Digressions&Impressions

Contextual Naturalism, Ernest Nagel, and The Philosophy of a Free Society.

It follows that the human scene is as much an integral part of nature, and as valid a subject for the philosopher's concern with basic features of existence, as is any of its other sectors. As contextualistic naturalism views them, man and his works are not inexplicable occurrences, incomparable in every respect with other natural processes. Men come into being and act the way they do only because of the operations of natural forces, and they perish or cease to behave as men when forces no less natural disrupt the normal organization of their bodies and of their fields of behavior. On the other hand, though the conditions of man’s life are thus continuous with the rest of nature, his behavior exhibits features which are discontinuous with other parts of existence. For man is not simply another odd item in the inexhaustible catalogue of created things. He possesses the apparently unique gift of an inquiring mind, which enables him not only to act under the compulsion of internal springs of action and external pressures, but also to direct his impulses and to master many of the forces in his environment.

This gift of intelligence man owes to the organization of his body and the character of his environment, and no supernatural agency or disembodied soul is required to explain it. It is this organization, complicated by the structure of his surroundings, which also accounts for men’s moral and evaluative behaviors. The possession of needs and preferences, and the exercise of reflection upon them in the interest of fulfilling and harmonizing them, are as natural to man as is, for example, the property of a magnet to repel or attract another magnet. In any event, it is in the radical plurality of men’s needs and in the limitations which their physical and social environment impose upon their fulfillment, that contextualistic naturalism locates the source and urgency of moral problems. Accordingly, it does not conceive the primary moral problem to be that of discovering or actually instituting some fixed set of ethical norms valid everywhere and for all time. For basic moral problems are plural in number and specific in character, and are concerned with the adjustment, in the light of causes and consequences, of competing impulses occurring in specific environmental contexts. There can therefore be no general or final solution to the moral predicaments of mankind; the moral problem is the perennial one of finding ways and means for eliminating needless suffering and for organizing in a reasonable manner the energies of men.

The advocacy of a responsible intellectual method, especially in matters pertinent to social and ethical issues as well as in philosophy, is thus an emphatic strain in the writings of contextualistic naturalists. For reliable knowledge is the end-product of a reflective process, involving the use of experimental controls over ideas which initially have the status of tentative hypotheses; and it is this procedure which must be employed if reliable knowledge and reason- able evaluations are to be attained in the settlement of social and moral conflicts. This method of science supplies no guarantees against error, it does not preclude alternative solutions to problems, and it certifies none of its conclusions as eternally valid. But since it is in essence a self-corrective method, and involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection, it is a method which can discover its own errors. It is in any case the sole method which has historically shown itself able to yield intellectual and practical mastery over various segments of nature. From the systematic extension of the use of this method to the problems of men, contextualistic naturalists confidently anticipate an increased moral enlightenment. Compared with many fashionable philosophies contextualistic naturalism is almost prosaically sober. It contributes to the current intellectual scene no apocalyptic visions, no thunderous absolutes, no unshakeable certainties. It offers no spectacular promises of salvation. It is essentially scientific and secular in temper, but confident that the concentration of scientific methods upon specific problems will yield a rich harvest of genuine knowledge. It is sane and reasonable at a time when the tides of irrationalism run high in the world and when substitutes for the Appolonian virtues are at a premium. It expresses the convictions of a people confident that a bold but disciplined intelligence is still a creative power in the world.--Ernest Nagel (1947) "Philosophy and the American Temper" reprinted in Sovereign Reason (1954), pp. 56-7 (emphases added).

The other day, I called attention to Ernest Nagel's vision for philosophy of science (which is how he is remembered, if remembered at all). I wouldn't call his (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation especially lyrical. But even if we leave aside his role in constructing what became analytic philosophy, his essays -- mostly reviews, polemics, and serious studies of the major intellects of his day -- are full arresting asides and rhetorical gems (below I quote a few more).

The passage quoted above was written for a "European audience, and appeared in a French translation in the Chronique des Etats-Unis, a bi-monthly publication of the American office of Information in Paris, In April 1947" (309). I have found almost nothing about this periodical, but it stands to reason it was an instrument of the US State Department or the CIA. But I assume here that it was written before the cold war was a reality, although Nagel was already (recall) hostile to Marxism. In the following years he would publish withering reviews (in the Partisan Review; and Jphil) of Cornforth's Leninist attempts at refuting Carnap, logical empiricism, and pragmatism. So, while anachronistic, it would not be misleading to call "Philosophy and the American Temper" (hereafter: American Temper) a philosophy for cold war liberalism.

American Temper is a short essay. Part of the argument of the essay is a denial that there is a distinctive American philosophy. (Nagel shows no interest in indigenous thought.) He claims this follows straightforwardly from commitment to a "democratic way of life," which shows itself in a restraint from top-down imposition of an authorized philosophy and the expectation of pluralism that is, that the freedom to develop "alternative conceptions of nature and man" will be pursued (50). 

While I tend to think of Nagel as the leader of the scientific wing of twentieth century pragmatism, in American Temper, Nagel describes pragmatism as a decaying research program (53). That here Nagel is describing his own commitments as a 'contextual naturalist,' we can accept on no less authority than Isaac Levy (writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia). I mention this because while Nagel's association with contextual naturalism was noted by contemporary readers and reviewers of Nagel's essay (see here; here), the term never caught on. In a beautiful essay, Lawrence Cahoone makes an excellent case that Nagel's contextual naturalism is very indebted to Morris Cohen. In American Temper Nagel himself grants (53-4) that it grows out of later writings of Dewey, Sheldon's (1942) America's Progressive Philosophy, which is a species of process philosophy, and a collection edited by Krikorian (1944) Naturalism and the Human Spirit, which includes many philosophers associated with Columbia at mid century.

The cardinal thesis of contextual naturalism is "the essentially incomplete fundamentally plural character of existence, in which no overarching pattern of development can be discerned, and which qualitative discontinuities and loose conjunctions are as ultimate features as are firm connections and regular cycles of change." (54) This is clearly now an unfashionable, metaphysical doctrine.+ But we can hear in its pluralism echoes in the (dappled world, disunity) commitments of those associated with the Stanford School of the Philosophy of Science.* Since Nagel was Suppes' supervisor the connection is not wholly coincidental. 

The point of calling it 'contextual' is explained by the "emphasis upon the contextual conditions for the occurence and for the manifested properties of everything whatsoever--upon the fact a quality an objective constituent of nature even though its existence depends on the relations in which it stands to other things." (55) This generates an anti-reductionism and a general mistrust of eliminativist strategies. (How this fits with so-called Nagel reduction is not my present concern.)

Now, I noted recently, that Nagel's philosophy of science is not attracted to the idea that science is a means of silencing others in the name of a unified authority. Kuhn's philosophy of science is not just a methodological alternative, but also a political alternative. And while science contains differential expertise and skill, Nagel views it more as an open-ended conversation responsive to criticism and reasons. This point is echoed in American Temper: "involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection." And in this sense Nagel views science as a model for democratic society worth having. To what degree the science of our day would still be thought of as such an apt model is worth asking.

Alongside this is a rejection of ethics as a monistic, authoritative discipline imposing normative rules on the rest of us. Rather Nagel views ethics more in the spirit of what is now known as mechanism design. Its task is to find local, temporary ethical solutions to practical problems in light of our plural commitments in "specific environmental contexts." If there is an overarching theme it is the elimination of needless suffering. Obviously this slogan does not settle important questions (whose suffering will count; by whose light needless; and at what cost elimination?, etc.), but it gives the sense of the spirit of the project which is really about the never final organization of energy of men. The liberalism on offer is one with affinity to the New Deal.

We can also see that Nagel's vision for the philosophy of science as a template for a democratic society is itself ground in a pluralist metaphysics in which no single perspective is ultimately privileged. In addition this metaphysics provides a kind of template for society: each individual has objective existence, but is simultaneously socially embedded. 

Given that circumstances are constantly changing this is a philosophy of forever-unfinished-business, self-conscious of the fact that any proposed solution in the moment will seem archaic at a later date. As I wrap up, Nagel's comment on this point is worth quoting: 

contextualistic naturalists exhibit a profound distrust of philosophic systems which attempt to catch once for all the variegated contents of the world in a web of dialectical necessity. They are keenly conscious of the limitations of purely formal analysis even when they engage in it. For they recognize that a logic, no matter how subtle, provides no warrant concerning matters of fact unless it is supported by controlled observation. Indeed, they sometimes show an almost pathological fear that those concerned with formal analysis may be deceived into supposing that nature is as coherently organized and as simple as are their intellectual constructions. (54)

I hope readers have noticed that Nagel calls his own contextual naturalism 'sane and reasonable' and a 'sober' alternative to more fashionable and fanciful philosophies. There is an unapologetic willingness to develop the  apollonian edifices of civilization. But this way of framing it, and the acknowledged pathology -- the fear that controlled technique may facilitate a form of intellectual self-deception --, suggests recognition of the fact that some forces in our environment, including our own impulses, have dionysian roots that may haunt us. Nagel's analytic head is conjoined to the heart of a disciplined romantic.  

