Science and questions of value, significance, and meaning
Curtis White notes the excitement when Stephen Hawking seemed to deny the existence of God. In contrast, Hawking’s claim for the death of philosophy passed almost without comment, as though the reaction was, ‘yes, of course that’s dead.’ Hawking lamented the fact that philosophers had not kept up, and were badly deficient in mathematics. Given the way that knowledge has become so specialized, I’m not sure anyone could keep up in that sense. Hawking, however, is the voice of reason compared to other assaults on philosophy. In an interview with Ross Anderson of The Atlantic (April 23, 2012), Lawrence Krauss repeats his earlier claim that ‘philosophy hasn’t progressed in 2,000 years,’ adding:
Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read works by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science … And it’s really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I’d say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.
The questions of philosophy, of course, are the perennial questions of living, and are not meant to be resolved in the crude sense implied by Krauss here. It is plain that the rejection of philosophy contained in these arguments is based upon the view that philosophy does not generate new knowledge, and science does. You may as well criticize science for having nothing to say on statements of meaning and significance. We can defend philosophy as a form of decluttering, cleaning up the house from miscellaneous rubbish that has been acquired over the years, but that would indeed be the great comedown that Hawking’s describes in A Brief History of Time. Some even go so far as to deny that philosophy gives access to wisdom, let alone knowledge:
The humanities are nothing we have to take seriously except as symptoms. But they are everything we need to take seriously when it comes to entertainment, enjoyment and psychological satisfaction. Just don’t treat them as knowledge or wisdom.
Alex Rosenberg 307
Which means what exactly? The humanities are ‘symptoms’ of what exactly? Human life, society, culture, human beings themselves in their discourse and interaction? We are being told that these are things that science and scientists don’t have to take seriously? The human world may well not determine truth and knowledge with respect to the facts of the natural world, but what value objective truth and knowledge apart from the human world? I’ll put the question more pointedly – how do we make the facts on climate change existentially meaningful so as to provoke the actions required to avert eco-catastrophe? And to what does ‘entertainment, enjoyment and psychological satisfaction’ refer? I would say that here we get into the foundational economy of human needs, motivations, desires, the cosmic longing for meaning. That might not be objective knowledge and truth with respect to the natural world, but it concerns wisdom and the gaining of wisdom, certainly. Anyone who thinks otherwise should have a quick read of any of Victor Frankl’s books on human beings as meaning-seeking creatures. And if that quest for meaning is still met with a dismissive and disdainful response, then we can be clear that we are face-to-face with a certain inhumanism in this scientistic perspective. Such people are long on a specific kind of knowledge, but very short on wisdom.
These views are crude enough, but Richard Dawkins’ view is even cruder, describing Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes as ‘icons of haute francophonyism.’ (388). But of course, Curtis White writes, ‘Dawkins knows sweet nothing about Foucault.’
What do any of these science writers know about the history of philosophy before Bertrand Russell? Or even history? They are so bound up in the prejudice that scientific knowledge is the only legitimate form of knowledge that they don't feel the need to learn anything from any other realm. Their comments are merely expressions of an anti-intellectual prejudice. It's called 'scientism' and it is one of the primary fallacies of the age. That the age is going headlong to catastrophe should come as no surprise. I would go so far as to say that these remarks are a kind of bigotry. Dawkins knows squat about Foucault and Barthes. That's not ignorance or stupidity on his part, but sheer intellectual arrogance and conceit. He thinks such people have nothing of importance to say. The same with religion. Terry Eagleton doesn't have a religious axe to grind one way or the other. But he heard Dawkins holding forth on religion and theology and knew he was speaking out of prejudice. Eagleton explained that he was far from expert on theology, but he knew enough to know that Dawkins knew nothing of the issues he fulminated at length on. This is sheer prejudice. He knows nothing of theology simply because he considers theology to have nothing to say. Tellingly, when asked his views on climate change, Dawkins has evaded answering, claiming that since he is not a climate scientist he cannot say. This is hogwash. He knows nothing about theology but makes huge sweeping statements on the subject. Hogwash, too, because Dawkins is big on science as a form of knowledge that is superior to all other forms, indeed is the only form. So society is to be governed by scientific reason and not ignorance and superstition. Here, with climate change, is a huge civilizational question. Let's see how science deals with it. Dawkins ducked it. He may have been right to duck it; expertise in one area doesn't make a person an expert in other areas. This is true. And this is why government, politics, and law, the ways in which citizens mediate and manage their common affairs, can never be a matter of 'truth' and expertise, of whatever kind.
In the end, the problem for science is that it doesn’t know what its own discoveries mean. It can describe the long process of evolution, but it can’t say how we should judge it. Are these happy facts? Depressing? Or dazzling? As science historian John Gribbin acknowledges concerning the discoveries of quantum physics, they don’t ‘mean’ anything. That is, quantum physics cannot tell anyone what to think about a universe composed of quanta. Fulfillment? Disappointment? Science offers no way of evaluating what its methods produce. Gribbin writes:
People still argue about what all this ‘really means,’ but for our purposes it is sufficient to take the pragmatic approach and say that quantum mechanics works, in the sense of making predictions that are confirmed by experiments, so it doesn’t matter what it means.
Gribbin 520
As a consequence, when pushed on the matter by people who persist in wanting to know what it all means, science resorts to a tautology: ‘What we know is what to do with our reasoning, our experiments, and our instruments. If you want something more than that, go ahead … so long as you don’t violate scientific methodology as theology, philosophy, and art do.’ Which is what psychologists calls a double bind: science confesses that it doesn’t know how to provide meaning for its own knowledge, but all other forms of meaning are forbidden. And so human society and culture is reduced to statements of fact, the dictatorial assertions of some over against others, which said others have no choice but to accept. Motivations wither and die through the sheer impersonalism of it all.
Curtis White, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers 2013