Nov 22, 2015 10:01 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 22, 2015 10:02 PM by C C.)
Naturalism and its limits
EXCERPT: Many contemporary philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. They mean that they believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. I am sometimes described as a naturalist. Why do I resist the description? Not for any religious scruple: I am an atheist of the most straightforward kind. But accepting the naturalist slogan without looking beneath the slick packaging is an unscientific way to form one’s beliefs about the world, not something naturalists should recommend.
What, for a start, is the natural world? If we say it is the world of matter, or the world of atoms, we are left behind by modern physics, which characterizes the world in far more abstract terms. Anyway, the best current scientific theories will probably be superseded by future scientific developments. We might therefore define the natural world as whatever the scientific method eventually discovers. Thus naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. [...] Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?
[...] What is meant by “the scientific method”? Why assume that science only has one method? For naturalists [...] It involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predictions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is called the hypothetico-deductive method.
One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method. [...]
Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History? Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its bite. Naturalists typically criticize some traditional forms of philosophy as insufficiently scientific, because they ignore experimental tests. How can they maintain such objections unless they restrict scientific method to hypothetico-deductivism? But if they are too exclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its credibility, by imposing a method appropriate to natural science on areas where it is inappropriate. Unfortunately, rather than clarify the issue, many naturalists oscillate. When on the attack, they assume an exclusive understanding of science as hypothetico-deductive. When under attack themselves, they fall back on a more inclusive understanding of science that drastically waters down naturalism. Such maneuvering makes naturalism an obscure article of faith. I don’t call myself a naturalist because I don’t want to be implicated in equivocal dogma. Dismissing an idea as “inconsistent with naturalism” is little better than dismissing it as “inconsistent with Christianity.”
[...] We needn’t pretend that scientists’ motives are pure. They are human. Science doesn’t depend on indifference to fame, professional advancement, money, or comparisons with rivals. Rather, truth is best pursued in social environments, intellectual communities, that minimize conflict between such baser motives and the scientific spirit, by rewarding work that embodies the scientific virtues. Such traditions exist, and not just in natural science.
The scientific spirit is as relevant in mathematics, history, philosophy and elsewhere as in natural science. [...] Although the methods of natural science could beneficially be applied more widely than they have been so far, the default assumption must be that the practitioners of a well-established discipline know what they are doing, and use the available methods most appropriate for answering its questions. Exceptions may result from a conservative tradition, or one that does not value the scientific spirit. Still, impatience with all methods except those of natural science is a poor basis on which to identify those exceptions.
Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit....
To Weld, Perchance, to Dream
EXCERPT: It’s not often that one finds oneself uniquely qualified to comment on a matter in the popular media, but when Marco Rubio argued [...] that the country needs “more welders and less philosophers,” I had my moment. My father was a welder, and I am a philosopher. I actually did have a choice to make some decades ago: to weld or to philosophize?
Mr. Rubio got the response he wanted. Philosophiles and sundry humanities defenders gleefully pointed out that what he said was empirically false (philosophy professors apparently earn more than welders). [...] But maybe Marco has a point. As a friend of mine once elegantly put it: Philosophy doesn’t boil cabbages or skin rabbits. Nor does it spot weld or arc weld. Am I obviously better than my dad was because I get paid to think for a living?
I grew up in and around the factories my dad worked in, and later managed, north of London in the 1960s and ’70s. I started work at the age of 14 (illegal, even then) [...] After having nearly lost a couple of limbs in this manner, I thought I probably didn’t have much of a future in factories. [...] I imagine most people think that philosophers are rather effete types, the products of generations of ingrained liberal privilege. I don’t want to sound like a working-class hero or anything (what would John Lennon say?), but that is not always the case.
[...] I got lucky and wound up in a university when I was 22, where I first listened to philosophers teach. [...] I got hooked [...]
Of course, to risk wild understatement, the fact that philosophers have no observable practical skills and have made no progress on any of the major philosophical questions in nearly 3,000 years might sound like failure. But not so fast. Philosophers don’t know the answers, but we do know the questions and the fact that we keep on asking them is evidence to the fact that human beings are still perplexed by the major issues of truth, reality, God, justice and even happiness.
Perversely perhaps, this lack of practical skills is also what makes philosophers so eminently employable, both in and outside academia. We can read closely and carefully, think critically and constructively, forensically find the flaws in arguments and detect nonsense parading as sense. Do we need more welders than philosophers? Well, of course, that depends what you mean by “need....”
