Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
So you choose to be a tool.
Fine, not like I didn’t know that already.
But suit yourself. You always do.
Philosophers as professional academics had little or nothing to do with it.
Newton as a philosopher wasted immeasurable time and effort on alchemy and mysticism. When he allowed empirical evidence to drive his thinking, he prospered.
Science is not thinking about the way things have to be. It’s recursively imagining what kind of regularity fits the data, and testing the fit.
Would you care to outline it better? I’d really be interested to see how you can coherently deny the connection.
The problem is that you said something utterly illogical. You said, “…like history, political theory, literature, etc. philology is a disciplined, rigorous and methodological inquiry but not a scientific one.” This is the same as, “It has all those characteristics of science, but it’s not a science.” And that was it.
I must ask you again to identify the characteristic that distinguishes philology from (proper) science. Until then, your statement falls on itself.
What’s worse, this statement confirms the specifically Anglo-American reductive definition of science: physics/biology is science, humanities are not.
Let’s see. Are you claiming that physicists don’t need language? Or, reading closer, are you claiming that physicists don’t need formally trained and disciplined use of language (educated grammar, vocabulary, concept/terminology formation, notation systems, etc.)? To me you are self-evidently wrong on both accounts. Physicists likely don’t need to know linguistics, I’ll grant you this much, but there are a bunch of schools to go through and things about language to study (which has been digested into teachable form by linguists!) before one becomes a physicist. There are preconditions upon preconditions to any science and this is best acknowledged, not ignored.
Try to be more consistent then. Either veil your anti-humanities stance better or, if you don’t have that stance, be more straightforward about what you really are. As for all others, I have not seen a non-reductionist yet. Let them come out.
P.S. “Realist about teleology with regard to organisms” looks like a highly suspect phrase. I’ll let it be because I don’t see what it could possibly mean.
Oh I don’t think that’s true. Philosophy had a good deal to do with Newton’s thinking, with a good deal of interest in Cartesian ideas. Is it a coincidence that Newton’s absolute space is basically Cartesian space?
Gee, I thought alchemy was a rather empirical endeavor, although there certainly was a lot of mysticism woven into it. Newton as a philosopher paid heed to rules of “right reasoning.” From the Principia
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/newton-principia-rules-reasoning.pdf
Science is, however, thinking about how we see, envision, and think about the data. You really need a good handle on that in order to deal well with the facts.
On the other hand, Erik certainly seems to go way too far. Philosophy really had its problems with Newton and his science, as Hume noted, with Kant working out reasonably well what to do about it (problem of induction, etc.). Philosophy certainly laid the groundwork for logic and reasoning with observations, but natural philosophers like Newton were certainly beginning to show that we just have to find out how the world works, there’s no way we can simply reason our way to how it must/does work.
Glen Davidson
Newton’s use of, and impact upon, philosophy
Probably more than anyone could want.
Glen Davidson
That’s a nice challenge! I think it can be met — there are plenty of positive references in his work to Kant, Schopenhauer, and others — but I’m not strongly committed to derailing this thread even further with a discussion of Nietzsche. If there’s enough interest in Nietzsche we can start another thread, or let it go. We have plenty to talk about as it is.
I’m glad to see that I haven’t misread you!
I made the argument in a less concise, more verbose fashion because I think it’s important to see where it goes wrong.
As I see it, the argument is an attempt to refute skepticism about empirical knowledge. The skeptic about empirical knowledge points out that empirical knowledge cannot be self-justifying without vicious circularity. To refute the skeptic, the rationalist argues that empirical knowledge can be justified on the basis of reason alone, or a priori knowledge.
To this, however, the skeptic insists that there is vicious circularity at the level of reason alone. For how, she asks, do we know that reason is reliable? If the rationalist tries to show that reason alone shows that reason is reliable, this is just as circular as the empiricist’s attempt to show that the senses are reliable on the basis of empirical knowledge. Conversely, if the rationalist were to contend that reason does not need vindication, then it is unclear why the senses do.
(For the full-dress version of the argument that reason cannot be self-justifying, see Hume, “Of skepticism with regard to reason” in A Treatise of Human Nature, Part 4, section 1. Hume is drawing on Pyrrhonian arguments that can be found in Sextus Empiricus and in Montaigne.)
As is fairly well-known, Descartes’s own attempt to vindicate reason rely on several circular arguments — the most infamous of which is this: I can know that my reason is reliable because I know that God created my mind and is not a deceiver, but the conclusion that God created my mind and is not a deceiver is only correct if one is able to understand the argument, which in turn presupposes that my reason is reliable.
The skeptic will point out that this appeal to reason to vindicate reason is just as viciously circular as the appeal to the senses to vindicate the senses. If the rationalist accepts the skeptical argument against empiricism, then she is hoisted by her own petard.
