A new review of 50 Voices of Disbelief, but ...

Apparently there's a new review of the book in the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (Vol 13, No. 4, 2010).

I don't have easy access to this, so if anyone wants to let me know the gist of what is said (here or in an email) I'll be grateful.

Press release re World Philosophy Day (from the University of Queensland)

Sounds like an interesting talk if any of you can attend.

====

WORLD PHILOSOPHY DAY - THURSDAY 18 NOVEMBER

World Philosophy Day is a day for people to share thoughts, and to openly explore and discuss ideas and inspire public debate or discussion on society's challenges.

The objective is to make philosophy accessible and to create opportunities for rational reflection, discussion and to foster independent and critical thought.

Established by UNESCO in 2002, it is an international event observed annually on the third Thursday of November to honor philosophical reflection around the world.

Associate Professor William Grey will deliver an oration at the University of Queensland at 12 noon to mark the occasion. The lecture will take place at the St Lucia campus in Steele (Building 3) Lecture Room 206.

Dr Grey will reflect on 'What does it mean to be a Philosopher?' The role of philosophy and philosophers in contemporary society will be explored.

The significant social issue that Dr Grey will address concerns the challenge of ensuring a sustainable future. Dr Grey will question whether corporate-sponsored disinformation about the consequences of treating the atmosphere as an open sewer constitutes a crime against humanity, and perhaps also a crime against nature.

Dr Grey will also ask whether the misery and injustice inflicted on tens of millions by the Catholic Church's socially, ecologically and ethically indefensible ban on contraception may also come to be seen by future generations as a crime against humanity.

Following the talk there will be refreshments, light snacks and opportunity for philosophical discussion.

COPY OF PRESS RELEASE (FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE) DATED: MONDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2010

CONTACT: William Grey Philosophy, HPRC
University of Queensland
QLD 4072 AUSTRALIA
tel: +61 (0)7 336 52099
fax: +61 (0)7 336 56266
/

Opinions and information in this press release shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by the The University of Queensland.

Jack Donnelly disses collective rights

For all the talk of excessive individualism, the problem in the world today is not too many individual rights but that individual human rights are not sufficiently respected. States and societies have a variety of claims on individuals and modern states have awesome powers to bring individuals to their knees; if necessary, to break their minds as well as their bodies. Human rights, and particularly legal rights, are among the few resources of individuals in the face of the modern state. The balance is already (always?) tilted against the individual. The only likely result of advocating collective human rights ... is a further strengthening of the forces of repression.

Every day we see individuals crushed by society. Rarely, if ever, do we see society torn apart by the exercise of individual human rights. Social disorder and decay are usually associated with the violation of individual human rights by the state or some other organized segment of society. Human rights are a rare and valuable intellectual and moral resource in the struggle to right the balance between society (and the state) and the individual. Unless we preserve their distinctive character and stand firm on their character as individual rights, their positive role in the struggle for human dignity may be compromised.

Discuss.

I'm not actually big on the misleading (IMO) expression "human dignity", but it'll do as a place marker in this context. I think these paras from Jack Donnelly's book on human rights sum up something important.

"Eudaimonism has no room for compassion" - wtf?

Nicholas Wolterstorff claims, "No version of eudaimonism has room for compassion." This seems like madness.

Discuss.

No post today (spot the paradox)

There's more I want to say about science, scientism, the supernatural, rational inquiry, etc., the recent dominant themes of the blog. I'd like to bring it all together in one place, but have been spending time in the various threads rather than pulling it all together. Maybe I can get to that soon, especially since some of the reactions suggest that I need to spell out a bit more about the context of my thinking on these issues.

But this is it for today. I have Jenny getting home from the US tomorrow - yay! - should get to bed now, and have also been juggling some other things, so I guess I can look forward to a new batch of comments on the last two threads when I check in the morning.

A nice para from Harris

For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between "science" and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss "facts" - e.g. history. For instance, it is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind fall within the context of "science," broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality. Granted, one doesn't generally think of events like assassinations as "scientific" facts, but the murder of President Kennedy is as fully corroborated a fact as can be found anywhere, and it would betray a profoundly unscientific frame of mind to deny that it occurred. I think "science," therefore, should be considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world.

