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.
Of course, silly me. I forgot you have this theistic tendency to imagine things
From the op:
For a great many people religion answers a very important “how” question. How am I to live my life?
Human evolution is an evolution towards individual freedom. Just as each person develops from a state of total reliance on others towards inner freedom, so culture has evolved from a state where the authority of the leaders was unquestioned to contemporary western society in which, within reason, people are free in their choice of lifestyle.
Jesus superceded the Ten Commandments when he said, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”. The Ten Commandments were external rules that had to be obeyed. This new commandment was not something that could be imposed on people from without. Love is an individual act that can only be given from within in freedom. No one can be forced to love another.
So in today’s society religion or a philosophy of life should be something that is followed by each and every person as a free choice. It is a matter of their individual will. Science on the other hand should deal with revealing facts that are common to all. For example we cannot choose to disobey the laws of physics, they are universal and apply to all.
It is not a case of “fact versus faith”. Faith is a matter for the free individual, facts are true regardless of our personal predilections.
No, I intended “intentionality” in Brentano’s sense of the “aboutness” of mental states.
Why we don’t appeal to infinite regress.
Why avoid equivocation of terms.
Why use deductive reasoning.
Why to not be philosophically illiterate.
etc.
Then I’ll try to not imagine you’ve added anything worthwhile with this comment of yours.
RB,
I’d say that it’s not intentionality, but rather teleology and teleonomy, that need to be naturalized in order to find reasons (as opposed to mere efficient causes) for phenomena.
The reason some aquatic animals can sense electric fields is that it helps them to locate prey and evade predators, thus enhancing their survival. But when they evolved, that reason was not present in a mind. No intentionality was involved.
There was a reason, but it was independent of minds. It’s what Dennett — ever a fount of pithy and useful phrases — would call a free-floating rationale.
keiths,
What you say there is quite right — about naturalizing teleology — but that doesn’t touch on RB’s question about naturalizing intentionality. I know you don’t believe in original intentionality, and I do. But the reason why I believe that original intentionality is real (contra Dennett) is that I think original intentionality can be successfully naturalized!
KN,
Don’t forget why he asked that question:
I would amend his statement thus:
The naturalization of intentionality is still an important project, but for other reasons.
keiths,
Good!
Or, there are different kinds of “why?” questions, and some require naturalizing teleology and others require naturalizing intentionality (at least at a certain level).
Dennett’s “The Evolution of ‘Why’?” is actually quite good on these issues.
I don’t think she does either. However, that’s not what I’m suggesting.
I’m pointing out that “just was” and “just appeared” are equivalent from the perspective of providing an explanation. Adding God, or a designer, to the mix doesn’t add to the explanation. At best, it assumes that knowledge comes from authoritative sources. However, that is a specific philosophical view on knowledge. And I’m suggesting a bad one at that for similar reasons.
Knowledge “just was”?
If what has survived of him is any kind of true picture he deserves the description of polymath.
Yes but how (heh) to avoid infinite regress? All scientific “how” answers will hit the buffers at the moment of the Big Bang and biological ones currently hit the buffers with the last universal common ancestor.
That’s what a good “why” answer should do. Finding an example is another matter.
At the risk of saying something like “man cannot survive travelling at speeds over twenty miles an hour” or “man will never fly” I think this may be unattainable.
Absolutely and absolutely!
Unless you (or anyone) can show how science can answer “why” to any fundamental question avoiding infinite regress (or at to the Big Bang) then there is no scientific “why” answer.
Can we get the answers?
Alan,
If there is an infinite regress, we should embrace it, not avoid it. Pretending it isn’t there won’t make it disappear.
No, in both cases scientists are pushing further. OOL studies obviously involve events prior to the LUCA, and hypotheses such as Smolin’s Darwinian cosmology push beyond the Big Bang.
RB:
Alan:
It’s easy to find an example. I just walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a can of Mountain Dew. Why? Because I was thirsty. I have given a reason, and it answers the “why” question.
Why?
[To give an accurate “why” answer, you simply need to give your reasons for believing as you do. See? Finding examples is easy.]
These questions were a lot simpler before we knew anything.
About neuroscience and about AI.
The more we know, the more difficult philosophical questions become.
And you were thirsty because you pulled a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge!
Huh? Please elaborate.
One doesn’t learn philosophy in order to quench a thirst. Only science is good for that. Science and Mountain Dew.
I asked for elaboration, not an elaborate dodge.
Apologies in my delay in sending you greetings brother CharlieM.
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
Optimist!
What event before LUCA can you describe?
What events outside our lightcone can you tell me about?
