Stanley Fish, self-proclaimed “contemporary sophist,” recently weighed in on the “religion and science” question in the New York Times. For him, the chief problem we have in this area is that we’re too bothered by contradictions: “The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.”
As a historical claim, the latter part of the sentence is laughable and merits no consideration: it takes very little research indeed to find that the drive for logical consistency far predates any modern culture wars. It can be found not only in Plato, its most famous advocate, but also in Augustine, in Aquinas, in Śaṅkara and Kumārila. One might be tempted to find an exception in Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka school, which try to avoid having any position whatsoever; but even Nāgārjuna relies in his arguments on the assumption that our positions should not contradict each other – should make logical sense. Fish is smart enough to know this point; the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.
More interesting is the normative claim, the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by contradictions. After all, if that’s true, Fish may be entirely justified in lying. One can claim in the context of editorial journalism that consistency is merely a modern invention, and in the context of historical scholarship that it is an ideal as ancient as philosophy. That’s inconsistent, but consistency doesn’t matter.
Fish’s answer to the religion-science debates depends on just such a view: “the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another.” In a sense, Fish is taking up the logical implications of the NOMA view more seriously than Stephen Jay Gould had himself: “science” and “religion” can remain separate domains, not because they don’t contradict each other on important matters (it should be obvious that they do) but because that contradiction itself doesn’t matter.
Fish’s argument makes the case from everyday life. It’s not hard to imagine a fundamentalist Christian medical student during the week learning biological ideas founded on the presumption that human life evolved over millions of years, and then going to Bible fellowship on Sunday and speaking about human life on the assumption that human life was created by Jehovah in one instant. People can and do live with contradictions. Why should contradictions bother anyone, beyond pedantic philosophers bothered by obscure details?
Well, for starters, most of us already are bothered. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is fairly well established in social psychology: the perception of inconsistency among our own beliefs and actions is a motivating factor in its own right, one that makes us want to reduce this inconsistency. Perhaps Fish’s preferred form of spiritual practice would be a kind of therapy or meditation that makes us comfortable with such inconsistencies. He doesn’t, however, describe how such a practice could work, nor why we might want to follow it rather than just trying to make our beliefs and practices more harmonious. So we’ve already got a prima facie reason to try and reduce our inconsistencies and contradictions.
More than that: consistency is important for the efficacy of self-transformation as well. If one is trying to practice Osho‘s ideal of free expression for pleasure and sexuality, one will be hindered by simultaneously trying to practice the ascetic self-denial of a Theravāda monk; and vice versa. One’s efforts to become a better Christian will be hindered by learning in science class that core Christian beliefs are false. Attempting to practise contradictory ideals is like taking an expectorant and a decongestant at the same time: one undermines one’s own efforts. Perhaps Fish has never tried to become a better Christian or a better Buddhist or just a better person more generally, and has never had to deal with this problem; but for those of us trying to improve our lives, it’s a big issue. Consistency matters, and the differences between competing worldviews will not be resolved this easily in practice, let alone in theory.
Grad Student said:
I completely agree with your arguments for consistency, but I still have one quibble about your statement:
“…the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.”
Which should be compared to the relevant Fish quote:
“The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.”
I wonder if Fish is talking about the culture wars as a cultural phenomenon existing in the current public sphere, rather than the philosophical discussion of the subject. Hence his use of the word “context,” rather than, say, “arguments.”
Anyway, good post. I can’t believe I’m standing up for the guy, but I have a hard time believing that he is deliberately lying.
Amod Lele said:
Thanks! My problem is that Fish is saying that it’s the assumption, the idea itself, that comes from the context of the culture wars – not from the world itself, and it would seem not from any context beyond the culture wars. I suppose if you wanted to defend Fish’s integrity you could say that for us in particular it’s forced by the culture wars, whereas for Plato it was forced by the context of underlying Greek beliefs or something. (Strange claim to make when the Sophists defended a position like Fish’s, but I guess it’s imaginable.) On the other hand, I’m not sure if that’s necessary even from Fish’s perspective. If nothing’s wrong with contradiction, then what’s wrong with lying in the first place? You just say whatever’s pragmatically effective for a particular goal; it doesn’t matter if it contradicts your other beliefs, let alone contradicts some sort of external reality.
elisa freschi said:
Dear Amod, we have already had some disagreement on this point, and I hope not to sound too harsh.
Yes, of course, consistency matters.
But why should everything fight on the same battlefield? One’s beliefs, one’s biology class, one’s family, perhaps?
Or am I allowed to think that I, say, disinterestedly *love* my children although in the biology class I will talk about evolutionary strategies for the survival of a species (and include thereby love for one’s progeny)?
