The late John Davison often remarked that science could only answer “how” questions, not “why”. It seems to me philosophers, perhaps I’m really thinking of philosophers of religion rather than in general, attempt to find answers to “why” questions without always having a firm grasp on how reality works. Perhaps this is why there is so much talking past each other when the explanatory power of science vs other ways of knowing enters a discussion.
I’ve not been particularly motivated to read the anti-religious output of the “Gnu” atheists. I’ve not read Dawkins’ The God Delusion or any of Sam Harris’ output. I did read God is Not Great because someone lent me a copy which I found an entertaining polemic against some sacred cows (not the least being Mother Theresa) but I doubt I would have considered buying Jerry Coyne’s Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible as I have no need of such arguments being already convinced that no religious dogma has ever yet provided an answer to a “how” question.
But my eye was caught by a post at Uncommon Descent perhaps hopefully entitled “Feser Demolishes Coyne“. I’ve mentioned Edward Feser before (he teaches religious studies at Pasadena City College in California). He’s an outspoken right-wing Catholic blogger with a loyal following and a seemingly intense dislike of Jerry Coyne. The article applauded by Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent is published at “First Things” (America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion & Public Life ). Feser writes confidently and pejoritavely, finishing with a final barb:
For considered as an omnibus of concrete examples of elementary logical fallacies, Faith versus Fact is invaluable.
By Feser’s standards, the review is brief. Feser lambasts Coyne for choosing to direct his fire on the poster child of anti-science and anti-evolution, US-style Creationism, complains that Coyne defines science too broadly and that Coyne equivocates on the description scientism by embracing it. So I bought the book.
Regarding Feser’s complaint that Coyne focuses on US Creationism, in his first chapter, Coyne goes to some length to explain why he is most concerned with the US and Creationism. Creationism is rife in the US where he teaches, it is anti-evolution, a discipline that he teaches and holds dear and it is the area of scientific/religious conflict that he is familiar with.
As to defining science, Coyne writes (p 39):
In fact, I see science, conceived broadly, as any endeavour that tries to find the truth about nature using the tools of reason, observation and experiment.
Seems reasonable to me. A scientific approach is starting with some observation, some phenomenon, and moving through “that’s interesting” to “what’s going on” to hypothesis testing. But surviving everyday life relies on accepting and working with the regularities we find in the real world around us. Water won’t run uphill without a source of energy, and water running downhill can produce large and useful amounts of energy.
As to the charge of scientism, Coyne tackles this in some detail (according to Kindle, Coyne uses the word 43 times in the book). He points out “scientism” is invariably a pejorative term used to denigrate the idea of scientific endeavour as the only way to know anything about the external world. He demonstrates the equivocal meaning of scientism by suggesting four shades of meaning and embraces the first – that science is “the sole source of reliable facts about the universe.” By that definition, Coyne cheerfully admits:
…most of my colleagues and I are indeed guilty of scientism. But in that sense scientism is a virtue -the virtue of holding convictions with a tenacity proportional to the evidence supporting them.
I propose Feser’s review as evidence supporting my hypothesis that scientists concern themselves with how things really are and religious philosophers seem to ignore reality when clinging on to their rationalisations of why things are how they assume them to be.
Incidentally, I find Coyne’s book well-written and not at all polemical as might be expected if one assumed Feser’s review was at all accurate.
I’d like to be given an example of a why-question philosophy has answered.
There is a well known methodology for answering “why?” questions. It is called “making up stuff as you go along”. That methodology appears to be much used in both religion and philosophy.
I was thinking of the subset of philosophers of religion and especially religious apologists. It depends what “answered” means and I guess it also depends on the religious affiliation of the apologist supplying answers.
I haven’t bought Coyne’s book, and Feser’s review did not inspire me to buy it. My guess would be that Feser misunderstands science — a problem that is common among religionists and philosophers.
That said, I would probably agree with Feser, that Coyne defines science too broadly (I base that on reading his blog), and that he possibly leans toward scientism. As for concentrating on US style creationism — well, that’s to be expected given that Coyne is a biologist, and biology is constantly under attack from US style creationism.
