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Epicurus, Jan Westerhoff, Lucretius, Pali suttas, rebirth, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Halbfass
I am not entirely sure that I agree with the argument I am about to make. However, I do find it at least plausible and I have not seen it made before. I think this argument is worth somebody making, and I think it is worth doing here.
That is: I would like to make a Buddhist argument against rebirth. An argument against rebirth on Buddhist grounds.
I say “on Buddhist grounds” to make the methodological caveat that this is not, to my knowledge, an argument that any Buddhists have made in the past. Rather, it is a Buddhist argument in the sense that I am a Buddhist and I myself make the argument on Buddhist grounds, as a Buddhist theologian. It disagrees with most Buddhist positions that have been taken in the past – just as Nāgārjuna and Linji and Zhiyi and the author of the Lotus Sūtra all did when they made their radical revisions of the Buddhist path as known up to that time. Many Buddhists of course disagree with these thinkers, as well they should; Buddhist sectarianism expresses real and important differences. Still, most of us accept that the arguments of Linji or the Lotus Sūtra are legitimately Buddhist despite their radical differences from the Buddhism that came before them.
So to the argument itself. Most of us, it is not controversial to say, are deeply attached to our selves. The typical claim made by every non-Pudgalavāda Buddhist is that this is a problem. The idea of self is not only an illusion, it’s a harmful illusion, because it leads us to an attachment to something that does not deserve that attachment. We cling to the self and what is associated with it. In the Cūla Sīhanāda Sutta, the Buddha says that plenty of other teachers have warned against other types of clinging; what is original to him, what makes his understanding the fullest, is that he specifically warns against clinging to an idea of self.
And it seems to me that that sort of clinging, the clinging to self, is exactly what lies behind much of the widespread human belief in an afterlife. We are so attached to the idea of our selves existing that we cannot bear the thought of those selves ceasing to be, cannot even imagine it. We often act and speak as if death is something unusual that won’t really happen to us. This latter insight about our denial of death is hardly new to me; Freud, for one, wrote:
We have shown an unmistakable tendency to put death aside, to eliminate it from life. We attempted to hush it up, in fact, we have the proverb: to think of something as of death. Of course we meant our own death. We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality. (Reflections on War and Death, chapter 2)
But Freud was no Buddhist. The point I want to make here is the Buddhist one: belief in an afterlife, including rebirth, is a clinging to self. It is our obsession with our selves and our own existence that makes us postulate the continuance of that existence, whether in a heaven or in rebirth. Without that unhealthy obsession, we wouldn’t need that belief: we would be in the healthier world of Epicurus and Lucretius, where “death is nothing to us”. From a Buddhist perspective, the existential dread that greets the thought of our complete nonexistence is a healthy spiritual practice, one that helps us realize just how unsustainable our attachment to self turns out to be.
So too, it matters how much empirical observation has shown a connection between the mind and the brain. We have long known that changes to the brain, like drugs or injuries, affect the mind; contemporary neuroscience has explored this connection in excruciating detail and it has been quite successful in doing so, a progressive research program. The Epicureans appear to have been right that the mind is in that sense material. And so it seems logical to presume, with the Epicureans, that when the brain stops functioning, the mind will stop with it. By contrast, there seems to be far less evidence that minds can exist in any sense not connected to physical brains. Given the state of the empirical evidence as I understand it, rebirth appears to be not merely a belief that sustains our attachment to self, but an illusion that sustains our attachment to self: exactly the sort of thing that Buddhism is supposed to be all about fighting against.
Now there is one major problem with a Buddhism that rejects rebirth, one that Jan Westerhoff and I have both noted in the past: if one rejects rebirth and also accepts the doctrine that the sole good in life is the reduction of dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness), then it would seem that the best way to proceed in life is to kill oneself – or, if one is more altruistically oriented, to kill others. Wilhelm Halbfass points to a group called the Saṃsāramocakas, described in some classical Sanskrit texts, who supposedly took up a related conclusion and went around killing people to eliminate their dukkha. But we only know the Saṃsāramocakas through their opponents; it is not clear they actually existed. Nearly all the rest of us human beings would take their supposed position as a genuine reductio ad absurdum: the prasaṅga (consequence) of these positions is one that we cannot accept, and therefore we must either accept rebirth or accept goals in life other than the reduction of dukkha.
Westerhoff takes the first of these two options: he thinks that as Buddhists we must be entirely committed to dukkhanirodha and that we must therefore grasp at whatever straws we can find to prove the existence of rebirth. I do not. A core tenet of Buddhism has always been the need to see things yathābhūtam, just as they are, and it seems to me that a rebirth doctrine does not do this; it is one more form of illusion, and, if my argument above is correct, an illusion that leads us to exactly that form of clinging which the Buddha is most concerned to reject. Rather, I think we must take the second option, and allow that there is more to life than dukkhanirodha, as most self-identified Buddhists have in practice done throughout history.
Amod: You said that you would like to make an argument against rebirth “on Buddhist grounds”, but one of your grounds doesn’t seem very Buddhist, as far as I know, namely: “It is our obsession with our selves and our own existence that makes us postulate the continuance of that existence, whether in a heaven or in rebirth.” I am not a Buddhist scholar, but I don’t know of any Buddhist text that posits that our obsession with our selves is the motive behind ideas about rebirth; do you know of any such text? This argument seems to rely very much on a psychoanalytic ground, not purely Buddhist grounds. In the absence of a Buddhist text that makes such a claim, it would seem that you are taking a psychoanalytic idea and trying to present it as Buddhist due to some similarity between the psychoanalytic insight about denial of death and the Buddhist idea of clinging to self. It’s good that you revealed the sources of your thinking by sharing the quote from Freud, but if you wanted to argue “on Buddhist grounds” it seems you should have dumped the psychoanalysis and quoted a Buddhist text.
Furthermore, I could be wrong, but I have always understood the Buddhist idea of clinging to self to be not just about my “own self” (as you said) but about “any self”, i.e., the selfness of any being, which is an idea considerably more distant from psychoanalysis than a mere preoccupation with my own self.
Amod: FYI, I just googled “rebirth” + “secular buddhism”, and on the first page of search results is Stephen Batchelor’s 1992 article “Rebirth: a case for Buddhist agnosticism”, which quotes Śāntideva apparently as an example of a Buddhist ground for an argument against rebirth. But such a ground is very different from the psychoanalytic one in your post, as I noted above.
Thanks, Nathan. I didn’t mean that all my grounds were Buddhist, only some of them. If all Buddhist arguments had to be made entirely on grounds already made by other Buddhists, I think Buddhists would have a very hard time defending the tradition or reacting to new developments in the world (let alone making anything we could call progress). So no, I’m not aware of any existing Buddhist text that says our obsession with self is the motive behind rebirth, but that’s exactly why I begin the post by saying “this is not, to my knowledge, an argument that any Buddhists have made in the past.” One of the reasons why they haven’t made it is that they were in an environment where rebirth was taken for granted – and the psychological and neurological research of the past 150 years, which is also not Buddhist, gives us more reason than before to believe that to accept rebirth is not to see things yathābhūtam. Premodern Buddhist environments therefore had relatively little need to explain belief in rebirth, just because they assumed it as true – for the same reason we have little need to explain belief in democratic decision-making.