To put it even more briskly: am I allowed to say that my children/my husband/my mother/… are the best children/husband/mother/… in the whole world although I know you (and the rest of the world) would not agree? You will probably allow me to claim it, if only I specify that they are the best in the world IN MY view. Could not the same hold also for religion? Christian belief may be the best faith for ME. Its importance for me as a person would not be undermined by its acceptance by integralist scientists which beleive in science as if it were a key to all kind of statements.
(this post has nothing to do, by the way, with my personal life!)
Amod Lele said:
The question of saying your [relations] are the best in the whole world – that’s a tough one, in my view. In a sense it’s saying something which you know to be a falsehood, but which has important beneficial effects. A while ago I made a post discussing a similar, potentially false but surely beneficial, claim about children – ie that children will make you happy – and claimed that it involves lying to yourself. And, maybe a lie can be a good thing, even to oneself – a noble lie. In another old post I discussed the idea of the noble lie, and thought that one probably shouldn’t believe one is lying beneficially to others – but I’m not sure those arguments hold against lying to yourself. But none of this, in my view, changes the point that such a claim is a lie, beneficial or no. Your children aren’t the best in the world; you just think they are. Just as you might think the earth is flat, but it isn’t.
skholiast said:
Gould’s position, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s (which Fish is specifically treating), is not really that contradictions don’t matter at all, but that they do not *always* matter. This was defended by Wittgenstein, who said that we ought to ask about the times when a question becomes relevant; more recently it’s been argued even by certain logicians (e.g. Graham Priest), who suggest that it is possible to build systems in which not everything follows from a contradiction. It seems possible that the messy world of human practice might resemble such a para-consistent ‘system.’
Fish’s stance, though, does not really seem to be an intellectual or theoretical one at all—it’s more the position of someone who is bored by the whole science-religion dichotomy and annoyed when someone asks him “how can you believe X when you say Y”? He doesn’t see the question as relevant and he’s not interested in discussing it. Is this sophistry? Yes—or more specifically, misology, in the sense that Plato uses the word in the Phaedo: “hatred of argument.”
But I think that one can admit the general strategy that Gould or Smith wants to use, as one possible maneuver in a repertoire of different possible moves, without falling becoming a misologist. Fish’s stance is too extreme-pragmatists to be of much interest in itself (it shuts down discussion, rather than move it into fruitful or intriguing new directions—to use a Rortyan criterion), but a more modest stance can see NOMA as a sort of Thomistic move: When faced by a contradiction, draw a distinction. And this can provoke more discussion, potentially fruitful. I do not think that the NOMA argument works perfectly, but then, if it did, it would hardly be interesting—it too would shut down conversation. Luckily, the boundaries “between” the realms of relevancy are not solid, but more like fractals, and the interesting discussions proliferate the more thickly the more complex the “resolution” of the boundary gets.
I think it is more interesting to see the boundary and the distinction not primarily in terms of “science” and “religion,” (these vague terms) but between what Marcel called a “problem” and what he called a “mystery” (perhaps not less vague, but at least existentially relevant in the context of Marcel’s thought):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/#6
No, the fact/value ‘split’ is not absolute. While the immediate relevance of the facts of physiology to my enthusiasm for Bach and my boredom with Mahler is not obvious, I can certainly imagine some chain of argument which drew them closer together. But even so, I find it hard to imagine that physiology or physics could ever prescribe to me that I *ought* to like Mahler.
Amod Lele said:
Intriguing reply, skholiast. I haven’t read Smith’s book, and the reply here is only to Fish and not her. Fish is, as you note, something of an easy target; but my choice of an easy target is deliberate here, as I’m trying to think through these sorts of foundational issues and wanted to start my reflections with something I could say with confidence.
On the other hand, I see Gould as even less sophisticated than Fish on these sorts of matters (it’s quite a different story when he stays purely within the realm of natural science, of course). Gould’s approach relies far too heavily on that concept of “religion,” which (I think) you and I have agreed lies somewhere between misleading and worthless. Fish at least acknowledges that there are genuine contradictions between at least some “religious” and “scientific” claims, which Gould doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge.
Similarly for distinctions between fact and value. Now clearly not all factual statements and all value statements are bound to contradict each other, and I hope it didn’t sound like I was saying such a thing. Yet I think contradictions there do happen and shouldn’t be neglected (“it is good for me to pursue money over all other ends” and “the pursuit of money makes me miserable” are at least in tension with one another.) On Mahler, we would probably need to start with the question of aesthetic relativism in the first place; if there’s any sphere of life or philosophy where I think relativism has the potential to be persuasive, it’s aesthetics. If we accept aesthetic relativism it’s hard to talk about facts or values in the field; but if we don’t, if there are some sorts of objective standards of value in art, then it doesn’t seem impossible that physiology or even physics would play some part in determining or at least adjusting those standards.