EXCERPT: Many contemporary philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. They mean that they believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. I am sometimes described as a naturalist. Why do I resist the description? Not for any religious scruple: I am an atheist of the most straightforward kind. But accepting the naturalist slogan without looking beneath the slick packaging is an unscientific way to form one’s beliefs about the world, not something naturalists should recommend.
What, for a start, is the natural world? If we say it is the world of matter, or the world of atoms, we are left behind by modern physics, which characterizes the world in far more abstract terms. Anyway, the best current scientific theories will probably be superseded by future scientific developments. We might therefore define the natural world as whatever the scientific method eventually discovers. Thus naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. [...] Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?
[...] What is meant by “the scientific method”? Why assume that science only has one method? For naturalists [...] It involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predictions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is called the hypothetico-deductive method.
One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method. [...]
Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History? Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its bite. Naturalists typically criticize some traditional forms of philosophy as insufficiently scientific, because they ignore experimental tests. How can they maintain such objections unless they restrict scientific method to hypothetico-deductivism? But if they are too exclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its credibility, by imposing a method appropriate to natural science on areas where it is inappropriate. Unfortunately, rather than clarify the issue, many naturalists oscillate. When on the attack, they assume an exclusive understanding of science as hypothetico-deductive. When under attack themselves, they fall back on a more inclusive understanding of science that drastically waters down naturalism. Such maneuvering makes naturalism an obscure article of faith. I don’t call myself a naturalist because I don’t want to be implicated in equivocal dogma. Dismissing an idea as “inconsistent with naturalism” is little better than dismissing it as “inconsistent with Christianity.”
[...] We needn’t pretend that scientists’ motives are pure. They are human. Science doesn’t depend on indifference to fame, professional advancement, money, or comparisons with rivals. Rather, truth is best pursued in social environments, intellectual communities, that minimize conflict between such baser motives and the scientific spirit, by rewarding work that embodies the scientific virtues. Such traditions exist, and not just in natural science.
The scientific spirit is as relevant in mathematics, history, philosophy and elsewhere as in natural science. [...] Although the methods of natural science could beneficially be applied more widely than they have been so far, the default assumption must be that the practitioners of a well-established discipline know what they are doing, and use the available methods most appropriate for answering its questions. Exceptions may result from a conservative tradition, or one that does not value the scientific spirit. Still, impatience with all methods except those of natural science is a poor basis on which to identify those exceptions.
Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit....
To Weld, Perchance, to Dream
EXCERPT: It’s not often that one finds oneself uniquely qualified to comment on a matter in the popular media, but when Marco Rubio argued [...] that the country needs “more welders and less philosophers,” I had my moment. My father was a welder, and I am a philosopher. I actually did have a choice to make some decades ago: to weld or to philosophize?
Mr. Rubio got the response he wanted. Philosophiles and sundry humanities defenders gleefully pointed out that what he said was empirically false (philosophy professors apparently earn more than welders). [...] But maybe Marco has a point. As a friend of mine once elegantly put it: Philosophy doesn’t boil cabbages or skin rabbits. Nor does it spot weld or arc weld. Am I obviously better than my dad was because I get paid to think for a living?
I grew up in and around the factories my dad worked in, and later managed, north of London in the 1960s and ’70s. I started work at the age of 14 (illegal, even then) [...] After having nearly lost a couple of limbs in this manner, I thought I probably didn’t have much of a future in factories. [...] I imagine most people think that philosophers are rather effete types, the products of generations of ingrained liberal privilege. I don’t want to sound like a working-class hero or anything (what would John Lennon say?), but that is not always the case.
[...] I got lucky and wound up in a university when I was 22, where I first listened to philosophers teach. [...] I got hooked [...]
Of course, to risk wild understatement, the fact that philosophers have no observable practical skills and have made no progress on any of the major philosophical questions in nearly 3,000 years might sound like failure. But not so fast. Philosophers don’t know the answers, but we do know the questions and the fact that we keep on asking them is evidence to the fact that human beings are still perplexed by the major issues of truth, reality, God, justice and even happiness.
Perversely perhaps, this lack of practical skills is also what makes philosophers so eminently employable, both in and outside academia. We can read closely and carefully, think critically and constructively, forensically find the flaws in arguments and detect nonsense parading as sense. Do we need more welders than philosophers? Well, of course, that depends what you mean by “need....”
