Lately, the conversations I’ve been having here and with friends on other sites have focused my attention on the question, “what is the role of philosophy in an age of science?” (I have a long-standing interest in this question, as someone who pursued an undergraduate degree in biology and switched to philosophy for graduate study.)
Here are a couple of options that I think deserve to be taken seriously — though I think there are reasons for thinking that some of them are preferable to others — in coming up with this list I was inspired by Ian Barbour‘s models on science and religion —
(1) total separation: science inquires into a posteriori truths, and philosophy inquires into a priori truths, so nothing that science has to say can affect philosophy, or the other way around. (Another version of total separation puts the emphasis on the distinction between the descriptive project of science and the normative project of philosophy — “how ought we to live?” is not, at first blush, a scientific question.)
(2) conflict — philosophy makes claims about the human condition, experience, value, meaning (etc.) that are undermined by the causal explanations provided by science. Under the conflict model, science takes priority over philosophy, or philosophy takes priority over science. For example, phenomenology took the position that a distinctive kind of philosophical inquiry was the foundation of the sciences and made the sciences possible. (Though phenomenology might be better classified under separation than under conflict — it depends on the particular phenomenologist, perhaps.)
(3) dialogue — the sciences benefit from the reflective analysis practiced in philosophy for refining their basic concepts and assumptions, and philosophy benefits from the new empirical discoveries that science discloses. So philosophers can contribute the metaphysics of physics or the epistemology of scientific inquiry, for example.
(4) integration — a fully philosophical science and a scientific philosophy.
I would position myself somewhere between (3) and (4) — I think that the philosophy is most successful when it creates new conceptions that give voice to the problems and opportunities disclosed by new scientific discoveries*, e.g. re-conceiving the concepts of selfhood and autonomy in light of neuroscience, or in re-conceiving the concepts of matter and causation in light of quantum physics.
* though not just new scientific discoveries — new kinds of artistic creations and political relations can and should also prompt the philosopher to create new concepts.
Certainly philosophy has been helpful in clarifying concepts; a historical fact that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. It can be recommended for shaking people out of the stupor of their provincial upbringing if they haven’t already been exposed to a much broader world of ideas.
In the context of sectarian apologetics, however, it becomes worse than Medieval Scholasticism. In the hands of those sectarians attempting to justify sectarian beliefs despite scientific evidence that contradicts sectarian dogma, it appears to have become a vertigo-inducing plunge into infinitely nested labyrinths of word games. It is pseudo-philosophy; and it joins the pseudo history, the pseudoscience, and the pseudo everything else that sectarians use in their desperation to make silly beliefs look “respectable.”
But this sectarian misuse of philosophy does highlight one of the dangers of too much philosophical analysis; namely those labyrinths of arguments over the meanings of the meanings of the meanings of meanings.
As near as I can surmise, philosophy works best in those instances where it maintains intimate contact with the empirical world of direct, accumulated experience; and like most other modes of understanding, becomes irrelevant when done in isolation inside the heads of a few people who talk only among themselves.
I largely agree with Mike Elzinga, but there’s just one paragraph I want to take issue with:
This suggests that the sectarian apologists (to name names: Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and their popularizer William Lane Craig) go wrong by over-reliance on conceptual analysis (or linguistic analysis). Although conceptual analysis is foremost among their tools, it’s also foremost among mine, so that isn’t the heart of the problem.
The heart of the problem, as I see it, is an uncritical reliance upon deeply-rooted assumptions — “intuitions,” as philosophers call them — at the expense of noticing how empirical discoveries subvert those intuitions — and also, importantly, at expense of noticing the diversity of “intuitions” and how remarkably plastic those intuitions are. (Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett are extremely good at showing how plastic and unreliable these ‘intuitions’ turn out to be, once one learns a little neuroscience. Both of them philosophers, I hasten to point out. *ahem*)
As Hallq makes extremely clear, Plantinga simply assumes that the very concept of free will requires a libertarian conception of freedom — he has an “intuition” that this is the case — and all the rest follows from there. Likewise, in his EAAN — as we examined a few weeks ago — everything there turns on an “intuition” about what it is for a belief to be reliable. (Since a sophisticated naturalist would not share that “intuition,” the EAAN utterly fails to show that the naturalist’s own views are self-refuting — a fact that Plantinga stoutly ignores, though it has been pointed out numerous times.)