Now having said all that, I’m intrigued by your comment because some of the directions you suggest seem significantly more fruitful than either Gould’s or Fish’s. I haven’t read Priest and I’m very curious about how he could justify such a claim; I hope to get a chance to check him out soon. Similarly, I don’t have a good sense of the problem/mystery split; prima facie it seems like it might make more sense than the science/religion distinction.
skholiast said:
My guess is that when you find a contradiction that feels like it matters–and this is a purely intuitive question–you have several choices; and certainly at least one of those choices is to treat it as a spot on the fractal boundary where a ‘higher resolution’ would be of benefit. (One can also run away; or shrug,like Fish; or resign oneself to hypocrisy; or try to improvise an excuse; and I feel there must be other options as well). I am sure you are right to want to focus in on these places– they are where the real work of philosophy gets done (as you note by pointing to Plato in your initial post–Socrates could not stand to let it rest with a shrug and a “very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes!”)
Regarding Priest, his (& others’) work on paraconsistent logic is fairly hard for me to follow– I did not do so well with higher maths and formal logic, though I like to keep trying– but his glosses in informal language are quite intriguing, and there are several online places where one can read on this (or could– I last looked into this last year). What I find intriguing, though, is the possibility of marrying the kind of “analytic” rigor of the paraconsistent approach with the more existentially engaging distinctions that Marcel makes when he discusses the problem/mystery distinction and primary vs secondary reflection. As you probably know, Badiou makes a lot of hay in putting Godel and later set theory to work on the notion of the exception, or of the undecidable, precisely in the arena of ethics and in politics. My own persuasions are quite different from Badiou’s (I am a friend to ‘re-enchantment’, he is an avowed opponent), and I wonder about his tendency to focus on mathematics more than on logic; but I think he is onto something, even though I would take it in a very different direction.
michael reidy said:
‘In this building there are many flats’ someone said. I can imagine Ayer and Wittgenstein meeting in the hall collecting their post.
A: Why do they keep sending out this dreck?
W: If one will, the other must.
A: What is that catchy tune you are whistling?
W: It’s a little thing by Ultravox
The image has gone only you and I
It means nothing to me
This means nothing to me
Oh, Vienna
This means nothing to me
This means nothing to me
Oh, Vienna
A: Very interesting.
elisa freschi said:
Dear Amod,
it seems that we keep on disagreeing on the same point, namely, I admit genuine truths which are subject-dependent, that is, about whose content their experiencing subject is the ultimate judge. You don’t. Hence, I am sure that there are several (many?) parents who can claim that their children are their main source of joy and be honest about that (although I agree that in many cases one thinks/hopes they will be and then experiences they are not … it can even be the case that one still pretends they are because one does not want to admit the opposite to be true). You, on the other hand, seems to deny this possibility. Why? Because (I already asked you a direct question about that) of a statistic in Dan Gilbert’s book. Isn’t that being more royal than the king? All statistic experts will tell you that statistics do not have anything to say about single individuals. Hence, there may will be several/many individuals who honestly claim that their children made them happier. Similarly, they may honestly claim that their children are the best ones in the world and the same applies to many other instances. At the same time, they would know that this is just a subjective truth (that is, it is subject-dependent) and, hence, that it does only entail that “THEY view their own children as the best”, not that EVERYONE ELSE also has to. This means that there is no problem –in such cases– in accommodating two conflicting views, one just has to shift point of view.
Amod Lele said:
Elisa, let me first be clear: I never intended to say that children never make people happier. I can see how my first post on the subject might be read that way; so I did not write that post clearly enough. Obviously statistics are generalizations which do not apply to every individual. And I have little doubt that there are some people whose children do indeed make them happier. The question I wanted to raise in the post I cited above was about self-deception: cases in which we believe that children make us happy, when they don’t.
Here there’s a significant philosophical issue whatever the statistics say. Let us assume even that the research cited by Gilbert is wrong (or wrongly cited), so that having children makes 70% of parents happier and 30% of parents less happy (established by a reliable set of measures other than self-report). But suppose also that by self-report, 90% of parents say that their children make them happier (I imagine it’s at least that many). Then in most cases, parents are indeed being honest with themselves and others when they say their children make them happier. Nevertheless, there remain at least 20% of parents who think they’re made happier by their children, and aren’t. Those are the ones I’m concerned with; the specific numbers don’t really matter, if we grant that such people exist. (You may not want to grant that point, and that may be where our disagreement lies, but if so I’ll save further discussion for a future comment or post.)
