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A Problem for the Social Sciences: A Comment on James McCollum on Hermeneutical Injustice, Sandra Marshall

Jim Collier —  June 17, 2012 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Sandra Marshall, University of Stirling, s.e.marshall@stir.ac.uk

Marshall, Sandra. 2012.A Problem for the Social Sciences: A Comment on James McCollum on Hermeneutical Injustice. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (7): 21-23

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-nG

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In Miranda Fricker’s own account of ‘hermeneutical injustice’ two features seem to be particularly salient: that hermeneutical injustice is to be understood as structural and as involving a failure of communicative intelligibility. As Elizabeth Anderson usefully puts it: “Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a society lacks the interpretive resources to make sense of important features of a speaker’s experience … Hermeneutical injustice is structural, because hearers are not at fault for not being able to understand [my emphasis] what the victims are saying” (2012, 166) What is argued here is that this is a very particular kind of wrong and one which not simply reducible to other kinds of injustice, nor, presumably, to other kinds of wrong. We should be clear then that simply having one’s views, ideas, concerns or experiences ignored will not amount to hermeneutical injustice, but maybe, rather, a case of testimonial injustice. Or, it may not be any kind of injustice at all. So, if hermeneutical injustice is to be a useful tool for assessing the social sciences, and the applications of social scientific theories in trying to solve real world problems, as McCollum’s paper argues that it may, then both the core features mentioned above need to be kept firmly in view.

The first thing to say is that the application of Fricker’s idea to the broader context of policy and the social sciences, as McCollum proposes, looks entirely plausible. However, if it is to be effective rather more work needs to be done in fleshing out the nature of the structural aspect of hermeneutical injustice and the way these structures affect intelligibility. As it stands, Fricker’s own characterisation of the idea of structure in play is rather minimalist. There are hints of a more developed characterisation in McCollum’s argument but it is not always clear which of the different ways we might think of “structure” are in play at the various stages in the argument. In focusing on the activities of various international development agencies McCollum’s argument seems to highlight what I shall very crudely call “organisational structures” which themselves structure the decisions made by such agencies. So one might see how it is that the internal organization of large, powerful bodies such as the IMF and central banks for instance, detrimentally affect the way they deal with some individuals and groups. As McCollum suggests, the interests of those who are dependant upon the operations of these large bodies are frequently (always?) subordinated, lost sight of, because there is no easy way in which the views of these groups or individuals can get into the picture. It is a familiar enough problem that bureaucratic procedures, not all of them unnecessary, can result in inadequate decisions producing absurd situations on the ground. What is not immediately obvious is that this sort of structural problem involves hermeneutical injustice.

Let us take a familiar kind of example, one mentioned in the paper itself: that of the unfortunate inhabitants of Kanyama, who had no real way of getting to the health clinic which was meant to serve them. (A situation that is, in any case, also frequently to be found in highly developed polities with very sophisticated systems of health care). The way in which a resource like a health clinic gets to be located may well be the result of a number of decisions being made by agencies on the basis of considerations which taken by themselves make sense, but which are insufficiently co-coordinated. Thus, although the clinic is sufficient to serve a population of a certain size, and at a manageable cost, it fails because those whom it should serve are unable to get to it, or at least not easily. No one noticed that the area lacked the kind of transport infrastructure necessary or, in the case of the people of Kanyama, the lack of security at night. This looks like a kind of stupidity, or carelessness but what is needed for this to be case of hermeneutical injustice is for there to be a “failure of communicative intelligibility”. In this example there is nothing that looks like that kind of failure: there is nothing in the characterization of the problem — having no way of getting to the clinic because of lack of suitable transport and general conditions of security at night — by the inhabitants that suggests they had a difficulty conceptualizing their problem. Moreover, it does not even require the Kanyama people to point it out for it to be understood as a problem. Anyone could make the point, though no doubt it is the case that it needed the Kanyama people themselves to make the point that the clinic is inaccessible because others will not in fact notice. McCollum implies at least, that the Kanyama lacked “a chance to conceptualize the conditions that they regarded as necessary for their own well-being” (original emphasis, 197). That, I suggest, is not the problem. Suppose the “structure” were such that this kind of failure to notice an important aspect of the location of the clinic did not occur and the clinic had been suitably located or some further work done to also improve the infrastructure so that they could travel more easily to it. But there had been no input from the Kanyama, would there still be an argument for saying that they suffered an injustice, hermeneutical or otherwise? The issue then is about simply being ignored, not included, even though there is no difference at all between their view of their situation vis-à-vis the clinic and that of the planners. If there is any sense here in which there is an epistemic injustice i.e. they suffer a “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (Fricker 2007, 1) then it looks more like the testimonial kind.

Perhaps the point to make about the “structural” aspect of the organisational kind is that it seems to be more or less contingent, so that it is possible to imagine how the organisation might be changed so as to minimise the possibility of injustice. The solution McCollum himself offers looks like such an attempt: “Projects like ‘Voices for the Poor’ allow the subjects for whom development policy is implemented to speak from their own experiences and for that reason are hermeneutically just” (198). Yet, one strand of his argument suggests that such inclusion, even if one buys in to the idea of “positional objectivity” (198) to characterise the nature of the local judgements, will not be enough to preserve the role of the social sciences in policymaking, for at various places his argument seems to suggest that there is a different kind of “structure” which constitutes hermeneutical injustice, one which is not contingent. This comes out most clearly in his characterisation of the impact of neoliberal and neoclassical economic theory on development theory and policy. Here the problem is at the level not of organisation but conceptual structure. The point being that the very concepts employed in these economic theories are such that they have hermeneutical injustice built into them. These are, as McCollum indicates, old points but worth making in this connection: it is the very concept of “individual” and “development” which belongs with it cannot include the experiences of actual people, which is to say those experiences will not be intelligible in the theory. It will not be possible for people to understand their experiences in the light of such theories. If this is so then this will be a deep and intractable case of hermeneutical injustice. The question is how far this constitutive form of hermeneutical injustice runs in the social sciences. McCollum, for the most part, refers to economics in this way and it might well be argued that the “social sciences” are a somewhat eclectic group of disciplines, so that what might be said of one area will not follow for another. Nonetheless McCollum’s proposal to apply the idea of hermeneutical injustice to the social sciences if taken up would surely require a more detailed look at the conceptual structure of more than just neo classical economics before we can be sure that there really is any useful place for the social sciences in policy making, or whether they really are best left in the vacuum where they may be interesting and harmless (190).