So the real culprit here isn’t the over-reliance on conceptual analysis per se, but the over-reliance on “intuitions” as unimpeachable starting-points for conceptual analysis. (This isn’t a problem with sectarian apologists only — one sees the same kind of problem in very good secular philosophers, such as Saul Kripke and Thomas Nagel. I have a conjecture as to why this kind of uncritical acceptance of one’s “intuitions” became accepted philosophical methodology in the 1970s, but I’ll spare you the whole narrative — for now.)
Yeah; that pretty much summarizes being out of touch with empirical reality and accumulated experience.
Much of the freshman dorm room “philosophizing” one sees on the Internet seems to employ a notion that “proper reasoning” can get you to “truth” without regard to empirical facts and experience; in other words, to hell with scientific facts and well-substantiated theory.
And when “oppressive facts” intrude, bend and break science to fit one’s intuitions; then use that “science” to validate one’s “philosophy.”
I think this is why many of us in the sciences become impatient with “philosophical discussions” on the Internet; but that impatience is also with some of the pretentious schools of philosophical “thought” that seem more like ideological striving to obtain membership in an exclusive club rather than to achieve any form of disciplined thinking.
By way of contrast, there is a little exercise that one often sees among many working scientists that I don’t believe I have seen among philosophers; and that is the deliberate attempt to take complex ideas and put them in the most basic form possible. Strip away the math and the big words and try to get down to the bare essence of a concept that would be accessible to a layperson or a high school student. I have been in experimental groups that did this during their lunchtime gatherings; it had the effect of making us better at designing and analyzing our experiments and writing research proposals.
There is a frequent tendency among novice scientists to want to display their prowess at mathematics when trying to impress the public; but it doesn’t work. Some of the best presentations of physics to fellow scientists and the public that I have seen came from Victor Weisskopf who rarely used mathematics in his talks in colloquia.
There is often an illusion that is acquired with some of the powerful analyses of scientific concepts that one learns as a graduate student that seduces one into thinking that concepts are best expressed in advanced language; however, it isn’t so. You save the big artillery for getting work done; not for understanding it. In fact, one can’t use the big artillery properly without basic understanding of the concepts on which one wants to employ the big guns.
If Galileo solved the orbital configuration of the planets depends on the philosophy and it is due to Galileo´s work underlying philosophy.
Philosophism.
That conclusion is the result of your philosophy.
Mathematics and science evolved from Greek philosophy, but they are cousins of modern philosophy and of theology, not descendants.
Your shallow thought-free statement makes the term “philosophy” meaningless.
If you don’t have anything thoughtful and non-reactionary to add to this discussion, feel free to lurk silently.
This isn’t quite right. It is true that Galileo was deeply inspired by a Neoplatonic metaphysics — part of his hostility to the Aristotelian metaphysics that formed the intellectual back-bone of Scholasticism — which is why he applied mathematics to physical reality at all.
(Side-note: Aristotelian physics was completely qualitative, and in fact Aristotle explicitly denied that mathematics could be applied to physics at all. In Aristotle’s framework, mathematics only describes objects comprise of pure form, without any matter at all, which is why are eternal, unchanging, and ‘perceived’ only by the intellect — contrast with those things which are temporary, changeable, and perceived by the senses.)
But Galileo’s metaphysics is not what’s important — what is important is that his experiments worked. If they hadn’t, his metaphysics wouldn’t have mattered — he would have just been the Time Cube guy of late 16th/early 17th century Pisa, and would be entirely forgotten today.
The definition when experiments “work” is made as you call ” a priori” so philosophically based.
The criteria of what counts as “working” is a priori, in my distinctively pragmatist conception of the a priori based on C. I. Lewis and W. Sellars. (It bears note that this conception of the a priori is somewhat different from the ‘traditional’ notion of Leibniz and Kant.)
However, the fact that the experiments did work is not a priori — Galileo had to do the actual (and extremely difficult) work of finding out whether his metaphysical physics made sense of empirical reality — he didn’t merely assume that it did.
I trust that the same point can extended for Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, etc.
So if Blas is only saying that scientific theorizing makes use of metaphysical principles, then I have no objection; but if the point is to suggest that there is no difference between science and metaphysics, then I object strenuously.
To repeat my slogan: science is the synergy of metaphysics and technology.
Philosophism. Everything is reduced to philosophy.
Perhaps Blas could ask what philosophical tradition in Galileo’s time supported understanding phenomena through measurement and by instruments.
