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.
Really depends on who wins the shooting war, doesn’t it?
Aztecs and Incas don’t have much of a future either.
Still a fair number of people of meso-American descent around though.
keiths:
Alan:
It’s a bit odd to say that you don’t want a semantic argument when you’re making one yourself:
You acknowledge that Scheuler’s sentence is perfectly good English, so on what grounds other than semantics do you reject his use of “why”?
Because knowing how a limb functions, knowing how the nervous system functions, having insight into the neuroscientific and behavioural aspects of the physiology doesn’t answer why anything is. If, like a young child, you keep asking why, you eventually hit a point that science cannot explain further. For life on Earth, there is no explanation for why life exists and for the universe, why that exists.
So you’re making a semantic argument.
As I said, it’s a bit odd to say that you don’t want a semantic argument when you’re making one yourself.
Keith,
Do you see a difference between an explanation of something and a reason for something? An explanation attempts to show how something is or came to be. A reason attempts to say why something is or came to be.
Fair enough, we’re having a semantic argument. Better that than a substantive one, I guess. (That was irony!)
Alan,
It’s a bit odd to make a semantic argument and then complain that we’re having a semantic argument. If you didn’t want a semantic argument, then why did you make one?
May I suggest a tête-à-tête between you and yourself to work this out?
Regarding the semantic argument, I see no reason why Scheuler should have avoided the use of “why”.
“How” questions can be posed using both “how” and “why”. Regarding a certain situation in California, people may soon be asking:
Or:
Those are both “how” questions that can be answered something like this:
From that article, a nice example of how religion can turn brains to mush:
Reciprocating Bill,
Thank you for reminding me about that old remark from Putnam — and also for putting me onto the Stich book. I know of it, but the last time I came across a copy (in a used bookstore) I didn’t have the right background for it. I’ve been trying to retrain myself in philosophy of mind — prior to 2012 most of my work was in “Continental” philosophy.
I’m a strong proponent of Kukla’s more embodied-embedded interpretation of Dennett on stances, not least of which is that it helps dispel the air of paradox that Putnam picks up on. What we can say, rather, is that the emergence of discursive practices allows cognitive agents to take up different embodied stances towards the beings in their physical and social environments, including the folk-psychological stance.
Hence there are indeed real patterns of discursive practices being tracked by the folk-psychological stance without it being the case that the folk-psychological stance is also the correct scientific explanation of thought and agency. What would be needed to square this particular circle is to show that the normativity at work in discursive practices is also a real pattern as described by the natural sciences. Though this is admittedly a tall order, I’m about 1/2 way done with Rouse’s Articulating the World and I think he does a very good job of it. He builds nicely on Sterelny’s Thought in a Hostile World, which I’ll read next.
On “science” and “philosophy” generally . . .
Firstly, there’s no single or simple version of the history of the divergence of science and philosophy. The history of replete with interesting divergences, tensions, convergences, syntheses, and revolutions that continue today and will continue into the foreseeable future.
With that caveat aside . . .
Secondly, even in antiquity it’s not so simple how to parse out what belongs where. Democritus was perhaps the very first Western philosopher to conceive of a wholly atheistic worldview, and it has been suggested that if his predecessor Leucippus had done the same, then we can actually see Socrates and Plato as responding to the threat of atheism and trying to make some room for accommodating some aspect of institutionalized religion for the sake of ethico-political stability. Plato nowhere mentions Democritus, though Aristotle argues against him at length. Epicurus takes up Aristotle’s challenge and tries to integrate some principles of Aristotelian epistemology with Democritean metaphysics. The resulting synthesis is known to us from Lucretius’s masterpiece, On the Order of Things, which in turn had a massive (though also massively indirect) impact on the rise of modern science (see Greenblatt’s The Swerve).
The re-discovery of Aristotle in the 11th century CE was a major upset to the Catholic Church, which up until that time had relied solely on the Neoplatonism introduced into Catholic thought by Augustine. It took the heroic synthesis of Aquinas, building on Maimonides, Gershonides, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Sina, to convince the Church that Aristotelian science was no threat to Catholic doctrine. But that happy synthesis was threatened not long after by the rise of mechanistic, experimental, quantitative science, in part because of the rediscovery of Epicureanism. (By contrast with Aristotelian teleological, descriptive, and qualitative science.)