References

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2012. Epistemic justice as a virtue of social institutions. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 163-173.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCollum, James. 2012 Hermeneutical injustice and the social sciences: Development policy and positional objectivity. Social Epistemology 26 (2): 189-200.

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Response to David Coady, Wayne Riggs

Jim Collier —  June 15, 2012 — 2 Comments

Author Information: Wayne Riggs, University of Oklahoma, wriggs@ou.edu

Riggs, Wayne. 2012. Response to David Coady. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (7): 17-20.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-nG

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First, let me thank Professor Coady for his insightful comments on my article. They highlight several points that are well worth going over in more detail. Indeed, my thinking on these issues has deepened as a consequence of reading his responses, and for that I am doubly grateful.

Coady’s comments focus on my characterization of (Fricker’s account of) epistemic injustice as a kind of epistemic and/or moral negligence. (My goals in the paper were primarily exegetical, so I did not mean to commit myself to this account of epistemic injustice. But since I also did not disavow it, it is quite reasonable for Coady to have taken my silence to indicate assent.) Coady takes issue first with my proposed conditions on negligence in general, and then with the idea that the full range of epistemic injustices can be accounted for as forms of negligence. I will respond to these criticisms in turn.

In my paper, I claim that one is negligent only if one meets certain epistemic conditions, which I elaborate thusly:

First, it must be the case that it is reasonable to expect the negligent party to know that she was morally required to do the action that she failed to do. Second, for the negligent party to be culpable for any specific harm that results, those harms must be reasonably foreseeable—that is, it is reasonable to expect that someone in the relevant circumstances should recognize that such harms could result from her inaction. (156)

Coady argues that neither of these conditions is, in fact, necessary. His argument turns on a particular understanding of the, admittedly, ambiguous phrasing of the conditions. He says:

A person can be negligent without it being reasonable to expect him or her to know any better or to recognize the harms that would result from his or her negligence. It’s true that the legal, as opposed to the moral, concept of negligence is typically spelt out in terms of the concept of a reasonable person, but even in the legal context, it is not what a reasonable person would expect of the accused that is relevant, but what a reasonable person would do in the circumstances of the accused. The accused cannot escape blame by arguing that he is an unreasonable person, and hence that nothing better could reasonably be expected of him (original emphasis, 3-4).

This is, of course, entirely correct. When I claimed that a necessary condition on negligence was that it was “reasonable to expect” someone to be aware of both her obligation and of the harms that might result from her delinquency, I was not using the word “expect” in a merely predictive sense. Rather, I was using it in a somewhat normative sense. The condition is meant to express the idea that a negligent person should have been aware of the relevant facts whether or not she was, and whether or not it was predictable in advance that she would not be In this sense, for example, it is reasonable to expect my teenage daughter to get herself out of bed for school each day, even if I am woefully aware that this is very unlikely to happen. What I can “expect” is thus keyed to what a person with my daughter’s capacities is able to do, within reason.

Which leads me to say a little more about what it is reasonable to expect. Let us turn to the specific example from Fricker’s paper that Coady uses to make his case against my conditions on negligence. Herbert Greenleaf is negligent only if it is reasonable to expect him to know better than to act the way he does, and to be aware of the potential harmful consequences. While, as Coady points out, it is hardly impossible for Greenleaf to come to know these things, it would require Coady to have either critical skills and social and cultural insight that were very rare in his day, or else some other kind of access to the awareness that what more or less everyone took for granted as perfectly reasonable, even obligatory, behavior, was actually immoral. Again, it is true that this was not impossible, and we may even grant that some of Greenleaf’s contemporaries had such access. But it doesn’t follow that it is reasonable to expect everyone to be able to do what a very few can do. Much hangs on just how difficult it would have been for Greenleaf to accomplish this—not so much in terms of the effort involved, but in terms of the fundamental epistemic, emotional, empathetic, and imaginative skills that would be required.

As Coady indicated in a footnote, none of this will ultimately be convincing if one rejects the “ought implies can” principle altogether. I agree that the plausibility of this account of negligence rests squarely on that principle, and would require an altogether different sort of defense if “ought implies can” is abandoned. But that is far too weighty a topic for me to address in these simple comments.

Coady’s second objection is that characterizing epistemic injustice as a form of negligence fails to appreciate the fact that such injustice is often more active and intentional than the term “negligence” would account for. He says:

People are sometimes culpable, not merely for failing to act to compensate for (or eliminate) their objectionable prejudices, but also for actively and intentionally seeking evidence to confirm them, as well as actively and intentionally interpreting evidence in ways that seem to confirm them. I say that when they do either of these things, they are not merely being negligent, they are engaged in intentional wrongdoing, and I see no reason to restrict the expression “testimonial injustice” in such a way that it excludes this kind of wrongdoing (5).

As he anticipates, my initial response is to say that such activity is not, strictly speaking, possible on the part of psychologically normal agents. Belief is peculiar in that to hold a belief is to take it to be true. Hence, we generally cannot come to hold genuine beliefs on the basis of what present themselves to us as merely practical, rather than evidential, reasons. Hence, we cannot “actively and intentionally” interpret evidence in ways that suit our prejudices.

But why should this restriction matter? That is, why is it important whether epistemic injustices are always a matter of negligence rather than of acts of malicious intent? I suppose that one reason might be that we take such vicious acts to be more wrongful than mere negligence. I’m not sure that’s entirely warranted as a general claim, but let’s suppose it is. That would mean that acts of epistemic injustice would generally fail to be less morally transgressive than, say, acts of overt malice. That strikes me as likely to be correct.

But this seems not to get to the heart of Coady’s point, which is that characterizing epistemic injustice as negligence “fail[s] to do justice to the extent to which our beliefs are under our control and the extent to which we may be properly blamed or praised for them” (5). This is a hard charge to assess from a short set of comments, so I’m not entirely sure what to say in response. I (and I assume Fricker as well) think that we have a fair bit of control over our beliefs, and that we are often properly blamed or praised for them. But this control does not primarily come in the moment of belief, at which point we are more or less at the mercy of how things seem to us, together with our epistemic temperaments and habits. But all three of these contributors to what we believe in a given moment — the way things seem to us, our epistemic temperament, and our epistemic habits — are subject to training and development (as well as degeneration and neglect). Hence, we have a fair bit of “indirect control” over our beliefs, and the degree of responsibility that goes along with such control.

I don’t want to minimize either the harm caused by epistemic injustice or the responsibility borne by those who perpetrate it. Clearly, the outcomes resulting from negligence can be as harmful as the results of any overt action. Hence, the difference in the degree of moral transgression must be due to the indirect connection between intention and consequence in the case of negligence. In cases of negligence, there need be no intention to harm, though there might well be a failure of one’s intention to prevent harm from prompting the appropriate preventative actions.

