From the 24 May 2012 description posted on YouTube: “[Sandstrom's] TEDx presentation speaks to the debate over innovation of ideas specifically regarding evolution, creation and intelligent design. He asks whether or not science can have the courage to work together with philosophy and religion or worldview to discover where humanity is headed and presents the idea of human extension as a way to promote human dignity, cooperation, altruism and flourishing instead of Darwinian dehumanisation, conflict and struggle.”
In the first place, far from trying to shift our attention away from hermeneutical resources, my polyphonic contextualism and my argument in the paper under discussion try to show precisely that we need to pay attention to expressive and interpretative resources in a more pluralistic and situated way, taking into account not only those resources that are widely or universally shared, but also those that are only shared by subgroups in virtue of their distinctive experiences, and even those nascent meanings that only some individuals (who do not yet constitute a well-formed public) are struggling to articulate. I argued that there are typically more hermeneutical resources than those shared by all the members of a collective. My argument was not an argument against shared hermeneutical resources in general, but an argument against Fricker’s use of the notion of “the collective resource” in the singular. According to my polyphonic contextualism, such notion is a problematic analytical tool that can easily lead to distortions, for it captures at best only the hermeneutical resources of mainstream culture or of the established social imaginary. My polyphonic contextualism underscores that a collective is often heterogeneous and contains subgroups and diverse standpoints, and that although it is important to identify the hermeneutical resources that are shared within a collective, we always need to ask “shared by whom?”, so that we can properly understand how shared and non-shared resources can be used in situated communicative dynamics among particular subjects. In other words, any appeal to hermeneutical resources in our analysis has to be properly contextualized by taking into account what is shared and what is not shared by subjects, groups, and entire collectives. My polyphonic contextualism does not try to fracture understanding and interpretation to the point that nothing is antecedently shared and we are left with idiolects à la Davidson; it simply tries to bring our hermeneutical analyses in synch with the inner diversity and heterogeneity of interpretative communities and subcommunities.
In the second place, I fully agree with Beeby’s remarks about shared responsibility in the concluding paragraph. I am grateful to Beeby for identifying a key area of convergence between Fricker’s views and mine. Both of us agree that “we are all responsible for the epistemic virtue and vice present in our social and political institutions.” But this is not at all incompatible with also taking responsibility for what we say and do in particular communicative contexts. In fact, on my view, these areas of epistemic responsibility are interconnected and do not function independently, as Beeby and Fricker seem to think. Following Fricker, Beeby writes as if changing “structures” and changing “the hearts and minds of individual communicators” were independent tasks. On my view, institutions can only display hermeneutical virtues when and because individuals and communities have developed fair patterns of communication, and have learned to speak and listen to each other. Institutions cannot approximate the virtue of hermeneutical justice without improving the sensibilities of the subjects who are part of those institutions. For example, for the police force or the immigration authority of a country to becomes epistemically virtuous, police officers and immigration officers would have to learn to give a more fair hermeneutical treatment to those they interact with; and for this to happen, it is not enough to formulate the right protocols: the subjects following those protocols need to have the appropriate sensibilities and their “hearts and minds” have to be in it. On the other hand, I do not think that the mitigation of hermeneutical injustices and the achievement of hermeneutical virtue are things that individuals can do by themselves, for they certainly need institutional support and changes in the structural conditions of their interactions. If I called special attention to individual and interpersonal aspects of our epistemic responsibility with respect to hermeneutical injustices, it is because these elements are missing in Fricker’s account, not because I do not think that such responsibility has also a crucial collective and structural dimension. I think it would be a mistake to fall into a false dichotomy between individual and collective responsibility in our discussions of epistemic justice, as if the achievement of justice had to be left entirely in the hands of individuals, or entirely in the hands of institutions and structural conditions. In my new book The Epistemology of Resistance,[1] I argue for a social connection model of epistemic responsibility. What has primacy in this model is neither individual nor collective responsibility, but shared responsibility — that is, the responsibility of interconnected individuals in social networks. Leading political theorists such as Iris Marion Young[2] and Larry May[3] have also put the emphasis on shared responsibility in recent discussions of community responses to injustice. My own contextualist model of shared epistemic responsibility is inspired by these theorists. I could not be happier to see that Beeby’s concluding remarks also put the emphasis on the shared aspects of epistemic responsibility.
May, Larry. 1993. Sharing responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
May, Larry. 2005. Crimes against humanity: A Normative Account. New York: Cambridge University Press.
May, Larry. 2010. Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Medina, José. 2012. Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 201-220.
Medina, José. 2012. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming December, 2012).
Young, Iris M. 2011. Responsibility for justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[1] Medina, José. 2012. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming December, 2012).
[2] See esp. Young, Iris M. 2011. Responsibility for justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[3] See May, Larry. 1993. Sharing responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; May, Larry. 2005. Crimes against humanity: A Normative Account. New York: Cambridge University Press; May, Larry. 2010. Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Reading Karen Jones’ paper, “The Politics of Intellectual Self-Trust” has stretched and deepened my thinking on epistemic politics, epistemic psychology, and trust; anyone with an interest in those areas should read it!
In this paper, Jones brings together her long-standing interests in trust and in the politics of credibility, and builds on her earlier work on those areas (see esp. 1996 and 2002). The paper develops a compelling argument and a focused, carefully thought-out account of self-trust, which takes the some “mixed” cognitive/affective approach to self-trust as Jones takes toward other-trust (1996). The paper goes on to chart the interactive relation between self-trust and the perpetuation, and possible disruption, of epistemic injustice. I’ll sketch the view and its primary argument, and raise several questions along the way.
According to Jones (2012), “intellectual self-trust” (in a domain D) is an attitude of optimism about one’s cognitive competence” in D (242-243). It is “appropriate if and only if one’s domain-relativized optimism matches one’s domain-based competence” (243). The paper focuses on the former (what self-trust is) rather than the latter (when it is appropriate). An agent who trusts herself intellectually in D will be disposed to: feel confident regarding her cognitive abilities in D; rely on her D-related epistemic “mechanisms and methods” (240) even when the possibility of error brings risk; privilege her own D-related judgments in circumstances of conflicting judgment; make D-related assertions with confidence. And her self-trust will (at least partly) determine the character of her epistemic meta-reflection: excessive distrust will lead to excessive second-guessing and overly harsh self-assessments, excessive trust will lead to excessive optimism and inadequate self-monitoring (all duly qualified, i.e., in a domain).
Jones develops her argument by showing that it works where others don’t, to give us what we should want from an account of self-trust. According to the first contender—the “simple dispositional model” (240) — to trust oneself intellectually (in D) is to have a set of dispositions to rely on one’s own epistemic methods and mechanisms (in D). While Jones agrees that if agent A trusts himself intellectually, then he will have that set of dispositions, she argues that an appeal to such dispositions alone doesn’t capture the kind of self-trust we are looking for, which is the self-trust involved in epistemic agency. My dog is disposed to fully rely on her epistemic mechanisms, but she isn’t an epistemic agent thereby exhibiting self-trust. For this, there needs to be “a gap between the exercise of the mechanisms and belief — a space that opens up the possibility of epistemic agency” (239). Epistemic agents are able to evaluatively self-reflect; the self-trusting epistemic agent’s dispositions to self-reflect express her self-trust.
On the second view — the purely cognitive model — to have intellectual self-trust in a domain is “to believe or judge that your mechanisms or methods of inquiry in that domain are reliable” (240). The self-trust is “appropriate” iff those beliefs are more or less correct. Jones argues that this cognitivist model cannot account for cases where beliefs are correct but fail to grasp onto reliance-dispositions. You can believe that you are cognitively competent in a domain, and nonetheless not behave in a way that expresses self-trust in that domain, since “cognitive habits lag behind reflective awareness” (238). Jones’ first example: you know that you’ve placed your passport in your bag, and yet you (pathologically) constantly re-check. The second: You know that research shows that women’s intellectual contributions are systematically undervalued in your field (and you believe that it should not be), and yet you go on (unintentionally) undervaluing them, because you do not see your belief about the research as a reason to doubt yourself. This sort of (patterned) mismatch between belief and epistemic dispositions wouldn’t be possible if the cognitive account of self-trust were correct.
What explains this mismatch, Jones argues, is that self-trust is an affective stance: affective states can affect perception, and particularly, they can affect whether or not you perceive something as a reason (in this case, whether or not you sees the research as a reason to distrust your assessments of women’s contributions to the field). The account of self-trust we need, like Jones’ earlier account of other-trust, is therefore a “mixed account” (242) — both affective and cognitive. This kind of account tightly links self-trust to the relevant dispositions, while explaining the mismatch that may occur between belief and self-trust.
I think that Jones is absolutely right that self-trust, like other-trust, involves an affective component. If someone asks you why you trust another, you may say “I just do”. If I don’t trust another, it might be just because “I just get a weird vibe from him”. Or you might express a belief in D with caution even though your level of competence warrants confidence, simply because you don’t feel sure of yourself, for no good reason (or, you may feel sure of yourself, for no good reason!) So: I think that Jones’ view goes a long way toward capturing the phenomenology of self-(dis)trust .
However, I am not sure that I am fully convinced by the argument against cognitivism (although I think the mixed account is right). I think it all depends on how we understand belief, and I think I have a different picture of belief than Jones does. Let’s return to the counterexamples: first, the pathological re-checker: should we expect an account of self-trust to track pathological departures from rational behavior? Or is the idea of pathology that it doesn’t follow normal patterns (here, patterns normal to the relation between belief and behavior)? I’m not sure.