Models, Politics, Populations, and Public Science in times of Pandemic (III); on Stegenga and Philosophy of Science

What is the role, if any, of philosophy of science during this pandemic and global lockdown?...So far in the lockdown—May whatever-it-is-today—I am not aware of a systematic piece written by a philosopher of science on the pandemic or the policy response...What’s keeping me up at night, though, is this: should philosophers of science be trying to assess the merits of the various scientific arguments pertaining to SARS-CoV-2 that are now having such profound implications on policy, in a rigorous yet publicly visible manner, at a pace which accords with that of the relevant scientific work? This has been a moment of what we might call ‘fast science’. Ought philosophy of science attempt to engage with, contribute to, and criticize fast science, as it unfolds?

Both the harms (broadly construed) of SARS-CoV-2 and the effectiveness and unintended consequences of the social policies meant to mitigate those harms have been underdetermined by available evidence. At issue are the plurality of epidemiological models generating discordant predictions, the reliability of the various models, the empirical substantiation of model parameters, the evidential basis of the effectiveness of many lockdown strategies, and a complicated intertwining of social values and science. Moreover, stances on the pandemic are, obviously, politicized. The pandemic and global policy response seems, therefore, apt for analysis from the perspective of philosophy of science.

...The relevant scientific issues require technical expertise in epidemiology and economics, and up-to-date knowledge of a rapidly shifting epistemic landscape. A meta-level operative principle for any commentator on the pandemic ought to be epistemic humility, especially given the secondary pandemic of over-confidence among policymakers, armchair epidemiologists, and the scientists themselves. Moreover, because positions on the pandemic are often politicized, a philosopher of science who defends the Swedish approach (for example) might be assumed to have values and motivations aligned with, say, Trump supporters.

That said, our colleagues in philosophy of science include experts on scientific models, on methodological problems in medical science, on causal inference, on the relationship between science and values, on inductive risk, and on many other issues pertinent to the pandemic and policy response. Obviously, the stakes are high: some models are telling us that millions of people might die from the virus, while other models are telling us that millions of children might starve as a result of the global lockdowns. Should we be using our expertise to assess these scientific arguments as they unfold? There is a temporal dimension to my question....I am asking if we should be assessing the particular details and predictions of these models, now, and how they are being deployed in policy, today, in a manner that, to the extent possible, reflects the manner of presentation of the pertinent scientific arguments (namely, the speed of their articulation, their visibility, and their impact). Should philosophy of science engage with fast science?

...

So much science having so much impact, yet philosophers of science have been relatively quiet.....

In an email, Nancy Cartwright agreed that philosophers can and should weigh in on serious scientific and policy issues, though she noted that her own skills are at a meta-level rather than assessing particular data and models—I reckon that this is a diagnosis for many of us.  Jay Odenbaugh raised a number of such meta-level questions about models that are especially salient in the present context and that are worth quoting in full:

When should policymakers ignore models and when should they use them for policy guidance? What are good rules of thumb for critically thinking about models for laypeople? Do we need models for policy or can we simply get by with observational studies? How should we determine who is a good or bad modeller? How do epidemiological models compare to other types of models in other domains?

Although persuasive answers to these questions might require the sort of slow, meta-level scholarship that our discipline is accustomed to, such answers might better prepare our discipline for more rapid and impactful engagement in future episodes of fast science, which could emerge from all sorts of phenomena, such as a climate crisis, advances in artificial intelligence, or indeed, another virus.--Jacob Stegenga  "Fast Science and the Philosophy of Science"at Auxiliary Hypothesis BJPS & Dailynous

Today is the third in a series of posts (see the first here inspired by Phillipe Lempoine; and the second here). 

In his essay quoted above, which summarizes and expands on a lively facebook discussion among philosophers of science, Stegenga, distinguishes (implicitly) between fast science and slow science. He implies that slow science is the norm and fast science is the exception due to the (exceptional) "current crisis." He does not define either, but let's assume we understand what he means and accept the distinction. It is worth noting that some of the reasons given by philosophers of science why they might not have anything to contribute to the public debates over unfolding fast science have nothing to do with the fact that it is 'fast', but rather that it is policy apt. So, within the philosophy of science there is a further divide if not in kind then at least in degree between, let's call it, pure science and policy apt science (not to be confused with 'applied' science). 

Much of philosophy of science and the ruling norms within it is still shaped by the dominance of physics, math, and logic in the philosophical imagination. Of course, biology and cognitive science are huge fields in philosophy of science, but when these are studied by philosophers of science, they are not, in the first, instance treated as policy apt. Yes, philosophers of science who work on medicine, economics, engineering, and (say) decision theory, are much more aware that the sciences they study are themselves organized around epistemic norms pertaining to application and practices of justification that presuppose uptake. Even so, I cannot tell you how often, say, decision theorists will balk at the thought that how the formal apparatus is regularly applied is a legitimate form of criticism against the epistemic status of the machinery. (That's 'misuse' and so irrelevant, etc.) I mention this to suggest that thinking about uptake does not come naturally to bread and butter philosophers of science who often pay lip-service to this fact in grant applications and social media presence, but don't internalize it in their work and mutual evaluation.

Of course, the previous sentence is an exaggeration. Thanks to Heather Douglas there is a lively discussion about inductive risk in philosophy of science, and one can now assume knowledge of the concerns and arguments of feminist philosophers of science, which was not common when I was a PhD student a generation or so. Even so, it is no surprise that Eric Winsberg (who has done important work in climate science) and Alex Broadbent (who has done important work on epidemiology) have been so visible as philosophers of science. They have cut their teeth thinking, in part, about the complexities of science in public policy.* Okay, with that in place I want to offer four mutually supporting, but distinct claims.

First, the question philosophers of science should be asking is [A] how should we think about the intersection between fast and policy apt science in a crisis? It strikes me what's clearly needed is real philosophical work on that. One way to assimilate that question to familiar philosophy of science  is to think about that intersection in terms of the combination of scientific norms of controversy and inductive risk (or what in my own work I call 'responsible speech'). It is well understood since Kuhn, that the range of disagreement is constrained in scientific practice. In many ways fast, policy apt science during a crisis has features that are related to the turbulence characteristic of a possible paradigm shift and the intense disagreement familiar from a pre-paradigmatic stage. But in a crisis, these very familiar features play out with possible uptake, mediated by what Polanyi calls 'influentials' and I call 'aggregators,' in policy.

Second, in a policy apt context one can never assume what one may call a free market in ideas, or perfect communicative rationality, which is nearly always tacitly assumed by philosophers of science when discussing scientific controversy. By this I am not pointing to the barriers of entry of who counts as a relevant expert or who has access to the expensive machines. But rather that in in policy apt contexts two features tend to be structurally present: (i) some of the experts are not free to judge or free to say what they think even though they have highly salient expertise. Government scientists may well have gag orders of various kinds. This need not always be sinister--for coordination purposes, it may well be very important that government has a clear message. This is why, for example, Eric Winsberg and I noted that one should be alert to manufactured consensus. (Of course, philosophers of science should model under what conditions a unified flawed message is to be preferred over more noisy signal!) (ii) Governments always have an incentive to withhold inconvenient facts or to nudge scientists in a certain direction. So, what we really should be asking is [B] how should we think about the intersection between fast and policy apt science in a crisis with imperfect communicative rationality.

Third, the way the modern academy is organized is to incentivize and reward hyper-specialization (that is, creating barriers of entry of various kinds).  In one sense philosophy of science is no exception: our work often maps on to particular sub-disciplines in special sciences. But simultaneously, many sciences draw on generic methods and practices common to many sciences. In virtue of the foundational questions we are often free to pursue, philosophers of science often build up non-domain specific expertise about the strengths and weaknesses and features of these generic methods that can surpasse experts within a special  science. Of course, such generic knowledge is not limited to philosophers (e.g., statisticians, computer scientists, etc.) But it's the presence of such domain invariant expertise about generic instruments of science that I have claimed that synthetic philosophy is possible.