There are a variety of responses to this problem in the tradition of modern Western philosophy. One might say that skepticism is irrefutable, but fortunately human nature and custom are more powerful than reason (Hume). Or one might aim to refute skepticism by changing the conversation, so that the possibility of empirical knowledge is grounded in the a priori structure of the mind — at the cost of being unable to know anything about things in themselves (Kant). Contemporary analytic metaphysicians assume that reason can know things in themselves and do not trouble themselves with vindicating reason at all; skepticism is simply ignored rather than refuted.
Or, one could — and this is of course where my own allegiances lie — grant to the skeptic that skepticism cannot be refuted once the assumptions have been accepted, and acknowledge to the skeptic that skepticism is correct in maintaining that both rationalism and empiricism fail. But, having done so, proceed to show that the skeptic’s conception of our epistemic situation relies on faulty assumptions.
The key problem is that skepticism begins by ignoring the interplay between mutual criticism and self-criticism actually at work in our epistemic practices. The skeptic adopts a detached, disengaged attitude towards those practices, and tries to look at them from a distance — and once one does that, one has climbed up a ladder from which there is no way back down. The alternative to skepticism is to not climb up the ladder in the first place, but to reflect carefully on the dynamics of epistemic practices — to make explicit their implicit features — while remaining fully engaged with those practices as they are used in meaningful human action and interaction.
In other words, the alternative to skepticism is neither rationalism nor empiricism but — what else? — pragmatism. And that is the ultimate rationale for adopting pragmatism: because only pragmatism offers a conception of human knowledge that does not open the door to skepticism, which cannot be refuted on either rationalist or empiricist grounds.
And that is why I am a pragmatist.
Depends what you mean by “reduction.” You haven’t specified (hint: scorn is not the same thing as specification).
Absolute space turned out to be a less than adequate model, although productive for a long time. It is an example of imagining a model that fits the data (and later looking for a better model that fits new data). I can’t think of any objection to geometric philosophy or other mathematical philosophy. but I think philosophy without iterative empirical feedback is unproductive. What makes science more productive is modelling, feedback, iteration. If that’s philosophical, so be it, but as far as I can tell, it’s a subset of philosophy.
Alchemy stumbled upon chemical knowledge, but was base on a poor and ultimately unproductive model.
Nice post.
Previously I’d put this point this way:
To which Erik responded:
I think that Peirce was right about this: the justification for empirical knowledge comes from reflection on the history of methods of attaining reliable habits of action, because empirical knowledge relies on a forced confrontation between our conceptual frameworks and real causal powers. (What Peirce called “the Outward Clash”). We know that about science because it is by using what we do know about those powers (in the equipment that we design and build) that we can discover further powers that were previously unknown to us (in experiments and observations).
This is, of course, a philosophical defense of science — and one that comes from a philosopher who was also a trained scientist (Peirce) and whose reflections on scientific methodology were informed by the general discourse on scientific methodology going on in 19th-century intellectual circles. (For example, Peirce was a careful student of Whewell.)
But it is not what Erik claims we need: a vindication of science by philosophy that has the form of conclusion to premise. And therefore it is not a vindication that has the structure of logical priority.
The problem with philosophy in science is there is no logical or rational road to model building. Logic is applied after the fact, during testing and verification.
I’m honestly not interested in Nietzsche (after all, I don’t even think of him as a philosopher). Only interested in the specific challenge.
This was not my reasoning at all. First, it was not in response to a skeptic about empirical knowledge, but in response to the thesis that science must be physicalist. Second, instead of ruling out any sort of knowledge, my aim would be to put it into relative perspective.
Reason puts senses into perspective. That’s all there is to it. Reason controls the senses, and should. Just see what you’ll get when you try to argue for the opposite.
There are higher functions than reason, but our discussion will never get that far.
I’m trying to digest my shock that anything I’ve said here could possibly be interpreted as “anti-humanities”. What I’ve said is that the humanities aren’t sciences. I’m at an utter loss as to how could be interpreted as opposition to the humanities.
In any event, my considered position is that the humanities involve a hermeneutic circle, or self-reflexivity. One puts oneself to the question in the questions that one puts to narratives of historical events, or to works of literature, or to systems of thought and faith. The humanist is implicated in her relation with the objects of inquiry.
The task of the humanities is to help us be more thoughtful, reflective, less self-enclosed within our own prejudices, more critical and self-aware, less prone to manipulation by the prevailing ideologies of the day. That’s precisely why I teach the humanities and place such high value on them.
But the humanities don’t do what the sciences do: disclose the underlying dynamics of real causal powers. I’m a pluralist about the methodologies for doing so — developmental psychology, sociology, neuroscience, cosmology, molecular biology, ecology, solid-state physics, fluid mechanics, population genetics, etc. all have their own ways of doing this. There’s no one-size-fits-all method, and there’s no way of translating the “regional ontology” of one science into that of another, let alone into that of fundamental physics.