Keiths:
The following passage captures an important disinction, for me:
This from G. F. Scheuler’s chapter: Action Explanations: Causes and Purposes found in Intentions and Intentionality, edited by Bertram F. Malle et al.
The point here is that solving, or dissolving, this dilemma, is both important and falls at least in part in the domain of philosophy, in particular vis the disposition of the intentional states (“beliefs that…, desires that…”) vis physicalism.
That “overdetermined” conclusion seems wrong.
Yes that is what I mean. I have read a lot of geomorphology papers and its full of hypothesis that contradict other ones to explain some mechanism.
Everywhere its this way and especially all the attention to healing our bodies and all the failure.
the success is not sampling the collective effort. Only a fraction of hypothesis get accepted and some shouldn’t.
An infinite regress isn’t actually a problem unless your a Foundationist of some sort, such as Empiricist. While it was useful because it help promote observations, Empiricism has it backwards. Theories are tested by observations, not derived from them.
All knowledge is conjecture controlled by criticism in some form or another and we tentatively accept hard to vary ideas that we have no criticism of. For example, I can’t think of a harder to vary explanation of why 2+2 = 4 than 2+2 actually equals 4. It’s nearly impossible to vary, with the exception of extremely large integers. That’s it.
Popper’s theory of knowledge is universal because it includes knowledge in genes, books and even brains. And it’s objective because it doesn’t require a knowing subject. It unifies several fields, which is how we make progress.
Reciprocating Bill,
First, thank you for bringing that collection to my attention — I will order it immediately!
Second, I think there are a couple of different approaches here. One approach is to go “full Dennett” and say that intentional explanations are explanations undertaken from a specific stance, which is useful for many purposes, even though other purposes require taking up other stances — such as the design stance or the physical stance.
Which is “the right stance”? There is no answer to that question. A chiropractor will take a design stance towards her patients; a pathologist will take a physical stance; a therapist will take an intentional stance (though of a very distinct and unusual sort). Different stances are causally efficacious in disclosing different real patterns, and that’s all there is to be said.
That is to say that although human beings are physical, material entities, there are nevertheless going to be real patterns that can’t be disclosed by adopting the physical stance alone. (This is also true for organisms — organisms are goal-directed patterns of activity that can only be made intelligible by adopting the teleological stance.)
It will take a great deal of careful, patient scientific theorizing to understand what the real patterns are that the physical, teleological, and intentional stances are latching onto as a result of which those stances are genuinely causally efficacious.
I laughed aloud upon reading Putnam’s remark on Dennett and “stances”:
“Thus it is that in the closing decades of the twentieth century we have intelligent philosophers claiming that intentionality itself is something we project by taking a ‘stance’ to some parts of the world (as if ‘taking a stance’ were not itself an intentional notion!)…”
(The Many Faces of Realism, p. 16)
KN, add Stephen Stich to your list of philosophers who were at one point or another a strict eliminativist – that story, and the story of his subsequent deconversion, told in “Deconstructing the Mind”.
So long as we realize that scientific knowledge is cumulative. At any given time, there are multiple hypotheses forwarded to explain what has not yet become established. But within a generation, all but one of them have vanished, and the current batch of hypotheses would be senseless if that one surviving hypothesis from before had not proven correct enough.
Learning by trial and error means lots of errors, but it’s worthwhile because those efforts that are NOT errors are retained and built on going forward.
Alan,
Please, no goalpost shifting.
Here’s the actual statement of yours that I was contesting:
Smolin’s hypothesis (and other cosmological models) already go beyond the Big Bang “buffers”, and even if they didn’t, there’d be no reason to think that future models would fall short as well.
Likewise, biological investigations do not “hit the buffers” at the LUCA. See this,.for example.
Explanations can occur at multiple levels with different modes, such as emergent properties. Another example is constructor theory. The current conception of physics starts out with initial conditions and tries to predict what will occur from there. But this is very limited in that we cannot always know the initial conditions. Furthermore, we cannot predict the impact the growth of knowledge will have beyond a specific horizon. The objection that “Evolution isn’t science” often has root that, despite explaining how they could appear from simple initial conditions, such as a primitive biological replicator, evolution doesn’t predict elephants at time t in the universe.
However, Constructor Theory is about what transformations are possible, which are impossible and why. From this simple dichotomy, we can formulate the whole of fundamental physics. And do so at a more fundamental level as constructor Theory underlies theories such as quantum mechanics and information theory.
Constructor theory is new mode of explanation that brings information theory into fundamental physics. To use a concrete example, this article on the constructor theory of life is a practical example that contrasts the current conception of physics: How constructor theory solve the riddle of life.