I am not denying that Galileo and his descendants benefited from philosophy. I am arguing that science and mathematics split off from philosophy (at different times and places) and that there is currently very little horizontal meme transfer between contemporary philosophy and science. I would bet very few working researchers read contemporary philosophy.
But I have been politely asking for counterexamples.
There is some “horizontal meme transfer” (love that phrase!) from neuroscience to philosophy of mind, from physics to philosophy of physics, and from ecology to environmental philosophy. There is definitely much more HMT among the younger philosophers. Philosophy professors I know in their late thirties and younger take the sciences really seriously, and tend to be very disparaging of older philosophers who don’t. (Here is a very recent and especially brutal savaging of a work of purely a priori philosophy of physics by an empirically responsible philosopher of physics.)
However, there is (so far as I know) rather little HMT in the other direction, where scientists read the relevant philosophers and/or engage them in conversation. There are physicists who take Hilary Putnam and David Albert seriously, and neuroscientists who take Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett seriously. And there are even ecologists who take environmental philosophy seriously.
But I would imagine that the majority of scientists don’t read the relevant philosophers, or even know who they are. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is, of course, exactly what we’re talking about. My view is that scientists ought to take seriously philosophy of science, if the philosophy of science is itself empirically grounded, takes the science into account, and so on. (Churchland and Dennett earned the respect of neuroscientists by going into their labs and getting trained in neuroscience; same for Nancy Cartwright and Craig Callendar in philosophy of physics.) We do need more philosophers getting their hands dirty, but we also need scientists to be more receptive to philosophers who want to get their hands dirty.
Expanding on my argument, I see science and contemporary philosophy as different languages or different species having a common ancestor.
I can’t say that science couldn’t benefit from studying philosophy, because I don’t know much (about either, actually).
But following Mike’s post, I think philosophers should be able to make their case in non-technical language. I cannot speak French, but I could follow an argument that there are benefits to being able to speak French.
The broad problem is that philosophers see themselves as working with propositions, while scientists see themselves as working with reality. So they often talk past one another.
I do have a positive impression of Nancy Cartwright, in her work with physicists. I’m not so sure about Churchland and Dennett. I appreciate that they are willing to break from entrenched traditions, but I doubt that they have made a wide enough break.
As a philosopher rather than a scientist, I see myself as working with concepts, but those concepts do, at the end of the day, bear on empirical reality. That’s why I consider myself a philosopher and not a logician.
How are the concepts you work on that bear on empirical reality different from hypotheses?
Because I am interested in testing their consistency with other concepts rather than with testing their adequacy with regard to empirical reality.
Let me be more specific: I’m writing a book about the concept of intentionality. I propose a distinction between two different kinds of intentionality, which I call “discursive intentionality” and “somatic intentionality”. The former is the intentionality of thoughts and language; the latter is the intentionality of bodily activity. My distinction will explain, at a philosophical level, the difference between perception and thought.
But it is not a purely logical matter, because these concepts have content by virtue of their use in talking about the world as we experience it (and ourselves as part of that world). So my work is neither strictly logical nor simply of a piece with empirical science. It is what a naturalistic version of what Kant called “transcendental philosophy,” though in my hands quite separable from Kant’s transcendental idealism.
Does anyone remember when scientists were called natural philosophers?
Yes, I do. William Whewell coined the English word “scientist” in 1833. They were all called “natural philosophers” (sometimes, “men of science” — there weren’t any “women of science” that we’d care to recognize). Indeed, I remember it well. Man, does that take me back. Thanks, Mung!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Paley’s book was called Natural Theology.
I’m still wondering how a philosophical discussion of intentionality would inform an empirical investigation of intentionality, unless the philosopher develops operational definitions.
I would say that it is the business of the scientist (in this case, a cognitive scientist) to develop the operational definitions based on my conceptions of those troublesome concepts. I would be delighted if she found my conceptions to be more easily operationalized than other conceptions, but operationalization is not my foremost concern. My foremost concern is developing better conceptions based on philosophical considerations — in particular, avoiding what Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given” and which Lewis nicely summarizes as “substituting adoration of a mystery for explanation of a fact”.
There is no “Age of Science.” It follows that there are no ‘roles’ for philosophy to play in the non-existent “Age of Science.”
Perhaps your title should have been “The Roles of Philosophy in An Age of Scientism.”
