Archives For Moti Mizrahi

Weak Scientism: The Prosecution Rests, Bernard Wills

SERRC —  October 16, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Sir Wilfred Grenfell College (Memorial University), bwills@grenfell.mun.ca.

Wills, Bernard. “Weak Scientism: The Prosecution Rests.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 10 (2018): 31-36.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41T

Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favour too

Image by Vetustense Photorogue via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

On a lazy afternoon there is nothing like another defense of Weak Scientism to get the juices flowing. This one “Why Scientific Knowledge is Still the Best” is quite the specimen. It includes, among other delights, an attempt to humble my perceived pride based on a comparison between myself and my wonderful colleague Dr. Svetlana Barkanova. (Mizrahi, 2018c, 20)

Here I must concede defeat. I don’t hold a candle to the esteemed Dr. Barkanova and would never claim to be her equal. Plus, I need no metrics to convince me of this. I am well aware of her overall excellence as she is an acquaintance of mine. However, this petty display overshoots its mark. All I said was that journals have, in fact, published things (by me) Mizrahi explicitly claimed no journal would publish (2018b, 46) and, frankly, I think I have established that point with any objective reader. I am certainly not bragging or claiming I have some rock star status as a scholar. Let’s proceed then to address the specific arguments he offers in his essay.

Material Causes Behind Intellectual Appearances

I will begin with quantity. This is a point he claims I overemphasize though at the same time he claims it is a crucial component of his own argument. (2018c,19) At any rate, he goes on yet another tangent about the superior quantity and impact of scientific research. To this I respond again, so what? It is no doubt true that more research and more ‘impactful’ research is produced in the sciences but why is this so?

To quote Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy stupid”. Science serves the interests of corporations and the military in ways that the humanities do not and so more money gets directed to the sciences. Since this is the case more scientific research is produced overall.

Now one could make an argument that this speaks to an overall greater utility for the sciences as opposed to other domains, but this is not the argument Mizrahi makes. Rather he asserts raw quantity itself as a feature that makes for the superiority of science. In both my replies I explained the problem with this and in neither of his replies has Mizrahi rebutted my points.

I pointed out a. that commercials are not superior to great artworks even though their number and impact is greater and b. Shakespeare scholarship would not be superior to physics if it simply happened that there were more of it. Mizrahi’s response to this is to complain about the word ‘odd’ (Mizrahi, 19) as if I intended it as a gratuitous personal insult. Actually though, I intended only to imply that his position seemed odd. It still seems odd to me to claim that if Shakespeare scholars suddenly put out a tremendous burst of articles (and pulled into the lead in the great race to produce more and more research) then that would somehow throw particle physics in the shade.

But, if Mizrahi wants to accept that conclusion then he is certainly welcome to it. If he wants to say that weak scientism is only contingently true and that it is only contingently the case that the sciences happen currently to produce more impactful research (for whatever reason), then he has done only what he all too often does; won a debating point by reducing his own thesis to a truism, here, that more =more. (Mizrahi, 19) At any rate, the frustrating thing here is that while Mizrahi asserts again and again the quantitative superiority of science he never condescends to explain why quantity is a valid metric in the first place, he asserts the fact without explaining why I or anyone else should regard that fact as significant.[1]

An Unanswered Question: Recursivity and Science

And, since Mizrahi is obviously sensitive on the point, let me say that calling an argument a sophism is merely an objective description not a personal insult as Mizrahi seems to think. (Mizrahi, 21) Mizrahi still does not recognize the fallacy, perhaps a kinder, better word than sophism (mea culpa), he committed in his reply to my point concerning recursive knowledge. Let me try again. My point was simple. Any argument founded on the claimed quantitative superiority of science founders on the fact that recursive processes, any recursive processes, can produce an infinity of true propositions.

In response to this Mizrahi said that this is not a problem for scientism for we can reflect recursively on scientific propositions in the same manner. To this I responded by saying that this was true but irrelevant as this had nothing whatsoever to do with whether a proposition was scientific or not. Nor does his account of scientific explanation include reflexivity as a source of knowledge. Reflecting recursively on a scientific proposition is not the same as thinking scientifically.  His response his fallacious because it conflates two distinct processes.