The big question then was whether mechanistic, experimental, quantitative science also described the very fundamental nature of reality — which would seemingly lead to determinism, atheism, and materialism (no immorality of the soul) — or if there was some way of preserving free will, theism, and dualism while still acknowledging the technological benefits of modern science. With every major scientific advance, there is a corresponding change in the conception of what science is and a corresponding change in the conception of what philosophy is.
Once Spinoza had clearly staked out the first option in all its detail and shown how taking that option would destroy all organized religion and most forms of political organization (except for democracy!), we have the big split between the radical Enlightenment that follows Spinoza (La Mettrie, Diderot, La Rochefocauld, Paine, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, the Frankfurt School, the Vienna Circle, Dewey, Deleuze, Foucault) and the moderate Enlightenment that tries to contain the threat of Spinozism (Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Jefferson, James, Cassirer, Husserl).
It is an interesting fact that what was a respectable but minor philosophical school in antiquity became an existential threat to civilization in modernity because of the entanglement of religious, political, economic, and cultural hierarchies.
At our current stage of the dialectic — bearing in mind that such judgments are almost impossible to make — I’d say that the big question remains that of explicating the philosophical-political vision at the heart of the radical, Spinozistic Enlightenment in a way that avoids the common accusations of nihilism and scientism.
(I think this comment ended at a different point that I imagined when I began, but I also like it as it is.)
Thankyou, and with you.
Keith,
Someone can lie through their teeth or unwittingly make a totally false assumption while still using perfectly good English.
I can see from your posts how you are arguing that “why” can be sustituted for “how”. But I’m not sure why you are arguing about it.
CharlieM,
Of course.
I’m responding to Alan, who is arguing the opposite:
The odd thing is that having introduced that argument, Alan is now complaining that it is semantic and non-substantive.
Go figure.
I suspect you are trying to say that each answer to a “why” question is a “how” answer at a higher level of abstraction.
Why did the leg move? Because the muscles contracted.
Why did the muscles contract? Because they were instructed to by a signal from the brain.
Why did the brain send that signal? Because it wanted the leg in a different place.
Why did it want the leg in a different place? And so on. Eventually you work your way up to some abstract purpose. But why have that purpose? I wonder if there IS any meaningful “ultimate why”.
Yes thats right. Except one hypothesis might not yet be true because it beat others. its day may come yet. no time limit.
in health issues hypothesis still need to come.
Science is all about people figuring things. So there are quality control issues with us.
Creationism sees a quality control issue with evolutionism.
Thats why there is the unique dust up in origin issues relative to other ‘sciences” which have hypothesis.
It’s unlikely that medical science will again confuse the head with the heart, or resurrect the devil theory of disease.
The problem with creationism, in this respect, is that there is no cumulative understanding, no building on established explanations to extend them to new ones. Science has an arbiter all scientists agree on — objective reality — which ultimately resolves all conflicts, disputes, and incompatible hypotheses. Creationism (indeed, religion generally) has no such arbiter, reality is not involved, and so there is no cumulative understanding.
Religion is not about people figuring things and testing them. Religion is about people SAYING things and then insisting on them. Scientists win scientific disputes by producing better evidence and making better predictions with their models. Religions win religious disputes by generating schisms and being followed by a majority — or by excommunicating those who disagree.
Creationism really has no hypotheses. Instead, they substitute creeds, and make their “scientists” agree in advance to follow ONLY that evidence (if any) which leads to foregone conclusions.
The idea that there is a real difference between rational explanations (the giving of reasons, of justifying, for what one says and does) and causal explanations (the mechanisms that brought it what one says and does) is an old and (I think) important distinction. Plato introduces this distinction in his criticism of Anaxagoras in Phaedo, and a few thousand years later, Leibniz returns to it — citing Leibniz — in his criticisms of mechanistic philosophers such as Spinoza. And it also becomes crucial for Kant’s attempt to vindicate freedom and the moral point of view.
But I see no reason to think that the semantic distinction between “how-questions” and “why-questions” is necessary or sufficient to mark the conceptual distinction between causal explanations and rational explanations.
This distinction is also at work in contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, such as McDowell vs Dennett, as well as in recent work by Jennifer Hornsby and Julia Tanney. But, as recent work in philosophy of science tells us, it is crucial not to uncritically accept an overly simplistic picture of “what science tells us”.
McDowell, Hornsby, Tanney, and many others who complain about “such-and-such cannot fit into a scientific picture of the world” — whether such-and-such is intentionality, consciousness, valuing, agency, morality, normativity — all assume a much more simplistic and cruder picture of what “the scientific picture of the world” is than is warranted by our best contemporary philosophy of science.