RB,
Yes, but remember that we were talking about how answering “why” questions involves the giving of reasons. Reasons apply in any teleonomic/teleological context whether or not intentionality is involved.
The answer to “why did Keith go to the refrigerator?” involves intentionality. The answer to “why is a polar bear’s fur white?” does not.
The common thread is teleology/teleonomy, not intentionality.
RB,
Regarding Scheuler’s concerns about overdetermination:
I think that’s wrong because we can aver that the physical explanation and the reason-based explanation are two sides of the same coin, not competing explanations.
RB,
I’m not sure why Putnam sees this as a problem for Dennett. As far as I can tell, Dennett would happily agree that the taking of the intentional stance is itself an instance of “as-if intentionality”. He doesn’t think original intentionality exists, after all.
Buffers aren’t so easy to shift.
Never say never, sure. Except there is no way to test a hypothesis that makes predictions as to what may lie beyond our lightcone.
And you test this, how? Actually, I’ll agree I may have misspoken as the limit for testability is prior to having Darwinian processes available as an explanatory mechanism. And I qualified with “currently”. And “optimist” is not pejorative. I think SETI could change everything regarding OoL. Without evidence other than circumstantial, testability of OoL hypotheses remains elusive.
Alan,
So you shifted goalposts instead.
Despite your lightcone avatar, you’re confusing “outside our lightcone” with “beyond the Big Bang”. Your original statement referred to the Big Bang:
keiths:
Alan:
The authors explained that:
Alan:
Neither the LUCA nor the advent of Darwinian processes marks an inherent chronological boundary beyond which biology cannot venture. OOL research is actual science.
Which undermines your point. If the “buffers” aren’t permanent, science can eventually move beyond them. Science is already probing beyond the “buffers” you named.
No, they’re generally quite testable.
Remember, the fact that a hypothesis is testable does not mean that passing a test will confirm its truth. You misunderstood that about supernatural hypotheses, and I think you’re doing the same with OOL.
As is SETI research. Both need optimists. As I said, never say never. My point about OoL is that there is no remaining evidence (other than circumstantial such as extrapolating from molecular phylogenetics) that we can examine to enable us to decide between competing OoL hypotheses. That may change in the future and will certainly change if evidence of life elsewhere turns up.
ETA oops premature posting
The speed of light is an insurmountable barrier to ever finding out what is beyond what we can see. If our universe was once a singularity, there is no way of exploring what happened before, if there was a before.
Wondering why you think that I would suggest otherwise. What have I written that implies evidence supporting a hypothesis confirms it as “truth”? I’m not sure what “truth” is in the context of scientific hypotheses.
Wishful thinking, currently.
But I’d accept that one might, in principle, set up an experiment to simulate the conditions postulated in a particular hypothesis. I don’t think that has been done yet, has it? (Miller-Urey was far from demonstrating a natural process that could result in self-sustaining self-replicators).
And were it to be done, we really can’t be sure those conditions were the ones that in fact existed when life first appeared on Earth. Though, an experiment such that the simulation resulted in the outcome of life or at least some kind of self-replicating proto-life would change the game somewhat.
Alan,
There are multiple confusions here, but I'll leave the unpacking for tomorrow. I'm off to bed.
*my emphasis
Prime example of what I’m trying to say. Scheuler is using “why” when he should be using “how”.
You do have a knack of summarizing issues. 🙂
My thinking is still that science as an endeavour has been reasonably successful in answering “how” questions. I don’t think science can tell us why this universe is like it is and why we are here. Philosophers have been very successful at asking “why” questions but less successful at supplying “why” answers. While it is perhaps not the rôle of philosophers to provide answers to “how” questions, philosophy that does not take account of the current state of our growing scientific knowledge is bound to be ignored.
This is especially true of religious apologetics (the nec plus ultra being YEC). Continuing to ignore or deny reality in insisting on particular religious dogmas and explanations – virtuoso believing – doesn’t seem an approach with a future.
I’m with you Alan. I think the folks who have tried to provide “examples” of “why” questions that science has answered have merely used tortured English to rephrase “how” questions. So far I’ve not seen any actual “why” questions actually answered by science. And I’ve never seen philosophy of any kind offer any sort of answer to a “how” question.
Alan,
That’s silly, Alan. Scheuler’s statement is perfectly good English, and his use of ‘why’ is fine.
The distinction between “how” and “why” questions is not a literal one. You can’t simply scan for those two words.
Nor me, though I guess to be fair, it’s not something generally claimed as an ability by philosophers other than theologians
I’m not suggesting it is not. If you want a semantic argument, I’m not interested. But understanding physiology doesn’t answer why a limb moves.
And back up in 6 hours? You didn’t get much sleep! 😉