The Cult of the Scientific

First off, I'd like to shamelessly plug some of my ongoing efforts. The schedule for Philopolis Guelph (October 12–13) has just been released online; there are full descriptions for all the activities to be found there as well. Also, I'll be giving a talk on the Carrés Rouges movement this Tuesday (September 25), 7:00 PM at the Guelph Public Library. For all those of you who commented on that post, thanks very much. Your responses have been very helpful in honing what I'll say at the talk, even if I haven't had a chance to respond to you in writing yet.

Anyway, let's turn the page now and get on task for this week's post. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me an article chronicling a debate between a scientist and a philosopher about which discipline answers "the big questions of life." This article irritated me sufficiently to warrant a blog post, for a few reasons. The first is a cultural prevalence to believe prima facie ("on the face of it," or, at first glance) that the answer to that question is trivial, and that of course science answers all such questions. This belief often goes along with a willingness to misinterpret scientific data, and when I say "misinterpret," what I specifically mean is the willingness to conclude from an experiment far more than what the data warrants. The second irritating point (and philosophers everywhere should appreciate what's coming) is that even the question is badly posed. Why is it assumed that one of the two must answer all the big questions? The formulation itself presupposes that the big questions are all of one type (or maybe that all questions are of one type) and on that basis looks to see which methodology will address such a type of question. In good philosophical style, my first move in answering the question is to undermine the question itself. I don't believe there is only one type of question; I disagree that all the big questions fall into one type; and therefore I disagree that we need to settle the issue of which discipline answers all of the big ones.

However, let's now have a closer look at what's going on in the discussion itself. Julian Baggini's opening comment about science envy from philosophers is spot on: anyone who's written a SSHRC application trying to get funding for a PhD in philosophy knows the pressure is on not only to justify one's project within the discipline, but that the value of philosophy as a whole often has to be justified right along with it. If only I could say my project were science, then people would know it's legit and I could just get the money to go off and do it. Science has indeed worked miracles. (And humanities scholars often feel that a lot more money goes to our scientific brethren than it does to us, and with more ease. This situation probably is true, and is beautifully caricatured in Futurama when Prof. Farnsworth talks about running an upcoming research project on a machine powered by "dump trucks full of flaming grant money.") But philosophers are quick to draw on history to demonstrate that individual sciences have grown out of philosophical inquiries. And so, as the young upstarts that they are, we sharply bring them back to order. After all, even scientists get awarded PhDs: philosophical doctorates. Respect your elders. Remember where you came from. Never forget who you are. All such things, if for no other reason than to make philosophers feel better and take the pressure off us for a wee while as we try to get a little research done.

Anyway, Baggini (the philosopher) asks Krauss (his physicist interlocutor) if the imperialist ambitions of science know no bounds. In other words, should we expect science to take over all of the questions that philosophy has treated, or only some? Baggini cites the issue of morality, to which Krauss replies that science provides the basis for moral decisions. Such decisions are based on reason, and reason is gleaned from empirical evidence. "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs." The response from Krauss here suggests to me that he hasn't spent an awful lot of time thinking about this situation. (Note here that I'm adopting a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective on ethics, which is not my position at all, but which is rather the position that Krauss himself suggests by immediately looking at consequences, and I'll therefore follow him into his own territory.) One might easily divide moral questions into two parts: first, what would the desirable outcome be; second, how might I achieve that outcome? Clearly, science will play a central role, maybe even the only role, in addressing the second part of that question. Science can guide us well in trying to accomplish a great many things. However, what about the first part of the question: can science ever tell us what ought to be the case? This picks up an old problem from the history of philosophy, that of trying to derive an "ought" from an "is," or otherwise put, trying to derive a normative claim from one or more factual claims. To my knowledge, no solution has yet been advanced for this problem, at least not one that will make you feel anything but tricked by a dirty philosopher and in need of a shower.