Unfortunately, I’ve learned, it is extremely rare to find good philosophy of mind informed by good, contemporary philosophy of science. Even philosophers of mind who use cognitive science don’t really attend to how philosophers of science have been constructing a new understanding of how scientific explanations work.
Specifically, philosophers of science over the last few decades have been putting more emphasis on what scientists do over what scientists say, and putting more emphasis on the materiality of messy experimentation over the construction of elegant theory. But this important turn in philosophy of science and science studies has not yet trickled up to what metaphysicians, epistemologists, and philosophers of mind think that “science tells us”.
Flint,
That quote is from Alan, not me.
I’ll reply in more detail later, but what I’m really saying is that “how question” and “why question” are just convenient labels. What really distinguishes “how” questions from “why” questions is not the particular words used, but the intent of the questions.
When you ask a “why” question, you are asking about purpose(s). When you ask a “how” question, you are asking about causes in general.
Purpose can become a how question. It looks like the reductionism and emergence problem.
Well, that’s what bothers me. Theism wants to tell us there is some ultimate purpose to our existence, a reason for the universe, for life on Earth. But the only source I see for those answers is human invention. Maybe there is some ultimate purpose to it all. I don’t think it is within the realm of science to answer and yet scientific discovery undermines the old theistic stories of creation and other religious dogmas.
You write that as if that is not what I have been saying.
I think it’s commonly taken for granted that purposes cause things to happen. Nearly everything we do in life has layers of purposes
I’ve already mentioned Samir Okasha who, I hope, would get your seal of approval in his efforts to bridge the gap between science and philosophy.
I don’t know Okasha’s work specifically but he certainly exemplifies the kind of scientifically informed philosophy that has been gaining prominence within professional philosophy of science over the past twenty-odd years.
Things taken for granted are the worst.
Purposes are caused. We just don’t have any convenient way of figuring out the causes.
What if theism wants to tell you that you get to define your own purpose?
Well, what if?
Next time someone asks me why I did something I am going to explain how I did it, because that’s really all that matters, right?
I’m tempted to remark, it would be a bit of a departure for you. Are you saying there is a distinction between asking how an event happened and why an event happened?
I know you are responding to Alan.
I can see how you would be satisfied if Scheuler had used “how” but I don’t see how you can be satisfied with his use of “why” below.
According to Scheuler the initial cause turns out to be not one cause but various causes. This naturally leads on to a further question: What causes various chemical or electrical changes in the brain to work together to instigate bodily movement? We are driven to look for a unifying cause behind the multiple causes given.
With “why?” we are looking for an initial cause. With “how?” we are asking, “By what mechanism is the effect achieved?”
Alan:
It would be helpful if you would resist the quotemining urge.
Here’s what I said in context:
What I said there is definitely not what you have been saying.
Instead, you have focused on the particular words chosen, criticizing Scheuler for choosing “why” over “how”. You’ve even cited it as a “prime example” of what you are trying to say:
That’s goofy, for reasons I’ve already given. Scheuler’s use of “why” is perfectly fine.
You’ve even gone on to complain that the argument is semantic and not substantive, forgetting that it is your own argument, not mine, that you are complaining about.
CharlieM:
Why wouldn’t I be? His usage matches the following examples, which are perfectly satisfactory:
Q: “Why won’t your car start?”
A: “The battery’s dead.”
or
Q: “Why is there wine all over the floor?”
A: “We had an earthquake, and it knocked the bottle off the shelf. Didn’t you feel it?”
All in favor of resisting the quote-mining urge speak up now!
Keith, your examples are pretty poor comparisons.
In that situation I would not be satisfied with that answer. I would ask further, “Is it because of an internal fault in the battery or is it because of an external fault. I would not want to replace a serviceable battery for no good reason.
This answer is not a good match. A better match would be:
“There were various oscillations and movements in the structure of the building, this caused the shelf to shake and the wine bottle fell of.” That is as far as the Scheuler quote goes.
But we can take it further. What caused the movements? Was it a meteorite, or a bomb, or an earthquake? I am told it was an earthquake.
What caused the various chemical or electrical changes in the person’s brain that resulted in her arms and legs moving? She felt the building shake and decided that a rapid exit was in order.