Of course, what is characteristic of the present crisis, is that we see the intermingling not just of fast and policy apt sciences, but also many policy questions that have not yet been so defined that they are what I call constrained choice. That is (to simplify) that the relevant issues have been internalized in one science and can be formulated as one kind of policy decision. Rather, the crisis is characterized by evolving recognition that many different kinds of sciences, many different kinds of policies, can have many complex social effects (psychological well-being, rates of hospitalization on incidence of non Covid-19 diseases, supply-chain limitations, public transit and social distancing, etc., etc.). I have suggested that this requires something I have called 'policy apt synthetic philosophy.' So, the question we should ask is  [c] how should policy apt synthetic philosophers of science think about the intersection among many fast and policy apt science in a crisis with imperfect communicative rationality. 

Fourth, policy apt synthetic philosophy is now housed in attenuated fashion in departments of scientific policy/advice that help coordinate decisions that involve multiple sciences and policy domains. There is a need for a class of individuals that study versions of [A; B; & C] alongside the principles of such policy coordination that are not government officials so that they can contribute alongside the scientific aggregators to public discussion in independent fashion. But what this also points to is the need for a more collaborative ethic within philosophy [of science] along the model of what I once dubbed (recall) integrated PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics).+ This last point suggests that some of the infrastructure for policy apt synthetic philosophy is already developing, but let me stop here, today.

On Polanyi, Spontaneous Order (yes, Hayek and Kuhn)

The next example of dynamic order will be our main subject, Science. Every scientist in search of discovery is faced with the scientific results and opinions of all other scientists up to that date, both living and dead, which are summed up in text books or-for more recent work-in current publications and public discussions. The scientist differs from the judge in that he is not given his case to decide, but has to select his own problem for investigation. Early in life he specialises on certain branches of science which fit his own personal gifts and his own strongest inclinations. Then he looks out for an opportunity to apply his particular knowledge and gifts; and finally he selects a special problem by the pursuit of which he expects to achieve the most important results. In the setting of his problem and in the way he seeks its solution, he is applying the traditional methods of science and the particular procedure of his own branch: with such possible modifications as he may desire to attempt. His judgment, through which his results are expressed, is based on accepted scientific standards of reliability and precision: again, possibly, with some personal variation of his own. Discovery in the end will be largely based on thousands of previous discoveries; and though the new addition will always modify the previously prevailing ideas to some extent, and sometimes may cause revolutionary changes in outlook, the essential unity of science will be maintained. Scientific discoveries are published without delay, since each scientist desires to get the credit for his own achievements. Discoverers will often defend their claims emphatically against criticism and seek to assure their acceptance by the scientific public.

Science is thus seen to be growing by the characteristic process producing dynamic order. New scientific claims are made in due consideration of all previously established ones; and the results thus obtained continuously modify the previously achieved positions of science.

In the way a scientist, intent on a problem, consults the results and opinions of scientists who worked before him, he resembles a judge referring to precedent. But in the way in which he looks out for a problem to which to apply his special gifts to the best advantage, and later, when discovery is achieved, puts his claims before his colleagues and tries to gain their acceptance for them, he acts rather like the business man, first seeking the most profitable application of his resources and then soliciting the consumers' approval for his goods. We see here a variation in the nature of the methods of adjustment ("internal forces") that are operating in the formation of the dynamic order. Between different judges the adjustments are of a purely consultative character; between business men they are largely competitive ; while between scientists they show combinations of both types.--Michael Polanyi (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, "Economica, 8(32): 437.

When I was a PhD student, Mary Jo Nye visited and emphasized the significance of Michael Polanyi. I dutifully read Personal Knowledge, and found it useful to refer to his account of the role of passions in science. But suggestible as I am, I know how the sociological winds blow in analytic philosophy; I am not the first to notice (cf. Stephen Turner) that when the big guns of contemporary analytic philosophy went after know how, Polanyi's account and examples of tacit knowledge simply got ignored

The context of the quoted passage is Polanyi's attempt to graft on the "spontaneous ordering" (432) of "mutually adjusting units" (in context he is appealing to molecules in equilibrium) a description of a "kind of liberty that goes far beyond the claims of personal freedom." (438) The point is that "individuals, participating in the building up of a dynamic order, all act independently," in light of their own judgment. This judgment is not in the service of "the satisfaction of the desire to be left alone, or to do as you please" but rather ""to make discoveries that are important in science-as important as possible....[and to] see these discoveries accepted by science and credited to himself." (445) From this motive they serve the collective endeavor of science. This understanding of freedom Polanyi calls "public liberty." (438) Such public liberty is according to Polanyi constrained by one's own convictions and the judgment of others, and social "incentives" (444).

As an aside, Polanyi uses the reality of simultaneous discovery in science as an illustration of the existence of shared incentives and judgments and to downplay the influence of individual idiosyncrasy (445). This is a bit peculiar because he also treats individual conviction as a necessary feature of the efficiency of science; it's individuality that allows the possible search space to be explored (see Logic of Liberty, p. 34).* 

Be that as it may, the two main examples of a spontaneous or dynamic order Polanyi develops at any length are science and law. But he is quit explicit there "exist many other systems in the intellectual and moral sphere" that blend cognitive and normative features, including the economy. It is well known (see Caldwell) that these remarks appealed to Hayek. And I am not the first to wonder how much Polanyi shaped Kuhn's ideas. What I didn't previously appreciate is that Polanyi develops these ideas in order to combat both communist and fascist conceptions of science which presuppose social (including democratic) control of science. For me, at least, this makes more intelligible the idea that the initial reception of Kuhn was, in fact, facilitated by the cold war context.

I want to close with two observations. First, Polanyi treats the existence of Knightian uncertainty as real and as a ground to doubt the possibility of planning of science: "The main difficulty in handling men according to a pre-arranged plan lies in the fact that the outcome of human endeavour is mostly uncertain and is often worth while only to the extent to which it is uncertain." (433) It is notable that Polanyi treats the very worth of agency as presupposing uncertainty.

Second, I find it amusing that the image of science (recall) that Polanyi presents is itself grounded in a system studied by science. There is, thus, a fractal like quality to his thought.

Philosophy of Science in The Nobel Prize (Economics) Lecture by Stigler

I propose on this occasion to address the same kinds of questions to an entirely different market: the market for new ideas in economic science. Most economists enter this market in new ideas, let me emphasize, in order to obtain ideas and methods for the applications they are making of economics to the thousand problems with which they are occupied: these economists are not the suppliers of new ideas but only demanders. Their problem is comparable to that of the automobile buyer: to find a reliable vehicle. Indeed, they usually end up by buying a used, and therefore tested, idea.--George Stigler (1982)  Nobel Lecture (Economics), Stockholm.

As regular readers know, the Nobel (Chicago-economist), George J. Stigler, had a lifelong interest in the philosophy, and sociology of science. I have remarked in the past that this interest was not entirely disinterested; it's clear that Stigler's work also aimed at influencing the discipline (for example, encouraging consensus-aiming practices that would allow one to ignore criticisms) and I have argued here that he was rather successful at doing so and so is worth paying attention to how philosophical ideas shape scientific practice.

Somewhat surprisingly and unusually Stigler chose to structure his prize lecture around his interest in the sociology/philosophy of economics. I call it unusual because he won the prize for his "seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation," and ordinarily the Nobel lecture is an elegant discussion of and introduction into the material that generated professional recognition often  accompanied with polite recognition of folk who did not get the prize, but paved the way to it. Stigler deviates from the precedent. It's not that he does not discuss these topics at all -- and one could argue that he is discussing the functioning of the markets in ideas -- , but they are all framed by his sociological interests in science. These interests are long-standing, and they were shaped not just by his teacher, Knight, but also his encounters with Merton (a colleague at Columbia) and Talcott Parsons (probably a colleague at Stanford), and his early readings of Kuhn. 

As an aside, Stigler was a world-class historian of economics, even long after that had become professionally non-fashionable. This lack of fashion was itself a consequence, in part, because he would (while echoing Kuhn) tell folk that a sign of scientific maturity was that disciplinary history became of little interest to the puzzle solving economists (thus providing justification for the elimination of history of economics from graduate curricula).

In fact, the previous paragraph is not really an aside. The Nobel lecture relies explicitly on [A] a distinction "between prescientific and scientific stages of a discipline." (This is quoted from the abstract.) It also relies (more implicitly) on a [B] distinction between those (the few) that supply "new ideas" -- akin to Kuhnian legislators --  and those ("most") that "demand" ideas to be applied to the determinate problems with which they are occupied (the Kuhnian worker-bees, or puzzle-solvers). (The quoted material is the second paragraph of the lecture.)