It would have been, if I had a non-pejorative use for the term, “scientism”. But I do not, for the following reason.
As I see it, the right-wing criticism of scientism — the criticism of scientism in the name of “tradition” — is fundamentally reactionary and antithetical to the spirit of the Enlightenment. The left-wing criticism of scientism — the criticism of scientism in the name of social justice or the value of art and literature — wrongly blames science for the evils wrought by capitalism.
As a social democrat, conceived of as radicalizing the spirit of the Enlightenment (or: following Spinoza rather than Locke), I am quite critical of both stances, although the latter is closer to the truth. Hence “scientism” is not a word for which I have a non-pejorative use.
If philosophy ignores some of the blunt realities of the existence of life on this planet and falls into “adorations” of ideological preconceptions (e.g., sectarian religions, political ideologies, economic ideologies, etc.) then philosophy is of no help to anyone except those who embrace ideologies while holding absolute power over others.
One of the lessons of science – especially in regard to evolution and natural selection – is that human existence goes bang up against resource limitations and the harsh realities of selection just like all other living organisms on this planet.
Back in the 1960s through the 1980s, during a heightened consciousness of peak oil and environmental degradation (somehow now forgotten, by the way), Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a strong advocate of connecting economics with physical reality. One of his most concise criticisms of “economic theory” was its shortsightedness. It was, as he said, as though our thinking implied, “Why should we care about posterity; what has posterity ever done for us?”
Science has revealed our universe and our place in it in considerable detail; and it damned well better be considered in any “philosophical” deliberations about how and what we know. Wishing doesn’t make things so; and not listening to reality or trying to “philosophize” reality away is not philosophy but dogmatic denial of reality.
If philosophy doesn’t acknowledge the fact that we humans compete for resources, space, mates, food, and comfortable living conditions – even if that striving and the resulting overpopulation deprives other humans and living organisms of the same needs – then philosophy degenerates into mere word-gaming and rationalizing about who is superior and whose desires trump everything else; who gets things now, and to hell with posterity and any form of rational population control.
Mike Elzinga,
I don’t disagree with anything said there.
I think Mung and Blas are equivocating.They are conflating academic and formal philosophy with common attitudes and opinions. The make such informal approaches to life as “every man for himself” or “devil take the hindmost” into philosophies.
The unexamined philosophy is not worth having.
But that is not the worst thing they do.
They attribute antisocial behavior to scientists without evidence, by arguing that anyone who disagrees with their basis for morality must necessarily behave badly.
Well, at least the DI and UD illustrate the effects of ideological extremism on society. When politically gerrymandered districts in backward states are able to elect such ideologues to the US Congress, these ideologues can jamb up any legislative processes that attempt to deal with reality.
Makes a helluva lotta sense to me!
I thought that is what I have been doing here. Have I not been successful in communicating my ideas?
You have actually helped.
I’m afraid that words like intentionality simply fly past me. I don’t know what they mean, and I don’t have any hooks on which they might fit.
I can cope with intention in the context of law, but I’m pretty sure that anything I might mean by the word would not dance with anything you might mean.
Actually, the legal context is not too far off from what I mean.
Philosophers use the word “intentionality” as a fancy, Latin-derived word to mean “about-ness”. Our thoughts are about things. Aboutness is a bit of a mystery, since on the one hand, it seems to be a relation — my thought about my cats is a relation between my mind and the cats. But ordinarily, relations obtain between things that exist. Yet we can think about things that don’t exist.
The idea of “intentionality” was central to Scholasticism and vanished from philosophy in the 17th century when the focus shifted to talking about “ideas”. Intentionality was revived as a serious concern in the late 19th century when the psychologist Franz Brentano proposed it as the mark of what distinguished psychological from physical phenomena. Since then it has been taken up by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (in the phenomenological tradition, mostly German and French 20th century philosophers) and also by Anglo-American philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists.
My proposal combines insights from Wilfrid Sellars and Merleau-Ponty. I argue that there are two different kinds of intentionality: discursive intentionality and somatic intentionality. The former accounts for the intentionality of thoughts and assertions; the latter accounts for the intentionality of perceptual experience (by which I mean: when I perceive something, there is some content to my perception). The latter kind of intentionality is what we share with animals and infants, and possessing it is a necessary condition for acquiring discursive intentionality.