(I’m using “fundamental physics” here in the Ladyman and Ross sense — fundamental physics is that inquiry in which a measurement taken anywhere in space and time can confirm or disconfirm an empirical hypothesis. They think that only quantum mechanics, general relativity, and possibly thermodynamics — plus their successor theories in the future — can count.)
In other words, the humanities and the sciences are just different — they aim at different things, and they are valuable for different reasons. Neither is superior or inferior to the other. They are different and complementary.
I hope that lays to rest any suggestions that I hold an “anti-humanities stance”.
Well, if that wasn’t your reasoning, then why did you endorse the less concise version of the argument when I repeated it earlier today? Did I just waste the hour it took to explain my position and why I hold it?
I hope the rest of you appreciate the time and effort I put into a condensed history of Western epistemology from Sextus Empiricus to Peirce!
(grumble, grumble)
What is “the opposite” — that the senses can and should control reason?
Why should anyone think that there are only those who options — that one must control the other?
What about the Kantian option, that knowledge involves the harmonious interplay of senses and reason, or that in knowledge, senses and reason are related as matter and form? Does form “control” matter? Or does matter “control” form? Or is “control” simply not the right metaphor? Does one partner in a dance “control” the other?
Actually, logic (among other things) verifies the model. When your conclusion denies e.g. the law of excluded middle (“this model is true and not true at the same time”), then you know you got crap, not a model.
Models can be verified all you want by logic, but a logically leaky model that leads to productive research beats an airtight model that is unproductive.
The obvious example is Darwin’s original formulation of evolution, which is quite flakey, but has been tremendously productive. Self consistency is desirable in science, but not as desirable as heuristics.
Find someone who implied that it did.
I don’t make the lame mistakes you do.
Of course not, it was assumed and “known.” What you get are statements that relate to a cosmology that accommodates the “knowledge” of the flat earth.
Did I write of a virtual proof-text? No, that’s your thinking, and it’s not good thinking. I said that they sensibly tell of a flat earth. However, this is one that apparently (along with other positive and negative evidence) assumes a flat earth:
You get it more from lines like 240-242:
Anyway, the point isn’t Theogony as such, but the general view, which is seen better in stories of Phaethon and glimpses in Homer.
Whatever. You haven’t in the slightest demonstrated any early idea of a (roughly or otherwise) spherical earth. Your Wikipedia quote didn’t support it, and apparently it was supposed to be a sufficient source. Oh, until I quoted Wikipedia to show that the Mesopotamian view was of a flat earth, when suddenly it didn’t count.
The fact is that Homer is rather better at showing a (roughly at least) flat earth early. Iliad 7.421-423:
There you’ve got the sun rising out of the ocean, which is what encircles the flat earth in these models. There are a number of similar statements in Odyssey.
The typical ancient view was that the sun had to go under the earth to rise again in the east. Which view is attested in Odyssey, 10.190-192:
And I’m sure that someone could very well spin that to fit their presuppositions, but to those who just want to know, of course it’s really bespeaking the sun’s return beneath the earth to the east to come up yet again. We have geocentric cosmologies from the likes of Aristotle, we most certainly don’t (let alone heliocentric models) from Homer, the Babylonians, Egyptians, or the Hebrews.
Glen Davidson
We are both guilty of haste here.
Yes, because this is the distinction of rationalism and empiricism in the sharpened sense.
On my reading, Kant was a purebred rationalist. Senses have their purpose, and the purpose is realized by reason when it puts the senses under control and in perspective. That’s the harmony. And as said, reason and senses are not the only faculties.
But I know your real third option is pragmatism. I will write about it when I can do it concisely.
GlenDavidson,
Your point about Newton is well-taken — and I would certainly want to emphasize that Descartes too was not just a philosopher, but also made crucial contributions to optics, mathematics, and mechanical physics.
However, Petrushka made a carefully specified claim about philosophers as professional academics.
Philosophy as an academic discipline is fairly recent innovation that comes out of mid-19th century German Neo-Kantianism. The first Ph.D. in philosophy in the United States was awarded in 1878 to Josiah Royce at the John Hopkins University. John Hopkins was founded in 1876 as a cutting-edge research university in deliberate emulation of the German (actually Bismarckian) model.
It’s actually a quite nice question what philosophy as professionalized academic discipline has contributed to science.
I think that in recent years there have been fruitful collaborations between philosophers and cognitive scientists, psychologists, sociologists, biologists, and economists. I’m not sure about physics but I would imagine there is. I also know that logicians and computer scientists frequently collaborate.