I’m more clear on what I think about the second example (where you continue to trust your first-pass evaluative reactions to the relative merit of differently gendered colleagues’ work even though you have a belief that implies that you shouldn’t). A different take on the situation where someone relies on his cognitive capacities in D even though he “knows” that he shouldn’t is that he continues to harbor sexist beliefs (integrated with affective responses) at a “deep level”. (This brings us into conversation with indirect voluntarism: As with my patterned affective responses, so with my “deep” beliefs: I can change them only gradually, by rehabituating myself — e.g., repeatedly catching myself when I realize that I am “seeing” someone as “a-woman-therefore-someone-not-fully-competent-or-authoritative-in-D”, and listening to her more carefully as a result). If I am epistemically responsible, I will decide to rehabituate myself in order to adjust my (often affect-inflected) entrenched beliefs, when (as a self-reflexive agent) I recognize that “new information” requires that I do so. The resistance of “deep beliefs” (such as those that comprise a social ontology) to change is what we should expect if we see them as forming a system or “web” — changing one reverberates through the system and therefore requires a good deal of force. This is the sort of thing that underlies the cognitive strain of my account (2006), which Jones discusses in a footnote. But I should emphasize: my account there focuses on trustworthiness — on when trust is appropriate — without ever defining trust. This is one of the reasons that thinking about Jones’ paper has been worthwhile for me).
I’m also unsure about whether or not the account that Jones develops really is a cognitive/affective hybrid — at times in the paper, self-trust seems to be (just) a robust feeling of self-confidence. Self-trust is optimism toward one’s cognitive competence in a domain, where that optimism is understood to be an affective attitude toward one’s cognitive methods and mechanisms expressed dispositionally (as spelled out above). Jones argues that self-trust “does not require the belief that one is in fact competent, but tends to promote the very belief that would justify it” (245). So: the optimism isn’t linked to a belief (such as (thought cheerily): “I am good at this kind of cognitive task; I can do this easily!”), although the two (the belief and the optimism-affect) are likely to causally reinforce one another (unless “strong countervailing forces of cognitive habit” stand in the way) (243).
So my question is: where is the cognitive element of the account? I think it needs to be there: I don’t think we can really make sense of all of the dispositions through which self-trust is expressed as flowing from optimism that is not optimism tied to a belief or a belief-like attitude. A belief such as “if anyone can figure this out, I can” is an optimistic belief: it “comes with” feelings of optimism. The disposition to confidently assert my D- related beliefs seems to express an optimistic belief in my reliability. My reliance on my abilities where there is risk in error—which seems to me to be a central case of trust —seems to express my (cognitive) grasp that I am vulnerable, and my optimistic belief that my cognitive abilities can deliver.
One related worry: if I’ve got it right, Jones’ view of self-trust allows that one can believe oneself untrustworthy and yet trust oneself, and one can believe oneself trustworthy and yet not trust oneself. The latter isn’t hard to make sense of when self-esteem has never fully developed, or has taken lots of battering. The former is harder to make sense of. It certainly is a mark of a poor epistemic agent! But I would think that the belief (“I am not trustworthy in this domain”) would and should destroy the optimism. On the “deeply entrenched belief” picture of the mismatch between explicit judgment and actual reliance, I would have a residual belief that I am not trustworthy in D which well-considered judgment hasn’t yet displaced.
This case leads me to wonder whether we shouldn’t expect a disanalogy between an account of self-trust and an account of other-trust: I have an easier time making sense of the mismatch between a belief (“S is not trustworthy in D”) and an affective optimism regarding S in D, when there are two distinct agencies involved than when there is only one involved. I might think/feel: “even though S’s track record in D is mixed, she’ll come through for me,” but here I am trusting her as a friend. I expect her to be motivated by our friendship; on Jones’ (1996) account, I expect that she will be moved by my trusting her. But how could that work in the case of self-trust?
Finally, to turn to the relation between self-trust and testimonial injustice: remember, here we consider patterns integrated into normal testimonial practices through which members of socially subordinated groups suffer epistemically undeserved “credibility deficits” (see Fricker (2007)) in testimonial exchange (especially in domains where recognition of epistemic authority tends to reinforce power and prestige); members of socially privileged groups enjoy epistemically unearned credibility bonuses in that type of domain; the result is testimonial injustice suffered by the socially subordinated. Jones argues — and I wholeheartedly agree — that since all aspects of epistemic agency, including intellectual self-trust, normally develop through social/epistemic interaction, agents who are systematically treated as not fully deserving of epistemic respect—i.e., who suffer “credibility deficits” (in D) — are likely to become intellectually distrusting of themselves (in D); and it is rational of them to do so, given that the mechanisms of testimonial injustice are woven into the normal patterns of epistemic exchange through which we all learn to participate in epistemic communities. (But — as Jones indicates in her final paragraph while making a related point — it’s important to acknowledge that if those epistemically disrespected (in some communities/social contexts) are suitably supported in other communities/social contexts (especially “home” communities), their self-trust may hold steady. And they are positioned to become effective agents of change).
So: the marginalized are likely to develop excessive self-distrust; the privileged are likely to develop excessive self-trust; hence, in Jones’ words, the self-trust of both is “miscalibrated”: it doesn’t match their actual cognitive competences, or their actual relative cognitive competences (in D). Correcting for epistemic injustice, and purging its patterns from normal practices, thus requires “recalibrating intellectual self-trust”. (Here Jones continues the argument against cognitivism: meta-reflection alone — coming to form corrective evaluative beliefs about one’s cognitive capacities — doesn’t manage to grab onto behavior or “recalibrate” self-trust.) She suggests three stages that recalibration will require: we need to learn to recognize testimonial injustice and its effects on self-trust; we need to undo its effects “by actively disrupting the dispositions” that maintain it; and, through rehabituation, we need to “come to have the right affective attitude towards our cognitive competence in a domain” (247).
I think these three carefully articulated stages are all key: here Jones draws effectively on her earlier work in (2002). Here again, I want to note how much work the cognitive part of the account does, and suggest that meta-reflection is a more effective force for change than Jones suggests: I agree, as Jones says, that solitary meta-reflection is not very effective in actually changing a person’s habits and affective responses. But meta-reflection is rarely fully solitary: we gauge how we are doing cognitively (in D) in complex, patterned interactions through which we “read” others responses to us, in light of how we think they are doing cognitively. If we shift among communities — and I think this is key too — we’ll have to notice/feel differences in those patterns, and the dissonance between our different experiences should cause us (if we are moved by a genuine desire for truth and justice) both to recognize what’s going on, and to have a range of affective responses in tandem with (or as part of) that recognition, which should cause us to attend more consciously to what we are doing, and thereby to begin to disrupt dispositional patterns. So: although ingrained habits of mind/feeling are hard to destabilize, new feelings and habits are introduced by new recognition, which forms new beliefs and affects, and together they work on displacing the old ways.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not arguing for (pure) cognitivism. One of the recurrent strengths of Jones’ work is that it recognizes that features of agency and practice once thought of (in academic philosophy) as (properly) purely cognitive, in domains once thought of as (properly) purely cognitive, are (I would add also) affective to the core. Jones’ emphasis on the impotence of “pure meta-cognition” is important: if kids learn in school that “racist beliefs are wrong”, this day’s lesson is not going to undo their dispositions to have affective racist responses (to members of others’, or their own, racial groupings, depending on the character of their “home” communities) even if they believe that their teacher knows what she is talking about. So-called “color-blind” policies allow patterns of racist behavior and affect to simply continue.
My point is that this may be because “deep beliefs” to which those affects attach have not been displaced by what we learn “in theory”. Just as affective elements of our psychology run deep, so do cognitive ones.
Daukas, Nancy. 2006. Epistemic trust and social location. Episteme 3 (1-2): 109–24.
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Cambridge: Oxford University Press.
Jones, Karen. 1996. Trust as an affective attitude. Ethics 107 (1): 4–25.
Jones, Karen. 2002. The politics of credibility. In A mind of one’s own: Feminist essays on reason and objectivity, 2nd ed., edited by Louse Antony and Charlotte Witt, pp. 154–76. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Jones, Karen. 2012. The politics of intellectual self-trust. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 237-251.
In “Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared Responsibilities”, José Medina suggests some refinements to Miranda Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice. As Medina sees it, Fricker “pays insufficient attention to the interactive and performative dimension of hermeneutical injustice, which is treated [by Fricker] mainly as a semantic phenomenon concerning the intelligibility of experiential contents”. [1] While Fricker develops the idea of hermeneutical injustice as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding” [2], Medina wants us to consider the thought that the notion of a collective understanding may be insufficiently complex to capture the social dynamics present in so many of our communicative exchanges. I think Medina is right to point out some difficulties presented by the idea of a collective understanding. However, I don’t think these difficulties necessarily preclude us from making any use of the idea at all.
First, let’s look at some background to the idea of a collective understanding. In her account of hermeneutical injustice, Miranda Fricker draws our attention to one disadvantage stemming from women’s situation within an unjustly structured society. This particular disadvantage has to do with something that Fricker calls ‘social power’ and its influence on what she calls ‘collective forms of social understanding’.
One way of taking the epistemological suggestion that social power has an unfair impact on collective forms of social understanding is to think of our shared understandings as reflecting the perspectives of different social groups, and to entertain the idea that relations of unequal power can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on as they make sense of their social experiences, whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible.[3]
It seems reasonable to take Fricker as suggesting here that different social groups each contribute their perspective on various concepts like gender roles, workplace conventions, racial stereotypes, and other socially constructed concepts to a communal resource, which is then used by society at large as a tool to understand and interpret various situations and experiences relevant to those concepts. Because some social groups have more power (social, economic, etc.) than others, these powerful groups will not only contribute more information to the communal resource (a situation which sets conditions for later ‘eruptions’[4] of hermeneutical injustice), but they will also find it easier to use the resource when they need to understand some aspect of their social experience. This is presumably because powerful groups and individuals have more authority over social conventions and over which perspectives shape our norms, and therefore are also able to relate to the communal resource more easily since it contains familiar materials. Over time, the communal resource will come to reflect the perspective of powerful groups more than that of less powerful groups. Less powerful groups will have more and more difficulty understanding their own social experiences because they, and the community at large, lack the resources that are supposed to help them form such understandings. This is a rough sketch of the situation that Fricker suggests is both present in our society today and responsible for hermeneutical injustice.
