Jun 25, 2021 11:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 25, 2021 11:27 PM by C C.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...f-knowing/
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): An edgy biography of Stephen Hawking has me reminiscing about science’s good old days. Or were they bad? I can’t decide. I’m talking about the 1990s, when scientific hubris ran rampant. As journalist Charles Seife recalls in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, Hawking and other physicists convinced us that they were on the verge of a “theory of everything” that would solve the riddle of existence. It would reveal why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is the way it is.
[...] In his 1998 bestseller Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson prophesies that science will soon yield such a compelling, complete theory of nature, including human nature, that “the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.” Wilson calls this unification of knowledge “consilience,” an old-fashioned term for coming together or converging. Consilience will resolve our age-old identity crisis, helping us understand once and for all “who we are and why we are here,” as Wilson puts it.
Dismissing philosophers’ warnings against deriving “ought” from “is,” Wilson insists that we can deduce moral principles from science. Science can illuminate our moral impulses and emotions, such as our love for those who share our genes, as well as giving us moral guidance. This linkage of science to ethics is crucial, because Wilson wants us to share his desire to preserve nature in all its wild variety, a goal that he views as an ethical imperative.
At first glance you might wonder: Who could possibly object to this vision? Wouldn’t we all love to agree on a comprehensive worldview, consistent with science, that tells us how to behave individually and collectively? And in fact. many scholars share Wilson’s hope for a merger of science with alternative ways of engaging with reality. Some enthusiasts have formed the Consilience Project, dedicated to “developing a body of social theory and analysis that explains and seeks solutions to the unique challenges we face today.” Last year, poet-novelist Clint Margrave wrote an eloquent defense of consilience for Quillette, noting that he has “often drawn inspiration from science.”
Another consilience booster is psychologist and megapundit Steven Pinker, who praised Wilson’s “excellent” book in 1998 and calls for consilience between science and the humanities in his 2018 bestseller Enlightenment Now. The major difference between Wilson and Pinker is stylistic. Whereas Wilson holds out an olive branch to “postmodern” humanities scholars who challenge science’s objectivity and authority, Pinker scolds them. Pinker accuses postmodernists of “defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism and suffocating political correctness.”
[...] I also saw theoretical diversity, or pluralism, as philosophers call it, as a symptom of failure; the abundance of “solutions” [...] But increasingly, I see pluralism as a valuable, even necessary counterweight to our yearning for certitude...
[...] Wilson acknowledges that consilience is a reductionistic enterprise, which will eliminate many ways of seeing the world.
[...] Wilson is a gracious, courtly man in person as well on the page. But his consilience project stems from excessive faith in science, or scientism. (Both Wilson and Pinker embrace the term scientism, and they no doubt think that the phrase “excessive faith in science” is oxymoronic.) Given the failure to achieve consilience within physics and biology—not to mention the replication crisis and other problems—scientists should stop indulging in fantasies about conquering all human culture and attaining something akin to omniscience. Scientists, in short, should be more humble... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): An edgy biography of Stephen Hawking has me reminiscing about science’s good old days. Or were they bad? I can’t decide. I’m talking about the 1990s, when scientific hubris ran rampant. As journalist Charles Seife recalls in Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, Hawking and other physicists convinced us that they were on the verge of a “theory of everything” that would solve the riddle of existence. It would reveal why there is something rather than nothing, and why that something is the way it is.
[...] In his 1998 bestseller Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson prophesies that science will soon yield such a compelling, complete theory of nature, including human nature, that “the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.” Wilson calls this unification of knowledge “consilience,” an old-fashioned term for coming together or converging. Consilience will resolve our age-old identity crisis, helping us understand once and for all “who we are and why we are here,” as Wilson puts it.
Dismissing philosophers’ warnings against deriving “ought” from “is,” Wilson insists that we can deduce moral principles from science. Science can illuminate our moral impulses and emotions, such as our love for those who share our genes, as well as giving us moral guidance. This linkage of science to ethics is crucial, because Wilson wants us to share his desire to preserve nature in all its wild variety, a goal that he views as an ethical imperative.
At first glance you might wonder: Who could possibly object to this vision? Wouldn’t we all love to agree on a comprehensive worldview, consistent with science, that tells us how to behave individually and collectively? And in fact. many scholars share Wilson’s hope for a merger of science with alternative ways of engaging with reality. Some enthusiasts have formed the Consilience Project, dedicated to “developing a body of social theory and analysis that explains and seeks solutions to the unique challenges we face today.” Last year, poet-novelist Clint Margrave wrote an eloquent defense of consilience for Quillette, noting that he has “often drawn inspiration from science.”
Another consilience booster is psychologist and megapundit Steven Pinker, who praised Wilson’s “excellent” book in 1998 and calls for consilience between science and the humanities in his 2018 bestseller Enlightenment Now. The major difference between Wilson and Pinker is stylistic. Whereas Wilson holds out an olive branch to “postmodern” humanities scholars who challenge science’s objectivity and authority, Pinker scolds them. Pinker accuses postmodernists of “defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism and suffocating political correctness.”
[...] I also saw theoretical diversity, or pluralism, as philosophers call it, as a symptom of failure; the abundance of “solutions” [...] But increasingly, I see pluralism as a valuable, even necessary counterweight to our yearning for certitude...
[...] Wilson acknowledges that consilience is a reductionistic enterprise, which will eliminate many ways of seeing the world.
[...] Wilson is a gracious, courtly man in person as well on the page. But his consilience project stems from excessive faith in science, or scientism. (Both Wilson and Pinker embrace the term scientism, and they no doubt think that the phrase “excessive faith in science” is oxymoronic.) Given the failure to achieve consilience within physics and biology—not to mention the replication crisis and other problems—scientists should stop indulging in fantasies about conquering all human culture and attaining something akin to omniscience. Scientists, in short, should be more humble... (MORE - missing details)