It turns out however that the few are, from Stigler's perspective, unusual characters, I quote the relevant paragraph before I comment:

Those economists who seek to engage in research on the new ideas of the science to refute or confirm or develop or displace them are in a sense both buyers and sellers of new ideas. They seek to develop new ideas and persuade the science to accept them, but they also are following clues and promises and explorations in the current or preceding ideas of the science. It is very costly to enter this market: it takes a good deal of time and thought to explore a new idea far enough to discover its promise or its lack of promise. The history of economics, and I assume of every science, is strewn with costly errors: of ideas, so to speak, that wouldn't run far or carry many passengers (530)

Kuhnian legislators have two roles: being [C] developers of new ideas and, unless they have disciples willing to do the work, [D] persuaders of others to accept them. [D] means there is a need for scientific entrepreneurs and the art of rhetoric in science. It turns out that [E] there are high barriers to entry to become a Kuhnian legislator both because (i) it requires a lot of effort and time to be on top of existing science and develop new ideas, as well as (ii) the risks involved of producing ideas that do not pan out. Some of the costs involved, are (iii) investments in prior social infrastructure of science ("the machinery of intellectual exchange-journals, learned societies, and conferences"(535)) that make a "large expenditure of time, intelligence, and research resources" possible (536). Notice that such ideas may well be true, but if there is no uptake (recall [D]) and so no "prestige, reputation, and income" (530) worth having, then this, too, will be treated as failure.*

Famously, Kuhn divides the immature and mature stage of science in terms of consensus or lack thereof. Stigler had used such a measure, too, in the past. But in the Nobel lecture he offers a different criterion: the pre-scientific stage "is characterized by absence of a set of interacting practitioners who are devoting a large part of their lives to the accumulation of knowledge, and hence it is characterized by the absence of cumulative progress." (530) There are really two claims here: [F] in the scientific stage a science is progressing. More important, [G] a science is characterized by the presence of practitioners who (i) recognize each other as fellow travelers/scientists, who (ii) are professionals (in the sense that science is their main occupation), and (iii) who form a communicative community. It's not always clear if he thinks whether [G] causes [F] or [G] is a symptom of [F.]

One interesting feature of the absence of progress and lack of a scientific community in the pre-scientific stage that Stigler notes is that descriptions of it often (a) "almost totally lack a time dimension." In pre-scientific stages it makes little difference in what order doctrines are discussed. An interesting feature of the presence of a scientific community is that (b) detected errors will be refuted, and "only the detected errors of unimportant economists are spared a prompt reputation." (531)

Another criterion he offers between the pre-scientific and scientific eras, is that in the pre-scientific era the problems of a would-be-science are shaped by the (often practical needs of the) environment. While Stigler does not deny that "new circumstances" (political and technological changes) can spur interest in some questions and even innovation, but at bottom his view is that "an empirical science such as economics is to provide general understanding of events in the real world, and ultimately all of its theories and techniques must be instrumental to that task. That is very different from saying, however, that it must be responsive to the contemporaneous conditions and problems of the society in which it is situated." That is, Stigler [H] denies what in earlier work he had called “environmental theory.” And, in fact, it is accompanied by a further claim  that [I] "A science requires for its very existence a set of fundamental and durable problems." (534) One may say that these problems are part of the identity conditions of the science and the ones that Kuhnian legislators help illuminate.+ But in the moment it's very difficult to distinguish between fruitful ideas and dead-ends. And this means [J] that all sciences will be subject to fashions that after the fact prove illusory in fruitfulness.

Because Stigler treats mature science as a fairly efficient communicative community, the [K] new ideas that will prove to be fruitful must in some sense be a natural and small enough, discrete extension from existing practices ("science also progresses through time without making large jumps" with an explicit nod to Darwin's Natura non facit saltus. ) This commitment follows quite naturally from the way demand in economics is conceived. For [L] any idea to have uptake it most (and Stigler credits his Chicago colleague,  Gary Becker) be deploy-able by applied practitioners (who have specific human capital) with little extra cost and more potential reward (and who are risk averse). It also follows that given the structure  of the market of economic ideas that there is a bias against novelty from the majority because their "capital would be reduced if [their] knowledge were made obsolete by the general acceptance of a new theory. Hence, established scholars should, in their own self-interest, attack new theories." (538) That is to say, [M] there is considerable status quo bias in any scientific discipline that also (and Stigler does not point this out) helps stabilize the boundaries and the identity conditions of the discipline.

In fact, [N] often novel ideas will be subject to controversy, although Stigler points to the uptake of his own work in the economics of information as an exception (there was little controversy). Stigler thinks this was due to the fact that "no established scientific theory was being challenged by this work." (539) So there are for Stigler [O] two kinds of new ideas: those that extend a theory or apply a known tool in a new area (relatively little controversy) and those that challenge existing practices. The latter can form the basis of a true challenge to the status quo [P], "it takes a theory to beat a theory." But Stigler admits that [Q] a true test is rare because it is rare that "a theory in economics has a well-defined domain of applicability." (542) Instead theories are tested indirectly for "fertility,"  by deploying them to "explore a variety of problems." Such [R] indirect tests take time and a theory can linger for a long time before it is ultimately discarded.

Stigler explicitly recognizes that there may be more other interesting factors. But we can treat [A]-[R] as the main factors of Stigler's public choice model of science. (He credits Downs, Buchanan, and Tullock, but seems to have been unaware of Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry, which (recall) anticipates many of his own views.

Because I have gone on too long for a blog post, I will not offer critical commentary today. I just note one final feature of Stigler's philosophy of science. For, Stigler, thus [Q] a science is characterized by fundamental Knightian uncertainty about its own development ("No one can describe the precise characteristics or content of a new piece of scientific work that will find ready and eager reception from the scientists of a period." (538))** This commitment to Knight's ideas is especially notable because he rejects the thought (which he explicitly associates with his teacher Knight) that the subjects studied by economists are mistake prone and do not grasp the effects of their policy choices (recall also my treatment of his Tanner lectures).

 

Al-Ghazali's Genealogy of Philosophy and Natural Religion

29. Know that the philosophers, notwithstanding the multiplicity of their groups and the diversity of their doctrines, can be divided into three main divisions: Materialists, Naturalists, and Theists.
30. The first category, the Materialists, were a group of the most ancient philosophers who denied the existence of the omniscient and omnipotent Creator-Ruler. They alleged that the world has existed from eternity as it is, of itself and not by reason of a Maker. Animals have unceasingly come from seed, and seed from animals: thus it was, and thus it ever will be. These are the godless in the full sense of the term.
31. The second category, the Naturalists, were men who devoted much study to the world of nature and the marvels found in animals and plants; they also were much taken up with the dissection of animal organs. In these they saw such marvels of God Most High’s making and such wonders of His wisdom that they were compelled, with that in mind, to acknowledge the existence of a wise Creator cognizant of the aims and purposes of all things. Indeed, no one can study the science of anatomy and the marvelous uses of the organs without acquiring this compelling knowledge of the perfect governance of Him Who shaped the structure of animals, and especially that of man. 

32. However, it appeared to these philosophers, because they had studied nature so much, that the equilibrium of the mixture of humors had a great effect on the resulting constitution of the animal’s powers. Hence they thought that man’s rational power was also dependent on the mixture of his humors and that its corruption would follow the corruption of the mixture of his humors, and so that power would cease to exist. Once it ceased to exist, they alleged that bringing back the nonexistent would be unintelligible. So they adopted the view that the soul dies, never to return. Consequently they denied the afterlife and rejected the Garden and the Fire, the assembly and the Recall, and the Resurrection and the Reckoning. So in their view there would be no future reward for obedience, and no punishment for disobedience. Therefore they lost all restraint and abandoned themselves to their passions like beasts. These were also godless men, because basic faith is belief in God and the Last Day — and these men denied the Last Day, even though they believed in God and His Attributes.
33. The third category, the Theists, were the later philosophers, such as Socrates, the master of Plato, and Plato, the master of Aristotle. It was Aristotle who systematized logic for the philosophers and refined the philosophical sciences, accurately formulating previously imprecise statements and bringing to maturity the crudities of their sciences. Taken altogether, these refuted the first two categories of the Materialists and the Naturalists. Indeed, by the arguments they advanced to lay bare the enormities of the latter, they relieved others of that task: “And God spared the believers from fighting (the unbelievers)” (33.25) by reason of the unbelievers’ own infighting.
34. Then Aristotle refuted Plato and Socrates and the Theists who had preceded him in such thorough fashion that he disassociated himself from them all. Yet he, too, retained remnants of their vicious unbelief and innovation which he was unsuccessful in avoiding. So they all must be taxed with unbelief, as must their partisans among the Muslim philosophers, such as Ibn Sina and al-Farabi and their likes. None, however, of the Muslim philosophers engaged so much in transmitting Aristotle’s lore as did the two men just mentioned. What others transmitted is not free from disorder and confusion and in studying it one’s mind becomes so muddled that he fails to understand it — and how can the incomprehensible be rejected or accepted?--Al-Ghazali Deliverance from Error.