Fricker illustrates the consequences of this situation with an example about the origins of the term ‘sexual harassment’. A woman named Carmita Wood worked for a Cornell University in the early 1970s, at a time when significant numbers of women had not been members of ‘the professions’ long enough for us to develop a nuanced understanding of professional gender relations.[5] At a time when we had no concept of what sexual harassment was, Carmita Wood’s boss made unwanted sexual advances to her in their place of work. Carmita did everything she could to avoid or alleviate the situation before succumbing to stress and trauma and quitting her job. Her subsequent claim for unemployment insurance was denied because she could not name or describe to her (or anyone else’s) satisfaction the reason for her unemployment. This moment, the moment when Carmita struggled and failed to find words to describe her experience, was the point when she became a victim of hermeneutical injustice. She could not find words to describe her experience because that experience, one we now understand as an instance of sexual harassment, was “obscured from collective understanding”.[6]
Medina builds on Fricker’s work on hermeneutical injustice by situating it in the framework of polyphonic contextualism. Polyphonic contextualism is Medina’s way of paying attention to the range of dynamics present in our communicative practices. He is troubled by Fricker’s narrow focus on the intelligibility of certain social experiences, and he advocates a broad focus on communicative dynamics across different social contexts.
But the problem remains in the ambiguity of the expression “the intelligibility of experience” as a semantic category detached from particular communicative dynamics. The multifaceted aspects of the struggles to make sense of one’s experiences to oneself, to those who undergo similar experiences, and to other groups are obscured by simply talking about the intelligibility or unintelligibility of experience without specifying to whom, in what communicative context and with what dynamic…[7]
In other words, an understanding of our experiences is not either obscured from or available to collective understanding. Instead, there are degrees and shades of understanding and intelligibility that come through different communicative dynamics. What’s more, it is unhelpful to think of this struggle as happening between an individual and society. Instead, the struggle happens most often between individuals or groups of people who communicate with each other for various reasons and in various contexts. These particular reasons and contexts will do more to shape the success of the conversation than any collective understanding stemming from a collective interpretive resource. Also, Medina is careful to point out, social power may turn out to be more of a obstacle to understanding one’s experiences than a help, as in the case of white ignorance.[8] In the end, the crucially important thing for Medina is that we are trying to make ourselves intelligible to someone in particular, not to society in general. And if this is the case, a collective understanding will be less important than a localized one.
In addition to this focus on the particularities of our listeners, Medina challenges Fricker to account for all of the smaller steps that we take on the way to intelligibility. Fricker’s theory is (perhaps fairly) characterized here as an all-or-nothing affair: either we all share the same cognitive deficit due to the gaps in our collective interpretive resources, or there is no gap and therefore no deficit or possibility of injustice. However, Medina claims that we can find ways of rendering an experience intelligible in some way while still remaining a victim of hermeneutical injustice. For example, it seems plausible that Carmita Wood may have fumbled towards some kind of limited understanding of her experience before she left her job and applied for unemployment insurance. This understanding would not have been as robust or easily communicable as the understanding that came after the creation of the term ‘sexual harassment’ and its attendant concept, but it seems plausible to call it an understanding nonetheless. This, then, is the advantage offered by polyphonic contextualism: with it, Medina can allow for the possibility of levels of intelligibility that are inextricably bound up with the social dynamics present between different speaker/listener parings throughout the community.
Medina’s most serious challenge to Fricker comes, then, in the form of a question:
But whose “collective understanding”? And whose “collective hermeneutical resource” (in the singular!)?[9]
It seems right that many of our experiences may be understood in degrees of intelligibility, and that we will struggle to articulate our experiences in different ways with different audiences. However, if we admit to these degrees then must we also change Fricker’s picture of our collective hermeneutical resources? The resource as Fricker describes it does not allow for foggy half-articulations, nor for articulations more available to one audience than another. For Fricker, Carmita Wood and her harasser share the same cognitive deficit, regardless of whom they speak with about sexual harassment. Given Medina’s exploration of communicative dynamics and social power, this seems unlikely to be the best characterization of their experience. So must we abandon a collective interpretive resource in favor of a series of smaller localized resources? I suggest that one consequence of adopting polyphonic contextualism is that we will shift our discussion away from talk of interpretive resources and towards a context-based parsing of politically significant communication failures. Resources will cease to hold the significance that they do for Fricker. The interpretive resources of people only tangentially connected to a situation will not play a role in our analysis of communication failures; instead, we will be concerned almost entirely with localized power dynamics and communicative practices. It may not be the case that we must abandon a collective resource, or even that we must decide between a range of resource models. Instead, we might find ourselves moving away from resource talk altogether.
One consequence of this shift is that we lose a sense of shared responsibility for politically significant communication failure. Although Medina develops the idea that Fricker’s understanding of hermeneutical injustice does not allow for agency and individual responsibility (for Fricker, hermeneutical injustice is a purely structural notion[10]), there is a sense for Fricker in which we all are responsible for the epistemic virtue and vice present in our social and political institutions. These structures may be more difficult to change than the hearts and minds of individual communicators, but they are nonetheless our institutions and structures. The responsibility to shape and improve them lies with each of us. If we no longer feel this sense of collective responsibility to society, then we are held only to standards of responsibility relative to each individual conversational context. And it is much easier to ignore the importance of an individual communication failure than it is to deny our part in shaping a shared resource accessible to sympathetic and unsympathetic listeners alike.
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice. Power and the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press.
Medina, José. 2012. Hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: Social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 201-220.
As a way of adding to the productive dialogue between Miranda Fricker and Elizabeth Anderson, the latter commenting on Fricker’s important book Epistemic Injustice, I want to explore the main claims of Prof. Anderson’s paper, and to point to ways the dialogue can be continued.[1] I have little to say by way of critique as such, but I do want to suggest directions that such further dialogue might need to proceed.
Anderson’s response to Fricker’s insightful analysis of epistemic injustice relies on the distinction between transactional injustice – wrongs committed locally at the site of individual or dyadic transactions – and structural injustice – injustice manifested at the social or institutional level. Anderson argues that contrary to Fricker’s focus on individual virtue as a response to both testimonial and hermeneutical epistemic injustice, some epistemic harms must be corrected at the collective, policy level – i.e., structurally. Anderson focuses on testimonial injustice, but her point can be stated also about hermeneutical injustice as well.
Recall the distinction between these two forms of epistemic injustice. Testimonial injustice involves a wrong done to a person when she is unfairly excluded or downgraded as a credible source of knowledge. Hermeneutic injustice, on the other hand, involves the wrong done to a person when the dominant discourse of a society lacks the crucial vocabulary with which a person can express her interests (and the wrong done to her when those interests are significantly set back). The primary example Fricker uses for this is the experience of what we would now call sexual harassment in an age before such treatment was (properly) identified for what it was. (Picture a typical episode of the TV show Mad Men.) As Fricker claims and Anderson reiterates, hermeneutic injustice is always structural, in that it is a product of collective social practices and institutional vocabularies not the interaction between individuals at the “local” level.
The chief claim Anderson makes here is to challenge Fricker’s view that for both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, (individual) ethics is the primary focus of responses to injustice of this sort. That is, Fricker admits that the virtue she puts forward as antidotes to epistemic injustice are connected with corresponding requirements at the institutional and political level, but she claims that efforts to overcome epistemic injustice should be understood as individual ethical virtues, and “in terms of our philosophical understanding of epistemic injustice, the ethical is primary.”[2] Anderson disagrees, and in at least three areas of group-based credibility deficits, structural responses are needed, and individual ethical prescriptions will be either otiose or counter-productive. Those areas include “differential access to the markers of credibility; ethnocentrism, and the ‘shared reality bias’” (Anderson 2012, 169).
In each of these areas, individual behavior may be innocent, such as the use of benign stereotypes to identify reliable sources of certain kinds of knowledge. So that adverse effects of some of these habits at the collective level must be dealt with structurally, and that individual virtue responses are either misplaced or ineffective. Similarly, ethnocentric (in group) favoritism can be malicious, but it can also serve valuable social functions. And when such tendencies have problematic social effects, the proper response is at the level of social rules, not individual behavior. For example, when social segregation along racial lines exaggerates (at the collective level) the habits of otherwise innocent ethnocentrism, we must combat that segregation at that collective level. It would be counter-productive at best to expect individuals to amend their cognitive habits locally to respond to this problem, especially insofar as they will fail to see it as a problem (since they may not understand the connection between their sense of familiarity with the cognitive and discursive habits of others and social segregation on a larger scale).
The additional observations I want to make here are quite in keeping with Anderson’s point and in fact are partially implicit in what she says. The first is to emphasize that institutional policies implementing responses to social injustice at the collective level must be seen as supportive of individual values and senses of good behavior. That is, if the response is purely structural – imposing a collective response to a social injustice with no social impetus for people to re-think their individual habits, values and behaviors, serious problems of effectiveness if not legitimacy of that social policy hover on the horizon. This is not only because for justice to be done it must be seen to be done, but also because social rules must gain the support of those living under them by mapping, even if indirectly, to the individual virtues and values in local social transactions that motivate them.
This is to entirely agree with Anderson’s insistence that structural responses should not be seen as competing with individual virtue promotion, for often such structural remedies can be put in place to “enable individual virtue to work” (Anderson 2012, 168). My claim is the complement to this, namely that the promotion of individual attitudes, values and virtues will be required for structural remedies themselves to work, if not to gain their full legitimacy as instances of justice-based policies.