So perhaps this difference between Coady and myself (and perhaps Fricker) comes down to a matter of degree. I think that an analysis in terms of negligence gives us what we want in an account of epistemic injustice: we are responsible for perpetrating it and for the consequent harms, and hence are blameworthy when guilty. We are also sufficiently in control over the internal mechanisms of such injustice that we can, over time, become more epistemically just.

So, I don’t think that considerations of blameworthiness or control over belief require us to abandon the negligence model of epistemic injustice. However, being pushed to think harder about this by Coady’s comments, it occurs to me that there might well be other reasons to do so. The reason negligence is an appropriate way to account for the kinds of instances of epistemic injustice considered by Fricker in her book is that belief is peculiar. We cannot simply choose to believe something in the moment. But epistemic injustice would seem to be caused by actions as well as beliefs. For instance, consider the courtroom scene from To Kill a Mockingbird wherein the prosecutor mocks Tom Robinson, the black defendant, for his testimony on the stand. This is straightforwardly a case of epistemic injustice, if we take it at face value that the prosecutor does not believe Tom’s testimony because he fails to judge him credible (on account of his racist stereotypes).

Yet there is much more to the injustice perpetrated on Tom Robinson in this scene than simply one man’s failure to attribute an appropriate amount of credibility to Tom Robinson’s testimony. This scene is painful to read and horrific to imagine. Tom Robinson is being publicly humiliated, taunted, and called a liar before his entire community, all of which is unjust. Moreover, among the many consequences of these actions on the part of the prosecutor, Tom’s reputation as a truth-teller and, hence, a purveyor of knowledge is being severely damaged. Tom may well internalize some of these insults in such a way to prompt inappropriate self-doubt and further harm him as a knower. Thus, it seems that these actions on the part of the prosecutor constitute an epistemic injustice to Tom Robinson.

If so, then Coady’s argument that negligence is insufficient to account for all cases of epistemic injustice looms more starkly. Actions of the sort just described are paradigmatic of the kinds of things that people do intentionally and, sometimes, maliciously. Whereas one cannot choose to believe whether or not someone is credible, one certainly can choose to publicly humiliate that person. I suspect that this will lead to a need to more carefully circumscribe what makes epistemic injustice epistemic. Perhaps there is a way to do so that results in the actions just described as constituting injustice of a non-epistemic kind. Precisely how these things are carved up is not altogether clear in Fricker’s book, and would be well worth exploring in their own right.

References

Coady, David. 2012. Critical reply to “Culpability for Epistemic Injustice: Deontic or Aretetic?” by Wayne Riggs. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (5): 3-6.

Riggs, Wayne. 2012. Culpability for epistemic injustice: Deontic or aretetic? Social Epistemology 26 (2): 149-162.

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Reply to John Christman’s comments, Elizabeth Anderson

Jim Collier —  June 12, 2012 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan, eandersn@umich.edu

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2012.Reply to John Christman’s comments. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (7): 15-16

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-o1

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I would like to build on two points raised by Prof. Christman. First, he argues that the effectiveness and legitimacy of structural remedies to structural epistemic injustices may depend on the congruence of these remedies with the values and virtues of the people participating in those structures. Second, he argues that the practicing the virtue of hermeneutical justice may require already recognizing that hermeneutical injustice has been done. I think these two points are deeply linked.

In my original paper, I argued that group segregation along lines of identity is an important cause of structural epistemic injustice, and that integration is a remedy for this injustice. In many institutional settings, affirmative action — that is, active, group-conscious measures to include disadvantaged groups — is needed to produce integration. Prof. Christman worries that integration will be neither legitimate or effective in correcting structural epistemic injustice unless people accept affirmative action as an appropriate means for achieving justice.

At this point it is necessary to consider effectiveness and legitimacy separately. I argue in my book (Anderson 2010, ch. 7) that the means by which integration works to promote justice operate largely behind people’s backs. For example, integration — that is, institutionally supported cooperation on terms of equality — often reduces identity prejudice not by direct persuasion but by promoting familiarity and friendliness across group lines, and by motivating people to individuate the targets of prejudice. On my account, integration reduces epistemic prejudice in particular by triggering the ethnocentric and shared reality biases in favor of disadvantaged groups. These mechanisms work independently of people’s awareness and may even operate against their values. So I take exception to the argument that integration will not work if people think it is brought about illegitimately. Integration can and does work despite people’s (initial) resentment of it.

Of course, given that integration entails not mere intergroup contact but cooperation on terms of equality, one may question how that can be achieved without willing participation. If people don’t already accept the legitimacy of integration, wouldn’t they resist? We can get a clue by focusing on the case of racial integration, and considering the sorts of cases where it has been found to be most effective: in the military, sports teams, and employment contexts. These settings feature hierarchical enforcement of intergroup cooperation by officers, coaches, and bosses (Estlund 2005, 126-34). To a substantial degree, deference to authority can substitute for direct endorsement of integration. As far as effectiveness goes, authority can get the mechanisms that promote epistemic justice rolling before people come around to endorsing its methods.

It is still desirable that people do come around. My point is that the legitimacy of active measures to promote integration may be achieved ex post — after these measures are implemented. One of the most consistent findings of research on integration is that people who have experienced integration in a significant domain of life (particularly if they were younger) tend to lead more integrated lives thereafter (Anderson 2010, ch. 6). The experience of integration is the major source of evidence in favor of the practice of integration. People come to appreciate its value from the inside, even if they initially resisted it. This is a kind of moral discovery, an instance of epistemic growth that underwrites moral legitimacy. Upon reflection, people can come to understand their prior resistance as a kind of stubborn parochialism, grounded in ignorance of the perspectives of the disadvantaged.

To put the point another way, we need not read Prof. Christman’s second point as a counsel of despair at the virtual impossibility of bootstrapping our way into epistemic justice. We can take it rather in a pragmatist spirit: we learn about the value of social institutions by living in accordance with them and seeing whether we appreciate the results. We don’t already have to know that the experiment will work to have reason to try it out.