What is in premodern sources is a discussion and recognition of the fear of death. At the beginning of Bodhicaryāvatāra ch7 there is a memorable discussion of how the fact of death catches us unawares and fearful, and in a way that does evoke a clinging to self: we think “I have not started this! This I started, but it remains half-done! Death has come from nowhere! Oh no, I am stricken!” Put that together with the previous paragraph, and I think you do get Buddhist grounds for treating belief in rebirth as a product of clinging to self. I can’t imagine Śāntideva would have accepted such an argument, but then I also can’t imagine the historical Buddha would have accepted the Lotus Sūtra.
And while the Buddhist idea of clinging to self does refer to selves in general, I think the paradigm case is our own selves: there’s so much rhetoric “turn away from ‘I’ and ‘mine'”.
Thanks—that all makes sense. Unsurprisingly, I agree about the consequences for the rebirth hypothesis of modern psychological and neurological research. I never think about rebirth—not only because it wasn’t part of the culture in which I was raised, but also because it doesn’t seem to fit with my science education and work in a science institution.
Self-centeredness (or myside bias, etc.) as the consequence of “asymmetry” in perception has been well described in, e.g.: Emily Pronin (2008), “How we see ourselves and how we see others”, Science, 320(5880), 1177–1180: “People see themselves differently from how they see others. They are immersed in their own sensations, emotions, and cognitions at the same time that their experience of others is dominated by what can be observed externally. This basic asymmetry has broad consequences….”
You note that human belief in an afterlife is rooted in clinging to self. Perhaps. But this is not the basis for the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth. For a Buddhist, rebirth is actually quite horrific. There are Buddhists with superficial motivations who aspire to favorable rebirth — but the point of Buddhist practice is to escape from karma and rebirth altogether. Escape is possible, because our self and our world are based on illusion. This is not illusion in the sense that things don’t appear — just that things are conditioned on the mind that experiences. A mosquito lives in a difference realm than a human being, brings a different set of habits and rigid views, and has a different set of experiences. Even within the human realm, a psychopath experiences a human interaction differently than a Benedictine monk. The Buddhist goal is to see through these illusions — to be free of karma and rebirth. The very fact that the illusions exist, I suggest, is evidence of rebirth.
Jim, this is a really important point: that Buddhists have traditionally viewed rebirth negatively, as a problem. I think that point significantly complicates the argument that I made above. I’m not ready to give up on it yet, though. For one thing, the rebirth doctrine in India predates Buddhism – it was clearly there in the early Jains, and more importantly I believe it was in the pre-Buddhist portions of the Upaniṣads. There, I think it was viewed without any of the negative valence that Jains and Buddhists would come to put on it. After that, I think the existence of rebirth was basically taken for granted by all comers – the Cārvāka/Lokāyata school seems to have challenged it, but it’s not clear to me that they were taken seriously. It seems plausible to me that this universal acceptance of rebirth – whatever valence attached to it – may have been because it provided a convenient way to express attachment to self.
Hi,
Without getting involved in esoteric debate, it seems to me that, if there is no Self, the notions of reincarnation/karma are nonsense. What/who is reincarnated? Certainly, people have individual personalities (mind?) as they also have different shaped faces and different size feet but those particular personalities, shapes and sizes have no separate existence of their own.
Yes, although somewhat oversimplified, that’s the prevalent conclusion of naturalized or secular Buddhists (not to mention earlier Buddhist debates); for example, the 1992 article by Stephen Batchelor (who, 25 years later, published a book titled “Secular Buddhism”) that I mentioned in a previous comment says: “In order to free oneself from suffering, one needs first and foremost to free oneself from clinging to such a notion of self identity. But how does one square this with the idea of rebirth, of something distinct from that which dies but which is somehow reborn and so passes from life to life? To answer this question, more or less every Buddhist school has come up with a different explanation—a fact that in itself suggests that their answers are based on speculation. Most schools claim that what is reborn is some kind of consciousness. Some say that this is simply the sixth sense (manovijnana); others propose the existence of a foundation consciousness (alayavijnana); the Tantric traditions talk of a combination of extremely subtle energy and mind. But as soon as one hypothesizes the presence of some kind of subtle stuff, no matter how sophisticated the technical term one invents to denote it, one has already reintroduced the notion of some kind of esoteric self-substance.” Batchelor goes on in the same article to cite some earlier Buddhist thinkers, including Śāntideva, apparently as grounds for a Buddhist argument against rebirth.
Hi Nathan,
Thank you for responding.
Assuming consciousness exists, it isn’t a commodity but a process (as with observation). Processes exist but have no Self. Also, they are not substances nor are they reincarnated.
Relabelling Self as consciousness is a subterfuge which attempts to objectify a verb and substitute “having” for “being”. To my understanding, this is contrary to the fundamental Buddhist ethic.
John, as I understand him and you, Batchelor is saying something very similar in the quoted passage to what you’re saying in your response. Batchelor’s next few sentences, which I didn’t quote above, are: “For the Prasangika-Madhyamika school of Buddhist philosophy, whose seventh- and eighth-century Indian proponents are often regarded as having taken the deconstructive logic of Nagarjuna as far as it can go, adherence to any kind of reified self or substance, no matter how subtle, is essentially in contradiction to enlightenment and liberation. Having rejected all concepts of some esoteric stuff that sneaks across from one birth to the next, the most one can legitimately say is: ‘I do.’ Any further elaboration of this ‘I’ will inevitably lead into reification.” The rhetorical structure and context is different but the ideas involved are very similar.
In reply to Nathan (6/8),
Hi again,
Does the expression “I do” not also objectify a process? We say “It is raining” but the rain is the weather, the weather is the rain and both are processes not objects. There is no “it” that rains and, similarly, no “I” that “does”.
If it rained yesterday but is sunny today, the rain has not been reincarnated (nor has it gone to Heaven or Hell because it was good or bad). Conceiving reality as a collection of objects (instead of processes) is delusional, not reality itself.
Science promotes that delusion. The Universe is a (unbounded) process not an (bounded) object and, as with Self, substance is fictional. There are no such objects as protons, electrons, neutrons, waves, particles, etc. because they are processes (verbs) not objects (nouns).
Personification is the issue and widening it exposes it as a fantasy. Nirvana, Enlightenment, etc. is the (often intuitive) understanding of that and a living experience unrelated to death, karma and rebirth as Buddhism professes.
Having never read Bachelor, I don’t know if he is singing the same song.
John, departing now from whatever Batchelor has said, some of what you said in your previous comment (such as “Conceiving reality as a collection of objects (instead of processes) is delusional” and “Science promotes that delusion”) assumes that we are deluded because we cannot distinguish between reality and models of reality.
But as long as we can distinguish between models and reality, then we can find ways to compare models to reality, and ways to compare one model with other models, and ways to make models of models of models, and there is no problem with speaking of “I” or “a collection of objects” or “such objects as protons, electrons, neutrons, waves, particles” or “processes” because we know that we are just speaking of models that represent (more or less well) certain aspects of reality (the famous parable of the blind men and an elephant, right?). Verbs and nouns are both useful for speaking about models of reality, which is why we have both verbs and nouns.
The prevalent conclusion of naturalized or secular Buddhists is that the idea of rebirth does not fit well with our current best models of reality. (Amod referred to this in his post above when he spoke of “the state of the empirical evidence as I understand it”, but it is not the core of his argument.)
Started a new thread
In response to Nathan.
What happens if the common herd adopt the scientific model as reality?
(Is science not the modern God?)