Consider racial injustice and the use of affirmative action policies to counteract its effects (in the U.S. context for example), a topic Anderson has written extensively about.[3] Such programs may well be a proper response to structural injustice and attempt, at a social level, to respond to entrenched racial injustice. At the same time, whites and other ethnic groups have reacted to these programs with resentment and resistance, and as Anderson uncovers in her recent work, lack of support for and understanding of the point of these policies have hampered their effectiveness. A dominant reason that such responses to racial inequality are so embattled is that the structural responses have not been met with sufficient buy-in by all affected: whites in many corners do not share the motivation behind the need for such measures and do not see it as a virtue to participate in or support them. The lack of personal commitment is at least part of the story.
My point here is familiar enough, and I make it merely to emphasize the dynamic correspondence between responses to injustice at a structural level and the transactional virtues associated with them. Unless there is at least acceptance of the values inherent in the structural measures at the individual (transactional) level, such institutional policies will prove to be ineffective and counter-productive in many cases and, one could argue, illegitimate.
If measures to counteract the bad effects of ethnocentric bias, for example, are seen as disadvantageous to certain groups, they will not engage in the requisite supportive behavior needed for those policies to function. Just as Anderson claims that collective responses to injustice are needed to give full effect to transactional virtues at the local level, the opposite also holds: individual support of the values inherent in the social policy are required for those policies to succeed. If a person’s sense of fairness and inclusivity guiding her local behavior is completely unconnected with the values guiding the public policy, the latter will lack effectiveness.
Indeed, they may also lack legitimacy, if we follow a certain reading of (the broad contours) of liberal democratic political theory. In that tradition, principles of justice at the collective level (as the “first virtues of social institutions” in John Rawls’s phrase) are prioritized over the promotion of individual values and social goods. And in more recent developments of liberal theory, this priority is far from absolute, in that political principles of justice must be seen as part of a package of goods the whole of which is broadly acceptable as part of a political consensus (again, to follow Rawls, if only loosely). If the imposition of a collective response to a social “injustice” is divorced completely from individual citizens’ senses of value and virtue, and as a result they cannot accept the public justification of those social principles, it is unclear they are fully legitimate.
(I mention these philosophical tenets of what is described as “ideal theory” though I realize that the critical enterprise in which we are all engaged in this conversation – correcting ongoing and entrenched injustice – lies within the realm of “non-ideal theory”. [4] But I think the points are nevertheless worth considering in the same way.)
So my point is that claims that certain policies are required to restructure social institutions and practices are legitimate only when paired with notions of virtue and the good espoused by (or acceptable to) those who must follow them. Rules of justice that shape institutions will not only be ineffective but arguably illegitimate if they are entirely unconnected with conceptions of individual virtue and the good functioning in the micro-terrain of interpersonal relations.
This issue of complementarity – between structural responses and individual virtue – plays out more forcefully in the case of hermeneutical injustice and indeed may raise worries about Fricker’s analysis not mentioned by Anderson. Recall that hermeneutical injustice involves the public discourse within which people’s interests (and claims of victimization) might be expressed, and when the dominant discourse fails to include a vocabulary within which such interests can be articulated, a systemic form of exclusion and “silencing” occurs. Anderson focuses on testimonial injustice, but her points about structural responses to epistemic biases apply here as well, though with new complications.
For example, Anderson also raises questions about the effectiveness of individual responses to epistemic injustice in cases where people are unaware of the markers of cognitive disadvantage. In such cases we cannot expect the virtue of greater sensitivity to that disadvantage to take hold, even if we adopt the habits of sensitivity to such patterns of exclusion that Fricker recommends. This point, however, can be applied to hermeneutitcal injustice in even more powerful ways. For if the dominant social discourse does not even contain the vocabulary by which people’s experience of harm can be expressed, it is obscure how we can adopt the virtue of being sensitive to such disadvantage at the individual level. Not that I want to forgive the sexual harasser’s in the age of Mad Men, but insofar as the claims that certain experiences of hurt and harm are a mark of injustice are themselves not substantiated in the public discourse (yet) or are still a matter of dispute, a virtue of sensitivity to still unexpressed forms of hermeneutical injustice will have no content.
At a time before a vocabulary of harm and injustice has been established, when some people express the claim that they are being misunderstood, it is unclear what substance the virtue of hermeneutic justice will have unless we already know how the story will end, namely that they are being misunderstood and are not merely engaging in special pleading. Consider, for example, individuals who claim to suffer from what is called “Body Integrity Identity Disorder” who desire to amputate their own healthy limbs due to a feeling of estrangement from their body form. Such individuals have asked the medical community to respond to their needs for this type of procedure and have claimed injustice in not being properly heard.[5] But whether those medical professionals who refuse to participate in such amputations are exhibiting the vice of hermeneutic insensitivity or not will very much depend on how the issue of the status of such claims will work out. We will have to wait to see, for instance, whether such a desire comes to be understood as the expression of a genuine interest in a social context whose dominant discourse lacks a vocabulary for that interest, or is an idiosyncratic preference that has no claim on society in general. The content of the hermeneutic virtue here is under-determined at this point. (I choose this example because I am agnostic about the status of such claims; for those readers who think this expresses my own insensitivity, or over-sensitivity, I then need a different case where the jury is indeed still out on the status of the claims in question.)
But this is contestable in given cases. The more general form of the virtue might be this: “be aware of the historical patterns of silencing that have victimized less powerful groups because we failed to listen carefully enough to their complaints”. And this is very much in keeping Fricker’s own view about the individual virtue of hermeneutic justice.[6] But what would a structural response to hermeneutical injustice look like if it were pursued along such lines? On the one hand, it would resemble calls for greater inclusion and flexibility in the modes of public discussion, both in formal political chambers and the public sphere more generally.[7] But the issue of indeterminacy arises here with greater force: we cannot assume that the particular voices not being publicly understood (yet) represent a case of unjust exclusion until we allow the dynamics of full social discussion of the issues to take their course. It cannot be assumed that excluding certain modes of expression is a matter of injustice prior to coming to realize that they represent genuine interests rather than factional or idiosyncratic pleadings.
So here the structural response is more complicated. But clearly the understanding of the ways in which our patterns of thinking, communicating and listening can be infused with forms of injustice has been greatly illuminated both by Prof. Fricker’s book as well as Prof. Anderson’s amendments and challenges. I only hope these comments spur further discussion of this important area of inquiry and public discussion.
The following text is a collection of quotations from books, papers, interviews, journalistic articles, videos and audio lectures by Steve Fuller, August Comte Chair of Social Epistemology at Warwick University, on the topic of ‘intelligent design’ (ID). They have been collected over the past 5 years and are now arranged in such a way as to give an opportunity for those unacquainted with or lacking a wider picture of Dr. Fuller’s position regarding ID to become familiar with it. This is not a definitive collection as surely it would be next to impossible to gather all of his publically expressed thoughts on this topic.
Instead, this document represents what I have found most relevant and germane in his works regarding the conversation between evolution, creation and intelligent design. Steve is perhaps best known by some people for his participation in the Dover Area School District trial about ID in 2005 (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District), however, quotations from the transcript of that trial are not included here as they would have added significantly to the length and because his contribution to ID has been developed and honed since that time. Some themes in the quotations are twice or several times repeated, given the nuances in meaning and purpose displayed in different media settings. Any further relevant and documented quotations by Prof. Fuller are welcome to be added to this collection by sending them to my address provided at SERRC. Likewise, I will continue adding new quotations when they arrive as Fuller’s work on ‘intelligent design’ continues.
This leaves the question of why it makes sense to display Steve Fuller’s thoughts about evolutionism, creationism, ID, neo-Darwinism and related topics. Frankly, I think Fuller is the most perceptive and broad-ranging thinker today on these topics. His works cross a variety of fields, from history, philosophy and sociology of science, to social epistemology, science and technology studies and generally involve interdisciplinary methods and themes. And he is unashamed to take his message to the public through a variety of media channels. He is not prejudiced by the politics and religion dialogue in the U.S.A. (i.e. where the IDM originated), though he learned about these things through his education, teaching experiences and upbringing there. Now, living in the U.K., where religion is officially established and active in education by decree of the government (cf. Will & Kate’s wedding in Westminster Abbey), Fuller’s perspectives offer many insightful points that are not to be found in works by scholars, scientists and lobbyists in the U.S.A. Party-line new atheists would do well to heed the messages he brings in transition from ‘secular humanist’ to Abrahamic theistic defender of ID as a legitimate research program for study in science, philosophy and religion/worldview discourse.
After that brief introduction for context and preparation, I bow out now as appreciative collector and give space to Steve Fuller’s voice on the topic of ‘intelligent design.’