Of course you’re welcome to believe that the various chemical or electrical changes in her brain were the primal instigators of her movement. Her feeling the tremors and reacting in panic was just an illusion. I would have a hard time believing this to be the case.
There are things stirring in my neurons telling me to say aye.
I don’t see Alan as having quotemined there.
You omitted the full context of Alan’s post. In particular, you omitted the link that he provided back to the source of your statement that he was quoting. You did not provide a link back to Alan’s post.
In any case, the part of your post that Alan did not explicitly quote was implicit in what he has been saying all along.
Can I use this in my quotemine thread?
To what does “this” refer?
petrushka,
Sure, why not? It’s actually a nice, concise example of quotemining. Alan is pretending that he agrees with what I said, whereas if my quote is taken in context, it’s clear that we are disagreeing quite fundamentally.
Whatever it is your post referred to. I don’t really read complaints about moderation. I’m sure moderation isn’t perfect, but it’s better than most sites.
Pandas Thumb has the equivalent of guano.
Would anyone be offended if I don’t care about your squabbles? It’s been so many posts since anyone summarized their position, I have no idea what the disagreement was about.
Seems to me that these distinctions turn on usage.
In ordinary parlance one might say that the reason the mountain eroded into the sea is that wind and water acted upon it. We rightly ask “why did the mountain diminish?” and our response is “Erosion. That’s the reason.” Nothing wrong with that.
However, I am suggesting, for the purposes of this discussion, a narrower use of “reason” and “why.” Here, for the sake of clarity, I would like to reserve “reasons” to denote the sense of rational agents “giving reasons,” justifications that are necessarily intentional (in Brentano’s sense) because they necessarily invoke intentional states (“I believed that,” “I desired that…,” etc.). For the rest, I’ll use “causes.”
So when Keiths says…
…he is deploying “reason” in the broader (and perfectly serviceable) sense that encompasses both agentic justifications and more general causation, here to describe an instance of more general evolutionary causation that does not turn on representation or intentional states. It exemplifies “reasons” that don’t entail intentionality because his use of “reasons” is broader than mine. Deploying my narrower definition of reason, it becomes inappropriate to say there were “reasons” for such ability to have arisen, while appropriate to refer to causes.
But that is all definitional, again for the purpose of making a particular conceptual distinction salient. The key is to be clear in which senses one is using one’s terms.
More anon.
Neil,
Not too surprising. You’re highly motivated not to see it — or not to admit it if you do see it.
I quoted Alan’s entire comment, but he redacted part of mine in order to change its apparent meaning. That is, he quotemined me. Like you, Alan has a hard time admitting mistakes and will sometimes go to surprising lengths to avoid doing so.
No, it’s the opposite of what he’s been saying. It’s simple, Neil, but you need to pay attention.
Here’s the part Alan redacted:
keiths:
And here’s what Alan wrote:
Could our statements be any more different?
His complaint is bogus:
I have no desire to dwell on this, but I do think it’s important to point out quotemining when it happens.
Knock it off, Alan.
CharlieM:
keiths:
CharlieM:
You’re always free to ask more questions.. My point is that both the question and the answer are perfectly sensible.
Your claim is simply incorrect:
That’s not the case, as my example shows.
CharlieM:
What difference does it make? In both cases, the answer provides a causal explanation for the fact that there’s wine all over the floor.
You can always ask more questions. But again, both the question and the answer are perfectly sensible as is.
It isn’t either/or. As a physicalist, I see those as alternate descriptions of the same phenomena.
No, you did not quote the link back to your earlier post (back to the full context that you are complaining about.
You are imputing motives, and without a clear basis that I can see. By doing so, you seem to be presuming that Alan replied in bad faith (which is contrary to the rules).
Good grief, Neil. I quoted the entire comment in which the quotemining took place, and I demonstrated that it was in fact an instance of quotemining.
If you disagree, let’s hear your argument that what I wrote…
…jibes with what Alan wrote:
RB:
Not quite. I’m still distinguishing between reason-based explanations and causal explanations, but I’m placing teleonomic explanations on the reason-based side of the ledger.
I do this because I consider teleonomic explanations to be indispensable when discussing evolution. Try expressing this statement…
…in non-teleonomic language, and you’ll see why.
For me, it’s teleology/teleonomy that reason-based explanations have in common, not intentionality. So the main project is to naturalize teleology/teleonomy, and naturalizing intentionality is just a means to that end in some, but not all, cases.