Some might argue that the inevitable result is solipsism which, although irrational, is the prevailing Western philosophy and the cause of almost all our social woes. Along with the scientific model, possibly religions that preach the existence of Self/Soul lay at the root of that.
At least religion attempts to offsets solipsism with morality and notions of Heaven/Hell but science offers no such counter-measure.
John, no need to worry—there’s no single scientific model of reality that the common herd could adopt! Science has produced a vast collection of models, not a single model. Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning “knowledge”) as I understand it is the collective activity of many people (and their tools). I think it would be wrong to think of science as a “modern God” because science is too pluralistic, and since science is a product of humans it couldn’t take the place of an supreme being that created humans. Science didn’t create humans in the way that God is said to have created humans. But, sure, there are modern replacements for God (but science isn’t one of them): somewhere Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that the idea of interbeing is a successor to the idea of God. As for the problem of solipsism, I don’t think much about it, and I don’t see how it would be a result of science.
Hi Nathan,
You said that you fail to understand the connection between science and solipsism. Although somewhat repetitious, perhaps the following clarification will assist.
The issue is not whether nouns and verbs are useful but whether the Universe is an object or a process. I am saying that science, as generally understood, explains reality as a collection of objects thus promoting the notion of Self as an entity. The religious idea of Soul does the same which is counter-productive because the notion of Self lays at the root of anti-social (solipsistic) behaviour.
As an alternative to entities, reality can be rationally explained as a system of processes (gravity, electro-magnetism, growth, combustion, digestion, thinking, etc) which are not objects but represented by them (as mathematical symbols represent addition, subtraction, etc). The significant difference is that, because processes are not entities, they have no Self. Consequently (by this explanation) understanding is de-personalised, hopefully with the result that it replaces unfounded/irrational belief (feelings).
The “processes” interpretation outlined above is somewhat analogous to Schopenhauer’s idea of The World as Will and Representation. It also accords with Kant’s noumena/phenomena, would satisfy Hume by rendering substance superfluous and conforms with Wittgenstein’s ideas about language. If you have a better theory, I shall be pleased to learn of it but divulging your feeling that a supreme being created humans isn’t helpful.
John, what you said makes more sense now because I see that your definition of solipsism (as “anti-social behavior”) is different from my definition (as “extreme skepticism about reality”).
I never said that I have what you call a “feeling that a supreme being created humans”; you must have misinterpreted my response to your comment about “science as the modern God”. I was explaining why science is not the modern God; I was not endorsing or promoting God. (You’re the one who brought up God, not me; I would have been happy to leave Him out of it!)
What I would like to emphasize about your argument is that both the “process” view and the “object” view (which seem to correspond roughly to holism and atomism) are descriptions of models of reality. Whatever the advantages of the “process” view over the “object” view (and there may also be disadvantages that would point to a better third view beyond those two views), the “process” view and the “object” view will both lead to delusion if we are unable to distinguish between models and reality.
John, I should have also said that while I now understand what you meant when you said that science’s “inevitable result is solipsism”, I don’t see how that can be correct. Defined your way, as “anti-social behavior”, science is the opposite of solipsism because science is highly social and requires collaboration. Defined my way, as “extreme skepticism about reality”, solipsism is an obstacle to science, not a result of it.
Anti-social behaviour is a result rather than a definition of solipsism. Solipsists believe their feelings are the only reality and are unable to attach any validity to thoughts, experiences, and emotions other than their own. In a nutshell, they believe Self to be World (Truth). I venture that most scientists are of that ilk because they believe reality to comprises physical objects governed by scientific laws and dismiss all other explanations as invalid.
You mention holism and atomism but that distinction can also be described as that between the conceptual and the perceptual, the imaginary and the apparent or idealism and realism. Relativity theory appears to lay on one side of the divide and quantum physics on the other (processes are continuous whereas objects are discrete) where particles ultimately resolves into processes (virtual particles and quarks which are practically and theoretically undetectable as objects i.e. they are imaginary).
Carried to its own logical conclusion, the scientific explanation demonstrates that objects are imaginary but scientists seem reluctant to accept that in much the same way as Christians claim Heaven exists but are not enthusiastic about dying. The resultant contradictory (unintelligent) jumble is most people’s reality and, in that circumstance, the only practical guide is self-interest. Hence the connection between science, religion, Self, solipsism and anti-social behaviour.
Your definition of solipsism is what I would describe as nihilism.
John, however we define solipsism, I can’t accept your argument for at least the following reasons (and there may be other reasons, but I can only say so much in a blog comment):
(1) As I mentioned above, science is very heterogeneous, as are scientific models and scientists and philosophers of science. It is not true “that most scientists are of that ilk because they believe reality to comprises physical objects governed by scientific laws and dismiss all other explanations as invalid”. This statement assumes that scientists have only one model or are unable to distinguish between their models and reality. But both assumptions are incorrect: just google “model-based science” for innumerable counterexamples (well, OK, they are numerable: Google returns about 59,900 results for that search term). Or google “science” + “process model”, which returns about five million results. As Ronald Giere stated in “How models represent reality” (2004): “Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes.” Notice all the plural words in that sentence: scientists, models, aspects of the world (or of reality), specific purposes. Your argument does not accommodate this plurality.
(2) Your argument seems to confuse ontological and epistemological models (and this confusion may underlie the assumptions that scientists have only one model or are unable to distinguish between models and reality): the distinctions between holism and atomism, or processes and objects, are ontological; the distinction between “the conceptual and the perceptual, the imaginary and the apparent or idealism and realism” is epistemological. Holism and atomism are ontological models; the other distinctions refer to one or more epistemological models.
(3) You impute beliefs or assumptions to scientists without any evidence: e.g., “scientists seem reluctant to accept that”. Then you claim an analogy between the alleged beliefs of scientists and the beliefs of Christians. I have worked with many scientists and I have never met one (let alone many) who professed the belief that you impute to them. So the analogy with Christian beliefs fails.
All of the above undermines your account of the relation between “science, religion, Self, solipsism and anti-social behaviour”.
Good Evening Nathan,
1. I do not dispute that science is heterogeneous. Whatever your experience, common perception is that objects exist as a scientific fact and I am not aware of scientists publicly denying that or informing us that mass is imaginary. If they did and I missed it, what happened to E = mc^2?
2. I do not confuse ontology with epistemology but maintain they are inseparable. Knowledge without an ontological foundation is merely speculation. Also, because every apparent “object” is both the whole of a part and a part of the whole, the distinction between holism and atomism is linguistic not actual. That is why I prefer the alternatives I listed.
3. Refer to point 1 above.
Let us not forget that the issue is whether the objectification of processes is of any significance, (not the identification of responsibility for such objectification). My contention is that it is significant because, in the case of Self, it inevitably leads to solipsism. Do you agree or disagree on the basis of my definition?
John, you said that (1) “common perception is that objects exist as a scientific fact” and you said that (2) the ideas of “mass” and “E=mc^2” are somehow evidence for, or an example of, 1? I don’t see the connection between “objects existing” and “mass” and “E=mc^2”. Physics teachers teach that mass and E=mc^2 are ideas. As physics teacher Art Hobson said of E=mc^2 in his article “Teaching E=mc^2: mass without mass” (2005): “Like all the equations of physics, it stands for an idea.” Or we could say: it stands for a model.