“… [S]cientific creationism and intelligent design theory [are] versions of natural theology that refuse to accept the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in biology that would cast the difference between humans and other animals as merely a matter of degree, not kind.” (4)
“… [I]ntelligent design theory taps into the vast majority of science that has been done under the assumption that nature is a unified rational whole; and humans have been specially created to understand, manage and possibly improve it, if not to bring it to outright completion.” (15)
“Intelligent design theory, in its quest to achieve intellectual respectability as an opponent to Neo-Darwinism, has somewhat mimicked its opponent by adopting a conception of ‘intelligent designer’ just as open as that of the Neo-Darwinist conception of ‘evolution’. I argue that neither strategy works well, either epistemologically or politically.” (164)
“…[T]he theory’s proponents have tried to treat the concept of ‘intelligent design’ very much as Neo-Darwinists have treated ‘evolution’, namely, as a ‘big tent’ for many different competing interpretations that do not necessarily add up to a coherent or compelling theory.” (171)
“The failure of intelligent design theory to specify the intelligent designer constitutes both a rhetorical and an epistemological disadvantage…The epistemological disadvantage is subtler, namely, that intelligent design theory is unnecessarily forced to adopt an instrumentalist philosophy of science, whereby its theory is treated merely as a device for explaining particular phenomena (i.e. as products of intelligent design) without allowing inferences to the best explanation (i.e. the properties of the implied designer).” (171)
“I believe [it] is necessary [to] return to theology as the source of theoretical guidance on the nature of the intelligent designer (Fuller 2008a).” (171)
“In short, by studiously avoiding the appeal to theological arguments as part of their scientific explanations, intelligent design theorists only inhibit their own ability to meet the opposition of Neo-Darwinian apologists like Sober. Admittedly, making such appeals would mean not only re-opening old theological debates but also making them part of secular academic debate. A test of our collective intellectual maturity will lie in our ability to tolerate such a newly charged situation. But as it stands, intelligent design theory does itself no intellectual favours by keeping the identity of the intelligent designer as vague as Neo-Darwinians keep the identity of evolution, even if that practice appears justified as politically expedient.” (173)
“Theology at its best: Intelligent design as heuristic for scientific discovery” (173)
“For nearly all creationists and many intelligent design supporters, the legally relevant question here is whether restricting publicly funded science instruction to the pronounced anti-humanism of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution constitutes an encroachment of the state into matters that are constitutionally delegated to civil society. Thus, the legal mind behind intelligent design theory, Philip Johnson (1991), has accused the singular promotion of Darwinism in schools of fostering a naturalistic religion. And he is literally correct, as long as US courts insist on upholding the idea that science requires a belief that natural history is entirely the result of processes observable today under normal circumstances. This insistence ties ‘naturalism’ to what in the 19th century was called ‘uniformitarianism’ but which nowadays might be regarded as a species of ‘inductivism’. It harks back to David Hume’s rather muted defence of Newtonian mechanics as a mathematically elegant and useful summary of the solar system’s regularities – but not a glimpse into the deep causal structure of the natural world – and hence not a basis for launching a design-based argument for God’s existence.” (176)
“…[M]y own interest in promoting intelligent design in schools, which is much more positive than Johnson’s original worries about naturalism turning into an established religion. I actually believe that the deep theological roots of intelligent design theory provide a robust basis for perpetuating the radical spirit of inquiry that marks both philosophy and science at their best – not at their worst, as their collective response to intelligent design has put on public display (Fuller 2009b). As a true social constructivist (Fuller 2000b: Preface), I see myself as one of the constructors of intelligent design theory. I am not simply remarking from the sidelines about what others have done or are doing, as a historian or a journalist might. Rather I am making a front-line contribution to defining the theory’s identity.” (177)
“In terms of pedagogical implications, my support of intelligent design goes beyond merely requiring that students learn the history and philosophy of science alongside their normal studies. It involves reengineering the science curriculum so that its history and philosophy falls within its normal remit.” (180)
“…[W]e should not be surprised if in the next few years Johnson’s worst fears are vindicated by a major lawsuit brought against some science instructor whose overzealous naturalism leads him [or her] to deny divine causation in a public school district whose tax base is funded mainly by religious believers.” (181)
“It is very unlikely that science would have taken the course it has – and [be] valued as much as it has been – were it not for the Abrahamic belief that humans were created in the image of God.” (183)
“A careful reading of the various historical and contemporary theorists of intelligent design reveals a diversity of opinion about the identity – or even the identifiability – of the intelligence informing nature’s design comparable to the diversity of processes endorsed by self-avowed ‘evolutionists’. It is unfortunate, albeit understandable, that these differences remain largely suppressed in the culture war with the Darwinists. However, I have been quite open about identifying the ‘intelligence’ of intelligent design with the mind of a version of the Abrahamic God into which the scientist aspires to enter by virtue of having been created in imago dei. This claim implies – in a way that has been very controversial in theology but crucial for the rise of modern science – that human and divine intelligence differ in degree not kind. In terms that medieval scholastics of the Franciscan order, notably John Duns Scotus, would have approved, a univocal sense of ‘intelligent’ is attributed to both God and humans, the only difference being that the former possesses infinitely more than the latter. Thus, to say that God ‘intelligently designed’ reality is to implicate the deity in a process in which humans, however very imperfectly, also engage. Without admitting this semantic point at the outset, the ‘intelligence’ behind intelligent design would be mysterious and useless to science.” (187)
“… [A] unified science of intelligent design that divides into two main branches: divine artifice (aka biology) and human artifice (aka technology) – the former literally considered as a superior version of the latter, or the latter an inferior version of the former, or perhaps the two artifices co-produced in some way, all depending on one’s theological starting point.” (191)
“Other than whether to take biology’s pervasive design talk literally, the most controversial question relating to design in nature concerns the ‘units of design’: Exactly what sort of thing is supposed to be, in the intelligent design jargon, so ‘irreducibly’ (Behe) or ‘specifically’ (Dembski) complex as to imply a designer? William Paley, the historic standard-bearer for intelligent design theory – largely because of the negative example he provided for Darwin – proves to have been a transitional figure in the history of design thinking. To be sure, Paley retained the ancient Aristotelian typological perspective, which presumes that every normal member of a recognised species is designed (or ‘pre-adapted’) for its environment. However, Paley supplemented this with a populational perspective, indebted to his fellow cleric Malthus, which justified differential rates of survival – especially amongst various nations and classes of Homo sapiens – as providing at least indirect lessons in the conduct of life. Thus, Chapter 26 of Paley’s Natural Theology, entitled ‘On the Goodness of the Deity’, is devoted to a defence of Malthus’ controversial (at least amongst Christians) for his call to end Poor Laws as a futile exercise in resistance to divine will. Darwin not only abandoned the typological in favour of the populational side of Paley’s scheme, but he also divested the populational side of its link to theodicy, reflecting Darwin’s unwillingness to credit a Creator who would allow so much wasted life. For Darwin, ever the Epicurean, suffering as such is evil, even were it to come from a deity whose ultimate sense of benevolence is brought about by such cruel means as mass extinction. (192-3)
“For better or worse, and perhaps surprising to all concerned, social engineering is a secular offspring of intelligent design theory.” (195)
“…[W]hatever role God assigns to humanity in his cosmic plan, it must be, like the deity’s plan itself, potentially subject to self-legislation. Bluntly put, to be accorded the respect to which we are entitled by virtue of having been created in imago dei, we must be able and allowed to choose to be part of the divine scheme, as if we had a hand in its design.” (219)
“Intelligent design theory (ID), the latest version of scientific creationism to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy in biology, is in the unenviable position of being damned as both bad science and bad theology. However, if those charges are true, then the basis of our belief in both science and God may be irrational. At the very least, ID suggests that belief in the two may be interdependent.”
“The most basic formulation of ID is that biology is divine technology. In other words, God is no less – and possibly no more – than an infinitely better version of the ideal Homo sapiens, whose distinctive species calling card is art, science and technology. Thus, when ID supporters claim that a cell is as intelligently designed as a mousetrap, they mean it literally. The difference between God and us is simply that God is the one being in whom all of our virtues are concentrated perfectly, whereas for our own part those virtues are distributed imperfectly amongst many individuals.”
“The Christian doctrine of providence, which was designed to instill perseverance in the face of adversity, is the model for this curious, and some would say, blind faith in science. Certainly such a view makes more sense if God is thought to reveal his handiwork in nature, as ID supporters presume, than if the deity is inscrutable or non-existent, as ID opponents normally do.”
“[Darwin] began as an ID supporter but fell from the fold when he could not square the mass extinctions, monstrous events and design flaws so evident in nature with a super-smart, super-good, super-powerful deity that might serve as a beacon for human progress. As this awareness set in, Darwin gradually became more pessimistic about science’s capacity to ameliorate the human condition.”
“I also point out that much of the supposedly ‘anti-scientific’ sentiment of our times – ranging from New Age medicine to Intelligent Design Theory – really marks a maturation of the scientific sensibility in society at large. This is captured by ‘Protscience’. Instead of kowtowing to a science they don’t understand, people are increasingly motivated to learn about science for themselves and draw their own conclusions about its relevance for their physical and spiritual lives.”