In Deliverance from Error (recall and here), Al-Ghazali conceives the origin of philosophy as a atheist revolt against a natural form of theism, one that posits an omniscient and omnipotent Creator-Ruler of the sort that naturally accompanies sovereign kingship [in which the political ruler understands himself as a God, the mirror image  of the cosmic Creator-Ruler). We are not told much else about the natural form of theism, but (given the stringent denials of the original philosophers), we can infer it posited a providential creation story. (I return to this below.) By contrast (on the hostile interpretation of Al-Ghazali) the first philosophers -- one can recognize a stylized picture of the atomists in it -- posit a cosmic order of eternal return without meaning. 

Al-Ghazali is careful not to name any of these original philosophers nor to characterize the natural theism they reject. But they both precede Socrates. There is, in fact, a peculiarity here in that Al-Ghazali ignores the pure forms of Greek polytheism. The natural form of theism is closer to Judaism and (perhaps more likely on his mind) Zoroastrianism; and original philosophy a revolt against it.  

Al-Ghazali's 'naturalists' are a kind of empirical, natural philosophers. (It's a bit surprising he does not mention medicine in this context, but there are hints of Galen throughout the piece.) These find evidence of functionality and design everywhere, there are led, inductively to a theistic designer. But they view a soul as something emergent from or grounded in physical processes and so mortal. Because they deny an afterlife (and resurrection), they become practical atheists. 

It's no surprise that Al-Ghazali sees a tight connection between beliefs about the nature of the soul and, perhaps, more important the existence of judgment day and  observed behavior. (Let's stipulate he is right about observed behavior.) But it is a bit surprising that the charge of immoral behavior is only lodged against the so-called naturalists and not the earlier materialists (a point repeated in paragraph 33!)

I called Al-Ghazali's narrative a 'genealogy.' But it would have been better, perhaps, to call it a 'natural history.' The achievement of the (Socratic) Theists is not just to refute the materialists and naturalists theoretically and to show why the behavior of the latter was truly immoral, but to turn an immature practice into a mature fields ("accurately formulating previously imprecise statements and bringing to maturity the crudities of their sciences.") To put Al-Ghazali's narrative in Kuhnian terms, Socrates is the start of a revolution in philosophy that culminates in Aristotle's achievements.

In the analysis of the after-effects of Aristotle's achievements, Al-Ghazali notices that even theistic philosophy inherit the "remnants of...vicious unbelief and innovation" of the naturalists and materialists relative to the original religion. This entails that Al-Ghazali treats the original religion as a species of (what we may call along with the tradition) true religion. Not for the first time (recall), I notice that Al-Ghazali suggests that that while Muhammad's revelation is instrumentally useful, it is not itself necessary for the existence of true religion. 

 

Darwin's (meta)-Philosophy of Science In The Origin of Species (and a note on his subtle Spinozism and debts to Smith)

The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone mutation.

But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the slow action of the coast-waves. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the `plan of creation,' `unity of design,' &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt on the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.--Charles Darwin The Origin of Species, Chapter 14.

Yesterday (recall), I remarked that Darwin likes to bookend/frame his arguments in terms of the ignorance of savages (recall also here). In later editions (from the third onward) of Origin this is accompanied by a further framing: in An Historical Sketch, Darwin gives an informed (albeit potted) history of the "progress of opinion on the origin of species" leading up to "the publication of the edition of the work." The book closes with a kind "prophetic glance into futurity"* in which Darwin sketches a trajectory for the reception of his book which I have quoted above. Of course, the rhetorical point of both (the historical sketch) and the quoted passage above is to promote and influence the uptake of Darwin's theory (and, perhaps, to reward him with  proper credit for the relevant bits of it).

Ever since the work of D.T. Campbell (on 'evolutionary epistemology' a term coined by him in Popper's (1974) Schilpp volume) and David Hull (with his evolutionary approach to development of Science) the idea of applying evolutionary ideas to knowledge has been thoroughly worked out and covers many different kinds of projects. The SEP article by Bradie and Harms suggests that Dewey and the pragmatists were the first to to do so. But I am convinced that evolutionary ideas about knowledge precede Darwin and may well have influenced the development of his views in biology (that's for another time). Even so, the purpose of the present post is to look at how Darwin conceptualizes the sociology of knowledge. 

1. The first sentence above suggests that ideas in biology are influenced by ideas about or dependent on cosmogony/cosmology. That's no surprise because as Darwin is at pains to emphasize, his theory requires an almost unimaginable lengthening of the age of the Earth. For those steeped in Christianity that's a problem; but even among christian deists there was a steady increase in the possible age of the Earth from the seventeenth century onward. Spinozists, of course, had no trouble allowing that the age of the Earth extended backward into infinity (as space was infinite).  That is to say, Darwin is acutely aware that the uptake of his ideas about the living world are influenced by what is taken to be possible and reasonable in other domains of inquiry.

2. The second sentence, which restates an important evidential objection against Darwin's theory, reinforces that first point and recalls his ninth chapter which was devoted to refuting the objection. His response there is really three-fold: the geological record has not been exhausted yet; the geological record will always be incomplete (due to constraints on fossilization, and the submersion of previous lands into oceans, etc.); the study of the geological record is itself influenced by the recent "the revolution in our palaeontological ideas." That is, while Darwin is a gradualist about the evolution of species, Darwin conceives of development of disciplinary knowledge as capable of revolutions in thought. I am convinced this idea is indebted to Smith's History of Astronomy.+ Despite the existence of such revolutions, his own 'historical sketch' suggests that there is progress in knowledge. So Darwin is using 'revolution' not in the old-fashioned sense of a circular understanding of knowledge (time, orbits, etc.) but more in the modern sense of a dramatic change, which can (but need not) be an important advance,

Incidentally, as an aside, my mention of Spinozism is not innocent; in that ninth chapter he also writes, "During each of these years, over the whole world, the land and the water has been peopled by hosts of living forms. What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!" While I am happy to concede to a skeptic that all Darwin needs to be saying here is that there has been a very huge number of generations beyond the mind's possible conception, his use of 'infinite' is politically dangerous--because that implies there need not have been a start at all.** This infinity is repeated in the passage quoted above. 

3. In the second quoted paragraph Darwin then offers a non-epistemic, but psychological error-theory for why a community of enquirers, may be resistant to the uptake of his theory. He claims it is a psychological fact that we require to see intermediate steps before we grant the existence of a great change. And if those steps are not easily visible, we are "always slow" in admitting any "great change." The psychology here is indebted to Smith's psychological-epistemic account (see my book) of how gaps prevent the mind to go along with any claim (and even generate the  painful emotion of wonder--which prompts us to further inquiry). We recoil from such gaps. 

4. This is related to a further psychological point which closes the second paragraph: from the vantage point of the minds of individual epistemic agents, the claims made in geology and in Darwin's theory are fundamentally hard if not impossible to grasp. The point is a quirky one, but can be understood if we take the idea of gaps seriously. It is impossible to inspect visually or manually, as it were, each step in an (unfolding) infinite series. Even if we avoid Zeno style paradoxes here, there is simply no time or resources to do so. The would be knower here, has to allow a form of abstraction that jumps over any would be gaps.++

5. Darwin then closes with a now familiar thought (often attributed to Planck -- "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it --) that scientists who grew up with different conceptual framework are likely to resist to come around to his theory. The epistemic significant point is that Darwin again expresses the idea that background ideas influence the uptake of new theories. In this case the background ideas are deeply entrenched in alternative paradigm. 

6. In addition, Darwin points out that there are really two main kinds of stances toward a theory: (i) one can have a disposition" to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties; (ii) and a disposition that attaches more weight "to the explanation of a certain number of facts." The first (i) is a skeptical disposition; the second (ii) is a confirmatory disposition. The interesting point here is that Darwin recognizes that (i) is a legitimate position and that he does not try to argue against it. But it's clear he thinks that this is nonthreatening because such characters may well find even more problems with other theories.