(From this theoretical perspective, I would argue that the problem with good, old-fashioned A.I. was that it tried to implement discursive intentionality without somatic intentionality. I’m actually quite hopeful about a robotics-approach to A.I.)
Using your definitions, wouldn’t a thermostat have “somatic intentionality” without “discursive intentionality”?
How about a bacterium following chemical gradients?
Is “awareness” necessary? If so, what is “awareness”?
I doubt if your definition tracks mine.
My interpretation of the law probably isn’t what’s in the books, but jury instructions in my state require jurors to apply “common sense.”
My common sense says that if a person (or entity) learns from feedback, it is intentional or has intentionality. Certain insane people would not qualify.
John Wilkins, Erdos number 3
http://evolvingthoughts.net/blog/
Particularly his work on the species concept.
Species: A History of the Idea, University of California Press 2011.
Zachriel,
Someone else (Neil, maybe?) suggested a discussion about the concept of a species. I find the topic deeply interesting, but I’m not qualified to start a discussion about it — philosophy of biology is a niche of its own (pun intended), and not one of mine. I’m better on broader topics in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy.
Someone else want to start it?
My prejudice here is that there is something to the idea of “original intentionality,” in contrast to the “derived intentionality” of thermostats or computers. I have an argument for this but I don’t know how good it is, and I’ll admit that I haven’t completely come to grips with Dennett’s criticism of original intentionality.
I just don’t know what to say about bacteria following chemical gradients. I worry about that a lot. I have pretty firm views about multicellular animals, but once we get down to fungi, plants, and bacteria, words utterly fail me.
I do think that some sort of very minimal consciousness is correlated with somatic intentionality, and I don’t have a theory of consciousness. Wish I did!
I actually started a series of posts on my own blog about this (about the question of whether species are conventional), in response to a post of John Wilkins.
I’m not a biologist either. So those posts of mine really are, if indirectly, about epistemology and philosophy of mind. But skip the history of philosophy, about which I know little.
Who or what is doing the intending? I can’t help but envision an infinite regress of homunculi.
In an earlier note in this thread, you said you have some hope for AI based on robotics, presumably using some type of computer and, I assume, with “original intentionality”.
So it seems like there is tension between this two posts on this thread. What have I missed?
(BTW, as I understand him, Dennett thinks Millikan’s work on mental representation and evolution bears strongly on this issue, so I guess we are back at EAAN!).
I don’t think you’ve missed anything — it could be that my thoughts about this issue are genuinely confused. But let’s see.
I use “original intentionality” in contrast with “derived intentionality” to mean cases of meaningful activity that are not not explained in terms of other cases of intentionality. So, an inscription, sentence, or sign is meaningful, or has intentionality, by virtue of how it is produced and interpreted by members of a language-using community, but we do not refer the discursive community as a whole to some other case of intentionality in order to understand it as such.
Now, the same applies (presumably) to devices such as thermostats or computers. A genuinely sapient robot, by contrast, would be a member of the discursive community. I would agree with Dennett insofar as there is no magic moment when the computer suddenly ceases to be merely derived and becomes originally intentional.
(For the sci-fi fans, however, I cannot recommend highly enough my all-time favorite sci-fi novel, When HARLIE Was One (Release 2.0), by David Gerrold, for an emotionally intense scene in which a programmer has the epiphany that his intelligence-simulating machine is an actual person.)
Now, since I distinguish between discursive and somatic intentionality — both of which are original, neither derived from the other — the locus of the former is the discursive community, and the locus of the latter is the living body of the individual organism. And “original” in my sense does not mean “unexplainable”; on the contrary, original intentionality can be (indeed, must be) naturalistically explained. Explaining intentionality is not my task, however, simply because I am not trained in the cognitive sciences or biology. My task, as a philosopher, is to put the specify the right conceptions of the concepts of discursive and somatic intentionality so that cognitive scientists can have an easier time of it.
Kantian Naturalist,
Thanks. I missed your distinction between “computers” and “genuinely sapient robots”.
By “magic moment”, I understand you to mean that there is a continuum of derived versus original such that it may be difficult to distinguish the two at some points between the ends.
Going back to discursive intentionality, does some similar grey area apply? I understand you to be saying that only language-using beings can have discursive intentionality. But I think at least some animals must have mental representations beyond those involved in perceptions, and would those not constitute a non-somatic intentionality somewhere that similar grey area? It seems that such animals would have original intentionality too. (Possibly the same might apply to computers/robots in the grey area related to the magic moment of original versus derived).