“Even if intelligent design theory appears to enjoy less scientific support than neo-Darwinism, it is nevertheless more likely to promote faith in the scientific enterprise than neo-Darwinism itself.” (3)
“The pursuit of science is more often defended for what it makes possible than for what it actually does.” (5)
“In contrast to the fundamentally species- egalitarian position of Darwinism, science requires that reality be anthropocentric, although not necessarily anthropomorphic. In other words, the world must be constructed so that we may master it but not because we ourselves have constructed it.” (16)
“… [T]he systematic erasure from both professional and lay memory of natural science’s indebtedness to social thought has done the most to drive the wedge between modern science and its monotheistic origins… Lest the reader doubt the extent to which major natural science breakthroughs have been inspired by the social sciences, understood as disciplines that by example bear witness to God’s intelligent design, simply consider how statistical thinking entered physics in a famous address given by James Clerk Maxwell at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1873.” (20, 21)
“…[T]he Abrahamic faiths cannot straightforwardly coexist with the atheistic naturalism behind Darwin’s theory of evolution, which as a matter of principle limits its explanatory resources to what can be normally encountered in nature.” (30)
“The key question is whether scientific progress has been advanced or retarded by the spread and elaboration of design talk. The answer that comes through loud and clear from normal scientific usage itself is that design language possesses heuristic value, in that the more it is used, the more science tends to advance.” (39)
“… [T]he “natural selection” that neo- Darwinists claim to have been revealed in the lab is simply a mischaracterization of a very controlled form of artificial selection, in which the creative power of the experimenter is transferred to nature, almost in the manner of a ventriloquist, in order to satisfy a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism, whereby success in the laboratory is presumed to be indicative of natural processes that would have occurred even without the experimenter’s intervention.” (42)
“While ‘scientists’ names a group people with increasingly specialized credentials, scientists themselves resist embracing all the implications of a scientific priesthood, leaning instead on the more “Protestant” idea of a “scientific method” whose observance is potentially within any sincere enquirer’s reach.” (46)
“That idea of “science as a vocation”, as Max Weber called it with a nod to Luther, is essentially religious. The original model was monasticism, but it was updated in the nineteenth century when the word “scientist” was coined to describe someone with credentials in scientific subjects who was thereby authorized to provide deep, rational, unifying explanations of naturally and artificially produced phenomena.” (55)
“Here the internet functions as the printing press did five hundred years ago: an information technology that provides vernacular conveyance of alternative models for applying canonical concepts, be they religious or scientific … Just as the Protestants sought to recover the original biblical spirit behind centuries of encrusted tradition and ritual, today’s Protscientists wish to revive the empowering spirit of scientific enquiry from the institutions that shackle it.” (62)
“…‘[P]ublic understanding of science’ is tantamount to the scientific establishment’s Counter- Reformation, with Richard Dawkins behaving like an especially fiery Jesuit.” (63)
“Would it [science] suffer even if we added intelligent design to neo-Darwinism as a permissible general explanatory theory? … [V]ery probably not.” (65)
“…[T]here is no reason to think that rejecting a grand explanatory theory nurtured by the scientific establishment, such as neo-Darwinism, entails rejecting any of the technical aspects of science that serve us so well.” (66)
“By the end of the twenty-first century, the sociology of scientific authority will probably look very much like the sociology of religious authority today.” (69)
“Whatever one ultimately makes of [Stephen C.] Meyer’s argument, its reception shows that the public harbours enough scientific literacy to pick and mix from what the scientific establishment would rather have them accept or reject as a package deal. Welcome to the world of Protscience!”
“It is only when biologists feel collectively under threat that they take refuge under a specifically Darwinian rubric and rally around a purposeless sense of natural selection for their definition of evolution.” (79)
Q: “What has atheism – old or new – ever done for science?” (Chapter title, 86)
A: “Atheism as a positive doctrine has done precious little for science.” (110)
“…[B]elief in a very old earth is an outright conceptual requirement of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which explains organic change by nothing more intelligent than random variation and natural selection. From a Darwinian standpoint, the older the earth the better, since it allows that much more time for undirected chance- based processes to work themselves out in nature.” (89)
“On the one hand, Dawkins provides protective colouration for gunshy so-called theistic evolutionists who wish to admit the reality of design in nature without having to enter the public minefield of theorizing about whatever (divine) intelligence might be informing it. This is the spirit in which Cambridge’s Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, Simon Conway Morris, has expressed his grudging admiration for Dawkins. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, Dawkins provides licence for atheistic evolutionists to make glib assertions, in both popular and technical forums, about “suboptimal” features of organisms and their parts that purport to demonstrate the lack of intelligent design in nature. Such assertions presuppose that one already knows, or can imagine how a superior intelligence would design nature, so that by nature failing to bear the relevant signatures, it can be inferred that no such intelligence is to be found… the seriousness with which the public takes pronouncements about nature’s suboptimality by theologically illiterate atheists is nothing short of amazing.” (96)
“Whereas Newton, fuelled by confidence in the biblical account of humans as creatures in imago dei, concluded that his theory had mapped the divine plan, Darwin, starting out with similar confidence, was ultimately persuaded by the evidence that humans lacked any natural privilege, not least because there was no plan beyond the actual unfolding of natural history. Both worked on their grand projects for twenty years, the result of which reinforced the faith of one scientist and removed the faith of the other.” (105)
“Whatever its concrete scientific benefits turn out to be, intelligent design theory has already succeeded in reasserting science’s rootedness in theology’s quest for a normatively unified sense of ourselves as enquirers and the reality into which we enquire. However, this quest for normative unity poses its own deep problems, ones that constitute a field that has periodically surfaced in this book: theodicy … theodicy was the original science of intelligent design, a comprehensive master discipline that hails from a time – the late seventeenth century – before theology, philosophy and science were neatly compartmentalized into discrete academic fields. The fundamental question posed back then was how could the divine creator, who is described in the Bible as omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, produce a world that is imperfect in so many respects.” (113)
“In short, our free will, as the expression of our divine origins, could redeem creation in the end.” (115)
“Thus, today’s intelligent design theorists regard biological cells as literally high-tech information processing systems whose functionally integrated machinery and error-correction-and-repair systems outpace our current engineering know-how. Yet, many theologians have bristled at such a specific characterization of God’s modus operandi – versions of which can be found throughout the history of theodicy – because the more we think we understand the implicit logic of divine creation, the more that suffering and evil look like something that God had planned all along. This has potentially troubling consequences for the lessons we, again as creatures in imago dei, should draw for the conduct of our own lives.” (116-7)
“Natural Theology [by William Paley], a book normally celebrated in intelligent design circles for its remarks about evidence for design in living organisms but ignored for its acceptance of poverty and shortness of life on a mass scale as equally providing evidence of the divine plan.” (120)
“If humans are the crown of creation, as the Abrahamic faiths would lead us to believe, then the metaphysically levelling character of Darwin’s theory of evolution needs to be actively resisted.” (121)
“It was just this respect for the decision-making powers of the individual – accepting that they might make the wrong decision – that fuelled the Protestant Reformation’s return to the Bible and the Enlightenment’s championing of free expression. It is also in just this spirit that intelligent design theory wishes to recover science from its captivity in such authoritarian institutions as national academies of science that do not permit a free vote on epistemic matters among all certified scientists.” (129)
“… [A]n overriding faith in scientific progress makes sense only because we imagine the history of science as a long collective quest to recover Adam’s original closeness with God that was lost with the Fall, and which we, as Adam’s heirs, dimly remember and in turn drives us to seek an understanding of reality that transcends the knowledge needed to maintain our sheer animal existence.” (130)
“…[H]umanity’s free will, the spontaneous creativity that entitles us to the status of creatures in imago dei.” (131)
“…[E]ven when regarded in purely metaphysical terms, Darwinism offends. There is something profoundly irrational in hitching one’s fate to a theory in which all that is meaningful is ultimately based on chance-based processes, the plausibility of which depend on an ever-expanding and aging universe.” (146)
“From the standpoint of a pure scientific naturalism, there’s no reason to privilege human beings.”
“What exactly is special about human beings once you take a pure Darwinist line, which is a kind of species egalitarian line?”
The idea that human beings were/are created in the image of God, “enables scientists to trust their intellects.”
~~
From: “Modes of Enchantment and Disenchantment in Science: A 21st Century Perspective.” Audio, workshop in memory of Professor Mariano Artigas, organized by the Thomas More Institute and the Research Group on Science, Reason and Faith (CRYF) of the University of Navarra, 2009.
“It isn’t so hard to imagine that God is a big engineer.”
“The way the arguments get conducted on the intelligent design side is from an engineering perspective.”
“The difference between God’s creation and our creation is a difference in degree and not kind.”
“We are more closely associated ontologically with God than with natural creatures.”
“Cracking the genetic code was the real Newton moment in biology, not Darwin.”
“The spirit in which you should enter into the discussion of intelligent design is that there is depth there. And it’s not reducible to just a handful of people you hear about in the media.”
“Intelligent design people are not anti-science, but they are anti-establishment.”