So, there is science as "broadly construed", which is our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality, and there is science as "a specialized branch" of that effort. That seems fair enough to me.

We just need to be clear what we're talking about in a given context. E.g., if I ask a friend what she's studying at university, and she says "science", I'll assume with some confidence that she's referring to stuff she's doing in the science faculty - she's probably not, for example, majoring in French literature or in constitutional law. She's doing stuff that falls in the "specialized branch" that Harris refers to (and there's other perfectly good stuff she could be doing which doesn't fall there). In most contexts when we talk about science, this is what we have in mind, and there are historical, pedagogical, etc., reasons for that.

But science in the sense of the specialized branch isn't radically discontinuous from everything else. Though we can point to it as something specialized, we also have to acknowledge that there's no "hard distinction" between it and the rest of rational inquiry. Or as I'd put it, science (the specialised branch of inquiry) is continuous with other branches of rational inquiry.

I think that Harris is pretty much correct on these points. Doubtless y'all can think of some additional subtleties, but Harris seems to get things about right, at least in this quote.

Opinion piece (forthcoming) at The Drum

Just letting y'all know that I have an opinion piece coming up soon at the ABC site The Drum, in support of The Australian Book of Atheism. I'll let you know more when I know a bit more.

These things I know - or do I?

Here are some claims that I am inclined to think true, and that I'm inclined, even after reflection, to think that I have justification or warrant for. In one or two cases, though, there may be some doubt about what is actually meant, let alone whether the claim is really true. Let's have a look:

"Right now, as I type this, the sun is shining outside my window."

"Macbeth is the main character in Macbeth."

"In Macbeth, Macbeth murders Duncan."

"Macbeth is a tragic hero."

"Macbeth loves Lady Macbeth, at least at the start of Macbeth."

"As I type, the US and Australian dollars are roughly at parity."

"Human reproductive cloning is illegal in Australia."

"I had spaghetti for lunch yesterday."

"Cheetahs are beautiful animals."

"Medellín was once racked by political instability and guerilla warfare."

"Maxwell Perkins was a great editor with a superb (if not unerring) ear for literature."

I've stolen the last couple of these, with minor modifications for concision and to make sure I think they are true, from Jerry Coyne's blog.

The first point I want to make about all the above is that, if I actually know these things to be true, it's not through science. My claim isn't necessarily that they are science defeaters, as if scientists are helpless to find out these sorts of things. I simply say that it wasn't through any distinctively scientific process that I found out any of the above. Nor did I find out these things by asking someone who did use a distinctively scientific process (or who in turn ... etc.). These are all things of a kind that could have been found out long before the methods that are distinctive of science coalesced into the beginnings of the institution or practice that we now know as science. Of course, we couldn't have known that human reproductive cloning was illegal, back in those days, because without science such a thing would not even make sense as something to ban. But we could certainly have consulted statute books, lawyers, and so on about various matters of law.

Nor could I have found out that it is illegal by looking it up on the internet ... not without the technoscience that makes the internet possible. But if I just go and look on a site like AustLII I am not doing anything distinctively scientific. I'm just doing the equivalent of reading a statute book, which could have been done in medieval times.

Whether there are some things that are, in principle, always going to be science defeaters is another thing. I don't make that claim and I'm not sure how exactly it could be settled. But I do, for example, claim that it would be impractical and unnecessary to try to use any distinctively scientific activities to find out whether or not Macbeth really is the main character of Macbeth. Just read the text or go and watch a production, and you'll come to that conclusion. Or ask someone who is trustworthy on such things.

But be warned, once you start drawing conclusions about Macbeth that go beyond the least sophisticated ("Macbeth is the main character of Macbeth"), you may need quite a bit of education in the English of the time, in the historical context, in the literary forms that had existed up until then, and so on. It's possible to pick that up in various ways, but there's a lot to be said for actual guided and formalised study with teachers who know what they're talking about.