This is why it does not matter in the least whether two people, a scientist or non-scientist, can produce an equal amount of knowledge by performing recursive acts in parallel. Neither are doing science. This perfectly obvious point is something Mizrahi claims he addresses in his replies to Brown (Mizrahi, 21) yet my examination of the passages he cites leaves me baffled for nothing in them touches remotely on the question of recursivity or explains how reflecting recursively on a scientific proposition is equivalent to uttering a scientific proposition as a scientist.

Since Mizrahi does not intend to reply any further I suppose I will just have to scratch my head on this one and bewail my own lack of native wit. Plus, as Mizrahi seems to set great store by citations and references even in informal spaces like a review and reply collective it is a little jarring to see HIS not quite panning out (more on this below however).[2]

Systems and Ideologies

Why does Dr. Mizrahi still think I am calling him a racist when I intended to speak only in terms of systemic and not personal racism (Mizrahi, 21-22)?   In a systemic and so intersectional context, non-white identity does not mean one cannot occupy a place of privilege. He still does not see the difference between an ad hominem attack and an ideological critique of scientism. (Mizrahi, 23) Lorraine Code and Helen Longino, among others, have explained how standard accounts of scientific method have (WITTINGLY OR NOT!!) excluded women as knowers and Mizrahi can consult their works if he is interested.[3]  He may also consult Edward Said on how pretensions to scientific ‘objectivity’ underwrite colonialism.

I, however, will use a different example, one closer to my own interests and experience. In the institution in which I teach a significant portion of the students are of indigenous Miq’maw heritage. They are, by and large, NOT interested in hearing that their elders convey a secondary and qualitatively inferior kind of knowledge when compared to western scientists. Now, you could say that this is simple perversity on their part; they should ‘man up’ and accept the gospel of weak scientism! Things are not however so simple.

It is idle to claim that the experience of colonial oppression is irrelevant because science is universal, objective and politically neutral. It is idle to claim that the elevation of scientific procedures to qualitative superiority has no social and political ramifications for those whose knowledge forms are thereby granted second class status. This is because the question of scientism is bound up with the question of authority.

The fact that Indigenous knowledge traditions are grounded in local knowledge, in traditional lore and in story means that on questions of importance to them indigenous peoples cannot speak. It means they have to listen to others who ‘know better’ because the propositions they utter have the form of science.[4]

Thus, whether intended or not, the elevation of scientific knowledge to superior status over indigenous knowledge elevates white settlers to authority over indigenous people and justifies the theft of their land and even of their children. Worse, indigenous people can see for themselves (because they are not blind) that this privileging of settler knowledge over their own is not benign. It is viciously exploitative and intended to keep indigenous peoples in a place of dependence and inferiority. Thus, Mizrahi’s facile assumption that scientism is ideologically innocent will not stand even cursory examination.

Partiality of Knowledge and the Limits of Learning

When I say that Mizrahi’s position is self-interested I am again simply pointing out a fact. If I were to write a paper arguing that the humanities are qualitatively superior to the sciences, deserved more funding than the sciences and that the hermeneutical practices of the humanities should be adopted by the sciences would Mizrahi not wonder if I was, in fact, being a little bit partial? Of course he would.

I, though, am not making that kind of argument, he is. I am not suggesting anyone is inferior to anyone; he is and as such I think it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether his position is tainted with bias. This is so especially as he has no much to say about the lack of ‘good faith’ in others.

On now to our unexpectedly long-lived example of Joyce scholars. Here I must thank Mizrahi for proving my point for me. Unaware that he is shooting his own argument in the foot he takes great pains to distinguish simplicity in scientific explanation from simplicity as an aesthetic quality.[5] He also distinguishes ‘accommodation’ (which the Joyce scholar seeks) from ‘novel prediction’ (which the scientist seeks). (Mizrahi, 25) It is indeed the case, as I myself asserted, that explanation in the humanities and in the sciences are related analogically not univocally. Terms from one domain do not immediately transfer directly to the other.