Yeah, not really. He used those words, then went straight to writing about Newton as a philosopher, supposedly in his role as an alchemist (not at all clear why there and not in Principia, where we actually see him being philosophical not uncommonly). By any reasonable standard, Newton the failed alchemist was his example of how professional academic philosophy failed. I was just using the term as he apparently was.
I thought Plato was somewhat prior to that.
Maybe, but what you’re discussing really wasn’t the issue by any reasonable reading of Petrushka’s comment.
Quantum discovery seemed to be heavily influenced by philosophy. I think the neo-Kantian and Romantic views common in Germany assisted in quantum discovery by allowing most anything (Planck didn’t believe his model, but who cares under neo-Kantianism?) as a possibility, but also led to the Copenhagen interpretation, which unnecessarily and misleadingly included the human mind in the collapse of wave function. A bit of a mixed bag, but I think the freedom to consider the seemingly unlikely and mutually-contrary results of quantum physics probably was more boon than the bane caused by philosphic baggage in interpretation.
Glen Davidson
Ah, so you talk but mean nothing. I will keep this in mind in the future.
And this supports the flat earth model how? If the earth is a flat disk standing on turtles all the way down, or is surrounded by ocean (as Theogony is often read), then how does the sun get under the earth to the other side?
I understand. You are not implying anything about flat earth.
By all means, stick with your blinkered views of others, and ignore what I actually did say. Clearly I’m not dumb enough to say that “round” means “flat,” but you pretended that round meant spherical, and you incorrectly ascribed something equally stupid to me for no sound reason or good purpose.
More made-up BS.
Try to support your claims with more than your misunderstandings of Wikipedia for once, instead of incorrectly ascribing positions as lame as yours to myself.
Wow, you’re 0 for 3.
Glen Davidson
Wait. Are you saying that science and philosophy have the relationship where philosophy is the conclusion and science the premise?
I have to be blunt about this one. There are continents where you cannot say “humanities aren’t sciences” without consequences. And it’s uneducated to be perplexed about this. It’s like saying in England, “All I did was drive on the right-hand side of the road.”
Naw, it’s just Erik practicing his mini-Gregory “skill” of putting lies in other people’s mouths,
No one else here chose to mis-interpret what you say about the humanities.
You know, you’re under no obligation to respond to Erik at all when he pulls that crap on you.
Ha ha aha aha aha.
“Consequences.”
Oh boy, oh boy.
No . . . I’m saying that the relationship between science and philosophy is not a logical relationship at all, in the sense that neither is premise nor conclusion to the other.
I was making, I thought, a philosophical point about the methodological differences between the humanities and the sciences. Now I need to take into consideration the political, historical, economic, and cultural conditions of academic and extra-academic intellectual life on every continent where the humanities and the sciences are practiced? That seems to be raising the bar a bit high, no?
In any event, I’ve gathered that you don’t live in the United States — am I wrong about that? Since I do, it’s pretty clear that you’re operating with different background assumptions and current concerns than I am.
Please don’t keep me guessing here — you have something specific in mind when you say that “there are continents where you cannot say “humanities aren’t sciences” without consequences”. Please, just tell us what you mean by this. I can’t read your mind and I’ve never been worked as an academic outside of the US. I’m sure there’s a lot about academia outside the US that I simply don’t know.
If I’m uneducated — and no doubt I am — then please either educate me yourself or tell me what to read so I can educate myself.
Duty calls!
Erik,
Excellent advice, Erik.
Given your newfound respect for directness, I’m sure you’re eager to straightforwardly answer this question:
Now, the Bible does say that only eight people survived the flood. Do you believe that to be true in reality? Note that I am not asking about what the text says — that’s very clear. Do you contend, as part of your claim that the flood was an historical event, that in reality those eight people were at one point in time the only living humans on the planet?
A straightforward yes or no will suffice.
Maybe count me among the uneducated. I sincerely didn’t know that (some) disciplines taught in universities were not considered sciences in America. Everywhere else in the world where I have been, it’s simple: When it’s taught in universities, then it’s a science. Therefore humanities are sciences.
And this is pretty much the last thing I have to say today. No need to read further.
I think the gist of your explanatory/apologetic post is this, “But the humanities don’t do what the sciences do: disclose the underlying dynamics of real causal powers. I’m a pluralist about the methodologies for doing so — developmental psychology, sociology, neuroscience, cosmology, molecular biology, ecology, solid-state physics, fluid mechanics, population genetics, etc. all have their own ways of doing this. There’s no one-size-fits-all method…”
Let’s deconstruct it a bit:
1. Humanities don’t do what sciences do, namely disclose the underlying dynamics of real causal powers.
2. List of methodologies that disclose the underlying dynamics of real causal powers: developmental psychology, sociology, neuroscience, cosmology, molecular biology, ecology, solid-state physics, fluid mechanics, population genetics, etc.