Then you said “Knowledge without an ontological foundation is merely speculation”, which doesn’t make much sense to me. For me, ontology is a kind of modeling; it can lead to knowledge, but I’m not sure that all knowledge requires ontology to avoid being “mere speculation”. Then you said that “the distinction between holism and atomism is linguistic” but in my view the distinction between holism and atomism is not just linguistic; it’s ontological (i.e., about modeling): a good discussion of the distinction (in my opinion) can be found in Mario Bunge’s “Systemism supersedes atomism and holism” (1979).
Then you referred back to point 1, but I can’t make sense of point 1, as I said above.
Then you said that “the issue is whether the objectification of processes is of any significance (not the identification of responsibility for such objectification)”, but that contradicts your earlier statement that “science promotes” the delusion of “conceiving reality as a collection of objects (instead of processes)”. Perhaps you’ve retracted the earlier statement, which would be great.
Leaving aside all of that and just asking the question: “Does the objectification of processes, in the case of Self, inevitably lead to solipsism?” I would answer, it may lead to solipsism if that “objectification of processes” is the only model you’ve got, and especially if you can’t distinguish that model from reality.
To begin with your final paragraph, I submit that the average Joe has little understanding and even less interest in the issues we have been discussing. His extremely basic model of reality is vague and confused and he seldom (if ever) thinks about it. To him, the existence of substance is an obvious fact, he has never heard of the Myth of the Given and his reality is as evidenced by his eyeballs with smattering of religion. Below is Nietzsche’s description of human nature and, to me, solipsism is an apt label for it.
“In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendour, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself – in short the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could have arisen among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees ‘forms’; their feeling nowhere leads into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blind man’s buff on the backs of things.”
Perhaps you are more charitable and disagree with this description but, if so, I doubt that anything will be achieved by us debating it and we must agree to disagree.
The connection between objects and mass is that objects are generally believed to consist of substance which has mass. Again, that is the common understanding and I am unaware of main-stream science refuting it.
As regards the connection between epistemology and ontology, the following quotation explains why the two are linked:
‘An error lurking in the of a system of thought does not become a truth simply by being evolved. It remains an error; and if thought is consistent, that consistency can mean only a more intricate enmeshing in error. Usually it requires a mistake in logic to produce correct conclusions from false premises, but false conclusions can be drawn from false premises with strict logical accuracy. In this way, integral and elaborate systems of thought can be unravelled in which the rules of logical procedure are rigidly adhered to, and yet the entire system can be invalidated by an error at its base.’ John Frederick Peifer.
correction to quotation:
“An error lurking in the roots of a system of thought …”
John, I think you’re right that what I’ve been trying to argue for (rather incompetently, I’m afraid) is a more charitable view of humanity and science than the one you have been presenting. I suspect that the question of how people really think is, like many things, an empirical question that could only be answered through systematic research into the actual conditions of knowledge, as found through, for example, research in applied educational and developmental psychology. The argument you’ve made, as well as Amod’s argument in his post, would be clarified by empirical research. In the case of Amod’s post: How common, in a given population, is the connection between obsession with self (or clinging to self) and belief in afterlife (or rebirth)? In the case of your comments: How common, in a given science-educated population or in some other population, is the belief (or, as I would say, the model) that “objects consist of substance which have mass”? (Modern physics teaches models that are more complex than this, as physics teachers like Art Hobson have written about extensively.) And how common, in a given population, is the connection between this belief (or model) and solipsism? Psychologists and sociologists do research about questions like these all the time. Our hypotheses about these issues need to be tested.
We live in an age where capitalism, socialism, justice, human rights, etc are imagined to be the issues but that is a sham. They are all fronts for greed which lurks in the background and fuels the agenda. The de facto purpose of human existence is “having” (in one form or another) not “being” despite all the babble about humanism. I attribute this to egotism (the objectification of Self) promoted by society at every turn. Greed thus feeds on itself and the result is ever-increasing dishonesty. Boosting the economy and satisfying greed is imagined to be the panacea but greed is insatiable and not alleviated but aggravated by prosperity. As I see it, the problem is philosophical/psychological not economic and rooted in a primitive/superstitious notion of Self. I live in Africa where the problems created by egotism/greed are worse than elsewhere and the cause is self-evident. There is no need for empirical research and its result, if honest, would be unacceptable. The ego believes only what it wants to hear.
To explain that “greed” or “egotism” or “objectification of self” or the combination of all three is/are the root cause of social problems is too simple, and to say that such a simple explanation is so self-evident that it doesn’t need to be tested is too anti-scientific for me. In a previous comment you contrasted knowledge and “mere speculation”; this simple explanation definitely counts as mere speculation.
If you lived in Africa, you would know exactly what I mean as a person living in a wet climate knows what rain is without requiring a scientific explanation and such knowledge is not mere speculation.
OK, I will agree that it can count as knowledge for you, because I can recognize that different people (and different groups of people) have different criteria for what differentiates knowledge from mere speculation.
It is not necessarily a case of different definitions. You see somebody you know and immediately recognise them and a three-year-old knows what rain is without having to refer to scientific/statistical research. Neither is speculation.
To me, the link between greed, egotism, objectification of self and immoral behaviour is obvious and shouldn’t require scientific evidence. If someone else finds that incomprehensible, it doesn’t render my understanding speculative.
Fair enough. Another way to put it, closely paraphrasing the sentence that I quoted above from Robert Giere’s article “How models are used to represent reality” (2004), is that you have created a model to represent an aspect of the world for a specific purpose. (It may be that in addition to a model you are also proposing, or assuming, certain principles, hypotheses and generalizations: see Giere’s article for his account of the relation between all of these. Furthermore, models can be said to be at different levels or degrees of abstraction.)
I agree with what you say about scientific models. They are as maps which describe the terrain but any resemblance between lines and symbols on a piece of paper and the actual landscape is imaginary. The general public do not understand this and mistake scientific theories (maps) for reality.
Neils Bohr got it right when he said “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” In short, science is about vocabulary and words mean whatever we say they mean. Hence, the scientific world is one of our own creation i.e. it is solipsistic. Certainly, science works. So also does my grandma’s recipe for macaroni cheese but she does not claim that it tells us something important about the Universe.
John, that’s an interesting quote from Niels Bohr. I had to look it up because I wasn’t sure how literally Bohr meant the word “say”. I see there are a variety of interpretations of what Bohr said, and given the context of the quote I side with those who point out that “say” doesn’t refer only to language and linguistic vocabulary but to representation in general, including representations more and less abstract than language. Note that Bohr’s sentence just before those two quoted sentences is: “There is only an abstract quantum physical description.” The word “abstract” may indicate a representation more abstract than language. Giere emphasized this too in his article that I cited, where he said in a footnote that “abstract models are definitely not to be identified with linguistic entities such as words or equations. Any particular abstract model can be characterized in many different ways.”
After I posted my last comment I realized that when I replaced Giere’s phrase “Scientists use models to represent…” with the phrase “you have created a model to represent…” I was basically admitting that YOU (yes, you) are a scientist. And that suddenly reminded me of psychologist George Kelly’s analogy of the “person as scientist”, which Kelly utilized to explain much of the everyday psychology of ordinary people. I did a little more research on this and I discovered that Kelly’s metaphor inspired a whole book in 2011 titled Science as Psychology by Lisa Osbeck (and others) that I’m eager to read. There’s also an interesting 2010 article by psychologist Dušan Stojnov titled “Psychotherapist as philosopher of science” which extends Kelly’s metaphor by pointing out that if the ordinary person is (like) a scientist, then the psychotherapist who treats that person’s mental disorders has to be (like) a philosopher of science. The point of all this is that there’s not a hard line between scientists and ordinary people; ordinary people are scientists (in a way), and scientists are ordinary people.