This is a perfect illustration of why scientific explanation is not the same as literary explanation. Simplicity is a desideratum for both forms of explanation but there is no answer to the question of whether general relativity is simpler than reader response theory for the obvious reason that different disciplines will parse the notion of simplicity differently.

But if this is so I ask again what makes a scientific theory qualitatively better than a critical reading of Joyce when they do not employ commensurate standards and have such fundamentally different aims? I ask again, what could ‘better’ possibly mean in this context? In what sense is a scientific theory simpler than a Joyce commentary if on Mizrahi’s own admission we are not dealing with univocal standards or senses of simplicity? In what sense is a scientific theory more coherent if we are not using ‘coherence’ in the same way in both domains?

Further I asked and ask again why the Joyce scholar even needs to make a novel prediction? Why is it a problem for his discipline if he does not use things he does not need? Further, Mizrahi resorts yet again to the canard that I am accusing him of saying the Joyce scholar does not produce knowledge as if this was even an answer to my question. (Mizrahi, 26)

Next, Scriabin. I think the best description of what my daughter did with the Prometheus chord is that she reverse engineered it. She worked backward from it to tell a story about how it came to be. Obviously this did not require any novel prediction about future Prometheus chords by future Scriabins. There is one Prometheus chord and it already exists. Further, the process by which it was created occurred once in the past.

Thus we are constructing an explanatory story about the past concerning a singular object not formulating a general law or making a testable prediction. This kind of story is used in all kinds of contexts. It is used here in music theory. It is used in those sciences concerned with past events. It is used by law enforcement to reconstruct a crime. Now, even if by some feat of prestidigitation one could contort such explanatory stories into the form of testable predictions this would be an after the fact rationalization not description of how actual people reason.

A World of Citations

Thus, let me emphasize once again that testability does not make science superior to on non-science for the simple reason that non-science does not typically need tests such as Mizrahi describes. Or, to put it another way testing is not employed in the same way in science and non-science so that if one says that, in some sense, the Joyce scholar ‘tests’ his ideas against the text one is speaking analogically not univocally as I attempted to point out in my previous reply. (Wills, 2018b, 38) Thus, Mizrahi’s claim about testability (Mizrahi, 28) is, yet again, beside the point.[6]

Now I turn to the minor objections. Dr. Mizrahi is upset that I have I have not cited the extensive literature on scientism. (Mizrahi, 18) Well Mizrahi has professed to show that science is superior to things like historiography and literary criticism even though he himself does not cite anything from those fields and shows no familiarity with what goes on in them.

Two can play at the rhetoric of citation and it is Mizrahi who claims that scientific procedures are better than non-scientific ones without making any direct comparison with the latter except for his cherished bugbear ‘armchair philosophy’. To return to the question of privilege, Mizrahi seems to assume that he is owed a deference he does not need to grant to others. As Latour says, citation is not accidental but essential to the rhetoric of an academic paper. (Latour; 1987, 30-62) Mizrahi’s use of the rhetoric of citation conveys the message that that his side has an epistemic privilege the other side does not: they are obliged to engage his literature but he is not obliged to engage theirs.

Again, Mizrahi accuses me of Eurocentric bias in citing Augustine and Aristotle (Mizrahi, 23) yet a glance at his own references does not reveal ANY citations from Shankara, Ashvaghosa, al Ghazzali, al Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Lao Tzu, Kung Fu Tzu, or any other thinker outside the western tradition. Miizrahi’s own citation list betrays the very story he is trying to tell about mine!  Finally, in a somewhat involved passage he responds to the charge that he vacillates between Weak and Strong Scientism by citing the full text of a passage from one of his replies to Brown. (Mizrahi, 24) I don’t why he does this because his words say the exact same thing even when put in this larger context.

He reports that certain philosophers and scientists think of knowledge as “the scholarly work or research produced in scientific fields of study studies, as opposed to non-scientific study.” He then states, directly, that he follows this view. (Mizrahi, 24) This does indeed look like vacillation between weak and strong scientism.

However, I will not hammer him on one passage for what might, after all, be an unintentional slip or loose phrasing. If he says his position is weak scientism and weak scientism only then I take him at his word.