“ID theorists tend to reinterpret existing science rather than do original research. Their short-term goal is to justify room for alternative explanations for the emergence and maintenance of life on Earth to that of modern evolutionary theory, or ‘genetically modified Darwinism’.” (1)
“ID’s long-term goal is to reorganise the sciences so that biology and technology come to be treated as ‘design sciences’ in exactly the same sense, the former a science of God’s design and the latter of human design. According to the ID theorist, technology imitates and – where possible – improves upon and perhaps even completes biology.” (1)
“The book before you begins by challenging the taken for-granted idea that there is a consensus of opinion in the scientific community.” (4)
“… [A] single-minded dedication to science would not make sense without faith in the intelligibility of all nature.” (50)
“Like other figures associated with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, Newton took literally the idea that the universe is a divine artefact; specifically, a great machine whose design we can reverse-engineer, and possibly improve and even perfect. This attitude continued to inform the scientists who migrated from physics to biology in the 20th century, first into genetics and then molecular biology, to such an extent that biotechnology forms the vanguard of today’s life sciences.” (51)
“For Darwin, ‘natural selection’ was, as we now put it, a ‘science-stopper’ that provided an absolute limit to our comprehension and control.” (51)
“…[M]ost contemporary biological research is not beholden to Darwin’s purposeless vision of life. The non-Darwinian history of modern biology, which goes from genetics to molecular biology to biotechnology, certainly vindicates the idea that nature has been designed with sufficient intelligence to be susceptible to purposeful human modification. This is a conclusion worthy of the title of ‘science’, something that Darwin once again claimed not to have practised.” (53)
“Impolitic though it may be to admit, to view science as an endeavour whose value surpasses that of other secular activities makes sense only if there is an overall design to nature that we are especially well-equipped to fathom, even though most of it has little bearing on our day-to-day animal survival. Humanity’s creation in the image and likeness of God, a doctrine foundational to the three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – provides the clearest historical rationale for the rather specialised expenditure of effort associated with science. The much-vaunted ‘creative’ dimension of science that culminates in ‘genius’ comes close to acknowledging this divine spark.” (76)
“Darwinian evolution’s capacity for obscuring the nature of life is epitomised by Ayala’s subtitle, ‘Design without a Designer’. This mysterious phrase presupposes a curious dualism. Not only are there designed things with a clear designer, namely human artefacts, but there are also supposed to be designed things without any designer. The natural theologian William Paley coined the phrase ‘design without a designer’ in 1800 as an oxymoron. Whatever his other failings, when compared with today’s evolutionists Paley had a remarkable sense of intellectual parsimony. He treated all designed things as what they literally are: artefacts. For Paley and all ID theorists after him, biology and technology are two species of the same genus, namely, ‘design sciences’, the former concerned with divine and the latter with human design. Thus, Paley notoriously likened the idea of nature as divine artifice with a watch found on a heath.” (118-9)
“Paley argued that ‘there cannot be design without a designer’ in the same sense that there cannot be ‘order without choice.’ By the end of the 19th century Newton’s solution had come to be interpreted in thermodynamic terms, with the ordered state of the universe featuring as an improbable outcome of the laws of statistical mechanics. This suggested to ID theorists like James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann that the universe was designed to be understood by creatures like us, an idea that is nowadays often called the ‘anthropic principle’.” (121)
“Indeed, were Darwin transported to our times, he would concede, in light of the largely laboratory-based work in genetics and molecular biology that has transpired since his death, that there is design in nature and that he had prematurely dismissed that prospect simply on the basis of the nature of life (and death) as he had observed it in field settings.” (122)
“Darwinism played a crucial role in the spin given to Mendel’s work; Darwinism enabled the Nazis (among others) to avoid taking personal responsibility for deciding who was fit to live and die by portraying eugenics as simply a matter of following nature’s orders, a slight personification of natural selection. Thus, artificial selection became less the intelligent design than the blind execution of natural selection.” (131)
“Perhaps Behe should not have taken Darwin’s bait: ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.’… An elementary course in the rhetoric of science would have taught Behe that all arguments from impossibility in science are doomed to failure: they always end up revealing the arguer’s lack of imagination. Darwin’s so-called challenge is best read as a rhetorical flourish, since you can’t prove that something is impossible unless its existence would amount to a logical contradiction. In that sense, Darwin has already won his own be … Thus, whenever Behe claims that a cell, organ or organism could not have evolved bit by bit over a very long time, because its intermediate ‘incomplete’ versions would have lacked the adaptive capacity to survive another generation, his nemesis Kenneth Miller converts the claim’s topic from natural history to experimental demonstration. In the process, Miller does not actually show what Behe says cannot be shown. Instead, he shows how today’s scientists can simulate in the lab what modern evolutionary theory presumes to have happened in the past without the intervention of the scientists themselves – or, more to the point, God. In short, Miller provides an actual model of a possible history. The rhetorical import of Miller’s response is to leave the impression that even if Behe is eventually proved correct in his claim that natural selection does not explain how the cell actually came to be as it is, in the short term he appears to be pre-emptively excluding a demonstrably possible account of the cell’s emergence.” (146 & 148-9)
“In the jargon of the philosophy of social sciences, Neo-Darwinism confuses nomothetic and idiographic inquiry, the study of recurrent tendencies and the study of unique events. The former is conducted in the lab, the latter in the field, yet evolutionists routinely elide methodologically significant differences between these rather different data-gathering sites – sometimes from one sentence to the next …We might regard this development as ID’s revenge, since the idiographic method itself was originally justified by each human’s possession of a unique consciousness, or ‘soul’.” (147 & 152)
“The social sciences enjoy an epistemological privilege in this discussion because they have most rigorously addressed the complex of issues implied here: how are we to relate together the findings reached by multiple methods that are meant to be applied to settings rather different from the ones in which the knowledge was first obtained? We might be interested in knowing about the remote past (e.g. the ‘origin of species’ in biology) or what is likely to work in the future (e.g. the prospects for eradicating a disease or preserving a species), but any knowledge we acquire, by whatever means, is in the so-called extended present … In this respect, regardless of their substantive views on the evolution–ID debate, social scientists can perform a valuable service simply in questioning the methodological assumptions made by evolutionists as they glide effortlessly between data gathered from radically different sources.” (149 & 151)
“… [D]oes the experiment Miller cites really refute ID? To an ID theorist, all successful laboratory demonstrations of evolution attempt to simulate on a small scale God’s own world-creating methods. These involve controlling certain conditions and allowing others to vary, both by acts of will. The extent to which the human simulations approximate to divine creation may be measured by their generalisability to situations outside the laboratory in so-called ‘real life’ or ‘in vivo’ settings. It is here that the gap in knowledge and power between the human and the divine is most keenly felt. But if the gap can be narrowed over time – in such a way that the artifices of the laboratory can be increasingly used to turn nature to human ends – then the ID theorist is justified in concluding that scientists are coming closer to grasping the divine creator’s methods.” (154)
“Dawkins, despite his self-avowed ‘intellectually fulfilled atheism’, has quite happily helped himself to design-based language, not least ‘selfish gene’ and ‘blind watchmaker’, to cite the titles of two of his books. In his hands, ‘adaptation’ is a secular synonym for ‘design’, and ‘natural selection’ a secular synonym for ‘God’.” (157)
“It was only once atomism and Epicureanism were embedded in a universalist cosmology subject to intelligent design that they contributed to the organised resistance against nature that has been characteristic of modern science. This cosmology derived from the biblical religions, in which the deity, in whose image humans are uniquely created, is presented as engaging in an ongoing but ultimately successful struggle against nature to realise his intentions.” (182)
“In response to his great contemporary and rival René Descartes, Gassendi ventured that human psychology is not especially well-designed to receive the truth, given our susceptibility to what most immediately attracts the senses. This is a version of the problem that had faced Tertullian in the early days of Christianity. However, Gassendi did not share Descartes’ optimism that rational self-discipline informed by Christian principles would enable us to comprehend the divine plan. Instead he concluded that God designed us in such a way that his nature would remain forever elusive, rendering the palpable imperfections of the world-system largely inexplicable.” (185)
“Since Darwin doubted that artificial selection could match the feats of natural selection, he resisted any hint that God might be an amplified version of a genius inventor who created the eye in the manner of the telescope.” (187-8)
“…[T]he overriding influence of Paley’s argument for God’s existence, which left the impression that design-based arguments imply a complacent creator whose handiwork can be understood simply upon inspection and admired by a grateful but passive humanity. However, the strongest arguments for design have placed the free will of both God and humans at their centre.” (191)
“Why is Intelligent Design Unlikely to Go Away?” (Chapter title, 194)
“An important strategic problem facing ID defenders is exactly what to make of the considerable, possibly even increasing, overlap between the language of design that they and their evolutionary opponents use. The existence of such overlap would seem to suggest that the two sides differ more at the level of overall research orientation – what Karl Popper called ‘metaphysical research programmes’ – than of testable scientific claims issued from the laboratory bench and recorded in peer-reviewed journal articles. This is reflected in the different phenomena with which both believe ‘the facts of life’ need to be rendered ‘consilient’, another word coined by Whewell, this time to describe Newton’s feat of unifying findings from a variety of disciplines under a set of simple laws. Within a broad definition of the ‘scientific community’ (that is, knowledge workers whose expertise is drawn mainly from mathematics or the natural sciences), ID derives its greatest support from fields peripheral to Darwin’s original concerns. These include the branches of biology closest to chemistry and physics, as well as engineering – including software engineering – and parts of medicine. In contrast, evolution’s heartland is to be found among the historically field-based disciplines in which Darwin himself would feel most comfortable today: zoology, botany and palaeontology. Genetics is a battleground common to both. Yet, truth be told, the emergence of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis in the 20th century has largely amounted to the displacement of Darwin’s own competences by people possessing much the same training and sensibility as those now inclined to support ID.” (197-8)
“ID operates with an anthropomorphic, even literal, sense of intelligence that is indebted to the Abrahamic idea of humans as created in imago dei. In that sense, ID supporters remain true to the etymology of ‘intelligence’, which derives from the Latin for ‘understand’. Something possesses ‘intelligence’ if it can be understood, which is to say if we can understand it. The idea is ultimately sociological: something is intelligible only if it involves a meeting of minds.” (199)
“Neo-Darwinism and ID face complementary challenges. Neo-Darwinism needs to justify the continued pursuit of science, given the diminished cosmic status that the theory accords to our species and the ecologically destabilizing consequences of the science that we have increasingly pursued. For its part, ID needs to adopt a consistently progressive stance towards the pursuit of science, as befits creatures designed in imago dei to master nature. If this dual challenge seems disorientating, that is only because, on the one hand, Neo-Darwinists continue to dine out on ID-based reasons for esteeming science as the signature project of human privilege, while on the other, ID theorists have yet to take the full measure of the literal force of our biblical entitlement, which requires embracing, however tentatively, science’s Faustian dimension.” (226)