Your mention of your grandma’s mac & cheese (as we call it where I live) is right to point out that not all skilled human activity relies on some kind of modeling. Making and eating mac & cheese does not require much if any modeling. Another example that comes to mind is riding a bicycle: for me to stay upright on my bicycle doesn’t require any kind of modeling; it’s just a process of proprioceptive feedback etc. The idea of rebirth, on the other hand, requires some kind of model or other representations, however confused or convoluted.
Thanks for staying with me and for stimulating all these ideas.
I agree that “abstract models are definitely not to be identified with linguistic entities such as words and equation” but submit that is exactly what “ordinary” people and “ordinary” scientists do. They mistake the recipe for the meal.
I don’t agree that “abstract models can be characterised in many different ways” (other than language) and alternatively submit that language has different forms. Body language is one of them although somewhat unscientific.
I agree that science is psychology but suggest both are mind/language games (per Wittgenstein). Mind is language which is an attribute of the body not a “ghost within the machine”. The body learns language in much the same way as it teaches itself to walk, swim, drive and play tennis, golf, etc. This (Spinozian) understanding renders the concept of Self (and, hence, physical rebirth) fictional.
Cooking and riding a bicycle are both talents as also thinking but the last is exceedingly rare because, whereas most talents are “external”, thinking isn’t. Communities of farmers produce farmers as fishing villages produce fishermen but (to me) thinking is philosophy (a verb not a noun) which ultimately resolves into language investigating itself (“internal”).
The core question of philosophy is: Do words really mean what they are believed to?
Answering the above requires thinking which is creativity because it questions and often revises understanding. By this process, words alter their meaning and a new language is created using the same old words (or similes). Thinking thus invents a new World to explore and, in that sense, rebirth is mental not physical.
By subjugating itself to consciousness, mind (language) is transformed from a believer to explorer. (That is roughly how Kant defined Enlightenment which is somewhat analogous to Nirvana). Alternatively, as Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is overcoming the bewitchment of intelligence by language to the purpose of escaping the fly-bottle (mind). Language is thereby demoted from master to servant.
Although you have described me as a scientist (as you have probably gathered and despite being a professional engineer) I have little patience with analytic/scientific philosophy (demolished by Wittgenstein) and am more Platonist than Aristotelian.
I thank you also for your perseverance. From my side, our exchange has been equally enjoyable.
John, I find what you’ve just said to be eloquent, and I imagine that the differences in our approaches are largely owing to our different backgrounds. My work has been mostly in visual science communication, so (what I call) language is a relatively small part of what I produce for money, and I can easily agree that language should be servant and not master. At the same time, I’ve never had much use for Wittgenstein’s thinking despite having several of his books on my shelf, because too much of what he did is about ordinary language-games, which I don’t find to be central to my usual problems as you can guess by what I’ve said and quoted.
A defect of Wittgenstein’s thinking (from my point of view) is his rejection of important areas of science, especially neuroscience, as irrelevant. It may have been easier for him to get away with that attitude in the time period and place in which he lived, but I agree with those who would find such an attitude indefensible today because neuroscience provides too many important insights (e.g., on questions about language and consciousness). I would also take the slash out of your phrase “analytic/scientific philosophy” since there are now many post-analytic philosophers of science (Giere, whom I’ve been quoting, is one example). Even in Wittgenstein’s time there was non-analytic scientific philosophy, such as some of the work of John Dewey (who greatly influenced the aforementioned George Kelly), but as far as I know Dewey and Wittgenstein completely ignored each other despite dying within about a year of each other and despite each being post-Kantian in his own way. If we were to differentiate our approaches according to famous philosophers of that time period, you might be called Wittgensteinian and I Deweyan (though I would object to being called Deweyan due to what I know that Dewey didn’t know, and you might make the same objection to being called Wittgensteinian).
Hi Nathan,
I wouldn’t describe myself as Wittgensteinian or anything else really. A number of Wittgenstein’s ideas resonate with me but my preferred writers are Emerson, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
My philosophy is “homegrown”, derived from personal observation and based on the tenet “simplify, simplify, simplify”. Unless one derives one’s own understanding it isn’t authentic. Basic conventions must be accepted for what they are but, beyond that, relying on somebody else’s say-so is imitation/pretense.
I reject “scientific” philosophy because, as previously expressed, science is no more scientific than cooking recipes. There are too many contradictions/discrepancies for most (any?) scientific theories be correct. The most fundamental is the issue of substance but there are many others.
You mention Giere as one of many post-analytic philosophers of science but previously quoted him as saying “abstract models are definitely not to be identified with linguistic entities such as words and equation”. What is science without definitions and equations?
A few responses:
“Simplify, simplify, simplify”: Or to paraphrase Einstein, make it as simple as possible but no simpler. More evidence that you are a scientist!
“Basic conventions must be accepted for what they are”: But one should understand where the conventions come from and question them as needed.
“Science is no more scientific than cooking recipes”: Fair enough, but this just shows that scientific philosophy is a synonym for good philosophy, since good science (which produces reliable knowledge) is to good cooking (which produces edible food) as bad science (which produces unreliable knowledge) is to bad cooking (which produces inedible food).
“There are too many contradictions/discrepancies for most (any?) scientific theories be correct”: Again, in the model-based approach it is just a question of whether scientific models represent aspects of reality well enough to suit the scientists’ purposes. There is no perfect model for all purposes, but that is not a problem.
“The most fundamental is the issue of substance”: If substance is an issue for a certain model, then use a different model.
“What is science without definitions and equations?” It’s not that scientists never use definitions and equations, but the practice of science is much more than writing definitions and equations. Even if we’re just asking how many kinds of representational structures are used in science, there are many more beyond definitions and equations. If you were to give me a general science textbook with only definitions and equations, and none of the many kinds of figures that continue to be invented and used in science, I would be extremely suspicious of that science textbook because it would leave out too much. When I said that the idea of rebirth does not fit well with our current best models of reality, those models use a variety of representational structures, more than definitions and equations.
It seems we are at cross purposes.
I don’t refute that science is useful but its usefulness is similar to a map which uses lines, symbols and a legend to represent the landscape. Similarly, science uses definitions, equations, explanations and diagrams but, in the case of science, the “ordinary” person and “ordinary” scientist believe those representations exist in reality. By analogy, science is cartography whereas philosophy is geography and it is advisable not to confuse them.
The fact that scientific text books contain explanations, diagrams, etc in addition to definitions and equations does not change the above. The Giere quotation you provided refers to “words and equations”. It does not mention diagrams, explanations, etc. else I would have included reference to them in addition to definitions and equations.
“By analogy, science is cartography whereas philosophy is geography and it is advisable not to confuse them”: Fair enough, but this analogy is apt in another way as well: cartography is essential to geography, and any geographer who ignored cartography entirely would not be doing geography that would interest me. I also like this analogy because as geographer Bill Bunge argued, “Geography is a field subject” (1983), which implies by analogy that philosophy is a field subject as well. By the way, philosopher Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther has a philosophy book on this subject due out next year titled When Maps Become the World.