References

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2010. The imperative of integration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Estlund, Cynthia. 2005. Working together: How workplace bonds strengthen a diverse democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Social laws should be conceived as a special case of mechanisms: A reply to Daniel Little, Johannes Persson

Jim Collier —  June 7, 2012 — 3 Comments

Author Information: Johannes Persson, Lund University, Johannes.Persson@fil.lu.se

Persson, Johannes. 2012. Social laws should be conceived as a special case of mechanisms: A reply to Daniel Little. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (7): 12-14

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shotlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-nG

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I am grateful to Daniel Little for his insightful reply to my recent article in Social Epistemology (2012, 105-114) about what appears to be a flaw in Jon Elster’s conception of mechanisms. I agree with much of what Little says, but want to amplify a different underlying problem with Elster’s conception (fourth point below) than Little suggests in his reply (third point below). This underlying problem connects nicely with a passage in Little’s reply, which he thinks unconnected with the point on which I focus.

First, I briefly state Elster’s position.

Elster roots his perspective in a traditional view of explanation. A traditional view holds that a perfect covering law explanation is the best kind of explanation. The problem, as Elster sees it, is that we know of few such explanations in the social sciences. To bolster our explanatory resources, Elster introduces mechanistic explanations. Elster partly frames these mechanisms in terms of epistemic uncertainty. For instance, Elsterian mechanisms “are triggered under generally unknown conditions” (Elster 2007, 36). Elsterian mechanisms, then, depend on current epistemic conditions. Some day we may come to know the triggering conditions, thus we will no longer have an Elsterian mechanism. In Elster’s view this outcome does not matter since we now have something even better — a covering law explanation — to replace mechanistic explanations.

For the purposes of this reply, I will assume I offer a correct interpretation of Elster.

Second, I want to formulate the paradox Elster’s position generates.

I argue (2012) that Elster’s view does not fit one important kind of scientific development. We can come to know the triggering conditions of local mechanisms without coming to know any covering laws. In those circumstances, Elster’s conception of mechanism leads to the paradox that while we know more relevant causal truths than before — since we neither have the mechanism nor the law — these truths explain less. In Elster’s words we would (quite surprisingly) be thrown “back on mere description and narrative” (Elster 1999, 1). The paradox is worrying as a logical possibility, but I think that scientific development often takes this path — developing an understanding of a particular mechanism before claiming that that mechanism is widely distributed (Persson 2005).

Third, I want to agree with Daniel Little’s claim that Elster’s epistemic conception of mechanisms generates this paradox.

Little’s response (2012) to me in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective locates an underlying problem with Elster’s position. He claims that Elster’s epistemic conception of mechanism generates the paradox: “I think it reveals an important underlying issue: the importance of treating causal mechanisms realistically rather than epistemically” (2012, 1) and “Or in other words: if Elster had taken a realist view of mechanisms, then his account would not be subject to the logical criticism that Persson raises against it. It is the relativization of ‘mechanism’ to ‘what we know’ that causes the problem” (2012, 5).

Moreover, a shift to realism about mechanisms (or “ontic mechanisms” as I prefer, Persson 2010) would align Elster’s conception not only with the contemporary literature on mechanisms but also with the way social scientists think of mechanisms — in line with what Little (2012) argues.

I fully agree with Little on these points, and I have little to add to the way he thinks that Elster’s position should be reformulated.

However, we are both attracted to realism about mechanisms for independent reasons. Little (1991) develops such a position in one of my favourite books, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. I have struggled with ontic accounts of mechanisms as well (Persson 1997 and 2005). Given our positions, we both risk a bias with regard to the remedies we suggest to remove the paradox.

Fourth, I want to propose, then, another underlying problem with Elster’s view.

One reason why I construct the argument against Elster (2012) without assuming a realist position is that I want to highlight a partly different underlying problem and to suggest another kind of remedy in addition to the kind Little proposes. The major problem with Elster’s conception of mechanism, I think, is that it cannot guard itself against the risk that there is a gap between mechanisms and covering laws. The paradox builds on the possibility of such a gap; we can add causal truths to a mechanism in order to disqualify it as a mechanism without adding so much that we end up with a causal law. Interestingly, this problem does not depend on an epistemic conception of mechanisms. A similar problem might arise in connection with ontic mechanisms as well.

The identification of this underlying problem is not in disagreement with Little’s remedy. A shift to ontic mechanisms from Elsterian mechanisms effectively eliminates this underlying problem as well. In Elster’s case, the fact that mechanisms depend on our epistemic condition gives rise to the existence of the gap between mechanisms and laws.

However, understanding the underlying problem with Elster’s conception, in the way I propose, makes other remedies possible. In particular, conceiving of causal laws as (generated in) a special case of mechanistic situation — a situation where the outcomes and triggering conditions are not indeterminate, for instance — would simply eliminate the paradox. And it does so whether or not an ontic conception of mechanisms is adopted.

Making this adjustment has consequences for the way we understand mechanistic explanation. For example, Elster could adjust his conception of mechanisms in the way I describe and still hold the view that covering-law explanation is the best kind of explanation we can have. But he would have to reconsider the idea that mechanistic explanation is preliminary or second best. It would simply not be right to say: “Mechanisms are good only because they enable us to explain when generalisations break down. They aren’t desirable in themselves, only faute de mieux.” (Elster 1998, 49)

Little (2012) concludes by claiming that “social-mechanism explanations are the very best explanations we can hope for or should expect.” Making social law-explanations a special case of mechanistic explanation makes part of that claim necessary without falsifying or trivializing Little’s insight — an insight Elster (1998, 49) in fact shares — that the covering law explanation ideal is sometimes the enemy of the good.

References

Elster, Jon. 1998. A plea for mechanisms. In Social mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory, ed. by Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, 45-73. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Elster, Jon. 1999. Alchemies of the mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elster, Jon. 2007. Explaining social behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Little, Daniel. 1991. Varieties of social explanation: An introduction to the philosophy of social science. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

Little, Daniel. 2012. Social mechanisms and scientific realism: Discussion of “Mechanistic explanation in social contexts” by Johannes Persson. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (3) 1-5.

Persson, Johannes. 1997. Causal facts. Stockholm: Thales.

Persson, Johannes. 2005. Tropes as mechanisms. Foundations of Science 10 (4): 371–93.

Persson, Johannes. 2010. Activity-based accounts of mechanism and the threat of polygenic effects. Erkenntnis 72 (1): 135–49.

Persson, Johannes. 2012. Mechanistic explanation in social contexts: Elster and the problem of local scientific growth. Social Epistemology 26 (1): 105–114.

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Sandstrom, Basbøll, Craddock, Scott. Intelligent Design as Social Epistemology: Collective Judgment Forum

Jim Collier —  June 5, 2012 — Leave a comment

Sandstrom, Gregory, Thomas Basbøll, Emma Craddock and Eric O. Scott. 2012.
Intelligent Design as Social Epistemology: Collective Judgment Forum (PDF)
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (7): 1-11
http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-mX

Please cite as: Sandstrom, Gregory, Thomas Basbøll, Emma Craddock and Eric O. Scott. 2012. Intelligent design as social epistemology: Collective judgment forum. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 1 (7): 1-11. Please refer to the article PDF for specific page numbers.