3. There’s no one-size-fits-all method.
Now, do you or do you not notice any disciplines of humanities in #2? If yes, then humanities actually do the same thing that sciences do. There’s no difference. And if your #3 is supposed to be a conclusion of some sort, then it confirms what I just said. In other words, a mess with nothing to support the distinction between humanities and sciences.
Okay. To be honest, your argument has no discernible structure. And that’s about your argument, not just about the non-relationship that science and philosophy have according to you, even though that’s messy too.
Science envy. Humpty Dumptyism.
If I call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
There has been a lot of discussion on these points, but I would like to add one point I did not see.
I think the people who started science as we know it would be difficult to classify using modern ideas of what philosophy is and what science is. So I don’t have a problem with calling thinking which started science “philosophical.”
My point is that science as practiced today includes meta-practices for deciding how to apply its methods to particular issues and for refining and adding to those methods. So it no longer relies on philosophy when applying and improving its methods.
I include definition of domain as part of what scientists do now. Domains change or overlap. We see that in psychology and neurosciences for example. Those scientists work together to address the overlap, often building theories that incorporate ideas from both sciences. All that work is scientific, not philosophical.
Ah, ok! Then we just had a disagreement due to linguistic/cultural misunderstanding.
Firstly, these are three closely related points, not discrete steps in a single argument.
Secondly, and this may be surprising — no, I don’t think that the disciplines I mentioned in #2 are humanities. (If I’d thought that, I wouldn’t have mentioned them!)
I think that this is one of those issues where my American bias is quite evident, and I’m willing to be honest about it: I don’t think that psychology and sociology are humanities. At least they aren’t as currently practiced in the US.
In the US, psychology was deeply influenced by verificationism — that’s what led to the rise of behaviorism, after all. Even though behaviorism has been rejected as a paradigm of psychological explanation, American psychology is still completely verificationist. (That’s also why psychoanalysis is not taken very seriously here among researchers, though there are still clinicians who use it.)
Likewise, sociology in the US has been deeply influenced by verificationism and positivism. In the US, dialectical or hermeneutical approaches to sociology — say, for example, Adorno or Habermas — can be found in philosophy, political theory, or even literature departments, but almost never in sociology departments.
(The astute reader will note that I have not mentioned economics. So what? I haven’t mentioned astrology either!)
So that’s my distinction: between disciplines that involve a hermeneutic dimension (e.g. literature, philosophy, history, fine arts, i.e. “the humanities”) and disciplines that build models of causal powers (e.g. psychology, sociology, biology, physics, i.e. “the sciences”).
Now, there’s this third category that we also talk about here — “the social sciences” — as distinct from “the natural sciences”. We often find the social sciences distinguishes from both the natural sciences and from the humanities. I am actually not too sure if this tripartite distinction between the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences can be defended in terms of our best philosophy of science.
I haven’t given it in terms of numbered propositions, but I did give some reasons for thinking that the relationship between the sciences and philosophy doesn’t fit into the structure of logical argument. This is not about me being a sloppy philosopher, though perhaps I am that as well — this is about my having reasons, already stated, for why the relationship between science and philosophy is far more complicated and messy than rationalism allows for.
When you say things like that, I take it as implying philosophy should be part of science. Is that what mean?
Some philosophers study scientists and science. Some do so to try to create philosophical theories about science and what scientists do. Some to criticize what philosophers see as conceptual confusions in a science. Sometimes to draw attention to new scientific concepts and their impact to philosophical issues.
But that’s not doing science, of course.
Perhaps some of that philosophical work has helped scientists somehow. But very little, I would suspect. And of course whether it has or not has nothing to do with the value of philosophy.
I have no doubt that scientists philosophize and no doubt that some ideas originated by philosophers have worked their way into science. Particularly ideas that could be called mathematical.
I suppose there are things in philosophy that could be called infrastructure, that make possible getting from one place to another. Infrastructure — like roads — are not usually considered causes when discussing how one arrives at a place. The are causally invisible.
But a huge part of science involves inventing instruments. Telescopes, microscopes, cameras, cloud chambers, particle accelerators, and so forth. And another huge part is inventing mathematical tools for modelling.
I don’t think most scientists worry much about what they come up with is true. They mostly worry about whether their conclusions are correct and replicable.
Anthropology (in the US) seems to be dividing between those who want the label “science” and those who do not, and the people who do not want that label appear to do the type of work you are referring to as being in the humanities.
So could the same divide not apply to work in other disciplines you call “humanities”? Some practitioners doing science and some humanities?
That question is one reason why I think science is in the method, not the name of the discipline.
Don Ross thinks economics and sociology are converging. So where would that leave the combined discipline? Inquiring readers want to know. Even if the question is not that astute!
But inasmuch as they are making use of the techniques of philosophy, they are still relying on philosophy. Otherwise you could argue that you don’t consume sugar because you put sugar in your tea, and in tea it’s tea now, not sugar anymore.