Some of the other claims I've made are trickier: e.g. is it really true that cheetahs are beautiful animals?

Well, they sure look it to me. But there's still a nagging question about whether cheetahs are really beautiful and what the claim even means. Does it just mean that they have (perhaps unspecified) characteristics that strike "us" (whoever "we" are in this context) in a certain "aesthetic" way - or what? Some people may believe that cheetahs possess a rather spooky property of strongly objective beauty such that any rational being in the universe somehow makes an error about reality if it fails to see a cheetah as beautiful. I doubt, though, that many of us really think anything like that, even if people in some culturally-closed societies (and perhaps not just them) have thought that way.

Note that science may be able to do a great deal to clarify how many people really see cheetahs as beautiful, what is going on at the level of the functioning of the brain, what it is about cheetahs that produces these responses, etc. I'm not at all claiming that science has nothing to say about the beauty of cheetahs, or, indeed, about any of the issues raised by the statements I listed above. Still, these are all things that are known to me, if they really do constitute knowledge, with nothing distinctively scientific being involved in the way I found out.

I keep talking about "distinctively scientific", because I am well aware that scientists are able to look outside and see whether the sun is shining or whether it's a cloudy day. Or they can use indirect methods of various kinds to infer, "The sun is currently shining in Newcastle, Australia." However, I don't rely on anything especially scientific; I just look out the window.

Obviously I am talking about "science" in a sense that is narrower than "rational inquiry" (I'm prepared to assume that looking out the window is, or can be, an example of rational inquiry). As usual, I can't give you a precise definition. I don't think that phenomena such as science lend themselves to sharp definitions; they are inherently fuzzy, as are many of our concepts. However, it is possible to have a fairly rich conception of science that definitely covers some things and not others. For example, if I simply read Macbeth I am definitely not doing science in the sense under discussion. If I'm trying to work out stuff about the play as I read it (Who is the main character? Could it be Macbeth?), I am engaging in a form of rational inquiry, but it's a humanistic form of rational inquiry, not a distinctively scientific form. On the other hand, it seems to me that these can merge into each other. For example, humanistic scholars are quite capable of using more distinctively scientific approaches on occasion - computerised word frequency analyses provide one example where a scientific instrument is being used by textual scholars to assist with humanistic research. And of course, scientists can read texts, watch plays, learn languages and so on. No one has a monopoly on any of this.

I object to the expression "other ways of knowing" because people who use it tend to countenance methods, such as divine revelation and mystical insight, that seem to me to be pretty damn dubious as ways of finding out stuff. But there are obviously many things I can do to find stuff out - e.g. I can just go and look, in some cases, or read a novel in others, or rely on my memory. Scientists rely on a mix of these things as does everyone else. But not everyone else puts so much emphasis on studying phenomena that are very small, very ancient, or very distant, or using theoretical propositions about these phenomena as causal explanations, and not everyone else relies so heavily on such things as mathematical models, controlled experiments and hypothetico-deductive reasoning, and scientific instruments.

I view science as a distinctive phenomenon that arose in a recognisable form around the start of the seventeenth century, though of course it had precursors. Seventeenth-century thinkers realised that they were confronted by something new and powerful, though they did not invent the word "scientist" (that came much later).

The thing about science is that it's continuous with rational inquiry more generally. We need a word for the phenomenon that I've sketched in the last couple of paras, and "science" is the word we've inherited. So I prefer not to use the word to mean simply "rational inquiry" and I think there's at least some fuzziness about, for instance, whether what we call political science is really best classified as science (usually, in fact, it isn't for pedagogical purposes). The main thing, however, is to make sure that we're consistent in any given context as to how we conceive of science and use the word "science". As so often, we'll create confusion if we use the word in two or more diffferent ways in the same discussion, or within the same argument.

Now, I don't accuse Jerry Coyne of doing that over here. He makes clear that he is using a broad conception of science while I am using a narrow one. It follows that we are not necessarily disagreeing with each other on anything.