Conclusion

I will reiterate again the one basic reason why I think weak scientism is unconvincing and that is that it seems to be an exercise in bare arithmetic. Is there more scientific research than non-scientific? Well, more is better! Does science have 4 of the features of good explanation and history only 3? Science wins! This purely arithmetic procedure completely ignores the contexts in which different scholars work and how they reach their conclusions.  I conclude by saying what I said in my first reply: that Mizrahi’s Weak Scientism is the mountain that gave birth to the proverbial mouse.

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

Bohannon, John. “Hate Journal Impact Factors? New Study Gives You One More Reason.” Science Magazine. 6 July 2016. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/hate-journal-impact-factors-new-study-gives-you-one-more-reason.

Mizrahi, Moti. “What’s So Bad About Scientism?” Social Epistemology 31, no. 4 (2017): 351-367.

Mizrahi, Moti. “Weak Scientism Defended Once More.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 41-50.

Van Wesel, Maarten; Sally Wyatt, and Jeroen ten Haaf. “What A Difference a Colon Makes: How Superficial Factors Influence Subsequent Citation.” Scientometrics 98, no. 3 (2014): 1601-1615.

Wills, Bernard. “On the Limits of Any Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 7 (2018): 34-39.

Wills, Bernard. “Why Mizrahi Needs to Replace Weak Scientism With an Even Weaker Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 18-24.

[1] Mizrahi is not going to like this but some have questioned whether impact ratings and other quantitative metrics have the significance sometimes claimed for them. See Callaway, as well as Van Wesel, Wyatt,  ten Haaff, and Bohanon. Indeed, Mizrahi seems to have internalized the standards of the university’s corporate masters (with their spurious emphasis on external metrics) to an uncritical and disturbing degree.

[2] Is Mizrahi claiming in these passages that ‘scientific knowledge’ is any knowledge that happens to be produced by a scientist as ‘practitioner’ in a field (Mizrahi 21) whether accidental to her practice or not? If so, he has yet again defended his thesis at the cost of making it trivial.

[3] He may begin with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy if he likes.

[4]  See D. Simmonds on this point (addressing an anti-indigenous activist notorious in Canada): “My particular interest here is the way in which science has been reified by Widdowson and Howard and used to legitimate state decision-making on behalf of oppressed peoples. Science is counterposed to indigenous traditional knowledge, which by way of a children’s parable (The Emperor’s New Clothes) is denounced as mere superstition in the service of a corrupt “aboriginal industry.” The state is called upon to harness scientific rationalism in the old colonial interest of “civilizing the savages.” In the words of Widdowson and Howard, “It is not clear how the remnants of Neolithic culture that are inhibiting this development can be addressed without intensive government planning and intervention” (252).

[5] Simplicity as I use it here does not refer to ‘simple language’ but to the economy of a work’s design. I admit though that I should have distinguished between two kinds of simplicity here. The simplicity of the work itself and the simplicity of the critic’s exposition of the work which of course formally differ. It is the latter case that more closely resembles the simplicity of a scientific theory though if Mizrahi wants to deny they are identical that is entirely to my own purpose for I deny this as well.

[6] This speaks to the overall banality of Mizrahi’s thesis. He tells us that the best explanation is one “explains the most, leaves out the least, is consistent with background knowledge, is the least complicated, and yields independently testable predictions.” (Mizrahi, 28) He then adds “Wills seems to grant that “unity, simplicity and coherence are good making properties of explanations, but not testability. But why not testability?”. (Mizrahi, 28) Well I have said many times why not. Testability as Mizrahi defines it is not relevant to all inquiries. It is not even relevant to all scientific inquiries. ‘Testing’ can take different forms that resemble each other analogically not univocally. I don’t know how many different ways I can say this: the test of a thesis on metaphysics is elenchic. The test of a thesis about Joyce is a close examination of his texts. The test of an archeological claim is the examination of artefacts. Mizrahi’s entire argument boils down to the claim that science beats non-science 4 to 3! Yet clearly Mizrahi has tilted the field by asking non-science to conform to a standard external to it and applied arbitrarily. Unity, coherence, testability and so on are resemblance terms that cash out differently in different inquiries.