At the heart of my concern is the thought that any naturalistic explanation must allow for overlap between people and other animals beyond perceptual mental content.
BruceS,
For one thing, somatic intentionality is a broad-brushed way of talking about the feedback between perception and action, and that will require mediating cognitive processes — we can call those ‘representations’ if you like. (There’s a lot of debate between representationalism and anti-representationalism in philosophy of cognitive science; I myself don’t have a dog in that fight just yet.)
In other words, somatic intentionality, as I’m conceiving it, is itself cognitive — it’s not just mere phenomenal awareness — and it’s cognitive because it involves mediation between perceptual intake and motor activity.
Now, cognitive is one thing, in the sense of “representational”, and then there’s the further question of whether somatic intentionality involves concepts or if it is satisfied entirely by “non-conceptual content” or “non-conceptual representations”. Here I’m deeply perplexed, because it all depends on what one’s theory of concepts is! But I do feel confident saying this: somatic intentionality is non-conceptual if one’s picture of concepts derives from thinking about language. So here a distinction between the complex concepts of language and the simple concepts of non-linguistic animals could be in order.
Kantian Naturalist,
Thanks for taking the time to help me understand your thoughts. Good luck with your book.
For KN, who is trying to validate (nay, even promote) philosophy among scientists, even ‘skeptical’ scientists such as at TSZ.
At a recent conference, from a philosopher working in cognitive studies, in response to my question about philosophy’s so-called ‘victory’ over science, he responsed saying “scientists hate philosophy.”
Well, then, here’s some good advice about “How to Talk to Philosophers.”
“Carry on, grasshopper.”
HT: M.A.
“One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge.”
– Thomas Nagel
I’ve started reading Teed Rockwell’s “No Gaps, No God?“, which seems like a promising article — not least of which because it pays very close attention to the difference between scientific questions and metaphysical questions, a concern close to my heart. (It might only be available behind an institutional pay-wall, but I’m not sure.)
Abstract: Darwinian atheists ridicule the “God of the Gaps” argument, claiming that it is theology and/or metaphysics masquerading as science.This is true as far as it goes, but Darwinian atheism relies on an argument which is equally metaphysical, which I call the “No Gaps,No God” argument. This atheist argument is metaphysical because it relies on a kind of conceptual necessity, rather than scientific observations or experiments. “No Gaps No God” is a much better metaphysical argument than “God of the Gaps,” because the latter is based on a clearly false conditional inference. However, there are also good, but not decisive, arguments against the “No Gaps No God” argument. Because metaphysical arguments never resolve as decisively as scientific research questions, there will probably always be a legitimate controversy at the metaphysical level on this topic, even though there is no serious controversy about Darwinian science itself. If this fact were more widely acknowledged, it could help to defuse the controversy over teaching Darwin in the public schools
I am not sure from the abstract just what the author thinks is the real issue regarding ID/creationism in the classroom.
As far back as we can trace the ID/creationist socio/political movement, we have seen their systematic distortions of basic scientific concepts in which concepts are bent and broken to comport with sectarian dogma.
From the laws of thermodynamics, to the behaviors of atoms and molecules, to the basic concepts of variation and natural selection in biology, ID/creationists have been mangling these concepts and expecting that everyone else will debate these ideas on their turf.
Today’s ID/creationism is a reification of all those bent and broken concepts since the formal founding of the ICR in 1970. They so thoroughly saturate the movement that its followers apparently genuinely believe that it is they who have the superior insights into science.
As far as I know, there are no laws against teaching junk science; but it would not only be bad pedagogy to conflate correct science with pseudoscience, it would be professionally irresponsible for any teacher to leave students to sort out the junk from the real stuff when many of these students will require a solid understanding of the fundamentals as they head off to college.
The US Constitution and the law forbid excessive entanglements with sectarian religion in the institutions of government, including publicly funded public schools. Those institutions are there to serve all people without projecting sectarian dogma.
This issue of professional responsibility to get the most accurate science that we have into public education is apparently in the hands of the professionals who actually carry out and vet our current scientific understanding; and they do this through professional organizations and by advising curriculum committees in various states and school districts.
It is not a matter of “democracy” to allow any and all crackpot science gussied up as “metaphysics” into the classroom; it is a matter of being professionally responsible to future generations, who will depend on what we teach them now, to keep the junk out.