Thanks. Finally you identified the characteristic by which you distinguish sciences and humanities.
A few notes on this. The two characteristics (involves a hermeneutic dimension versus models causal powers) are not on a par. The latter is more about what is being studied, the former about, well, about being involved in a dimension. So the distinction is unmethodical. Isn’t it conceivable that there’s a science that models causal powers while being involved in a hermeneutic dimension too? The word salad that you pour over sociology, psychology, verificationism, etc. seems to make them all very much involved in a hermeneutic dimension. Apart from that, your justifications in this area are strictly provincial, revolving around how Americans conduct these matters, disregarding how to conduct these matters scientifically or methodically or sensibly. As if Americans were above this.
Moreover, when you distinguish this way, the commonly used “scientific method” rationale goes out of the window. Method is about how the study is conducted, not about what is being studied, whereas you make it about what is being studied. Essentially, you are saying that if one’s desire is to be a scientist, the study must focus on the thing called “causal powers” while avoiding studying other things. (Which opens you to the charge of reductionism again, but enough of that in this thread.)
Anyway, I’d say that all sciences involve a hermeneutic dimension inasmuch as they interpret and analyze data. Let’s see you argue that this has nothing to do with hermeneutics.
Finally, your notion of “causal powers” is suspect all by itself. It requires philosophical analysis to make sense of it, thus making philosophy a prerequisite to science, but you don’t want philosophy and science to have this relationship, so…
The points following this in your post are all interesting and valuable.
But they are different from answering a question about the maximum life span of ancient people as reported in biblical text, assuming the question is to be interpreted and answered as modern demographers would do so.
Is it fair to say you don’t care to even ask such questions under that interpretation of how to answer them? Or if that is not fair, and you do care to ask questions in that way, then what do you think such demographers would find?
I’m happy to acknowledge that physicists need to understand their discipline’s “language”, as long as we understand that for physicists the languages are not natural, but mainly mathematics and diagrams. (Physicists must understand how to write scientific papers in natural language, but overall that is a trivial skill to pick up compared to the mathematics and how to apply it.)
It is physicists who determine how to use those languages in physics.
So I think it must be acknowledged that physicists determine what “languages” to use and how to use them in their discipline. No one else.
Further, since they continually revisit and update these decisions as part of doing physics, I don’t think it is appropriate to call them “preconditions”.
Once upon a time I was taught the Bible the way we are discussing it here. I call it science fiction/fantasy manner of interpretation now. Meanwhile I understood how spirituality is a distinct disciplined approach required for the understanding of scripture. Just like in order to appreciate poetry you have to be attuned to it, to be able to read musical or mathematical notation you must be trained for it, there’s a spiritual approach that opens up the understanding of scripture. Nobody here acknowledges this and this is what makes it difficult.
Anyway, feel free to discuss the ages of the antedeluvian people. It’s a possible topic. The link between ice age and flood stories is real too, even though this is merely on the historical reading. It would be nice if someone acknowledged the fact that the Bible has archeological evidence on its side and the Book of Mormon doesn’t, so they are different at least in this sense, even though it’s in the lame science fiction/fantasy sense. On this level only stalemate is possible.
Well, they are languages, not physics. Just like musical notation is a notation, not music. And inasmuch as they are required to practise physics and music, yes, they are preconditions or prerequisites or at least requirements. You fulfil the requirements first, then you become the scientist of the relevant field.
OMagain said:
Omagain, I gave you an example which I chose because of the seemingly contradictory nature of two different descriptions which both lie within what I assume you (and others here) consider to be the best arbiter of what we call reality. Some here may consider science to be the only arbiter of reality; if your arbiter of reality is itself capable of seemingly contradictory, non-reconciled useful descriptions, it makes my case.
If I were to give you an example from outside of the realm of science, such as moral knowledge/models or individual experience/models and their usefulness, and you only care about that which is scientifically describable, what would that mean to you? Where would the discussion go from there? Would you require that the non-scientific description, which conflicts with the scientific description, be verified scientifically before you consider it a valid example of conflicting descriptions having useful value?
This is why I gave you the example I did.
As far as non-scientific descriptions useful descriptions, one would be that prayer works. It may not be reconcilable with scientific research set up to determine if prayer has a significant statistical effect, but that doesn’t necessarily mean prayer doesn’t work – it just means that if prayer does work, it works in a way that is not scientifically verifiable (meaning, it’s not statistically verifiable under those kinds of experiments).
Like with the particle/wave experiment, much of personal experience may not be scientifically reconcilable with what is universally demonstrable in a statistically significant sense. What is true and real for the particle may not be true or real for the wave. Prayer has been immensely useful to billions of people. It has been immensely useful to me. But if such descriptions of the power of prayer conflict with scientific descriptions, where does that leave us?