We have at least on regular poster here who denies the findings of physics, astronomy, and geology with regard to the age of the earth and the age of life. He is a small minority here, but not necessarily in the world at large. (I think it is a mistake to concentrate on U.S.Christianity as the primary repository of creationism.)
My own view is rather scientistic. I think science is to philosophy and theology as Astronomy is to astrology and chemistry is to alchemy. Just an evolved version of these disciplines.
There are, of course, some poor scientists who do bad work. I would say that the social sciences are not really mature, and Coyne’s beloved biology has some sloppy writing in the public arena.
Rather than say that science can’t tackle traditional issues of ethics and morality, I would say that traditional moral and ethical precepts have a lot of momentum, and it is difficult to improve on them, however much we would like to. It’s a bit like trying to improve on evolved genetics. Great opportunity and great peril.
Of course Feser’s review is not at all accurate. He’s one of the dirtiest little fascists alive today, and far too ideologically motivated to be capable of telling the truth.
A good rule of thumb for dealing with Edward Feser: iif he says the sky is blue, get an independent witness to verify it.
No surprise Edward Feser is a darling of the bigots and dominionists holding court over at UD.
Why should we develop a “scientific” method?
Why should science involve experimentation?
Why is falsification be important?
Why should we help others?
Why is liberty important?
Why should we behave ethically?
Why should verification be important?
Why is the empirical method important?
Etc.
Just because different philosophies provide different answers, doesn’t mean philosophy doesn’t answer why questions.
After everything that I’ve done for you, I see philosophy lumped in with religion and philosophers with apologists! Who here has been talking about cognitive science? Who here has been talking about niche construction, the extended synthesis, and complexity theory? Oy, such ingratitude!
Is this directed at me?
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m sorry, sir. I do tend to paint with a broad brush! 🙂
I don’t like philosophy in general being bashed. Not pointing any fingers here, but without philosophy of science, science wouldn’t be what it is.
I think it’s unfair to accept scientific truth as provisional and then accuse philosophy of not having answered anything. This provisional/tentative truth has been shown to be a much more powerful truth thanks to science and of course it’s philosophical underpinnings
Q: Why does life have the pattern it has?
A: Common Descent.
It’s pure idiocy to claim that science restricts itself to ” how questions” and one doesn’t need to be a trained philosopher to see this.
The OP seems to have missed the point of Feser’s review.
As Alan Fox understood, I was being ironic in responding to the rather broad brush in which he painted the OP.
Philosophy is a remarkably contentious field, which makes it ripe for mockery, and some of the mockery is well-placed. (If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re doing it wrong!) There are many different ways of slicing up the field.
One could distinguish between topics: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science.
Or one could distinguish different positions that philosophers have held: Platonism, scholasticism, idealism, empiricism, rationalism, pragmatism, existentialism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, critical theory, logical positivism, naturalism, constructivism, anti-realism, realism.
But I think that one really big methodological and metaphilosophical distinction concerns whether philosophy is in any sense continuous with science or somehow distinct from science, perhaps even (somehow) prior to science.
Call the first view “anti-foundationalism” or “non-foundationalism” and the second view “foundationalism”, depending on whether or not philosophical inquiry is categorically different from empirical inquiry and can thereby provide “foundations” for empirical inquiry (i.e. science).
I am a firmly committed anti-foundationalist, in the tradition of the American pragmatists (esp. Dewey, Sellars, and Rorty, though I do find Peirce and James rewarding and I should read much more of their work), though my understanding of why anti-foundationalism is the correct approach is also strongly influenced by my study of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
That said, I do think that philosophy at its best should be responsive to science (and also to art, politics, economics, and everything else). I have no patience for philosophers who assign more epistemic authority to their “intuitions” than they do to empirically confirmed models of causal structures. I prefer Rorty over Nagel, Dennett over Chalmers, and Churchland over Plantinga.