Krauss's response might suggest that we could solve it, though. His position is that science will reduce our understanding of morality to well-defined biological constructs. However, this doesn't seem promising to me. Suppose that we accomplish what Krauss suggests will ultimately happen; suppose that we can give an evolutionary story about how our feelings about morality developed. Would such a story de facto tell us right from wrong? No, it would tell us how our feelings about morality have evolved. However, we recognise all the time that sometimes our moral intuitions are wrong. There is an appreciable gap between what people sometimes believe to be right, and what actually is right. An account of the type that Krauss foresees tells us about people's beliefs, and nothing about the moral truths that such beliefs might track more or less well.

Of course, all that we need here is a further stipulation. We need a scientific theory not about how we form all of our moral beliefs, but rather only about the ones that are actually correct. Notice here that the distinction between correct and incorrect moral beliefs will rely on a standard of judgment already presupposed in answering the question: we need to know what the moral truths are before we can know which beliefs are correct, and therefore before we can put together a science explaining how such beliefs come about. And what kind of scientific experiment could we run to test whether killing is wrong? What would that experiment look like? Science only seems to tell us what is (or was, or would be) the case, but never what ought to be the case. There is no empirical experiment that can tell us what ought to be the case, and therefore the sciences just won't have an answer for us there.

Going back to Krauss's quote more closely, he says: "Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not." Notice that he's actually weaseling his way out of the question here. Krauss was asked whether science would overtake questions of morality. What he has answered here, however, is whether science plays any role in moral decisions. As he says, "'reason' alone is impotent." However, the claim being made by consequentialist philosophers is not that reason alone will solve moral quandaries. They agree that science has a role to play here. What they dispute is that science has the only role to play, and Krauss dodges that question here. It is only with auxiliary philosophical hypotheses that science has anything to say about morality.

In fact, Krauss's own claim that science will reduce morality to a biological construct is not even an empirical claim. What he's saying can be recast as the following conditional: "If science can give an evolutionary story for our sense of right and wrong, then there isn't really something meaningfully 'right' or 'wrong.'" How could that possibly be an empirical statement (you know, the kind formulated, tested, and supported or rejected by empirical science)? If we succeed in giving that evolutionary story about our sense of right and wrong, how could we ever verify whether the consequent of that claim checks out? What object could we measure that would tell us that nothing is meaningfully right or wrong? There is no such thing. Trivially so.

As a matter of fact, that's a problem not only for morality. It's a problem for empirical science as well, because science itself rests on a set of philosophical assumptions. A well-known issue there is the problem of induction, which is the process of examining a finite amount of evidence in order to put together universal laws that apply more widely than one's evidence. It's a process that draws on knowledge of observed facts to pass judgment about unobserved facts. For instance, on the basis of the fact that the sun has risen every day of my life, I conclude that the sun will rise for all the days of my life still to come. However, how could science justify it? What test could we do that would conclusively tell us that using this kind of reasoning is okay? A very reasonable response is to say that the proof is in the pudding: after all, we've used it so many times already and it has worked, so using it in the future should be fine, too. Think about what just happened there: on the basis of the fact that past (observed) instances of induction have worked, the scientist claims that future applications of it are justified. But that was exactly the rule that we had set out for science to prove! (In fact, all past scientific theories have been false, so it's reasonable to believe that present ones are false, and that future ones will all be so as well.)

Do I want to decimate science here? Absolutely not. What I do want is to offer a harsh critique of the kind of rampant scientism that one finds in our society, the belief that science will answer any and all questions. Clearly, science is not up to that task, as I think I've just demonstrated (or at least I've pushed the burden of the argument into their camp: without a response, things look bleak at this point for science). What I want to demonstrate is the truth of the following claim: if science has all the answers, then science has no good answers because it can't justify itself scientifically. I don't see this as a problem for science. I see it as a problem for scientism. Philosophy and science work in tandem, not just on moral issues where philosophical theorisation about right and wrong are supplemented by scientific theorisation about how to achieve those ends, but also on the issues that seem to be clearly in the wheelhouse of science because science itself rests on a set of philosophical presuppositions. It would be foolish to say that science answers no questions; and that's exactly where we're headed if we say that science answers all of them.