Why should I bow to the scientific conclusion that prayer is ineffective, when my continued personal experience says exactly the opposite? Why should I adopt scientism as my philosophical worldview, when my ongoing personal experience appears to contradict at least some of what it claims?
Of course I’m not claiming science is useless – it’s very useful. But using science successfully is not the same thing as adopting scientism as a worldview and a constraint upon what one considers real. Just because I use what science offers doesn’t mean I must use only scientific models in my life. For me, science is nothing more than a useful tool to be used for the benefit of my life; it is not the sole arbiter of reality and a structure I must conform my thinking or practices around.
I agree that history as reported in the bible contains more archaelogical truth than history as reported in Mormon texts.
I do find it interesting to understand where and why biblical text differs from archaeological views. For example, I believe many archaeologists now believe that the wars in Canaan described in the bible as the external invasion of the freed Israelites were in fact mainly Canaanite civil wars.
Why would the authors of the bible choose to describe them differently? What were their goals and why were their goals different from simply providing a CNN-style account of a civil war? These are interesting questions.
I don’t have a problem with this understanding of preconditions and science. They key for me is recognizing that the preconditions are developed and enforced by scientists in the relevant community.
Ask a simple question, get a load of evasive bullshit back.
This isn’t complicated, Erik. When somebody asks whether YOU THINK there was any flood in the history of the earth that resulted in all but eight human beings being killed, they are looking for a Yes or No answer based on what you believe to be (literally) the case, using our modern concepts (and no metaphors). Same thing for questions involving the lifespan range of human beings in, say 2000 BCE. You can run but you can’t hide.
IF you don’t know, you can simply say “I don’t know.” Or, you could say, “You know, I DO think there was a flood with that result, though I don’t have great evidence for it.” Etc. But just so this is perfectly clear to you, your dancing around with talk about sprirituality being “a distinct approach” isn’t fooling anyone. A couple of posters are extremely nice about this practice of yours, but I’m guessing it’s pretty clear to them what you’re doing, too.
FWIW, I believe the same thing – that Hebrews were properly (self-)defined in Canaan wars, not before. The Exodus happened more likely in the form of a pilgriming sect, not ethnic migration like around the fall of the Roman Empire. The sect converted (or managed to occupy the position of) a Canaan chief/king and it evolved from there.
Why no CNN-style account? That was not the style back then. Texts were produced for long-term consumption, whereas everything on CNN today is disposable tomorrow. Ancient stories never contain just the history. History is like news, disposable.
Before Exodus there were no Hebrews in any sense. A single patriarch like Abraham or Noah is reasonably himself a random member of an ethnic group and doesn’t see himself as a forefather of anything. God may have told the patriarch “You will multiply and become a great nation etc.” but that’s God’s point of view, not the patriarch’s.
I know. You have a good point there. But so do I. There are lots of things we disagree on. For example whether ice age constitutes support for the flood. With others I disagree even on whether the ancient texts say the earth was flat or not.
So, we disagree on whether this is a simple question. If you ask me “Do numbers exist?” I understand very well it’s a Yes or No question, but will a simple Yes or No really settle it? Aren’t there some presuppositions to be clarified first?
Erik,
Two points:
You’re right that I conflated methodology and object of inquiry, but that can be corrected: there are disciplines that disclose real causal powers by way of building models through experimentation and observation (often but not always with technological augmentation of our perceptual and conceptual capacities), and there are disciplines that refine and expand our culturally-mediated self-understanding by way of hermeneutic reflexivity.
I don’t deny that the sciences implicitly involve a hermeneutic dimension as well, since everyone done in language does. But the hermeneutic circle plays out differently in the sciences, since the language of science is shot through with the formal language of mathematics.
In the social sciences the issue is more complicated because there are intense and complicated debates between practitioners of these methods — in sociology and in anthropology in particular. If one reads “The Positivism Debate in German Sociology” one can see both sides of that debate represented in sociological methods. As a philosopher I find the dialectical method praised and practiced by Adorno closer to my sympathies than the positivist method, but it’s hard to ignore the explanatory power of the positivist method and its descendants.
And now, back to talking about Scripture!
There’s a bit of a slide here — I was saying that a philosophical perspective on science reveals something important about what science is, but I don’t see how that functions as a “prerequisite” to science. One could with equal justice say that since we have to already be doing science in order to be able to say what science is, scientific practices are a “prerequisite” to the metaphysics and epistemology of science.
In truth, however, neither is a prerequisite to the other — rather there is a reciprocal relation between the social practices of engaging in scientific inquiry and the social practices of talking about scientific inquiry. Neither has “foundations”.
This doesn’t correct the issue that you prevent science from doing science by forcing it to study something called causal powers, instead of letting it exercise the scientific method to study all reality, including lies and stupidities, in order to determine that they are lies and stupidities.