7. Darwin assumes that the community of knowers is populated with epistemic agents that have different epistemic characters. For in addition to (i-ii), it turns out that (iii) flexibility of mind, and (iv) young age (which he claims is correlated with impartiality) may also impact the uptake of new theories. (I don't mean to suggest there can't be hybrids of i-iv for Darwin.) That is, not unlike his theory of plants and animals, Darwin assumes natural variability within epistemic communities. 

8. Okay, this is a long-ish blog post now. So, one closing observation. The selection mechanism here, which is a kind of bottleneck, is the mind and its  disposition of the epistemic agent. So, it strikes me that Darwin is edging close to a theory of cultural evolution of which his meta-philosophy of science is an example.

A Minor Debate: Kripke vs Dennett

As will be seen immediately, inversion in this sense is a devise for reversing priorities. William James summarized his famous theory of emotions (The Principles of Psychology)...by the assertion, "...the...rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry...not that we cry...because we are sorry. (p. 450). Many philosophies can be summed up crudely (no doubt, not really accurately) by slogans in similar form: "We do not condemn certain acts because they are immoral; they are immoral because we condemn them." "We do not accept the law of contradiction because it is a necessary truth; it is a necessary truth because we accept it (by convention." "Fire and heat are not constantly conjoined because fire causes heat; fire causes heat because they are constantly conjoined" (Hume). "We do not all say  12+7-19 and the like because all grasp the concept of addition; we say we all grasp the concept of addition because we all say 12+7=19 and the like" (Wittgenstein).

The device of inversion of a conditional in the text achieves the effect of reversing priorities in a way congenial to such slogans. Speaking for myself, I am suspicious of philosophical positions of the types illustrated by the slogans, whether or not  they are so crudely put." Saul Kripke (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules, pp. 93-4 note 76. [HT Jody Azzouni]

In the "preface" to Wittgenstein on Rules, Kripke informs the reader "with "emphasis" that "in this piece of writing" he does not "attempt to speak'" for himself, "or, except in occasional and minor asides, to say anything about" his "views on the substantive issues." (ix) Thus, the present topic is perfect for a Digression.

The quoted passage is a footnote to a restatement (and elucidation) by Kripke of an interpretation he has just given of a politically salient element of Wittgenstein's view as understood by Kripke. (At this point of the overall 'argument' Kripke is presenting Wittgenstein's 'skeptical solution' to the rule following  'paradox.') A deviant individual may be "judged a madman" by the community if his responses do not accord with the community's in enough cases. To be mad by the community's lights is to be (thought) to follow "no coherent rule at all." And then it excludes him from some transactions "such as the one between the grocer and the customer." (93)  On this view, ordinary commercial life presupposes, for example, being a member in good standing of a community.* Somebody whose behaviors can be relied upon.

An impatient reader may be annoyed that I call the discussion 'politically' salient here. On this picture of communal life, from within the community there is almost no difference between the madman, the outlaw (recall this post on Azzouni's aesthetics), the dissident, and the political revolutionary (until she usurps power successfully). A philosopher at odds with her own community better remain silent.

To return to the main point, or better Kripke's footnote, Kripke treats inversion as a device to shift attention and "reverses our priorities." (94) It is notable that Kripke, speaking in his own voice, strictly for himself (and, one may hasten to add, on nobody's authority) does not treat inversion as explanatory at all. Not to put too fine point on it, and to speak crudely for a moment, Kripke sees himself as unmasking a louche gimmick that is widespread in philosophy--William James is famous for some such trick, and so are Hume and Wittgenstein.** 

As it happens, James's version of the inversion is Spinozistic in character: "Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. . My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion." (I am not claiming that James is committed to attribute-parallelism here.) And it is notable that the one of the unnamed slogans [we do not condemn certain acts because they are immoral; they are immoral because we condemn them] is also Spinozistic (and Hobbesian).+ What James and Spinoza have in common is a willingness to treat our natural way of thinking as something that can be shown to be illusory even if there is also a sense in which this way of thinking, a manifest image of sorts, can not be eliminated fully from ordinary life. 

One reason why Kripke is unmoved by the inversion, is that he sees in it merely a logical point, after all "a conditional is equivalent to a contrapositive." (94) (P--> Q); (-Q --> -P).  In such instances, to treat the contrapositive as special and more worthy of our attention seems (ahh) crude no better than a slogan. (Of course, a slogan may well be true!) 

But, that's not the end of the matter. Another influential reader of Wittgenstein, Daniel Dennett, treats such inversions as potentially explanatory. And that's because he does not treat them as merely logical. For we can represent how Dennett thinks of the inversions in the following way:

1. You may naturally think that some basic property X is required for the explanation of (observed) properties Y.
2. Where X exhibits some intelligence/mindedness/intentionality and Ys typically do not.
3. But in reality properties Y are needed to explain X.

Throughout his writings of the last decade, Dennett attributes some such strange inversion of reasoning as a key moment in Darwin (natural selection), Turing (computing), Hume (causation), and David Haig (content). It is undoubtedly the case that Dennett has a tendency to say, 'don't look there, look here.' And philosophical critics often trouble themselves with understanding what the point of Dennett's writings are. (Kripke does not mention Dennett, so if you are the sincere type, you can treat the title of my post as click-bait.)

But in Dennett (and James, Hume, etc.) the shift of attention is not the end of the matter, but a heuristic toward a better explanation of the thing (mind, computers, emotions, morality, natural selection, causation, etc.) we're trying to understand. And a key step is to give up, or forego, a natural way of thinking about the issue at hand. To do so frequently is indeed mad. But the first step to a better understanding may well require a willingness to be thought mad by one's community/peers. 

 

It's not Kant, it's norms/incentives/institutions on Kuhn & Politics

But while Einstein won—and would continue to win—all the logical battles, Bohr was decisively winning the propaganda war. The Copenhagen doctrine of the completeness of quantum theory and the inescapability of fundamental chance spread, enforced by Bohr and Heisenberg and the rest of the Copenhagen school. Behind the scenes, the Copenhagenists did not agree with each other, but to the world they presented a unified front. Meanwhile, Einstein and Schrödinger both rejected Bohr, but they also bickered with each other.

Here is Einstein’s own description of Copenhagen: “The theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac.” Philosopher Imre Lakatos gave this later assessment:

In the new, post-1925 quantum theory the ‘anarchist’ position became dominant and modern quantum physics, in its ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, became one of the main standard bearers of philosophical obscurantism. In the new theory Bohr’s notorious ‘complementarity principle’ enthroned [weak] inconsistency as a basic ultimate feature of nature, and merged subjectivist positivism and antilogical dialectic and even ordinary language philosophy into one unholy alliance. After 1925 Bohr and his associates introduced a new and unprecedented lowering of critical standards for scientific theories. This led to a defeat of reason within modern physics and to an anarchist cult of incomprehensible chaos.

Strong words. It is Becker’s burden, and Becker’s triumph, to show that every word is true.

The story has twists and turns: John von Neumann’s purported mathematical proof (1932) that quantum mechanics is complete and one could not add anything more to it and retain its successful predictions; the philosopher Grete Hermann’s detection in 1935 of the fatal flaw in von Neumann’s proof—and the complete disregard of her work; the elaboration of Einstein’s reasoning into the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument; Bohr’s incomprehensible response to EPR; Schrödinger’s reaction, including his eponymous cat. Surely, one thinks, this mess must have been cleaned up eventually! But it never was. It persists to this day. And we are only through the first third of the book.

Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said, ‘If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.’

The middle third of Becker’s book adopts a somber tone in the stories of three renegades who bucked the system in the 1950s and ’60s, after the Copenhagen mysticism had congealed into an icy command: shut up and calculate! Work on the foundations of quantum theory was effectively forbidden, with one’s career and future at peril. The first renegade was David Bohm, a bright and dutiful Copenhagenist until he met the aging Einstein and recanted. Bohm rediscovered the pilot wave theory that Louis de Broglie had presented at Solvay in 1927. The theory slices through the enigma—wave or particle?—like Alexander’s sword through the Gordian knot: the answer is wave and particle. The wavefunction becomes a pilot wave that guides the particles along their paths. The theory is completely deterministic—no playing dice—and recovers all the predictions of standard quantum mechanics. One would think Einstein would love the theory, but he did not. The dreaded nonlocality had not been exorcized. Indeed, it was even more striking.

Bohm’s theory put the lie to von Neumann’s impossibility proof by direct counterexample. Contra Bohr, the particles are visualizable even at microscopic scale. In short, the theory demonstrates beyond all doubt that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsense. But Bohm’s work was ignored and effectively suppressed.

