It is asked, demanded really, what the quote was that shattered my agnosticism, it was this passage from the introduction to Computer Power And Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum.
The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be 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 only be more or less credible. And credibility is a term of individual psychology, i.e., a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer. To say that some proposition is credible is, after all, to say that it is believed by an agent who is free not to believe it, that is, by an observer who, after exercising judgement 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 delegitimized all other ways of understanding.
The entirety of the book shows why the common wisdom which the ideological pose of agnosticism is fed by is wrong.
"Agnostic" was a word invented by Darwin's closest ideological supporter, Thomas Huxley in the late 1860s, he said, in 1869, "It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe."
Note that Huxley's definition is given in the form of a command to be followed, the kind of thing that positivists are always doing, trying to boss people into doing things as they want them done, insisting that any other way of thinking or speaking is not to be done. Which, to the consternation of positivists, the great unwashed apparently doesn't in many cases give assent, though way too many with college-credentials which seem to have made them lazy cowards are cowed into following for fear of not being seen as part of the in-crowd. Unfortunately, that is what so much of education seems to be, now. And, as Weizenbaum notes, that article of faith has become ubiquitous, believed, or probably more felt, even by many who wouldn't understand what a statement of their belief meant. I doubt those who troll me would get it.
I knew that etymological history of the word while adopting the pose about a century to the year, later. Having read Huxley, though being young and stupid, I didn't subject him to his own alleged standard. As with most "men in the street" and not a few women, I was naive and stupid, really, about the claimed hard line separating knowledge and belief, the alleged involuntary action of belief called "knowledge" and other, in the common wisdom as expressed so arrogantly by Huxley, lesser "mere belief". As soon as I read that passage from Weizenbaum, I, of course, had to acknowledge that it was true. I believe I have mentioned before and think I thought soon after I read it about how Bertrand Russell, talking in his autobiography about how as his brother taught him the elements of euclidean geometry, he had heard that you use it to prove things so that when his brother began, as you have to with all mathematics, to state the unproven axioms of geometry, he asked why he should believe them unproven, his brother gave the reason that anyone who goes on with mathematics had to accept them as true or they couldn't go on. The same is true of every single thing in mathematics, as Russell and his teacher Whitehead found out after they went through a stupendous, years long exercise in some of the hardest thinking done in the history of Western thought to try to found mathematics in logical proof, their work was soon overtaken by even even better thinking that proved that you couldn't provide mathematics with an absolute foundation in logical proof.
Maybe you had to have accepted what Russell and Whitehead had had to accept before you could see why Thomas Huxley was being dishonest. His stand certainly, if applied rigorously, would have had to shake his confident, belligerently insistent demand that natural selection was a thing because it is certainly not an idea that stands up to the level of rigor that he demanded be applied to a belief in God.
Of course,that's something which agnostics uniformly do in declaring themselves agnostic, their lives are full to the top of ideas that are not founded in scientific, mathematical, logical, or evidentirary rigor. Even their own belief in huge swaths of science which they use in their work wouldn't stand up to Huxley's pretense because no one has ever, not the best scientists, certainly not lesser ones, gone through a. the mathematical proofs of the math they use, b. the previously published science they build on, c.the actual work that that published science is based in. In going over both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man rigorously checking Darwin's citations, he certainly didn't always rely on rigorously done science and he was quite capable of distorting and twisting what was said when it served his purpose, something that if Huxley had practiced what he preached, he would have found out if he had done that. He certainly must have known that the use of the scientifically dodgy stuff he got from animal breeders and similar lore was not science, even loosely speaking. Nor was stuff like what he got from W. R. Greg which was clearly based on common British prejudice, not science. If anything it is exactly Huxley's own field of biology that made things much worse in science than it had been when they had more modest goals than to explain what couldn't be established in observational evidence. They should have stuck with merely supporting that evolution had happened on grounds of geology and the fossil evidence, not trying to give it as firm a foundation as contemporary physics believed Newton had given that area of research, ignoring that Newton's ideas required observational evidence to confirm their soundness.
No, Huxley's invention is a dishonest ploy when it is made as a demand that, as the finer and more honest scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum pointed out scientists don't follow even in their own work. On that alone, I'd say the atheist Weizenbaum earned his eternal reward.
Update: As to the point I make at "c." that scientists don't go over the actual work of their fellow scientists to check if their reporting of their own work is valid, that was something that was massively confirmed in the standards practiced by evolutionary-psychology in the infamous Marc Hauser scandal in which even the complaints of his own grad students that he was committing scientific fraud didn't make much of a difference to those who reviewed his papers for publication. I was naive enough to believe that reviewers were more rigorous in their review than to merely take that stuff on the word of the researcher. A very fine scientist I know who regularly was asked to act as a reviewer set me straight on that, telling me that no one in his experience ever went into it that far when acting as a reviewer for a professional journal. There are a very few areas of such research that are regularly reviewed to that level or rigor though to my knowledge those are exactly the fields of research subject to the most instantaneous and ideological dismissal, a priori.
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