purported ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ of science?


    "One reason that I am unmoved by the melodrama," he replies, "is
    that historically people have had absolutely no problem with the idea that science
    is a social phenomenon. Scientists such as J. G. Crowther and J. B. S. Haldane
    were very keen on the idea that science was the product of various kinds of
    social relations and that these were the social relations that made it possible
    to produce knowledge that was testable and reliable. They celebrated historical
    studies of science as ways of explaining the heroic progress of science towards
    truth. Now if you imagine yourself back in that situation, then you are reminded
    that there is not necessarily a conflict between social studies of science and
    a belief in the truth content of science."


    However, Rée has one caveat. "It seems to me that these scientists,
    who thought there was no conflict between science and history, had a notion
    of scientific progress that I think was superficial – one that nobody really
    ought to believe anymore. Their model suggested that there was a pre-ordained
    destination which scientific enquiry was going to end up at. But I think that
    one can have a very strong idea of scientific progress, without supposing that
    it is predetermined what is going to be the better form of knowledge that emerges.
    So my notion is that there are lots of possible ways in which science could
    progress in the next century, all of them would be progress, but none of them
    would be the only possible way in which progress could be made."


    The importance of this caveat is that it is suggestive of an anti-realist strand
    in Rée’s thought. Particularly, it seems that in his conception, the
    progress of science is not governed by the nature of the objects of scientific
    enquiry. However, a critic might respond that whilst indeed it is impossible
    to predict how science will progress, it is nevertheless the case that its progression
    will be constrained by the nature of the objects it investigates. And moreover,
    that there are certain ways of looking at the world, certain theories, that
    are effectively dead, for example, Lamarckism – the belief that it is possible
    to inherit acquired characteristics. I asked Rée whether this was a point
    that he would accept and if so whether he felt there was, therefore, no contradiction
    at all between the objectivity of scientific truth claims and the fact that
    science is a social and historical phenomenon.


    "Yes, I think that I would accept these points," he replies. "But
    one of my proposals for advancing this debate is that there should be an embargo
    both on the word ‘objective’ and on the word ‘relativism’. I mean it’s ludicrous
    to think that adding the word ‘objective’ makes a truth any more true. There
    is a very important distinction between propositions that are true and propositions
    that are false. But I don’t know what further distinction is intended by adding
    the word ‘objective’. It is simply a rhetorical move that does mischief to the
    whole debate. What people need to understand is that the only truths that are
    available to us are those of specific historical contexts, but that they are
    no less true for that."


    In a sociological sense, the claim that truths are necessarily historical is
    unproblematic. However, it does raise the question as to the criteria for assessing
    truth-claims. I ask Rée whether he has any settled thoughts on what these
    are?


    "I don’t think," Rée says, "that there is a useful general
    answer to that. I mean there are textbook distinctions between correspondence,
    coherence, and pragmatism, that kind of thing,
    but it doesn’t seem to me that these add up to very much. I think you need to
    ask in more detail about how particular communities work out methods for attaining
    the kinds of true propositions that they want to get agreement on."


    The problem with this kind of answer is that the absence of general criteria
    for assessing truth-claims does seem to suggest the kinds of relativism that
    scientists find so infuriating. If the claim is that both truths and the criteria
    for truth are constituted in particular discourses, then, without adding in
    some extra ingredient, how is it possible to distinguish true propositions from
    false propositions?


    "Well," responds Rée, "I suppose I should first say that
    one should always be cautious before deciding that something is false. It is
    necessary to establish conversations with people who believe seemingly false
    propositions to determine exactly what it is they believe, then, once you’ve
    understood it, you may well find that there is something true in their belief.
    I think one of the side-effects of getting worked up about the idea of objective
    truth is that people do tend to get too impatient to investigate the possibility
    that there may be something they can learn from things that they are at first
    appalled by. But, of course, that is not to say that there are not some beliefs
    that are completely false."


    But again, if the criteria for truth are themselves constituted within discourse,
    what is it that enables us to privilege certain of these criteria so that we
    can meaningfully say that some beliefs are completely false?


    "I think this is why Rorty, who is quite wise about this matter, says
    that you should talk about intersubjectivity rather than objectivity,"
    replies Rée. "The question is not about different realities and
    how they connect up, but different conceptions, different vocabularies, and
    how they connect up. What you need to do is to experiment with trying to have
    conversations with people and to see whether you can negotiate some kind of
    linkage between the way that you’re talking about things and the way that they
    do. To the extent that this strategy is unsatisfactory, it is because our epistemological
    condition is unsatisfactory. I mean the fact is that it can always turn out
    that the things that we are convinced are unrevisably true might in fact be
    problematic in completely unexpected ways.


    ""I said that there are two terms that should be embargoed,"
    continues Rée, "the second one being ‘relativism’. It does seem
    to me that people who put themselves forward as friends of science, use the
    word ‘relativism’ to describe a position that they regard as being totally opposed
    to the notion that there can be such a thing as scientific progress. But if
    that is what relativism is, then I don’t know anyone that believes in it. An
    alternative tactic is to say ‘Sure, we should all be relativists’, because it
    seems to me that when we actually think about what the term relativism means,
    then it is a theory about how you get truth and how you know you’ve got it.
    And it is simply an unfair debating point to suggest that to be a relativist
    is to be someone who does not believe there is such a thing as truth. It is
    just that a relativist is someone who tries to be explicit about the various
    standards by which truth is measured in different contexts."