I like philosophy of mind that’s both informed by cognitive science and critical of the philosophical assumptions implicit in cognitive science: Bert Dreyfus, Alva Noe, Michael Wheeler, Andy Clark, Evan Thompson, Anthony Chemero. I like philosophy of science that is informed by what we know about how scientists actually reason: Ian Hacking, John Dupre, Nancy Cartwright, Joe Rouse, Helen Longino.
Even ethics and social/political philosophy are, at their best, responsive to ordinary lived experience as well as to the social and natural sciences. None of this can be done a priori.
By (extreme) contrast, Feser thinks that there are distinctly philosophical questions that can be decisively resolved by distinctly philosophical methods and that these issues are logically prior to any and all empirical inquiry. There’s a metaphilosophical divide between Feser (and philosophers like him, such as Plantinga and Nagel) and myself (and the philosophers who all much better than I am, mentioned above).
Point being: watch where you point that broad brush of yours! 🙂
It’s a requirement here. If you are going to bash theists and IDists here you have to bash philosophy.
I accept the criticism. Though I did say ” perhaps I’m really thinking of philosophers of religion rather than in general”. I am happy to confirm KN is one (and I’m sure there are more) excellent example disproving the general rule.
What was Aristotle, scientist or philosopher? Why on earth would Aristotle adopt a belief in a First Cause?
Just how much of Feser’s writings have you actually read?
Do you think people here really understand what you mean when you speak of logical priority?
True enough, of course by that standard so do fortune cookies
I’d accept there seems a growing realisation among the best philosophers of science that keeping up with scientific advance is tough but worthwhile. My point about science, reality and philosophy is that having a basic grasp of the current state of science and where some of the “hows” come from has to be a prerequisite for any coherent introspection into “why” questions.
He was certainly a scientist. Maybe the first scientist of whose work records have survived. His work on cuttlefish and how they mated was not believed until confirmed in the nineteenth century.
Yeah! 🙂
Thanks for that.
Now that we have developed such a thing, why do you advocate ignoring it?
I have a book* I can sell. It’s not a book to toss aside lightly. It’s been hurled with great force on more than one occasion.
H/T Dorothy Parker.
*Scholastic Metaphysics : A Contemporary Analysis
I think of Aristotle as being a scientist-philosopher; he was a very patient and articulate describer of many natural phenomena, and he also had inherited some philosophical problems from Parmenides, Plato, and Democritus that he was interested in solving.
Aristotle is actually an exemplar for me about how to move dialectically between first-order empirical inquiry and second-order philosophical reflection on that inquiry. He develops his theory of the distinction between form and matter as a result of that method, and on that basis develops his idea that the cosmos could not be a organized, unified whole unless there were some single ultimate organizing principle at work: the Unmoved Mover.
I certainly don’t need to accept Aristotle’s substantive conclusions in order to appreciate his methods! I think of Hegel and Dewey as faithful to Aristotle’s general methods while rejecting his conclusions, and I don’t see anything philosophically illicit about that.
Many of his blog posts, a few articles on First Things, excepts from The Last Superstition.
I have no idea, but I have no reason to believe that they don’t.
I don’t. I argue about what that method should entail.
Seems to me that “how” concerns causation, and is amenable to scientific investigation. “Why” concerns giving reasons rather than finding causes, and ensnares us in the question of intentionality and the naturalization of same.
For “why” to receive a scientific explanation requires the naturalization of intentionality, or provision of a good eliminative argument for why intentionality can’t/needn’t be naturalized. Has anyone attained either?
And isn’t this a philosophical project? I personally find philosophical efforts to think this through useful and interesting.
This question — whether intentionality can or can’t be naturalized — is the focus of my scholarship, so I think I can address it pretty well.
First, there are the philosophers who think that intentionality cannot be naturalized and that naturalism is false. I would put Plantinga in this camp, but also Edward Feser and Robert Koons on the side of the anti-naturalistic anti-naturalizers. These philosophers can be property dualists, hylomorphists, substance dualists — anything but naturalism!