“Much of the discontent generated by the prospect of creationism, or even ID, being introduced into science classes rests on two confusions that evolutionists tend to promote. The first is a failure to distinguish between attempts to remove evolution from the curriculum and attempts to add some form of creationism or ID. The spirits of the two proposals are rather different. Calls for the removal of evolution tend to object to the theory on more than strictly scientific grounds, appealing to the supposedly adverse political and moral consequences of, say, promoting the idea that humans are nothing but evolved animals. In contrast, calls for the inclusion of creationism, while often agreeing with the spirit of the former proposal, grant that evolution has significantly increased our understanding of natural phenomena, but hold that the Neo-Darwinian explanatory framework may not be adequate, and in any case would benefit from regularly having to confront historically relevant alternatives. Most so-called creationist movements in today’s world, including the campaign for ID, fit into this category.” (228)
“ID needs to revisit the intellectual schisms in biology that the Neo-Darwinian synthesis overcame in the middle third of the 20th century, versions of which still endure in the social sciences: qualitative vs. quantitative methods, field vs. lab research sites, macro vs. micro perspectives. To a large extent, the language of modern evolutionary theory papers over, rather than resolves, the divergent perspectives of these scientific cultures by portraying them as ultimately contributing to a common vision of reality that was first outlined in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.” (229)
“On the religious side, ID needs to reassert the specificity of the Abrahamic God as the implied intelligent designer. Without this specificity (which still allows for considerable theological dispute), the concept of an intelligent designer becomes devoid of content, adding to the suspicion that ID is no more than ‘not-evolution’. In this spirit, ID’s critics have proffered a ‘flying spaghetti monster’ and an ‘orbiting teapot’ as alternatives to a more biblically inspired deity. In response, ID defenders should openly confront the relatively recent anti-religious judicial reading of the US Constitution’s separation of Church and state, which now excludes even religiously motivated views from public science education: the issue should not be whether ID is primarily science or religion, but whether it passes scientific muster as an openly religious viewpoint with scientific aspirations – a matter to be decided by actual educational practice.” (231)
“… [T]he ‘track record’ of Neo-Darwinism is parasitic on prior creationist breakthroughs over which Neo-Darwinists now claim sole ownership, and which creationists have yet to claim back as their own.” (233)
“I believe that the version of creationism nowadays called ‘intelligent design theory’ (or IDT), which takes inspiration from the Bible but conducts its business in the currency of science, was responsible for the modern scientific world-view that evolution nowadays exemplifies so well. Even those who were led to reject IDT, not least Charles Darwin, began by assuming its vision of nature as a rational unity designed for human comprehension. In contrast, the general evolutionary perspective that Darwin ultimately championed has many cross-cultural precedents but these have tended to discourage systematic scientific inquiry, stressing instead the need to cope with our transient material condition in an ultimately pointless reality. I believe that to lose touch with the creationist backstory to modern science would be to undermine the strongest reason for pursuing science as a transgenerational universalistic project that aims to raise humans above the animals.” (2)
“In short, contrary to what advocates on both sides of this dispute appear to believe, IDT provides a surer path to a ‘progressive’ attitude to science than modern evolutionary theory. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection managed to create such a furore in the West – but not in the East – because his careful organization of the scientific evidence appeared to imply that the pursuit of science itself is ultimately meaningless the diversity of life would seem to lack the cosmic design that had inspired previous generations of Christians, Jews, and Muslims to study nature systematically. In effect, Darwin undermined what had always been a fundamentally religious motivation for doing science: the ennoblement of humanity, and the species created in God’s image.” (2)
“Darwin’s achievement has been largely rhetorical, as the theory of evolution by natural selection loosely constrains a vast range of biological disciplines, more in the spirit of a political party platform than a mathematical theory. I show that this looseness enables modern evolutionary theory to appear much more unified than the comparably arrayed disciplines in the social sciences, without having to encompass the social sciences into a kind of ‘sociobiology’.” (9)
“…[T]he main constituency for IDT among scientists, namely, those who think of themselves as doing on a smaller scale (or perhaps bringing to completion) work that the creator has done on a grand scale.” (57)
“…[B]oth friends and foes of the theory are profoundly ignorant of the centrality of intelligent design to the rise of modern science. There is much more to IDT than simply the sum of unsolved problems faced by modern evolutionary theory.” (162)
“…[A] biological science founded on intelligent design would radically reconfigure the disciplines. It would not simply be the flipside of the evolutionary paradigm.” (163)
“Were Darwin transported to today’s world, and educated in such largely design-based sciences as genetics and molecular biology that were developed after his death, would he continue to interpret the balance of the evidence as telling against intelligent design in nature? Evolutionists take for granted that the answer would be ‘yes.’ However, if you believe (as I do) that the advent of genetics and molecular biology in the first half of the 20th century, culminating in the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure in 1953, outweighs the significance of Darwin’s own work, you would be forced to conclude that Darwin would reinterpret natural selection as a design-based mechanism, possibly propelled by a divine engineer who could even command Newton’s respect.” (164)
“It may be time to replace a diffuse appeal to natural selection which metaphorically shadows a divine presence with a humanly accountable sense of intelligent design, which implies that we take full responsibility for the planet – as if we were its creators.” (164)
“Darwin … would become a believer in intelligent design.”
“Design without a designer is a science-stopper as far as I’m concerned.”
Lewis Wolpert: “There is a designer isn’t there?”
Steve Fuller: “Yes of course.”
Lewis Wolpert: “Who do you think the designer is?”
Steve Fuller: “I think this [Designer] is a reference to God, of course it is.”
“Lurking behind this ‘greening’ of the political left is the most fundamental challenge facing the future of the social sciences: Are humans always the privileged members of society? The question arises once we consider that the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of Mendelian genetics and evolutionary biology does not privilege Homo sapiens above other animals. Because animals share 90+% of their genes, species turn out to be convenient taxonomic schemes, not natural kinds. From a strictly Neo-Darwinian perspective, even commonsensical appeals to a ‘human nature’ that sharply distinguishes us from the ‘brutes’ is little more than a myth.” (29)
“The karmic spirit runs deep in the Neo-Darwinian synthesis in evolutionary biology. It certainly helps to explain the knee-jerk Darwinian resistance to an idea that seems perfectly acceptable to most Americans, namely, that evolution itself may be a product of a divinely inspired ‘intelligent design,’ which humans are especially well-placed to fathom, complete, and/or master.” (165-166)
“[Z]oocentric misanthropy” (187)
~~
Steve Fuller and Intelligent Design
Other Audio Resources:
Is Science Really Moving Faster Than Ever? This was the question Konstantin Kakaes (formerly on staff at The Economist and currently a Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation) and Daniel Sarewitz (currently a Professor in the School of Life Sciences and School of Sustainability and Director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University) debated in early April 2012, in a series of exchanges that appeared on Slate.com
In the first entry, It’s impossible to tell, Kakaes proposes that the truism that “the ‘pace of innovation’ is speeding up” is problematic because it’s impossible to come up with a meaningful metric for innovation and technological change, about which there is little useful quantitative data. He goes on to argue that curiosity and camaraderie are more fundamental to the successful production of scientific knowledge.
In his reply, What Chairman Mao and a malaria drug can teach us about the societal benefits of science, Sarewitz tries to draw a distinction between the idea that more scientific knowledge is being produced at a faster rate and the idea that this amounts to greater societal benefits. In short, he contends that determining a metric for the pace of scientific knowledge and innovation tells us nothing about whether such knowledge is beneficial. Greater attention needs to be paid to the institutional context of the “complex innovation ecosystem” instead, so that we can develop policies that contribute to “institutions and programs that link knowledge advance to societal needs.”
In the third entry, How MBA-speak is hurting the scientific academy, Kakaes responds that, though a better understanding of the innovation ecosystem is desirable, those tasked with understanding it tend to be policymakers “who’ve emerged from business schools and management consultancies convinced that Excel macros will let them give reality to the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave.” He also suggests that their attempts tend to be misguided because poor knowledge translation is not a science problem; it’s a problem of political will. Focusing on the link between science and societal needs instead of the role of policy tends to lead to mere short-term optimization.
Sarewitz’s concluding entry, Are scientists interested only in satisfying their own curiosity, or do they want real-world results? counters that the traditionalist model defended by Kakaes doesn’t fully appreciate the scientific context. It’s implausible and counter-productive to separate off scientific creativity from real-world problem-solving, which are “both at their best when they can feed off of each other.” This is why the “knowledge translation” view, where society is responsible for translating scientific findings into beneficial policy, fails. He concludes by suggesting that the important question to ask – which no one has yet figured out how answer – is “what’s the rate of production of knowledge and innovation that can make crucial contributions to our well-being and future prospects?”
The key difference between the contributors’ views is their answer to the question: what does or should motivate scientific inquiry – curiosity or social need? Or more generally, how is science practiced and how should it be practiced? Kakaes supports the “traditionalist” account, which entails funding basic science guided by curiosity, whereas Sarewitz suggests the distinction between basic and applied science is arbitrary anyway, and that the “innovation ecosystem” brings the two together in ways that show the former distinction to be harmful. Ironically, this difference leads both writers to the same conclusion – that what we should attend to is the scientific context. Where Kakaes recommends a context defined by curiosity-guided research and camaraderie between practitioners, Sarewitz includes more motives and actors. But the exchange between Kakaes and Sarewitz reveals a further question which neither address: how is the so-called context of science determined by the even broader context of what some have called the “innovation economy?”
Though the interlocutors both hint at this broader context (Kakaes in more critical terms than Sarewitz), neither explicitly identify the economic assumptions that form the backdrop of their exchange. In a “knowledge economy,” it would be a mistake to think of knowledge production and/or translation independently of the political and economic assumptions and imperatives that prioritize innovation. An examination of the social benefits of scientific knowledge of the sort Kakaes and Sarewitz offer cannot ignore the broader economic trends and discursive framing of the issue. To invoke terms like “knowledge translation” or “innovation ecosystem” without recognizing the political and economic paradigm that brought us these terms and legitimizes them as ways to frame our knowledge enterprises would be wrong-headed. I don’t imagine that either contributor is ignorant of these issues, but that they aren’t addressed specifically in this exchange is surprising.
How does this relate to the original question posed to them – is science really moving faster than ever? Surprisingly, Sarewitz’s conclusion – that we need to figure out how to meaningfully ask about and answer the question of what rate of knowledge production will lead to societal benefits – is the very question Kakaes rejects at the beginning, suggesting there is no way to quantify and therefore measure this usefully. So what have we learned from this exchange, if anything? The contributors have usefully pointed out that there is a connection between the context in which science occurs and the likely benefits to society, even though they disagree about what constitutes this context and how closely it is or should be linked with social needs. But the next question to be asked – one that the contributors overlook – is to what extent and in what ways should we allow political and economic assumptions and imperatives to determine our practices of knowing? Is drawing the boundaries of the scientific context the responsibility of the science community? And if not them, who?