On children being best, the distinction between honesty and truth is significant here. One can be honest about a false belief. If I sincerely believe the earth is flat and I tell you it’s flat, I’m being honest; if I sincerely believe the earth is flat and I tell you it’s round, I’m lying. But the lie in this case is nevertheless true, while the honest statement is a falsehood. It’s entirely possible for me to say honestly that my children are the best when they aren’t, or that the earth is flat when it isn’t.
Now, having said all that, I could grant that is possible for each person’s children to be the best for them to have, in a more limited sense – since we haven’t defined what “best children” consist of. That is, if I love Alex and Bella
because they’re mine and I don’t love Charlie and Danielle (or other children) because they’re not mine, then Alex and Bella are indeed the best children for me to have. That doesn’t mean they’re the noblest, smartest, strongest etc. children in the world, though – “best” by some more general measure.
Which takes us, finally, back to “religion and science.” One might say that Christian prayer is better than cognitive therapy for meeting a particular person’s spiritual needs, and vice versa for another person. In that sense different traditions can be best for different people. But the efficacy of Christian prayer (for health benefits, let’s say) doesn’t mean that God actually exists or answers the prayers, as the prayer’s content would seem to imply.
elisa freschi said:
Thank you, Amod. I think this helps. You are right, I have not defined good enough what I meant with “best”.
My point is: for parent X it is *true* to say “For *me*, my children are the best ones one could ever wish”. This can be true (it is not just “honest” of X to say so) because this truth is subject-dependent. On the other hand, truths such as “the earth is flat” are, as far as I can judge, subject-independent.
Amod Lele said:
I’m still not sure if “subject-dependent” is the best way to describe such a truth. A healthy diet is also something that differs from person to person; a healthy diet for Michael Phelps involves many thousands of carbohydrate calories daily, whereas the same diet would be very unhealthy for a typical desk worker. But the claim can be independently evaluated; it would be incorrect for Phelps to say that a healthy diet for him consists of 1200 calories a day. Even when things are true only about us, we can still be wrong about them. Such truths are not dependent on the subject believing or speaking them; “what is healthy for Michael Phelps to eat is not healthy for Amod Lele to eat” is true whether it’s you, me or Phelps making the claim.
skholiast said:
I hope I will be pardoned for interjecting in a conversation that was going on before I arrived. I grant that one might contend that, say, prayer was superior to cognitive therapy “for me” or “for you,” if my reasons for saying this were based upon some accident of our history. But the claim of [generic, western] “science” is that, accidents aside, and accounting for them, we can specify which approach would be Better-with-a-capital-B, were we to start with a level playing field and no false beliefs “accidentally” intruded.
In some cases, however, the accidents are not eliminable. “My kids are the best, *for me*” simply means, “my kids are mine.” This does not make it false, just tautologous. This is because these kids are irreducible and unrepeatable. The “accident” of their being paired with me is part of their existence. The cognitive therapy/prayer example is different; while it is impossible to switch out my kids, it is (some claim) possible to switch out (or at least “revise”) “belief systems” (to use a word I don’t find much more uesful than “religion,”–less, actually–but it’ll do here).
Such belief-revision is what is involved when one “worries about the contradictions.”
Hence it occurs to me that resolving the “science/religion” question along the lines suggested by NOMA might involve making tautologies more numerous: Evangelical Christianity is my religion, therefore its ‘therapy’ is best for me because it’s mine. There is a certain existential appeal to this approach– making everything more and more specific, so that generalizations (and science relies upon generalizations) apply less and less, & eventually not at all– but I think it undercuts more than just science if it is the only strategy. (In fact I’d say it is just incoherent, for “generalizations are impossible” is, well, a generalization.)
Sorry if this comment goes on too long– the subject is on my mind as I blogged about it recently in another connection.
Amod Lele said:
I don’t think that science tries to find an approach which is “Better” for everyone. The analogy to physical health may apply to your comment as well as Elisa’s. In physical health, the best therapy for someone with hypothermia is very different from the best therapy for someone with a high fever. Similarly, as I understand it, experimentally grounded psychology claims that the best therapy for histrionic personality will be very different from the best therapy for obsessive-compulsive personality. It’s empirically verified that different treatments work more effectively for different people.