Second, there are philosophers who think that intentionality cannot be naturalized and that naturalism is true, ergo intentionality must be eliminated. Alex Rosenberg has this view. I don’t know of any others, before or since.
Third, there are philosophers who think that intentionality can be naturalized and that naturalism (or something like it) is true. I tried to develop a naturalistic theory of intentionality in my first book. But I think that there two books in particular that are much better than mine: Mark Okrent’s Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality and Joe Rouse’s Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. There are subtle differences between their views and I’m still working through exactly how those differences should be conceptualized.
I think that somewhere in the zone disclosed by these two books is the right way of naturalizing intentionality. That’s what I’m going to be working on this summer when I begin my next book. Unlike Okrent and Rouse, who don’t talk about brains at all, I’m going to try and use what I’ve learned in philosophy of cognitive science (esp. Noe, Wheeler, and Clark) to examine the causal implementation of intentional acts (though without identifying intentional acts with neurophysiological activity alone).
I can see two possible answers to that question, depending on precisely what one means by “intentionality.”
Possible answer 1: No, it cannot be done. Intentionality is just a concealed form of dualism.
Possible answer 2: It was done, long ago, by scientists. But philosophers appear to have not noticed.
Personally, I prefer the second possible answer. But many philosophers seem to understand “intentionality” in a way that requires the first possible answer.
Neil Rickert,
I disagree. I think that the right view is that naturalizing intentionality requires a combined effort of the conceptual explications developed by philosophers and the causal explanations developed by scientists
Specifically, intentionality would be naturalized if it were shown that our best, empirically confirmed models of cognitive systems — models that incorporate lines of evidence from neuroscience, cognitive science, ecology, and evolutionary theory — are also satisfactory implementations of the explication of the concept of intentionality that we find in phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and philosophers writing today in their wake.
I don’t think that the conceptual explication of intentionality requires dualism, and I also don’t think that naturalizing intentionality is something that scientists figured out a while back and philosophers simply didn’t notice.
I think KN is the one who linked to this article:
Science proposes to offer answers or explanations to “why” questions. What exactly is the point of trying to pretend otherwise?
Yeah, I have to say, philosophy and science are distinct activities, and each is better when informed by the other, but I’m not happy with the idea that it’s as neat as saying that one deals with “how?” questions and the other deals with “why?” questions. There are “how” and “why” questions in both science and philosophy.
Alan,
Given Feser’s takedown of Coyne why should anyone bother to read the book? Feser demonstrates that Coyne contradicts himself and misleads his readers.
Am I going to find out differently if I buy it and read it for myself? I think I have better things to do with my time.
Does he?
Why?
In that case, you should go with my first answer — that it will never be solved.
As it is often framed by philosophy, intentionality is a philosophical problem. It isn’t a scientific problem. Scientists aren’t going to touch it.
Rather, scientists are just going to continue doing what they do, which includes making sure that the technical words that they introduce are indeed about something. Science could not work otherwise.
This is backwards. You cannot have a sensible model of cognition without first resolving the questions about intentionality.
Don’t look at what scientists write. Look at how they actually do science. The solution is in their actions, not in their words.
Neil:
Do you see the irony in this statement?
Fessers article was a hoot. He tried to muddy the waters that faith and fact both make competing truth claims. He also ‘no true Scotsmaned’ on religions.
“I propose Feser’s review as evidence supporting my hypothesis that scientists concern themselves with how things really are and religious philosophers seem to ignore reality when clinging on to their rationalisations of why things are how they assume them to be.”
Answers to a few simple questions should settle this particular matter. Does Coyne seem to have any clue about (or concern for) what religion is and how it works? Does he answer any of the “why” questions on the topic? Feser, on the other hand, is in his own familiar territory in this case.
I trust it that you, Alan, do not have deep general scorn for expertise. So it must be that you have deep general scorn for religion and you have a Hallelujah moment every time someone speaks up against it, the way Coyne does. And your militant atheism is stirred up when somebody spoils your Hallelujah moment, the way Feser does.