“The Giere quotation you provided refers to ‘words and equations’. It does not mention diagrams, explanations, etc. else I would have included reference to them”: Regarding your last paragraph, if you’re asking for an account of how all these kinds of representational artifacts relate to modeling, you might find a satisfactory response in one of Giere’s other articles, such as “An agent-based conception of models and scientific representation” (2010) or “The role of psychology in an agent-centered theory of science” (2012). Or perhaps you would find the rest of that same footnote by Giere satisfying enough; it reads: “Nor should abstract models be thought of as merely formal. They are created already interpreted. To take a homey example, we all know how to plan a trip to a supermarket, including making a shopping list. Such a planned trip is an abstract entity. I would even call the plan a model of a trip, a model that might never apply to anything if, for example, an emergency prevents the trip from taking place. Most abstract scientific models are much more complex, of course, but, as abstract entities, they should not be regarded as any more mysterious than a planned shopping trip.”
The science/cartography and philosophy/geography analogy came to me whilst replying to you and I like it. The comparison is somewhat similar to that between reading about a place and being there or information and knowledge which ties in with the language.
By simplification: Words, equations, symbols, explanations, diagrams and other representations are all language because they communicate information. By extension, the physical Universe might be said to comprise information which is form with knowledge being substance where the bridge between them is understanding.
Simplifying further: Form and substance (metaphysics) combines with information and knowledge (epistemology) as understanding which is self-created. Hence, the whole kit and caboodle condenses into creativity which necessarily exists as the cause of itself.
By this understanding, philosophy (knowledge/substance) is the creator and science (information/form) the created. (Geography gives rise to cartography not vice versa). Hence, the conceptual (knowledge/substance) creates the perceptual (information/form) and the Universe is essentially ideal (imaginary) not real (apparent).
How does that appeal to you? I expect that you might have an issue with my somewhat loose terminology but, as Giere says, it is the idea that is important not the words.
Incidentally, nobody seems to be following this conversation except us. Therefore, instead of continuing on this blog site, why don’t you post your WhatsApp ID. I will then message you my email address and we can continue on OneNote instead.
Meanwhile, I have downloaded some of Giere’s books and am busy with the introduction to “Science Without Laws” which resonates with much of what we have been discussing.
John, I’m sure both of us will keep learning and refining our understanding. Personally I’m not comfortable saying something like “the Universe is essentially…” because I don’t think I know enough to finish that sentence; I’m more comfortable with more modest problems, although if someone were to put a gun to my head and to say “Tell me what the Universe essentially is or I will kill you!” I would reluctantly describe my best model of the Universe to try to stay alive (which would really just be solving the more modest problem of staying alive rather than the grander problem posed by my assailant—perhaps some academic philosophy is a bit like this scenario). WhatsApp isn’t much used where I live, in contrast to the rest of the world, so perhaps we should end our thread-hijacking of Amod’s blog post and see each other again sometime on one of Amod’s future posts. Have fun reading Giere!
Below is the first paragraph of Kant’s essay on Enlightenment.
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
Possibly, if someone reads too much and thinks too little, they become hoarders of ideas rather than thinkers and, having substituted “having” for “being”, they cling to life instead of living. Also, book knowledge and understand are not the same.
I am almost 70 having lived quite an adventurous life (including several close encounters with the hereinafter) and am not afraid of sticking my neck out, least of all with regard to philosophy. What is the worst that can happen?
Thanks for the debate. It was fun.
John, I expected a response like this given my use of the word “comfortable”, which wasn’t the best way of putting it, I admit. I am not one who mindlessly defers to authority, and I sympathize with Kant’s attitude in that essay, as well as with Michel Foucault’s famous 1984 essay on Kant’s essay, which said: “The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries.”
In my case it’s not fear that would prevent me from finishing the sentence “the Universe is essentially…” but prudence resulting from a realistic assessment of the labor of diverse inquiries yet to be realized. But let’s pretend that I am in the scenario that I described, with a gun at my head, and I have to throw prudence to the wind to save my ass. I would say: “The Universe is essentially the interactions that produce both the patterns studied in physics as well as the supraphysical patterns studied in, e.g., the social and cognitive sciences. This statement is similar to Bergson’s 1903 statement that ‘Reality is mobility’ (‘Modern science dates from the day when mobility was set up as an independent reality’), although Bergson was wrong about so much, such as unnecessarily restricting the range of applicability of scientific methods. To say that ‘the Universe is essentially ideal’ confuses the supraphysical patterns called ideas with the interactions that produce them (interactions which, nevertheless, should not be called physical, because to do so would similarly confuse physical patterns with the interactions that produce them).” Whew, I survived!
A final thought: If philosophy/science is similar to geography/cartography, the philosophy of science is equivalent to the geography of cartography. This opens scope for a whole new area of research: The philosophy of the geography of cartography. Possibly academics will find someone to provide grants for that.
Nathan, I agree that Truth is “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life” or state of “mind” rather than a state of affairs but most people believe it to be the latter. Generally, they substitute science for religion and scientists for priests (although they are better likened to cooks).
I also agree that curiosity is the motivator of philosophical thought but facts without a theory are idle gossip with the result that one can wander the desert for forty years without getting anywhere. Some may say this is prudent (perhaps they are afraid of getting lost although they already are) but it is unproductive. Also, one does not learn to ride a bicycle without the risk of falling and it is better to start there than with a motor-bike
Let us recollect how our debate reached its current status. My contention is that the philosophy of science is equivalent to studying the geography of cartography and, although that pursuit may be of interest to some, it is unrelated to philosophy.
To the purpose of debunking science, consider the following:
Assume two random points (A and B) and a line through the midpoint of the join between them, perpendicular to it and intersecting the join at P.
It follows that the nothing can be said about A or B except that they are the reflection of each other on opposite sides of P i.e. A = -B and B = -A (if P is taken as the origin and the coordinates of A are x,y the coordinates of B are -x,-y). Adding these two equations we get A + B = – A – B or (1)(A + B) = (-1)(A +B) hence 1 = -1. Multiplying both sides by x, we get x = -x and (adding x to both sides) 2x = 0 (for all x)*.
Per the above, the entire two-times-table reduces to a list of zeroes and (by extension) the same applies to the three-times-table, four-times-table and all the rest. Hopefully this anomaly will contribution to your understanding of the philosophy of science by eliminating belief in math. As with language, math (and hence science) is but a set of conventions which “work” as do cooking recipes and are similarly unrelated to philosophy.
*(There are several other methods of achieving the same result but this is the simplest I know of).
John, I don’t agree that philosophy of science “is unrelated to philosophy”, and I am certain that our host Amod Lele would not agree either, given that he has written about philosophy of science often on this blog (last year he wrote: “I have found myself thinking more and more lately about the philosophy of science, and finding it increasingly important for the rest of philosophy”). To review Amod’s relevant posts, click on any of the relevant category links in the sidebar, e.g.: natural science, social science, philosophy of science. Perhaps you would find another blog more to your liking.
It is unavoidable that my views are unfashionable. That is necessarily so because they are original not second-hand.
Plato once described man as a biped without feathers. I had almost forgotten that.
John, whether your views are “unfashionable” or not is unimportant; what is important is the quality of the reasoning and evidence that led to your conclusions. Your conclusion that philosophy of science “is unrelated to philosophy” is not well grounded, in contrast to the opposite conclusion reached by Amod that philosophy of science is “important for the rest of philosophy”.
