Considering the Repute It Commands Science Must Be Required To Own Its Past And Its Real Present

Note:  Just noticed I neglected to include a link to Pinker's article when I posted this.  Sorry. 

Steven Pinker's recent column in The New Republic supposedly defending science against the charge of scientism is a good example of a piece growing wronger as it grows longer, there is so much he is just plain wrong about it would require a far longer piece to point all of it out.

In what is clearly an opportunistic muddling of the issue Pinker claims that the definition of "scientism" is unclear.

The term “scientism” is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine. Sometimes it is equated with lunatic positions, such as that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.” Sometimes it is clarified with adjectives like “simplistic,” “naïve,” and “vulgar.” The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of “queer” and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend.

There isn't anything incoherent about what scientism is in so far as denotation, it is the holding that science is the only means of really knowing something.   Most famously, it is the ideology of Bertrand Russell's famous and incoherent statement.

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

Which is a statement that, obviously, couldn't be known because science is unable to tell you if it is true that science is the only method of knowing something.   And there was no one who should have more painfully learned that truth by the year he said that, 1935, than Bertrand Russell.   That is the definition of scientism, however there is nothing preventing authors from misusing the term (imagine someone in his profession mistaking connotation for denotation).  Something that Pinker immediately did after he wrote that.

Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science. It is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

The first temptation is to go through some of Pinker's writing to see how much of what he asserts is backed up by rigorous use of the armamentarium of methods he mentions, but that would require another post.  The rigor with which scientists do not apply those and strictly hold to their pledged procedures is another enormous topic.  Science is very much a sometimes thing, even leaving aside occasional mistakes and accidental lapses.  Again, taking into account Pinker's professional field, it's amazing that he could make such a facile statement about this.

Scientism is an ideology, it is a statement of an ideological position.   And one of the worst things about ideologies is that they become an a priori substitute for the substance of thinking,  rejecting  information and filling where that belongs with previously held ideological holdings,  rejecting new information that contradicts or fails to confirm that holding.   It is a school of thought, in which the thinking either conforms to the requirements of the school or it is expelled or drops out.

If you believe, with Russell, that only those aspects of human experience which are susceptible to treatment by science, on one hand, you will reject everything that can't be adequately observed, quantified and analyzed to treat with science.  That inevitably rejects the possibility that those human experiences can possibly be valid and that the truth of them can be had.  In its most popular form today, that leads the ideologue of scientism to declare that large amounts of human experience is delusional, is false, is a lie when there is no evidence to support that rejection other than their ideological disqualification of it.

On the other hand, there is a far more subtle and far more dangerous tendency to try to fit human experience, that is undeniably there, into a simulation of science, of scientific treatment, when it isn't possible to make the adequate observations, measurements and analysis.  The method typical of such science is to leave things inconvenient to their purposes out of it, no matter how obviously relevant they are.  Pinker's piece, reflecting his professional interest, goes into defending behavioral and related sciences that could stand as the quintessential example of that practice.  He began:

The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists. Not only did many of them contribute to mathematics, physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid theorists in the sciences of human nature. They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms of the nervous system. They were evolutionary psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms.” And they were social psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the selfish passions that inflame us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that frustrate our best-laid plans.

His list of who he's talking about is rather interesting to consider for how accurately they fit into his retrospective categorization of their work into those currently fashionable within his ideological school of cognitive science.

These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge? What could they have done with it?

That's quite a shopping list.  Especially considering how much of what they concluded is unfashionable today. I mean, Descartes?  Rousseau?  As cited by a c. 2013 cognitive scientist?   Has Pinker even read them?    I wish some medium could consult them to ask what they think of the contemporary literature that Pinker contributes to as compared with their own work.  I somehow doubt that it would stand up well to the destructive acid of Descartes method.  I'd like to know what he thought about fMRI as superior to all too fallible human perception, especially if he reads the literature critical of its use -especially the famous example of brain activity being imaged in a dead salmon at Dartmouth.  If there's one thing I am certain of, the scientists who fooled the fMRI machine knew the fish was dead.

I wonder why he didn't include the most famous examples of Galileo and Newton.  I, somehow, think neither of them would be too impressed by the rigor of the methods by which the neruo and cognitive scientists of today glue their assertions to rigorously made observations and measurements, not to mention the far more resistant surface of the reality of what happens outside of their labs.   I'm far from confident that some of them would be all that impressed with the rigor of observation and some may point out that a great deal of it is far from rigorous at any step.   If Pinker wanted to give his guests from the distant past an honest view of it, they should be made familiar with the self-deception of more recent scientists in these areas, the ephemeral value of their firmly held scientific holdings.

Notice that I didn't put science in quotations in that last sentence.  The practice of separating once firmly held but now discontinued science from what is science today is to falsify reality.  I say that just as religion has to own up to its unattractive history and features, if it's going to be held up to be so far very superior in honesty and integrity, science must be required to own its own past.  

Science is only what is considered to be science by those making the assertion of it.  It is whatever purported truth is held to constitute science at any time, all of those ideas held to be science without sufficient opposition to be rejected as science.  This is far from the ideal held to constitute science, even the formal ideal of only those ideas which meet the most rigorous requirements alleged to constitute the methods of science and scientific review.

As a reader of Retraction Watch  it's crystal clear that even that most formal meaning of the word, "science," those ideas held in the minds of the most informed of scientists, includes many ideas that are soon shown to be false, at times entirely fraudulent but which have, nonetheless, passed through the contemporary methods of review of science.   The Platonic ideal that is generally held to comprise science is clearly not present on the Earth, in the minds of scientists, the only place in which science is known to reside.   And, in reality, science doesn't even get to live only in that elite neighborhood but is also in those far from well informed and far from rigorous minds which hold ideas it believes and CAN PASS OFF TO OTHERS as being science. The minds of those with but little learning in science is the residence of the largest part of science.  That's not really true of one related discipline, mathematics which practices such formal rigor and is, itself, not about anything vulnerable to a really popular treatments of the kind that Pinker specializes in.   And that fact is what makes mathematics so far less vulnerable for its truths becoming an embarrassment to be unmentioned or to be insulted by putting its identity  as mathematics in quotations for current purposes.

As I said, Pinker's article would require a far longer refutation than I'm able to give it in one post.  But I might go back to it.  It is such a rats nest of false ideas, superficial thinking and clearly wrong assertion of fact that it could produce another series.