That was intended (unless you are seeing some other subtle irony that I didn’t notice).
Some quality courtiers response shit right here
Yes.
To quote Popper, “All life is problem solving”. We start out with a problem to solve, conjecture a solution to that problem by creating a theory about how the world works, in reality, then criticizing that theory. For Popper, what separates philosophy and science is the type of criticism applied. In the case of science, criticism includes empirical observations and test. David Deutsch, who is also a Popperian, has improved on Popper in that our relatively recent tendency to prefer hard to vary explanations, which is mostly descriptive but also prescriptive. For example, Occam’s Razor is a specific case of an explanation that is hard to vary.
So, despite being a non-foundationalist, as KN, I do not think science and philosophy are distinct things. Explanations for how knowledge grows, which includes epistemology, is philosophy. What is or is not science is not a scientific question, as that would be circular. However, I think there are such things as bad explanations and good explanations. Namely, some are easily varied, while others are not.
For example, while visiting family over the holidays, my brother in law’s mother said something to the effect of “I don’t think evolution is true because I can’t believe that organisms just came out of nothing”.
Apparently, she doesn’t realize that God, as an explanation, just pushes the problem up a level but doesn’t solve it. Namely, a designer that “just was” complete with the knowledge of what genes will results in just the right proteins, which will result in just the right concrete features, already present, doesn’t serve an explanatory purpose. This is because one can more efficiently state that organisms “just appeared”, complete with the knowledge of what genes will results in just the right proteins, which will result in just the right concrete features, already present.
At best, this is the philosophical idea that knowledge comes from authoritative, or supernatural sources. Both of which are easily varied, and therefore bad explantations. Why? All this does is take knowledge from one place (in the designer or authority) and copy it to another place (in the organism), without actually explaining the origin of that knowledge.
Critical Rationalist,
Does anyone?
Seriously.
I doubt that she believes that God came from nothing. Did you ask her if she thinks organisms cannot come from nothing how it is she believes that God can come from nothing? After all, isn’t God just a bigger, fancier, organism?
Mung,
Entity.
Scientists, whatever that means, are people who try to know the how. BUT GET IT WRONG MOSTLY. Thats why most things are not understood. Yet they try and others try.
Creationist scientists also try to figure out how and show the HOW of others is not true.
Its a conflict between conclusions of people both claiming to be drawing conclusions from scientific investigation. Save YEC which draws some assertions from the bible.
Its all a humbug.
Its case verses case based on evidence.
ID presents evidence for and against and the evolutionists do and YEC does with a wee bit of help from a witness.
Books like this fail because they define the creationist side as not doing science.
Thats a accusation but not a indictment.
There is no religion verses science issue until everyone agrees one side is not doing science.
No side admits that yet so its a humbug case.
Yes, quite right. They get it wrong mostly. That’s why automobiles don’t work. That’s why planes don’t fly. That’s why you don’t have a computer that can deliver you the internet.
</sarcasm>
Here I would tend to agree with Byers. I read that the overwhelming majority of testable hypotheses, when tested, fail. Science is like evolution in this sense that they get it mostly wrong (as Byers says), but that they retain the successes for the next round while discarding the failures.
Good science popularization articles frequently provide several, sometimes many, possible explanations for some (usually small) body of data. They can’t all be right, and possibly none of them are right. Right now, multiple experiments are in progress to detect dark matter, all of them worthless if any of the other proposals is correct. Most (if not all) will get it wrong.
Discarding failed ideas is how scientific knowledge becomes cumulative.
Critical Rationalist,
I don’t see Occam’s Razor as an explanation itself, but rather as a heuristic for choosing among explanations.
RB:
I think you might mean “teleology” rather than “intentionality”, since the latter refers not to intentions but to the “aboutness” of thoughts, utterances, etc.
I wish philosophers had picked a different term, but “intentionality” has deep historical roots and is unlikely to be jettisoned despite all the confusion it causes.