A political leftist, Bohm had refused to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was dismissed from his job at Princeton and went into exile in Brazil. His U.S. passport was revoked. He eventually found his way to Birkbeck College in London, but never received the recognition that was his due. In a notorious episode, Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said, “If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.”

The second renegade was a graduate student at Princeton not long after Bohm left in 1952. Also rejecting Copenhagen, Hugh Everett took Schrödinger’s evolving wavefunction and removed the collapse. He argued that rather than an incomprehensible smear resulting, as Schrödinger’s neither-alive-nor-dead cat suggested, a multiplication of worlds results. Schrödinger’s cat ends up both dead and alive, as two cats in two equally real physical worlds. Today this approach is called the many-worlds interpretation.

Everett’s thesis advisor, John Wheeler, had great enthusiasm for Everett’s innovation. But he insisted that Everett get the nod of approval from Bohr. Bohr refused, and Wheeler required Everett to bowdlerize his thesis. Everett left academia and did not look back. His work lay in obscurity.

The last and greatest renegade was John Stewart Bell. Spurred by Bohm’s papers, Bell queried whether Einstein’s dreaded spooky action at a distance could be avoided. Copenhagen and the pilot wave theory had both failed this test. Bell proved that the nonlocality is unavoidable. No local theory—the type Einstein had sought—could recover the predictions of quantum mechanics. The predictions of all possible local theories must satisfy the condition called Bell’s inequality. Quantum theory predicts that Bell’s inequality can be violated. All that was left was to ask nature herself. In a series of sophisticated experiments, the answer has been established: Bell’s inequality is violated. The world is not local. No future innovation in physics can make it local again. The spookiness that Einstein spent decades deriding is here to stay.

How did the physics community react to this epochal discovery? With a shrug of incomprehension. For decades, discussion of the foundations of quantum theory had been suppressed. Physicists were unaware of the problems and unaware of the solutions. To this day, they commonly claim that Bell’s result proves Bohm’s theory to be impossible and indeterminism to be inevitable, while Bell himself was the staunchest advocate of Bohm’s deterministic theory. Even now, the average physicist has no understanding of what Einstein argued in the EPR paper and what Bell proved.

The last third of What Is Real? could hopefully be titled “Slow Convalescence.” Gradually the worst excesses of Bohr’s influence are mitigated as Bell’s work inspires a new generation to look into foundational issues. We meet a new cast of characters, and the overall atmosphere is mildly optimistic. But there is a long way to go, and this very book could prove to be a watershed moment for the physics community if it faces up to its own past and its present. Or, following the fate of Einstein, Bohm, and Everett, Becker could just be ignored. But if you have any interest in the implications of quantum theory, or in the suppression of scientific curiosity, What is Real? is required reading. There is no more reliable, careful, and readable account of the whole history of quantum theory in all its scandalous detail.--Tim Maudlin reviewing What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker in Boston Review. [HT: Liam Kofi Bright]

In his review, Maudlin (recall) makes clear that he thinks that in the history of quantum mechanics epistemic considerations have been thwarted by political machinations in the physics community. I want to make an impure three-fold distinction: 1. Some of the political machinations are connected to external politics--e.g., the reception of Bohm's theory really suffered due to his leftism. 2. Some of the political machinations are internal to science--including debates over resources and, let's say, conceptual hegemony (which often creates better access to resources). For example, Bohr and his students/admirers turn out to be very good at turning conceptual hegemony into resources. 3. And some of the political machinations are connected to underlying philosophical commitments (about nature of explanation, about what counts as intelligible, action at a distance, etc.)

The problem is that 2-3 also often involve debates over what counts as proper epistemic considerations.  (Let's stipulate that 1 is really unconnected to epistemic considerations.) But Maudlin, a word class philosopher of physics, is unabashed in taking sides here and suggesting that the scientific community has not merely made mistakes about philosophy (as philosophy arises in research), but also failed to make all possible epistemic progress in some sense.

It's worth noting that Maudlin here does not consider the possibility that the conceptual and theoretical confusions in the physics community (which are response of politics in all three senses) may have  been fruitful to the epistemic progress physics has made. This is not my own view in this case, but that's because I don't consider myself an expert on the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics. Even so, the older I get, the more receptive I am to the idea (I associate it with Bill Wimsatt) that too much conceptual clarity can sometimes hinder progress (for example, ambiguity can be useful). 

One important implication of Maudlin's analysis is that even in a field that is central to much of science, attracts widespread interest, and which is broadly international in scope, one cannot assume an efficient market in ideas in science. Regular readers know I think (recall for example) too much philosophy and science, decision-theory, and epistemology tacitly relies on such a free market in ideas in its image of science (but that's changing among students of Kevin Zolman and folks with a Ghent connection).

It is notable that Maudlin aims to end (the review of Becker) on an optimistic note about the future of quantum mechanics (and cosmology). But it is notable that he offers no ground for this optimism. For, he (Maudlin--I have not yet read Becker) never confronts what norms and institutions are responsible for the thwarting of epistemic considerations. (We do get mention of some big personalities --  Bohr, Feynman --, but that is not sufficient explanation.) I mention this because in some way the epistemic grounds of contemporary particle physics have narrowed considerably: there are a few big and very expensive particle accelerators and a few very very expensive instruments  that probe space (and so back in time); access to these machines is a political (in the second sense) affair; they are controlled by committees funded by big grant agencies. And their publications are committee work (sometimes huge  number of 'authors'). This is big science, big data, big statistics,* big software and big committees. It would be a miracle if politics became less under these circumstances.

Maudlin himself holds Kant and Kantian philosophy responsible for the mess in physics (and Kuhn). Really: "The hand of Kant lies behind both Bohr and Kuhn." I think it is undeniable that neo-Kantianism is important for understanding both the early debates in the reception of quantum mechanics and (mediated via Max Weber) as background to Kuhn's philosophy. Much as I like holding philosophers responsible for mucking things up in the world, but I really doubt that Kantianism is responsible for the state of affairs diagnosed by Maudlin/Becker. I do suspect that the decline of philosophical education and wider cultural literacy in the larger culture of science education impacted the decline of conceptual clarity and philosophical discussion within physics. I suspect this because we see something similar in the development of twentieth century economics (often recruited  from physicists), who also show such a decline. But that's just a hypothesis.

I close with a final reflection. The peculiarity of Maudlin's larger review is that the first half of the review really vindicates let's call it the empirical basis of Kuhn's philosophy of science. (I leave aside here incommensurability.) The internal life of science is, in part, governed by politics in various senses. That was part of the scandal Kuhn caused. It does not follow it is wholly so governed, and so I am not suggesting Kuhn's whole philosophy is thereby vindicated.

 

 

 

On Philosophical Expertise, Systematicity, and Coherence

...The puzzle presupposes that we ought to defer to experts.  But that only makes sense if we've reason to expect that expertise in a domain sufficiently increases epistemic reliability, i.e. the likelihood of true beliefs.  That's certainly the case for many domains -- it's why we should defer to scientific experts, for example.  But it arguably isn't so for philosophy in general.

Philosophical expertise seems compatible with being completely off the rails when it comes to the substantive content of one's philosophical views.  And this is to be expected once we appreciate that (i) there are many possible internally coherent worldviews, (ii) philosophical argumentation proceeds through a mixture of ironing out incoherence and making us aware of possibilities we had previously neglected, and so (iii) even the greatest expertise in these skills will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in roughly the right place.  Increasing the coherence of someone who is totally wrong (i.e. closer to one of the many internally coherent worldviews that is objectively incorrect) won't necessarily bring them any closer to the truth.

Publish

To put a more subjective spin on it: One's only hope of reaching the truth via rational means is to trust that your starting points are in the right vicinity, such that an ideally coherent version of your worldview would be getting things right.  So we've only got reason to defer to others if their verdicts are indicative of what our idealized selves would conclude.  Often, we can reasonably judge that other philosophers have views so alien to our own that it's unlikely that procedurally ideal reflection (increasing internal coherence) would lead us to share those views.  In such cases, we've no reason to defer to those philosophers, however 'expert' they may be.

(Terminological variant: If you want to build into the definition of a subject-area 'expert' that deference to expert judgement is mandatory, then you should restrict attributions of expertise to those whose starting points are sufficiently similar to your own.)

tl;dr: We should only be epistemically moved by peer disagreement (and related phenomena) when we take the other person's views to be evidence of what we ourselves would conclude upon ideal reflection.  Philosophical intransigence is thus often justified, insofar as we can justifiably believe that an improved version of our view could be developed that is at least as internally coherent as the opposing views. This remains true even if we judge that the defenders of the opposing views are (in purely procedural terms) smarter / better philosophers than we are ourselves.--Richard Yetter Chappell@Philosophy, et cetera, "Philosophical Expertise, Deference, and Intransigence" [HT: Liam Kofi Bright & Dailynous.]