Intelligent Design as Social Epistemology:
Collective Judgment Forum

Gregory Sandstrom, Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences
Thomas Basbøll, Independent Scholar, Copenhagen, Denmark
Emma Craddock, University of Nottingham
Eric O. Scott, George Mason University

Intelligent Design as Social Epistemology
Gregory Sandstrom, Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, SERRC

“There is a sociological dimension to science and to the prospering [or failure] of scientific theories.” – William Dembski (2002)

“[N]ot every statement by a scientist is a scientific statement.” – Michael Behe (2005)

To consider intelligent design (ID) as social epistemology (SE), we will look at those elements related to it that are social, or collective or group-oriented.

The 1993 meeting in Pajaro Dunes, California organised by Phillip Johnson with 14 participants set the stage for an “intelligent design movement” (IDM) of scientists, scholars, activists and PR-figures that oppose neo-Darwinian evolutionary theories and the ideology of naturalism. As Stephen C. Meyer writes: “At Pajaro Dunes, ‘the movement’ congealed.” (2008, 229) Paul Nelson suggests that a “person is welcome to join the community [IDM]. The admission price is minimal: one need only allow for the possibility of design.” (original emphasis, 2005)

Social epistemologists, following work done in Science and Technology Studies (STS), might ask the questions: Which science? Whose science? Which design? Whose design? To answer the first question, the IDM seeks to “detect design” that is supposedly present “in nature.” On the second question, it is “design” as interpreted by scientists or non-scientists who are either religious or persons of theistic faith, i.e. those who proclaim divine meaning, purpose and plan in the universe, and in their lives.

As Steve Fuller writes: “In effect, to see life as the product of intelligent design is to conceive of biology as divine technology.” (2011, 14) If one believes in any of the so-called “Abrahamic” faiths, suggests Fuller, one gains a “vision of nature as a rational unity designed for human comprehension.” (2007, 2) Though spokespersons for the IDM do not always admit it, the involvement of religion, theology or worldview in dialogue with philosophy and science is thus unavoidably at the heart of ID. As Meyer, Director of the Discovery Institute’s Centre for Science and Culture, states about ID, the theory has “obviously friendly implications for religious belief.” (2008, 240)

It therefore makes sense that religious people are far more likely to accept ID than non-religious people because ID seems to agree (at least generally) with their already held belief in a “Creator” or “Designer”. As Del Ratzsch writes, “the overwhelming bulk of ID advocates take the designer in question to be God” prior faith in God thus marks the IDM with a “sociologically dominant peripheral belief.” (2002) Though I am not aware of any studies done on the topic to verify the following claim, the rate of religious disbelief among ID proponents who are religious may be as low as or even lower than the rate of belief in God proportion of among evolutionary biologists who are either atheists or agnostics (4.7%, according to a Cornell University project reported on by Graffin and Provine, 2007). In terms of SE, this can be represented we can identify by familiar “underlying commitments” or “background beliefs” involved in adhering to either ID or evolutionary biology.

From a SE standpoint we can therefore say that certain people are more likely than others to accept or to reject ID, to study and promote evolutionary biology or to call themselves a “(neo-)Darwinist”. If a person believes in the Abrahamic faiths or, more specifically, if a person attends an evangelical Christian church in the United States they are more likely than others to support ID. Websites, networks, think tanks, forums and student clubs dedicated to ID at universities in the United States display the evangelical sociality and post-neo-creationist support base of the IDM.

Prominent ID proponent William Dembski asked in 2003, seeking to “exit the ghetto” in academia: “is it [ID] increasingly confined to American evangelicalism?” The IDM’s leadership has insisted upon ID-as-science, thus denying that it is predominantly about philosophy, religion or theology. Yet a view of ID as SE enables open and honest verification of ID’s religious propensities, without necessarily compromising its aspirations in various fields of natural and/or applied sciences.

As Fuller contends, “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” (original emphasis, 2008, 231). “On the religious side,” says Fuller, “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’” (2008, 231). Here is an example of counsel on science and religion dialogue being offered from one of the founders of contemporary ID theory to the IDM, which has a particular approach to science and the educational system based on legal precedents in the United States.

Instead of taking an unambiguous position that promotes science, philosophy and religion together, the IDM has created a so-called “big tent” strategy (Nelson 2005), which supposedly allows people of all religions or none to embrace it as long as they are willing to focusing on “design” as a legitimate “scientific” concept. Yet the Discovery Institute, the IDM’s main think tank, advocacy and PR hub, accepts money from openly right-wing political-religious proponents in the USA and continues to cater predominantly to evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, the Templeton Foundation has withdrawn its support for ID due to the IDM’s political and educational “revolutionary” crusades, indicating that the politics of ID does have an impact on the movement’s ability to engage in legitimate scientific work and to raise funding.

According to the IDM, “information” and “design” inescapably imply mind/Mind. SE then asks: Which mind and whose mind? William Dembski calls human beings “mundane designers”, in contrast with “transcendental designers”. However, the IDM’s Discovery Institute’s lack deficiency in scholars from the human-social sciences demonstrates a gap in their approach, as if what people believe doesn’t really have any impact on how they “do science”. In other words, the minds and hearts of scientists themselves are not considered part of ID theory as it is currently formulated, whereas ID as SE brings the thought processes and beliefs of scientists who may or may not posit ID to the forefront to interpret ID’s human-social meaning.

As Fuller cautions: “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” (2011, 187). A recurring strategy of the IDM has thus been to feign coy about which “intelligent agent(s)” are said to have “designed” biological information (as well as when, where and how this is said to have happened). Yet what this easily shows to social epistemologists is why the IDM uses the “uniform experience” of intelligent human agency to analogically imply a deity and/or divine meaning of human existence. That is, because human beings design, have minds and (many) believe in the divine, we must have been designed by a divine Mind at some point or via some historical process, whether natural science can prove it or not.

Stephen C. Meyer calls ID a “historical science” (cf. geology, palaeontology, archaeology) and then promotes an inference to the best of “competing explanations” for the “origins of biological information” based on analogy with human intelligence. He repeatedly cites human-made artefacts and social actions as examples that produce his particular religion-friendly philosophical meaning of “information”. But Meyer rarely makes appeal to God in his “professional” writings, thus keeping “science” and “religion” seemingly in separate spheres. Should we believe that Meyer’s opposition to materialistic, naturalistic and scientistic ideologies and his personal embrace of a spirituality reality in human existence have nothing whatsoever to do with why he proposes ID in the first place, especially given its obvious extra-scientific implications? If we take a SE approach to ID, no, we need not believe that or divorce science, philosophy and religion from each other unnaturally. We can then fairly conclude that Meyer’s faith-based worldview does indeed impact his acceptance and promotion of ID in the first place and then put that “agent-based” knowledge on the table for discourse that inevitably cannot be entirely “objectivistic”.