As discussed, science is analogous to cartography and there is very little philosophy attached to that (whatever Amod may think). Anyway, this debate is between you and I. Why do you keep mentioning Amod? Are you one of his disciples or something?
Nathan and John, thanks for your extended conversation, and for keeping your disagreements civil. You are welcome to continue the discussion here if you wish, or to take it elsewhere if you prefer. I’ve been following your debate though I haven’t had time to contribute, and I apologize for my current comment system’s way of handling nested comments – thanks for putting up with the tiny columns! (I presume Nathan is mentioning me simply because this is my blog and it was my post above that sparked this conversation.)
Nathan is correct that I find the philosophy of science a deeply valuable activity. I believe that the activities we collectively refer to as natural science have made the most successful contributions to human knowledge of all human endeavours. They do not by any means exhaust human knowledge or its possibilities, and attempts to make all knowledge scientific are doomed to failure for some pretty basic reasons. But they have given us one view of what it looks like for the contributors to a field of inquiry to come to rational agreement. For that reason, I have found (as does Alasdair MacIntyre) that Imre Lakatos’s and Thomas Kuhn’s historically and socially grounded philosophy of science recommends a promising method for how philosophical inquiry may proceed across traditions. You are welcome to disagree.
“Why do you keep mentioning Amod?” The answer should be obvious: this is Amod’s personal blog, which he considers to be a scholarly project that attempts to build his own cross-cultural philosophical system, as he explains in the “About this blog” page that is linked at the top of every page of the blog; we are his guests, and not very well-behaving ones given that we are spamming (or thread-hijacking) his post with conversation that is barely relevant to the original post and that doesn’t rise to the level of a coherent debate about the subject of the post. Your statement that “science is analogous to cartography and there is very little philosophy attached to that” is merely a weak analogy that fails to account for all the differences between, and diversity within, science and cartography and geography and philosophy.
I didn’t see Amod’s comment before I posted mine; if I had seen it, I wouldn’t have bothered to respond since it answered the question well enough.
Greetings Amod,
I remain of the view that philosophy is to science as geography is to cartography. There are various types of maps that serve different purposes. Similarly, science has various models that have different applications. The geographer may find maps useful but studying them is not his main area of research nor should it be. In my view, much the same applies to the philosophy of science else the situation created is that of the tail wagging the dog.
The above is my general view and does not apply to anyone personally. I do not presume to tell anyone what they should or should not do.
Moving on from philosophy to science:
As you may have gathered, my main issue with science is that, because its area of interest is physical reality, it promotes materialism. Hence, it indirectly promotes greed and moral degeneration. In ages past, religion countered this to some extent but, in the current scientific age, increased reliance must be placed on law enforcement. This solution is difficult to implement in Africa where corruption is ubiquitous and those responsible for law enforcement are often the worst culprits.
I have travelled extensively in Africa and have observed that the more “advanced” the environment, the less moral the population. In this circumstance, science is a two edged sword.
The philosophy of science was not the subject of your original post but somehow it crept in. The issue then became whether it is ungracious of me to air my views on the subject if they conflict with yours. Whatever the case, the conversation seems to have exhausted itself and I doubt any purpose will be served by continuing it.
Thank you for the use of your forum.
John said: “The issue then became whether it is ungracious of me to air my views on the subject if they conflict with yours.” I never thought it would be ungracious of you or me to present arguments and conclusions that conflict with Amod’s, but I was concerned that our conversation was drifting far off topic in a way that might have led Amod to cross his arms, scowl, and think, “When are these doofuses going to stop treating my blog post like it’s a social media platform?” The issue (for me) was the increasing irrelevance of our conversation to the original post. However, then Amod’s comment (which I didn’t see until after I posted my following comment) absolved us of our irrelevance, apparently.
Recent published monographs and papers in geography are so diverse that some of them are hard to distinguish from cartographic research, or from other social sciences, or from philosophy. The idea that geographers shouldn’t study mapmaking or map use as their main area of research doesn’t fit contemporary reality, because that’s exactly what many of them do. Take a look at recent back issues of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers or Applied Geography or Geoforum or Geographical Analysis or The Professional Geographer and you can find many examples of cartographic research intimately intertwined with other aspects of what geographers do.
I once read a magazine article titled “The Science of Cooking”. Ergo, cooks are scientists.
Goodbye Nathan.
John said: “cooks are scientists.” Yes, in a way, they are; why not? Cooks and scientists are both humans engaged in “superlative artifactual performance” (which was philosopher Barry Allen’s definition of knowledge in Knowledge and Civilization). Above you said that “science is no more scientific than cooking recipes”, and I agreed; but where you went too far was when you said that “Cooking and riding a bicycle are both talents as also thinking but the last is exceedingly rare”, as if one could cook well without thinking, which is obviously false. Again it seems I find myself defending the aforementioned “charitable view of humanity and science”, whereas you seem to be taking a misanthropic and anti-science position.
Nathan, you miss the point entirely. If I say that two things are as different as chalk and cheese, that isn’t disproved by referring to academic papers about chalk and cheese.
On the subject of thinking; suppose I buy a pizza comprising eight slices. Is it one entity or eight? If both, 1 = 8. If the slices are each 1/8 and I turn them upside down, does each slice become 8? Mathematically that is so although false but mathematics involves thinking. What thinking is that?
Are the Universe, the Milky Way, the Solar System, the Earth each one entity or many? Is an hour a single entity, 60 minutes, 3600 seconds or whatever number of whatever units we choose. How does counting “work”? If it there isn’t any sense to it , what sense can there be to mathematics/science? One might as well study a spiders web and imagine that to be philosophy (and a whole herd of academic somewhere might well “think” it is).
No doubt spiders find their webs useful. That doesn’t mean they are of philosophical significance but comparing them to science might lead somewhere. Maybe spiders don’t “think” much (whilst imagining they do) but at least most have enough sense to avoid being caught in their own web.
OK, let’s continue the silly analogies. John said: “If I say that two things are as different as chalk and cheese, that isn’t disproved by referring to academic papers about chalk and cheese.” But if what you thought was chalk is actually milk, and I refer to evidence that cheese is derived from milk (unless the cheese is really a cheese alternative), and you continue to insist that milk is chalk, who has missed the point?
I could have used another analogy, say apples and pears, instead of chalk and cheese. The point is that apples are not pears and chalk is not cheese although they may have similarities. Also, the fact that possibly many farmers grow both apples and pears and maybe it is possible to manufacture both chalk and cheese from milk is irrelevant. Try thinking about it. Perhaps the penny will drop.
There are variations within both science and philosophy that are not irrelevant. So much depends on whatever the problem is that scientists and philosophers happen to be addressing. If the problem is the same, a scientist and a philosopher may make the same arguments and reach the same conclusion and there is no difference at all between what they are doing; the scientist is philosopher and vice versa. Some philosophers today do what they call “empirical philosophy” that is indistinguishable from social science. But usually scientific problems are more empirical and philosophical problems are more conceptual.
Here are a couple of relevant quotations from The Scientist as Philosopher by Friedel Weinert (which, however, does not address today’s practice of “empirical philosophy” that I just mentioned):
“It is not contested that scientific discoveries have a bearing on philosophical notions. What is debatable is the extent of this influence. The concepts used by humans are not eternal. They must be adapted to new empirical discoveries. This is where philosophy comes to the fore. For the new empirical findings suggest adaptations of the conceptual network. Many great scientists were aware of this impact of new discoveries on the fundamental notions. This awareness made them philosopher-scientist. The present study will provide numerous illustrations of this awareness up to the present day. But the philosopher must ask a question of evaluation: To which extent are these conceptual shifts really philosophical consequences of the empirical discoveries?”