I like that in his post, Yetter Chappell does not simply assume that philosophical expertise is like scientific expertise in all the relevant ways.* In particular, he claims that the are very important differences between science and philosophy when it comes to "epistemic reliability, i.e. the likelihood of true beliefs." Drawing on work of Jason Brennan, he assumes that philosophical methods are not sufficient for generating true beliefs (recall also Katzav's skepticism). Let's spot him the thought, for the sake of argument, that scientific communities have methods that generate true beliefs in some specialist domain. (It is not un-problematic as the history of scientific revolutions and belief change suggests.) So, Yetter Chappell rejects (i) the post-Quine-ian (naturalist) tendency to assume that philosophy and science are continuous, and (ii) the popular move that we can use Kuhnian ideas about mature science as the exemplary ideal in our (arm-chair sociology of philosophy and) meta-philosophy. (So, if Kuhn is relevant at all, it's his views on immature, non-paradigmatic science.)

Before one objects that he does not mention Kuhn at all, it is worth noting that Yetter Chappell conceives philosophy as being involved in the generation of "coherent worldviews." (And the idea of a worldview is very Kuhnian.) That philosophers aim at the generation of coherent worldviews is not silly--it is a ruling ideal in the early modern period and in post-Kantian philosophy in the nineteenth century. This way of understanding philosophy finds its most beautiful (soft-Hegelian) expression in Alexandre Koyré's From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. But while Koyré undoubtedly influenced Kuhn his impact on analytic philosophy is negligible.

For, analytic philosophy is (with a few notable exceptions) fundamentally anti-systematic. (To be sure: by this I do not mean it embraces incoherence!) Rather it embraces an ideal of philosophy (depending on one's sensibility) that is focused on arguments, solving (carefully circumscribed) puzzles, or dissolves apparent paradoxes. This is no surprise: since Russell embraced decomposition or analysis this is part of the disciplinary ethos. (Even philosophers who wish to avoid conceptual confusion tend to do so by way of conceptual distinctions and decomposition.) Of course, there are more ambitious projects (such as L.A. Paul's conception of philosophy as modeling), but few embrace what we may call a kind of synthetic ideal.** There is a lot to be said for the virtues that are consequent of the analytic self-conception and practice. [Even if in another context (recall my series of posts on Nagel's Mind & Cosmos) I have tried to exhibit the costs of such lack of practice in systematicity.]

As an aside, I hinted there are exceptions to the rule. For example, it's true that David Lewis does have a systematic philosophy; but his is unusually modular. (Another exception is Jody Azzouni, who also is systematic, but his approach has little uptake so far and routinely receives hostile reviews.) In his cost-benefit analysis, Lewis does explicitly suggest, in fact, that "making a theory more systematic" is on the benefit side. But if it is not ignored altogether, in metaphysical practice among Lewisians, this condition/virtue/benefit is reduced to considerations of scope.

Okay, let me return to the main argument. It's clear that even Yetter Chappell is not really describing systematicity. This is clear from his diagnosis that philosophical expertise "will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in roughly the right place." That's obviously true if it's okay if one's axioms or foundational concepts are treated as primitive (the favored move these past few decades) or spotted for the sake of argument. But otherwise that's really not true.

What makes systematic philosophy more than mere coherent-ism is that a systematic philosophy has the further burden of having to anchor or ground (etc.) those starting points in bits of reality. This is also why for systematic philosophies more systematicity is (defeasible) evidence that they are getting closer to the truth.

That is to say, I agree with Yetter Chappell that philosophical intransigence is often justified; but I do so in virtue of the fact that so much contemporary philosophy relies either on unquestioned primitives (and/or shared background commitments) or abduction/inference to the best explanation. For in the popular philosophical methodologies today the starting points and conclusions are not themselves really being stress tested (even if one allows that the method of counterexamples does some of that).+

Now one may object that I have said nothing about explaining what the concept of 'conceptual stress testing' means here. Due to constraints on time and space in this post, I will acknowledge that that it is a fair objection and that I have left it very vague. But note that there are bits of science where it is the norm to only accept, say, 'five-sigma results;' this corresponds to a probability of 1 in 3.5 million that it is the result of chance. If one were permitted to transfer this kind of talk to philosophy, one can say that no philosophical abduction has this kind of probability; no argument with (by philosophical standards) modestly contestable premises can aspire to it.

 

On the Significance of an Anonymous Review of Newton

The work of M. Newton is a mechanics, the most perfect that one could imagine, as it is not possible to make demonstrations more precise or more exact than those that he gives in the first two books on lightness, on springiness, on the resistance of fluid bodies, and on the attractive and repulsive forces that are the principal basis of Physics. But one has to confess that one cannot regard these demonstrations otherwise than as only mechanical; indeed, the author recognizes himself at the end of page four and the beginning of page five that he has not considered their Prin­ciples as a Physicist, but as a mere Geometer.
He confesses the same thing at the beginning of the third book, where he endeavors nevertheless to explain the System of the World. But it is [done] only by hypotheses that are, most of them, arbitrary, and that, conse­quently, can serve as foundation only to a treatise of pure mechanics. He bases the explanation of the inequality of the tides on the principle that all the planets gravitate reciprocally toward each other ... But this supposi­tion is arbitrary as it has not been proved; the demonstration that depends on it can therefore only be mechanics. In order to make an opus as perfect as possible, M. Newton has only to give us a Physics as exact as his Mechanics. He will achieve this when he substitutes true motions for those he has supposed.---Anonymous, Journal des Scavans (2 August 1688), pp. 153 sq., translated by Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies, p.115. [see also here]

The 1688 review was the first public continental response to Isaac Newton. It is often taken to be the expression of a (neo-)Cartesian rejection of the Principia along the lines of Huygens or Leibniz. This is undoubtedly influenced by Koyré suggestion (he's not the first) that the reviewer was probably the Cartesian Regius. On the now standard reading the reviewer is rejecting action at a distance and asking for an explanation in terms of colliding bodies. I now think this standard reading does not do justice to the details of the review. I was prompted to re-think the review by a fascinating paper, "Beyond the “Continental Translation” of Newtonian Mechanics: The Beginnings of Rational Mechanics Reconsidered" (forthcoming in a OUP Handbook on Isaac Newton edited by Smeenk & Schliesser) by J.B. Shank (who has independent grounds to think the reviewer is Varignon).+

There are two oddities in the review that are incompatible with the reviewer being a standard neo-Cartesian-mechanical philosopher: the author of the review (i) rejects hypotheses; and s/he (ii) insists that knowledge of "true motions" of the planets is possible. But, as Huygens affirmed in his introduction in the Treatise on Light and Discourage on Gravity (which includes his published response to Newton's Principia) the mechanical philosophy was a hypothetical philosophy, relying on reduction to intelligible models, and it insisted that motions of the planets were too complex to be fully known with certainty. (Descartes himself had thought the motions of planets could only be known with rough approximation.) They were, in fact, in no position to complain about a science grounded on hypotheses or suppositions--that was, in fact, Newton's complaint about them. (They could, of course, claim that different hypotheses than those adopted by Newton's were preferable, but not that they were hypotheses.) In fact, for the first time since the Copernican hypothesis had errupted, Newton's Principia gave genuine hope that the true motions of the planets and their causes could be found and were within possible reach.

But the anonymous reviewer is attacking Newton from a more rationalist side: action at a distance is criticized for being (a) arbitrary and (b) un-grounded in indubitable foundations (that track the causal structure of the world).* In the Preface to the Principia, Newton himself had allowed that his foundations were, in an important sense, provisional: "the principles set down here will shed some light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one." Unfortunately, the reviewer does not explain what the starting points or standards of an exact and certain physics look like.

There is a sense, in fact, in which the reviewer can be read as a disappointed Newtonian. For, in the early 1670s, in his early lectures and correspondence on color, Newton had grown infamous for his assertion that his mathematical science of optics could be certain. The claim was watered down in print such that Newton granted Hooke that "the absolute certainty of a science cannot exceed the certainty of its principles." In fact, one can discern in the anonymous reviewer somebody who, after all the high flowing rhetoric of the 1670s (say), had expected from Newton more certain principles than the ones he had supplied in the Principia.

If I am right about this then one can say that rather than representing the informed response of a leading figure in an old paradigm, the 1688 review expresses the perspective of a new possible paradigm, what we may be dub -- with a glance ahead toward Émilie du Châtelet -- Newtonian-rationalism.