It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinner argues. If they are, then it is presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do. But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certain knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves. When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms the pieces of one of its games and some set of human observations. No such sets of correspondences can ever be proved to be correct. At best, they can be falsified, in the sense that formal manipulations of a system's symbols may lead to symbolic configurations which, when read in the light of the set of correspondences in question, yield interpretations contrary to empirically observed phenomena. Hence all empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored, not on bedrock as is commonly supposed, but on the shifting sand of fallible human judgment, conjecture, and intuition. It is not even true, again contrary to common belief, that a single purported counter-instance that, if accepted as genuine would certainly falsify a specific scientific theory, generally leads to the immediate abandonment of that theory. Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say, observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is, the faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict. In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.
The man on the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion. In his praxis, he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all. He is rather like a theatergoer, who in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events. The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument. Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime. Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be; a true believer. I choose the word "argument" thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion.
Scientific statements can never be certain; they can be only more or less credible. And credibility is a term in individual psychology, i.e., a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer. To say that some preposition is credible is, after all, to say that it is believed to be an agent who is free not to believe it, that is, by an observer who, after exercising judgment and (possibly) intuition chooses to accept the proposition as worthy of his believing it. How then can science, which itself surely and ultimately rests on vast arrays of human value judgments, demonstrate that human value judgments are illusory? It cannot do so without forfeiting its own status as the single legitimate path to understanding man and his world.
But no merely logical argument, no matter how cogent or eloquent can undo this reality that science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom. When I say that science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison, I mean that the attribution of certainty to scientific knowledge by the common wisdom, an attribution now made so nearly universally that it has become a commonsense dogma, has virtually delegitimatized all other ways of understanding. People viewed the arts, especially literature, as sources of intellectual nourishment and understanding but today the arts are perceived largely as entertainments. The ancient Greek and Oriental theaters, the Shakespearean stage, the stages peopled by the Ibsens and Chekhovs nearer to our day - these were schools. The curricula they taught were vehicles for understanding the societies they represented. Today, although an occasional Arthur Miller or Edward Albee survives and is permitted to teach on the New York or London stage, the people hunger only for what is represented to them to be scientifically validated knowledge. They seek to satiate themselves at such scientific cafeterias as Psychology Today, or on popularized versions of the works of Masters and Johnson, or on Scientology as revealed by L. Ron Hubbard. Belief in the rationality-logicality equation has corroded the prophetic power of language itself. We can count, but we are rapidly forgetting how to say what is worth counting and why.
As you read that, I hope you took into account that this was written in the mid-1970s, and some then current aspects of pop culture have given way for others. You can choose your 2013 counterparts but I would certainly replace B. F. Skinner with Richard Dawkins - just as Skinner's defunct behaviorism has been supplanted by Dawkins' evo-psy. Finding the counterpart for Hubbard is a bit more difficult but not because there is only one obvious one. Arthur Miller is, of course, dead, though, I believe Albee is still with us and as recently as last year was quite articulate about, among other things, the further decline in the theater.
I can only wonder what Joseph Weizembaum would have made of the foremost force for the scientism he warned against, "science" blogs. Since most of his late life was spent in Germany and his further thinking is unavailable in English perhaps he addressed them.
What Weizenbaum had to say is, if anything, far, far more true today. I would hold that it is far more true of what is officially denominated to be liberal politics. Looking back, I would date the late 60s and 1970s as the turning point, when liberal politics, dominated by the enormous moral force of Reverend King and the largely religious and effective civil rights movement and early anti-war movement to the anti-religious, "scientific" "left" that began replacing them at that time. That liberal politics reached its height in influence during the other than liberal Johnson and Nixon administrations testifies to the strength of that now lost liberalism. As the Clinton and Obama administrations prove, the "liberalism" of today doesn't even have the power to move the law when they hold the entire government.
The media, the foremost beneficiaries of the form of libertarianism that posed as liberalism, largely concentrated in the elite media and those indifferent if not actually hostile to religion, has proven it will sell out the genuine ideals of liberalism for fame and fortune. The list of putative liberal or leftists of that era who have jumped to what is universally recognized as being "the right" is impressively larger than those who have jumped the other way. I think it would be useful to come to a better understanding of that phenomenon, which I'd call something like "the Hentoff-Hitchens effect".
UPDATE: From The Lexicon of Popular Atheist Locutions
Word salad: One of a number of pat statements that means something is too complex or too long for the post-literate era atheist to understand. As used it is a variation on the logical positivist practice of declaring a statement not in accord with their ideological framing to be meaningless, though “word salad” is generally far less skillfully deployed.
If “word salad” is used to denote an actual passage that is nonsense it carries the danger that the user will be suspected of a low level of reading comprehension earned for the phrase by those who use it most often. It is more accurate to say "that is nonsense". However, unlike the use of "word salad" it doesn't carry the presumption that the one doing the dismissing is immune from having to be able to say why they have said that.
See also: But that's haaarrrrrd!
People viewed the arts, especially literature, as sources of intellectual nourishment and understanding but today the arts are perceived largely as entertainments.
ReplyDeleteHence the "E" in TED.
Been mulling a pointless post on my critique of the idea of TED. I may have to use this to get around to that post.
Many thanks!
Looking back, I would date the late 60s and 1970s as the turning point, when liberal politics, dominated by the enormous moral force of Reverend King and the largely religious and effective civil rights movement and early anti-war movement to the anti-religious, "scientific" "left" that began replacing them at that time.
ReplyDeleteSurprising how many people, especially those who weren't alive when King was, forget it was "the Reverend" King, and that his religious beliefs were the prime motivating factor of his leadership of the movement.
The famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was not addressed to the world; it was addressed to church leaders in Birmingham, Alabama.
I got dibs on Weizenbaum. I always say "the Reverend King" because to not do so is to misrepresent his clear intentions. Though I will admit I started doing so for the same reasons I always say CE and BCE, because it annoyed people who deserved it, then I took his example and found the real reason to do so.
ReplyDeleteThat was a joke. About the dibs.
Delete