This only applies if you take formal languages to be essentially different from natural languages. But natural languages are formal systems the same way as formal languages are. Similarly, humanities are sciences the same way as natural sciences are, insofar as they share the scientific method. And they do.
Determining what science is is not up to science to determine, certainly not to physics or biology. That’s the whole issue. As a minimum, it’s a matter of definition, and definitions are a matter of linguistics, logic, and philosophy, and you have neatly excluded those from the realm of science. Ready to reconsider?
Okay. Where were we? Do you have something to add? To ask?
Actually, I’m interested in your views about genre. We were discussing earlier how scripture is similar to folklore as a genre, and how it is different. We never quite got around to specifying the differences. How do you see them?
I’m also interested in genres generally. What is a genre? How neatly separated are they? How do new genres come into being? Why are there genres, and what do different genres do — how do they function? (These questions are of particular interest to me as a life-long devotee of science-fiction and fantasy.)
A friend of mine who works on Plato has pointed out that Socratic dialogues were a genre of Athenian literature — but that apart from Plato’s dialogues, only Xenophon’s The Banquet and a fragment of Isocrates have survived. I suspect that if we had more examples of this genre, the whole “Socrates/Plato question” wouldn’t be asked. I find this a fascinating thought.
There’s hardly any hope of us discussing the difference between folklore and scripture. Not in this life.
But their similarities are very instructive too. They are synthetic genres, meaning multifaceted. And multifaceted means that you can read folklore as something else, for example you can read a legend about a place name as if it were history about the place, or you can read proverbs like pedagogical, medical and other practical scientific advice (it is indeed advice, but not scientific; it’s advice stemming from the cultural tradition).
Now, the subtle thing here, again common to both folklore and scripture, is that even though they can be read as such other more limited and specialized genres, they are not exclusively intended as such. They are fine-tuned to work as other specific genres, but their real intent is both broader and deeper. They are meant to provide an everlasting impact, eternal utility. A legend about a place name, even though it may read as history, is not really meant as a history lesson. It’s meant as a holistic teaching about the connections of everything and everybody mentioned in the legend, plus its conceivable parallels whenever the story is retold, plus as an exercise in traditional storytelling, confirming the cultural perspective and the sense of unity between the storyteller and the audience.
The storyteller and the audience share the same culture. This is a very important point. The story is never meant as news. It’s meant as revelation of something that you should know deep down. It is meant to provide a sense of recognition or realization. Also, it’s not meant for outsiders, but for insiders.
Language serves a dual purpose. One purpose is to communicate a meaning. But if the communication is to be successful, the receiver must already know the language, i.e. be an insider. Hence language also excludes at the same time those who don’t know the language. Similarly with folklore. Greek, Babylonian, Hebrew etc. myths were never meant as information to us. They were meant as the common heritage for the respective peoples themselves, to provide a sense of continuity across generations.
Genre means type or sort or kind. Like the nomenclature in biology – species, family, order, class, etc. Genres are like that.
They are not neatly separated. They are nested and they melt one into another (precisely like the nomenclature in biology). However, there’s a distinction between specialized pragmatic genres and synthetic genres. The specialized or pragmatic genres, such as a CV, state budget, or note by mother about where you can find the steak, are indeed neatly separated from each other by context and can hardly be mixed up. Synthetic genres however, such as folklore and scripture, are hard to tell apart and easy to mix up. You have to be an expert, a scientist of the relevant field (philologist) to recognize synthetic genres.
How to recognize a genre? By context, meaning, purported and perceived intent. All that. It’s a matter of interpretation. The more insider, privy, and expert you are, the more correct the interpretation.
This genre could not have been unique to Plato. Dialogues are a fairly common form in educational literature in other literate civilizations, such as in India and China. It’s not the only form of course. The other common form is treatises, as exemplified by Aristotle. These two genres are so different that the authors’ choice between them must have been conscious.
By the way, how is it going with the Nietzsche challenge?
This all seems perfectly unobjectionable to me. But I am curious about one aspect: if all you say here about folklore also applies to Scripture, then it would seemingly follow that Scripture can only “speak” to its originally intended audience (and the cultural descendants of that audience, if there are any). Under those conditions, one might be skeptical as to whether anyone alive today is in the right linguistic and cultural circumstances to truly understand Scripture.
My claim wasn’t that dialogues weren’t unique to Plato, but that there was a whole genre of Socratic dialogues: dialogues in which Socrates appears as a main character, as in Plato and in Xenophon. Plato is innovating within an established genre, and inventing philosophy by doing so.
By the way, Aristotle also wrote dialogues, but they are lost.
I decided not to bother, since you don’t care and I have other things to do.
You haven’t been paying attention.
The Four Senses of Scripture