But if we're not all careful to define our terms - or at least give some indication of how broad our concepts are - we run quickly into the possibility of confusion. Let's all tread carefully here. Oh, and it might be a good idea to apply the principle of charity and assume that our interlocutors are not saying weird or extreme things.

Scientism

Wikipedia has an article on scientism which contains a lot of information, but also shows that the word "scientism" is used in a wide range of ways, usually pejorative.

Is there a phenomenon that could be called "scientism" and which deserves to be denounced? I suppose there is. I suppose there are people who think the humanities are worthless, or that public policy favours starving arts faculties of funds, or perhaps that we could somehow understand, let's say Macbeth, without developing any sensitivity to Shakespeare's language ... perhaps by applying the methods distinctive of science (though how you would use controlled experiments, for example, to interpret Macbeth is far from clear). The idea that science (defined narrowly in contradistinction to humanistic forms of inquiry) could answer every question would, in my view at least, be untenable. I don't see how science, narrowly defined, can tell you how sympathetic you should be to Macbeth when he learns of his wife's death and replies, "She should have died hereafter." The distinctive techniques of narrowly-defined science are not going to tell a literary scholar, an actor, or a director how that line should be spoken.

If "scientism" refers to some of the more extreme or loony viewpoints mentioned in the previous paragraph, then I think it's a bad thing. I don't think we should be closing faculties of arts or humanities, or that distinctively scientific techniques are much use in understanding or staging Macbeth, or that studying great literature is useless anyway, or anything remotely in this ballpark. But then again, I don't see many other people expressing those sentiments either. Once again, someone may think these things, but if I see Richard Dawkins, for example, accused of thinking these things I'm not going to be too impressed.

The thing is, if you're going to denounce someone for "scientism" or complain that her ideas lead to "scientism", or are somehow reliant on "scientism" - and if this is meant to be a serious criticism - you must be using the word "scientism" in a sense that denotes something horrible or foolish or otherwise worthy of denunciation. It's no use denouncing someone for "scientism" and then, when called on it, explain that you were using the word in some other, more technical, non-pejorative sense (perhaps that the person takes a logical empiricist approach to philosophy). That's equivocation. It's cheating to apply the word in some non-pejorative sense that you secretly have in mind while at the very same time trying to get the pejorative connotations of other senses of the word.

A word like "scientism" lends itself too readily to this kind of argumentative cheating. So much so that I think that intellectually honest people should stop using the word; and, frankly, when I see people using it in current debates I am automatically suspicious of their intellectual honesty. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Voting out judges

Nothing much to say here, but this piece by Derek C. Araujo is worth a look if you don't usually frequent the Center for Inquiry's site. It's about Supreme Court judges getting voted out in Iowa in the recent American elections.

Sample:

The notion that "the will of the people" rules supreme in the United States is seductive, but wrong in an important sense. Under our system of government, political majorities cannot use the ballot box to trample the rights of minorities. And the only people standing between minority rights and a tyranny of the majority are the men and women in black robes so frequently maligned by conservative forces.

Conservative critics of the judiciary make a great show of respecting "the Constitution." In my judgment, their stance is unprincipled. Judicial decisions they agree with must be respected under the Constitution and the rule of law; when shown a judicial decision they don't like, however, they fulminate against "activist" judges and "robed masters" who are "unaccountable to the people." Never mind that unaccountability to political forces is an essential component of the system of government enshrined in the Constitution.

The idea that (at least some) judges are elected in 39 of the American states is incredible. Araujo again:

This practice is virtually unknown in the rest of the world, and with good reason. As the Founders of the U.S. well knew, if judges are to render objectively fair decisions based on law rather than public opinion, the judiciary must be independent. If judges are to prevent the majority from trampling the rights of minorities and unpopular parties, they must be shielded from electoral politics, special interests, the need to raise ever-increasing amounts of money to fund elections, the force of public opinion, or fear of rebuke by powerful political forces. The Founders therefore guaranteed that federal court judges would not be elected, but would be appointed for life, subject to removal only on impeachment and conviction of "high crimes and misdemeanors."