Furthermore, as I understand it, people with personality disorders often tend to seek out therapies that are worst for them, because they’re the ones that allow them to stick with familiar and problematic behavioural patterns. So narcissists seek out fancy hot-shot thinkers who validate their sense of importance, obsessive-compulsives gravitate toward rehashing every element of their history, etc. If we stick with this analogy, it might be that the traditions people are raised in are in fact worst for them, because they leave people in their old ways of thinking and don’t allow them to see the flaws in their traditions. Better that every cradle Jew convert to Buddhism and vice versa.
michael reidy said:
This is perhaps a little simple. Your children are perhaps making you miserable. You wish you never had them. This it seems would banish your present woes. However you couldn’t possibly know this as then you would have a wholly different other life. I’m sure there’s a wise Buddhist sadhana for this form of dukkha, clinging to what is not and could not be. Likewise and similarly you may say ‘they are great brats but I feel my life is so much better for having them’. Again as the positivist scientist said – not even wrong. No information is being transmitted, just a positive attitude.
Some years ago there was great talk about David Benatar’s book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Didn’t read it. I will wait until it turns up in the Better not to have been published barrow.
Amod Lele said:
I’m interested in Benatar’s book, not least because it strikes me as having resonance with Buddhist views of dukkha.
michael reidy said:
Amod:
When you wander into the Samsara Shop for the nth. time the Bodhisattva will swoop down on you:
-How can I help you?
He has refused the option of not being born and I would suggest that is more likely to be touchstone of core Buddhism rather than a miserablist aversion.
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elisa freschi said:
Amod,
I’m sorry for not having been understandable. My definition of subject-dependent is: that whose truth depends on the subject. And it is quite difficult to argue that what a healthy diet is, depends on the subject. A better example would be: “I like tomatoes”. This is something no one else could know better than me. One can argue that there might be disturbing circumstances (e.g.: since my childhood I have been told that I hate tomatoes and hence I am under the delusion of hating them). So, I might be partly unreliable. Still, one would in vain look for someone who can tell better than me whether I like them or not.
Skholiast, I see your point. But ‘accidents’ can be set aside if we ask ourselves, say, what is the most-polluting chemical factor? On the other hand, subjects (and their accidents) count if we want to make them refrain from using these chemicals.
Michael Reidy,
I think your example about saying “my kids are horrible, but I feel my life is much better because of having them”, nails the point. It is not ‘scientifically’ wrong (in my terminology: from a subject-independent point of view it is not wrong …simply because it has no subject-independent truth value).
Amod Lele said:
I would agree that in general, liking different foods is something that the subject mostly knows best; but there as elsewhere there are exceptions. (Since this is basically a discussion of what gives pleasure, it seems like the flipside of our earlier discussion about pain.) Example: I despise beer when I first try it. But I keep drinking it for the sake of the alcoholic buzz, and as a result I start liking a few brands of beer more than others. Gradually the number of kinds of beer I like starts to expand, because I try more beer and also because I get used to the flavour. I continue to think of myself as someone who dislikes beer in general, until one day I start rhapsodizing at length about various kinds of beer and someone responds “Wow, sounds like you really like beer!” At that moment, they could tell me what I like better than I could. (This example is not entirely hypothetical.)
But more important than such counterexamples (which I’ll grant are relatively rare): if we grant that liking foods or drinks is largely or even entirely subject-dependent, to what extent can we make the same claim about children? That I like my children better than anyone else’s may be mostly subject-dependent. That they’re the best children for me – that is not subject-dependent (though in most cases it is probably true that one’s own children are the best for one to have). That’s why the analogy to health is important: “good” and “best” are in most cases not subject-dependent in the sense you’re describing. That’s even more true when we get to “religion,” I think. It may well be the case that some traditions (including secular therapies) are better for some people and other traditions are better for others – a position I’m fairly sympathetic with. But their value is not at all subject-dependent (or at least extremely little). It is not the case that people always know what tradition is best for them. Indeed, as I said to skholiast above, it may turn out that we tend to select the tradition that’s worst for us, because it’s the one that fits with our preexisting biases and bad habits.
elisa freschi said:
Amod,
what I labelled “subject-dependent” is one’s claim “My children are, for me, (e.g.) the most beautiful ones”. So, I am just talking about one’s experience of them, I am not saying that one’s children are good in themselves as one’s happiness-pill.
My first concern, was, however, to reflect whether it is possible to imagine contradictory claims to be simultaneously true, though from different viewpoints. One could feel “my children are the best” and, at the same time, know “my children are just normal children…it is just my love for them who make me feel that they are the best”. I started addressing this issue in my blog,
http://elisafreschi.blogspot.com/2010/02/but-after-all-reality-is-multifold-to.html
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