One might recall W.I. and D.S. Thomas’ dictum: “It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct — if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” For the IDM, it is not so crucial if “design” is correct, but that people interpret their lives as if the universe and human existence is “designed”, “fateful” or governed by “Providence”. This apologetic “design argument” historically pre-exists the IDM, while co-existing with it for today’s religious IDers. People in the ID community thus emphasize the role of purpose and a divine plan against the “unguided” or “accidental” notions present in many if not most versions of neo-Darwinian evolutionism, as biology or worldview, which suggest no “meaningful” life for humanity beyond a small window on Earth itself.

To get at the heart of ID as SE, we can admit that everybody believes in “design” is linked with “intelligence” in one way or another simply because they are reflexively intelligent persons who have “reflexive” contact with the world and other people. If human beings could somehow stop being reflexive or acting reflexively, they would stop seeing “design” in the world; they would not detect or perceive “intelligence” and “purpose” in human-made things. But since we cannot easily “turn off” our human reflexive human capacities, we inevitably see design and purpose, if not always or even easily “in nature” then at least often and everywhere “in human society”. As Fuller notes, ID is thus more appropriately seen to means that “nature is God’s machine, which we can understand by virtue of our own ability to make machines” (2011, 170). In other words, ID demonstrates reflexive instead of positive knowledge, which is inevitably based on our (un)common human experience of making machines and other artefacts.

What Fuller is thus calling for is “a humanly accountable sense of intelligent design, which implies that we take full responsibility for the planet — as if we were its creators” (2007, 164). This alternative meaning of ID posits human beings in the role of designers and co-creators on Earth in contrast to un-embodied or external-to-Earth designers (cf. Thomas’ E.T. ID below). Such an approach makes sense for ID as SE, then I do not know what is and shifts the focus from what IDM-ID has thus far explored to a more fruitfully “anthropic” (Fuller 2006) contribution capable of (re-)integrating scientific, philosophical and religious perspectives with a new sociological imagination.

Contact details: gregsandstrom@yahoo.ca

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent Design?
Thomas Basbøll, Independent Scholar, Copenhagen, Denmark, SERRC

His own protestations to the contrary, I think Richard Dawkins gave the game to the intelligent design movement (IDM) in Ben Stein’s film Expelled (2008) when he considered even the possibility of an extra-terrestrial designer. Dawkins is, of course, entirely right that this does not explain everything, since the “life” and “intelligence” of the designer would now also need to be explained. But so long as it is possible that we (human beings) are the product of an ancient alien adventure of interplanetary “seeding”, and that our genetic code might contain some evidence of this pedigree, perhaps even some kind of actual “signature”, he has acknowledged the scientific foundations of the IDM. It’s still a highly speculative venture, to be sure, but there is nothing in principle “unscientific” about it. Life “itself” may not be the result of design, but our lives may nonetheless be.

The question that Gregory has put to us, or at least the question I have chosen to answer, is whether the “theory” of intelligent design is a proper object of study by social epistemologists. In general, I’d argue, that certain things must be true of intelligent design (ID) in order for it to become a proper object of social epistemology: first, it must be an example of human knowledge, not mere folklore, mythology, or even ideology. The latter are the proper objects of other disciplines. Second, it must be situated in an interesting social context, and one that conditions whether or not we know any particular (historical) fact. As social epistemologists, that is, we must approach our truths as more or less socially convenient.

My own approach is to compare cases. Dawkins provides us with a very obvious one. Many so-called “skeptics,” like Carl Sagan and James Randi, are as staunch supporters of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) as they are opponents of ID. But are these two projects really so different? SETI, i.e., the use of radio astronomy to discover signs of possible alien civilizations, was originally presented as a scientific alternative to UFO-ology. It was highly unlikely that “advanced civilizations” would venture across space in “ships”, since the physical laws of the universe seemed to make this an inexorably slow process. It would be much more likely that they would send radio signals at the speed of light, in an attempt to find similarly clever life forms out there. That argument was enough to ground a research programme in the mid-1960s.

ID, it seems to me, just allows us to imagine an even cleverer (or perhaps just more imaginative) solution to the problem of crossing physical space. If it is really going to take thousands, perhaps millions, of years to reach a planet suitable for “colonization”, then why not let it take millions of years to colonize it? Why not colonize it, that is, at the molecular level? Simply install some genetic material in the primordial soup with a mildly teleological bent towards becoming vaguely “human”, with all the flora and fauna of a vaguely human environment, and then give the process the time it needs. I say “vaguely” human because the cleverness in this approach lies in accepting whatever forms of life are possible as adaptations to the initial conditions that are available in the “soup”. Indeed, by starting from “the beginning”, the question of what counts as a “suitable” planet (such as our Earth) can be answered much more broadly, as the specific attributes of the colonizing life form become “adaptations” to the local environment, which, of course, changes too.

But since social epistemology as I understand it must be sensitive, not just to the relative intelligibility of a purported knowledge claim, but also to its relative social convenience, we can’t leave things here. So how does SETI compare to the IDM? Well, both are reliant on private funding to enable viable research programs. But while SETI has an effective and largely uncontroversial outreach program to all levels of school education, ID is just as regularly opposed, especially when it comes to the level of (public school) curriculum.

Both SETI and the IDM claim to have a hopeful and inspiring message to students. And surely a major discovery by either would be equally epochal. A credible signal from another planet would once again alter our view of our place in the universe (a “Copernican revolution” with epistemological significance), but so too would a designer’s signature in our genetic code. Nonetheless, one program is accepted by mainstream scientists as perfectly plausible and a legitimate exemplar of the sort of research a career in science might involve, while the other is considered “out there,” i.e. outside of permissible epistemological boundaries of what qualifies as “science.” One program is promoted to “get young people interested in science” the other is denounced as a corrupter of those same young minds.