    All this seems perfectly reasonable. It is, of course, important that people
    who make conflicting truth-claims should attempt to establish points of connection
    in order to examine their respective beliefs and belief systems more closely.
    It is also at least arguable that scientific truths are by their very nature
    provisional. And further, it is the case that truths are constructed within
    particular discourses, and, in that sense at least, they are contextual. But
    a nagging doubt remains. And it is the same point as before. If the validity
    of truth-claims can only be established in terms of criteria that are
    themselves internal to particular discourses, what happens when a person inhabiting
    a non-scientific discourse refuses to accept, despite all attempts at persuasion,
    some of the established truths of science – for example, that the earth is more
    than 6000 years old or that it is not flat? It seems that the logic of the kind
    of position outlined by Rée means that it is not possible to privilege
    the scientific version of truth over the non-scientific version. But surely
    he cannot be happy with that outcome?


    "Well, the truth is," Rée admits, pausing, "that I’m
    not really able to give an interesting answer to the question, as you pose it.
    But I wonder why you put it in terms of beliefs that are so barmy that they
    are scarcely intelligible? What if it were in terms of something like Holocaust
    denial, where there is a genuine disagreement and it’s not really a disagreement
    over criteria. It seems to me that whilst it is undeniably exasperating to find
    people who stubbornly refuse to accept what you take to be pretty conclusive
    evidence, it is not fair to be asked ‘What are you going to do about the fact
    that you can’t change their minds?’ – at some point you just have to shrug your
    shoulders and simply say ‘Well, I can’t.’"


    But there are reasons for posing the question in terms of ‘barmy’ beliefs.
    Firstly, plenty of people believe things which in scientific terms are very
    bizarre – for example, opinion poll data suggests that about a third of Americans
    reject the idea of human evolution, and another third are undecided. And secondly,
    the more bizarre the beliefs, the more it becomes clear what is at stake in
    committing oneself to a conception which holds that the criteria for truth are
    only internal to particular discourses. Specifically, it brings into sharp focus
    the fact that this conception allows no definitive grounds for rejecting propositions
    that we nevertheless are certain are false. So I ask Rée what exactly
    he would say to someone who insisted that the earth was flat or that mermaids
    lived under the sea?


    "What you have to say is that, as far as I can see – and I may always
    be wrong – these beliefs are barmy. I think that the phenomenon that you are
    pointing to is just the fact that people can get into disagreements where it
    is extremely difficult to make any progress. But I think that that is just our
    shared epistemological condition, and I don’t see that claiming that what you’ve
    got is absolute truth and what they have got is not, is going to help. I would
    use the example of barmy beliefs as a way to bring you round to my slogan, which
    is ‘Neither a realist nor an anti-realist be.’


    "Listen," Rée goes on, "everything that the ‘friends
    of science’ want to say about the extraordinary achievements and progress of
    the natural sciences, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of technique,
    all of these things can be said by someone who describes themselves as a ‘relativist’
    and there is no intelligible sense of relativism that would lead you to deny
    the reality of scientific progress."


    So what then about the ultimate structure of the external world? Does the contextual
    nature of all truth-claims mean that this structure is always beyond our reach?


    "Well," says Rée, "I don’t think there is anything more
    satisfactory than invoking the Rorty move that I have already mentioned. This
    consists in saying that there is no real difference between talking in an upbeat
    way about getting to know more about the ultimate structure of the world, and
    talking in a more depressed kind of way about the possibilities of including
    more people in a conversation. It seems to me that they really come to the same
    thing. So the question becomes: how do the particular discourses of specialised
    sciences relate to other scientific discourses and to discourses outside science?


    "If you’re in a conversation with someone who is worried about having
    the ultimate structure of the world taken away from them, then you need to make
    them see that what they’re asking for is beyond what any possible agreement
    in the future about how to look at the world can deliver. They keep saying that
    they want objectivity, but they don’t actually need it, so the point is to close
    the gap and to say ‘You’re worried about being deprived of something that actually
    you haven’t got, and you wouldn’t know if you had.’ It’s a chimera, this thing
    that they’re worried about having taken away from them.


    "Imagine that we’re talking with a scientist," Rée continues,
    "worried about his work not being taken seriously – I think that we’re
    paying all the respect that a scientist could dream that we’d pay to the scientific
    enterprise if we say that relative to human discourses, science improves the
    knowledge and control we have over things that matter to us. Of course, you
    can say ‘Well, it does that because it tells us the truth about the objective
    structure of the world’ – and that’s fine, you can say that, but it’s hardly
    an ontological big deal."


    But if that is what Rée thinks is going on in scientific discourses,
    that they are telling us truths about the objective structure of the world,
    then surely that is a realist position, it is not some kind of half-way house
    position.


    "Yes," admits Rée, "that is what I’m saying, except that
    I think the word objective is a waste of space. Or are you trying to contrast
    the objective structure of the world with its subjective structure? I wouldn’t
    if I were you. But rather than ‘Neither a realist nor an anti-realist be’, perhaps
    I should say, ‘Neither an anti-realist nor an anti anti-realist be!’"


    Selected Bibliography
    ‘Rorty’s Nation’, Radical Philosophy, No. 87, Jan/Feb 1998.


    This interview is extracted from What
    Philosophers Think    , edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, and published
    by Continuum     (2003).

  • Compelled to Read This

    The New Scientist reviews What Philosophers Think and finds it necessary reading for scientists.