“It is important for both scientists and non-scientists to remember that science is much more than a set of equations: it has both philosophical and cultural consequences for the understanding of the wider world around us. Scientists and philosophers know that science has philosophical dimensions. They are embedded in the actual discoveries. This context is the focus of this study. In particular: how the great scientists saw the impact, which purely scientific discoveries had on our most cherished philosophical notions. We must emphasize that the interaction between science and philosophy is an ongoing concern.”
Thank you for the Weinert quote which (as with Gierre) seems to confirm what I have been trying to say all along.
To recap: My contention is that Joe Soap doesn’t understand science in its proper context but believes it to consist of definitions, equations, diagrams and all the rest (which I call language). Language is thereby substituted for understanding and, in the absence of understanding, self-interest is Joe’s only criterion. Also, his “scientific” perception of reality as a collection of objects is materialistic and results in a value system based on “having” rather than “being” (which puts the cart before the horse). The nett consequence of all this is greed (in its various forms).
Let me also explain that I subscribe to a definition of philosophy unrelated to science. In my view, the purpose of philosophy is to escape Plato’s cave or, to use Wittgenstein’s terminology, escape the fly-bottle by overcoming the bewitchment of intelligence by language. To me, this is somewhat synonymous with the Buddhist idea of Nirvana and the related Hindu concept of Maya. Joe’s linguistic interpretation of science is inimical to that purpose and, in that circumstance , science is not the ally but the enemy of philosophy.
As I see it, to the extent that philosophy follows the same direction as science, it aggravates the problem of greed and contradicts its own purpose (per my definition). Theoretically that isn’t necessarily so but, in Joe’s case, it is. This does not mean I am anti-science, only that I oppose confusing science with philosophy.
Your diagnosis of Joe may be correct, but it may not apply to Jan or Bob or Lea or Ann or Tre or Amy or Roy or Mat or Zoe or Pam or Les or Jim or May or Eva or Gus or Fay or Dan or Val or Sue or Lou. Each person’s understanding may deficient in various ways.
The recognition of this diversity of meaning-making in clinical psychology, and the development of a way to deal with it, was one of the strengths of the personal construct psychology of George Kelly, who inspired that recent book titled Science as Psychology that I mentioned above but haven’t read yet. (Kelly’s approach also had some weaknesses and is now outdated in some aspects.)
So I don’t say that your diagnosis of Joe is wrong, but if it is the only diagnosis that you have for philosophical disorders then you will not be able to successfully treat all the various cases: people other than Joe may misunderstand science in a similar way but not be greedy, or they may be greedy without having Joe’s particular misunderstanding of science.
I fear this is true even in clinical psychology today (not to mention spiritual traditions): some clinicians may have theoretical frameworks that are not flexible enough to successfully treat all the various presenting cases, leading to poor care or even malpractice. (I can provide pointers to the relevant literature about this if you’re interested.)
In my experience, greed is ubiquitous and Joe’s situation is fairly common although, as with every rule, there are exceptions.
Anyway, to my mind, detailed scientific analysis is not required because to me (as previously explained) philosophy and science are unrelated. By analogy, one might be a good driver whilst knowing very little about the mechanics and electrical systems of automobiles whereas, per your understanding, nobody would hit a golf ball without first undertaking detailed research into all the scientific aspects.
Perhaps that is the difference between being a Platonist and an Aristotelian.
You’re right that detailed scientific analysis is not “required” if there is no problem. It is only when certain problems arise that such inquiry is “required”, although it can be smart to practice such inquiry skills even when no problem is apparent, to discover as-yet-unperceived problems.
If I encounter a problem (in my body, car, or golf skills) and if someone else has already solved the same problem and if I have access to someone with that knowledge (a physician, a car mechanic, a golf coach), then it is not “required” to repeat any inquiry that has already been done to understand and solve the problem. Indeed, engaging in unnecessary inquiry is a bad idea when time is limited, as many Buddhist texts, such as the parable of the poisoned arrow, have emphasized. But if I encounter a rare problem that has never been understood or solved, scientific analysis may be “required” if I want to understand and solve the problem.
Again, so much depends upon what the problem is. There is no perfect model for all problems, not even a Platonic model or an Aristotelian model.
I have an acquaintance who Googles just about everything. He is an excellent example of my observation about people not thinking. To poach from Tom Sowell: The problem isn’t that Johnny doesn’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t even know what thinking is.
Many years ago, I was an avid reader but now prefer thinking and writing. Its more creative and, to me, creativity is the basic substance of the Universe (not the sub-atomic particles scientists babble about). Also, I approve of what Emerson wrote about self-reliance. Why carry that heavy weight around on your shoulders if you never use it?
People ask: How do you know that? Where did you get that information? Perhaps they are puzzled because they have never had an original thought in their entire life. There is a difference between knowledge, understanding and information but most people (including so-called educators) are unaware of it. Unconscious incompetence is an apt description which fits with solipsism.
To the proficient, knowledge comes before understanding followed by information. First knowing then thinking and finally talking/action but the common herd reverse that order and run aground with thinking. Here I again refer to Kant and his description of nonage.
A typical human is best led by a ring through his nose but in this day and age that is not possible. The best one can say about the result is that it is entertaining.
I have always liked the following statement by philosopher of science Donald T. Campbell that conceptualizes scientific methods in a very broad way, embracing both science and philosophy:
“More and more I have come to the conclusion that the core of the scientific method is not experimentation per se but rather the strategy connoted by the phrase ‘plausible rival hypotheses’. This strategy may start its puzzle solving with evidence, or it may start with hypothesis. Rather than presenting this hypothesis or evidence in the context-independent manner of positivistic confirmation (or even of postpositivistic corroboration), it is presented instead in extended networks of implications that (although never complete) are nonetheless crucial to its scientific evaluation. This strategy includes making explicit other implications of the hypothesis for other available data and reporting how these fit. It also includes seeking out rival explanations of the focal evidence and examining their plausibility. The plausibility of these rivals is usually reduced by ramification extinction, that is, by looking at their other implications on other data sets and seeing how well these fit. How far these two potentially endless tasks are carried depends on the scientific community of the time and what implications and plausible rival hypotheses have been made explicit. It is on such bases that successful scientific communities achieve effective consensus and cumulative achievements, without ever reaching foundational proof. Yet, these characteristics of the successful sciences were grossly neglected by the logical positivists and are underpracticed by the social sciences, quantitative or qualitative. Such checking by other implications and the ramification-extinction of rival hypotheses also characterizes validity-seeking research in the humanities, including the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Hirst, Habermas, and current scholarship on the interpretation of ancient texts. Similarly, the strategy is as available for a historian’s conjectures about a specific event as for a scientist’s assertion of a causal law. It is tragic that major movements in the social sciences are using the term ‘hermeneutics’ to connote giving up on the goal of validity and abandoning disputation as to who has got it right. Thus, in addition to the quantitative and quasi-experimental case study approach that Yin teaches, our social science methodological armamentarium also needs a humanistic validity-seeking case study methodology that, although making no use of quantification or tests of significance, would still work on the same questions and share the same goals of knowledge.”