As an individual, I’m in fact skeptical of both projects. It is not that I don’t think there might be alien civilizations or that we might have been intelligently designed. It’s that I think we exaggerate our ability to know such things. After all, we might make as interesting conversation partners for aliens as ants or trees make for us. Likewise, we might be as much a part of the goal (telos) of our genetic design that as the ants and trees that exist in our environment. In fact, it is not at all clear that our designers would be “alive” in a sense we would recognize as human beings. Suppose your electric toaster began to develop notions about whether or not it had been “designed”. In truth, it was designed by a person or persons. But a toaster can learn very little about the designer by studying itself.

What I find interesting as a social epistemologist, however, and at the same time intermittently distressing about this subject, is the rancor and pettiness of the participants in their conversations and relations. Surely, I think to myself, these are just interesting questions. An alien designer is “an intriguing possibility,” as Dawkins rightly admitted. So, too, is the possibility that somewhere, out there, a civilization might be trying to reach out to us with radio waves. As with all great questions, I’m not likely to learn the answer in my lifetime. But I think the conversation we might have about these things is important more or less for its own sake, for the falsehoods it would articulate as much as for the truth it would help us to discover. That conversation could be vastly improved over the next decade, such that the bounds of scientific permissibility may include proponents of ID, just as SETI has come to be accepted as a serious research program. And social epistemology clearly has a role to play in that development.

Contact details: thomas@basboell.com

Intelligent Design and New Atheism
Emma Craddock, University of Nottingham, SERRC

“Professor Behe and the entire ID movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don’t bother.” — Eric Rothschield (2005)

This comment made by Eric Rothschield in response to Professor Behe’s testimony in the Dover “intelligent design” trial sums up the typical attitude of what has been called “New Atheism” regarding whether or not Intelligent Design makes a valuable contribution to the production of knowledge.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins contrasts intelligent design theory with science, suggesting that they are opposites. He argues that: “science seeks out areas of ignorance to target research, ID does it to claim victory by default” (2006, 153). This seems to be one of the most common arguments against ID being a form of science; namely that rather than to investigate phenomenon, ID proponents just give up and say God did it. ID therefore uses gaps in knowledge as a way of winning by “default”.

For Dawkins, rather than being a form of social epistemology, ID is actually a club of creationists masquerading “in the politically expedient fancy dress of “intelligent design” (or cf. “creationism in a cheap tuxedo”). Through reducing ID theorists to creationists dressed up, Dawkins continually attempts to undermine the position of ID as an intellectual project. For Dawkins it is clear that one cannot be an atheist or a real scientist if they entertain the plausibility of ID. It certainly would seem, therefore that new atheists would be more likely to oppose ID than other groups. New Atheism presents ID as worse than pseudo-science; it is religion trying to pass itself off as science in order to be acceptable.

This is part of a larger dichotomy which New Atheism deliberately constructs; that of religion versus science. Science is cast as progressive, forward thinking and logical whereas religion and especially faith is portrayed as infantile, archaic and opposed to logic. Here we can see the reiteration of the warfare thesis. It is interesting that the New Atheist movement argues for a “natural” separation between faith and science, casting the two as opposites, given the history of science as a discipline. In fact, faith has traditionally played an important role in the process of doing science, often providing the motivation to keep trying even when results are not returned straight away (see for example, Fuller 2010).

Whilst New Atheism portrays ID as opposed to science, the scientists of the scientific revolution took a very different stance. There was no question of the merits of ID as a theory, rather most scientists assumed the existence of an intelligent designer and saw their role as scientists to be that of exploring the universe that had been created, determining natural laws and investigating the gaps in their knowledge. Here, we do not see ID theory as antithetical to science;, instead it is supplementary and provides the motivation and reasoning behind doing science. Furthermore, “gaps” in knowledge are not seen as a way to lazily default to Intelligent Design theory, rather the same inquisitive approach that Dawkins assigns to modern day science (and which he claims ID theory lacks) is evoked.

It is clear from reading The God Delusion that Dawkins would lump together ID theory with creationism and all the dangers and lack of intellectual thought that this school of thought is associated with. For Dawkins there is no spectrum of religious belief, it is not possible that one simply accepts the possibility of an intelligent designer and remains ambiguous to religion. If the plausibility of ID is entertained, the person is automatically written off as part of the religious camp, and ergo not worth listening to, nor are they capable of contributing anything of value to the body of scientific knowledge.

As Steve Fuller remarks, and as Gregory mentions above, the debate concerning ID should not be reduced to whether or not it is a science. However, this does seem to be the main criticism that is leveled against ID theory by its opponents, especially those who pitch themselves against religion such as the New Atheists. Although this is not the most useful way of framing the debate it needs to be responded to, if only to demonstrate that the New Atheists are guilty of the same “crime” that they accuse ID theorists of — that of resorting to a lazy default. For, rather than listening to and engage with ID theory’s arguments they simply write them off as part of a deluded belief system, or in other words — rather than engage with theories that challenge you, just give up and proclaim your opponents belong to the “creationist camp” and that cannot and should not be tolerated.

Admittedly, many books supporting the theory of ID are written by Christian apologists (such as John Lennox) who argue for ID based on the theory of creation found in Christianity. This feature of ID apologetics does not help to dispel the notion that ID is an idea that is found solely in the creationist camp. However, rather than to dismissing the arguments of ID a priori, atheists should respond to them intelligently and consider ID as a scientific hypothesis to be explored (albeit one that is very difficult to test). This approach can be seen in Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, a book that seeks to dispute ID theory but does this by engaging with it on a scientific level. In sum, whilst New Atheism certainly seems to have positioned itself as directly opposed to ID theorists in the same way that it is opposed to religion, the disputes would be more convincing and potentially productive if they engaged with ID in an intellectual and scientific manner.

Contact details: emmacraddock1@googlemail.com

Bayes, Paradigms, and Intelligent Design
Eric O. Scott, George Mason University

One’s interpretation of a particular piece of evidence is dependent on his or her prior beliefs about other things. This is legitimate: If I hear a sound in the kitchen while home alone, it is less reasonable to attribute it to a cat if I know I don’t own any pets! The projects of logic and science — the Organum and Novum Organum — aimed to give us the tools we need to mechanically break controversial topics down into manageable sub-problems and experiments, the interpretation of which can be agreed upon, solving the controversy. The message of contemporary philosophy of science, however, is that scientific interpretation is greater than the sum of its parts: to engage an opponent’s interpretation of one case may entail a clash of whole worldviews.

The more priors involved, the more difficult it is to justify one’s position to an opponent. Whether there is a cat in the kitchen is relatively simple, but whether a particular political policy is to be preferred draws heavily upon myriad beliefs regarding economics, human nature, ethics, and the opposition’s motivation. Many of these prior beliefs may be difficult to substantiate in turn, or may have been uncritically inherited from one’s peculiar cultural milieu. The interdependent nature of one’s inferential matrix can make communicating about our disagreements very difficult. In this provocation, I propose that the Bayesian model of inference can be used to intuitively sketch complex differences of opinion that would normally be very difficult to communicate about. More importantly, this method suggests that two individuals can disagree on a particular scientific question, and still be epistemic peers — that is, of equal intellectual capacity and perspicuity.

Consider the case of the Intelligent Design (ID) controversy. Call IC the observation of apparent irreducible complexity in a biological system (on any level, molecular or macroscopic). Then we can attempt to divide the problem into manageable pieces by a single expansion of Bayes’ theorem:

I invite the reader to ponder the implications of this equation: What beliefs, experiences, or social considerations contribute to the priors on the right hand side? A cursory breakdown is as follows:

1. P(Design) is heavily affected by the subject’s pre-existing beliefs about candidates for the designer. For most subjects, P(Design|God) >> P(Design|¬God).

2. P(IC| ¬Design) represents the probability that a seemingly irreducibly complex system would emerge via natural processes. This assessment depends on one’s understanding of the limits of evolution’s capacity for generating complexity.

3. P(IC|Design) is a query into what kind of choices a designer would make. While this can only be speculation, it seems safe to assume the probability of irreducibly complex designs is fairly high.

Proponents of ID claim that the value assigned to (2) should be so low as to render the design hypothesis scientifically plausible for any reasonably open-minded religious prior (1). Most biologists disagree. At this juncture, communication generally breaks down.

Is it plausible that natural selection could produce a given irreducibly complex system X? Current science cannot pinpoint the limits of evolution’s creativity very precisely, and so a complex set of priors comes into play: since natural evolution is deemed to be on solid ground from other evidence (biogeography, genomics, paleontology, etc), scientists find it reasonable to conclude that it can explain everything we have seen so far. As I argue (2011), if there are systems in biology that are beyond the capabilities of natural forces, present science is too immature to discern them.

This train of thought is only accessible, however, to those who have confidence in common descent. Many members of the general population don’t believe the fit between the data and common descent is all that strong. Further discussions, then, will be required with these individuals to hash out yet another level of priors: Do genomic data really fit a tree structure that well? Are the mutation rate assumptions used in the algorithms reasonable? Do they depend on how much of so-called “junk” DNA is functional? Is “common design” just as plausible? Few of these questions can be addressed in isolation, but instead our confidence in one area is affected by our confidence in another.

Examples of cross-paradigm dialogue that have been patient enough to wade effectively through the vast network of beliefs that constitutes a paradigm are few and far apart. Actually comparing two paradigms completely can be very difficult. Kuhn thus argued that the logic of an opposing paradigm “cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle” (1996, 94).

If we are indeed to treat paradigms as holistic, then we must resist the urge to dismiss as incompetent those who disagree with our answer to a particular question, such as design inference. This author happens to believe that the question of evolution is firmly settled — but the process of convincing someone of opposite persuasion that evolution accounts for the complexity in nature must needs be an involved one, and can only be inhibited by a belief in one’s own superiority. Dissuading an opponent on one node of their paradigm (which we might visualize vaguely as a vast Bayesian network) may require a rejiggering of their priors in many areas, many of which are fixed by cultural considerations. A highly rational person who is as informed as any expert in evolutionary biology may find, for instance, that his or her theological commitments, adopted in part from a religious community, make the inference of design quite plausible indeed, even without discounting the strength of fit between Darwin’s theory and the other data. We need not allow faith considerations into the canon of science to cede that these persons often behave quite rationally.

Bayesianism is notoriously controversial, and some ID proponents explicitly reject it in preference of a less subjective inferential framework (Dembski, 2004, chapter 33). I do not claim that Bayesianism is epistemological gospel — I only propose that it can and should, on a qualitative level, bring a new importance to the proverb: Before you condemn your opponent, you must understand him. Specifically, in many cases we should not expect one of our opponents — much less all of them — to cede to our interpretation on a matter such as design if we are not prepared to invest in dialoguing about all of the prior beliefs and cultural influences that inform such an interpretation. As Ratzsch puts it, in debates such as these “the harder the lines are drawn, the less actual communication there is and, indeed, the less importance actual communication seems to have” (1996, 9). Such cycles of war make it very difficult to respect alternative points of view, even when such respect is more than merited. It is little wonder, then, that progress is seldom made in such charged areas.

Contact details: escott8@gmu.edu

References

Behe, Michael. 2005. Kitzmiller vs. Dover area school district. Dover, Pennsylvania. Trial transcript. http://ncse.com/files/pub/legal/kitzmiller/trial_transcripts/2005_1018_day11_pm.pdf

Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God delusion. London: Bantam Books.

Dembski, William. 2002. Then and only then: A response to Mike Gene. http://www.designinference.com/documents/2002.07.Mike_Gene.htm

Dembski, William. 2003. Becoming a disciplined science: Prospects, pitfalls, and a reality check for ID. http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_disciplinedscience.htm

Dembski, William. 2004. The design revolution. Answering the toughest questions about intelligent design. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Fuller, Steve. 2006. The new sociological imagination. London: Sage.

Fuller, Steve. 2007. Science vs. religion? Intelligent design and the problem of evolution. Polity Press.

Fuller, Steve. 2008. Dissent over descent: Intelligent design’s challenge to Darwinism. Icon Books.

Fuller, Steve. 2011. Humanity 2.0: What it means to be human past, present and future. Palgrave MacMillan.

Graffin, Gregory W. and William B. Provine. 2007. Evolution, religion and free will. American Scientist 95 (4): July-August: 294-297.

Kuhn. Thomas. 1996. The structure of scientific revolutions. 3rd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Melott, Adrian. 2002. Intelligent design is creationism in a cheap tuxedo. Physics Today 55 (6): 48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1496376

Meyer, Stephen C. 2008. A scientific history – and philosophical defense – of the theory of intelligent design. Religion-Staat-Gesellschaft 7 203-247.

Nelson, Paul. 2005. Intelligent design. Nucleus winter: 13-21. http://www.cmf.org.uk/publications/content.asp?context=article&id=1303

Ratzsch, Del. 1996. The battle of beginnings: Why neither side is winning the creation-evolution debate. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Ratzsch, Del. 2002. Design theory and its critics: Monologues passing in the night. Ars Disputandi 2. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/ratzsch_del/design_theory_and_its_critics.pdf

Scott, Eric. 2011. Artificial intelligence and intelligent design. Andrews University Seminary Studies. http://mason.gmu.edu/~escott8/AIandID.pdf

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