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Why Scientific Knowledge Is Still the Best, Moti Mizrahi

SERRC —  September 11, 2018 — 2 Comments

Author Information: Moti Mizrahi, Florida Institute of Technology, mmizrahi@fit.edu.

Mizrahi, Moti. “Why Scientific Knowledge Is Still the Best.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 9 (2018): 18-32.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-40I

For context, see also:

Image by Specious Reasons via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

It is common knowledge among scholars and researchers that the norms of academic research dictate that one must enter an academic conversation by properly acknowledging, citing, and engaging with the work done by other scholars and researchers in the field, thereby showing that a larger conversation is taking place.[1] See, for example, Graff and Birkenstein (2018, 1-18) on “entering the conversation.” Properly “entering the conversation” is especially important when one aims to criticize the work done by other scholars and researchers in the field.

In my previous reply to Bernard Wills’ attack on Weak Scientism (Wills 2018a), I point out that Wills fails in his job as a scholar who aims to criticize work done by other scholars and researchers in the field (Mizrahi 2018b, 41), since Wills does not cite or engage with the paper in which I defend Weak Scientism originally (Mizrahi 2017a), the very thesis he seeks to attack. Moreover, he does not cite or engage with the papers in my exchange with Christopher Brown (Mizrahi 2017b; 2018a), not to mention other works in the literature on scientism.

In his latest attack, even though he claims to be a practitioner of “close reading” (Wills 2018b, 34), it appears that Wills still has not bothered to read the paper in which I defend the thesis he seeks to attack (Mizrahi 2017a), or any of the papers in my exchange with Brown (Mizrahi 2017b; 2018a), as evidenced by the fact that he does not cite them at all. To me, these are not only signs of lazy scholarship but also an indication that Wills has no interest in engaging with my arguments for Weak Scientism in good faith. For these reasons, this will be my second and final response to Wills. I have neither the time nor the patience to debate lazy scholars who argue in bad faith.

On the Quantitative Superiority of Scientific Knowledge

In response to my empirical data on the superiority of scientific knowledge over non-scientific knowledge in terms of research output and research impact (Mizrahi 2017a, 357-359; Mizrahi 2018a, 20-22; Mizrahi 2018b, 42-44), Wills (2018b, 34) claims that he has “no firm opinion at all as to whether the totality of the sciences have produced more ‘stuff’ than the totality of the humanities between 1997 and 2017 and the reason is that I simply don’t care.”

I would like to make a few points in reply. First, the sciences produce more published research, not just “stuff.” Wills’ use of the non-count noun ‘stuff’ is misleading because it suggests that research output cannot be counted or measured. However, research output (as well as research impact) can be counted and measured, which is why we can use this measure to determine that scientific research (or knowledge) is better than non-scientific research (or knowledge).

Second, my defense of Weak Scientism consists of a quantitative argument and a qualitative argument, thereby showing that scientific knowledge is superior to non-scientific knowledge both quantitatively and qualitatively, which are the two ways in which one thing can be said to be better than another (Mizrahi 2017a, 354). If Wills really does not care about the quantitative argument for Weak Scientism, as he claims, then why is he attacking my defense of Weak Scientism at all?

After all, showing that “scientific knowledge is [quantitatively] better – in terms of research output (i.e. more publications) and research impact (i.e. more citations) – than non-scientific knowledge” is an integral part of my defense of Weak Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a, 358). To know that, however, Wills would have to read the paper in which I make these arguments for Weak Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a). In his (2018a) and (2018b), I see no evidence that Wills has read, let alone read closely, that paper.

Third, for someone who says that he “simply [doesn’t] care” about quantity (Wills 2018b, 34), Wills sure talks about it a lot. For example, Wills claims that a “German professor once told [him] that in the first half of the 20th Century there were 40,000 monographs on Franz Kafka alone!” (Wills 2018a, 18) and that “Shakespeare scholars have all of us beat” (Wills 2018a, 18). Wills’ unsupported claims about quantity turn out to be false, of course, as I show in my previous reply (Mizrahi 2018b, 42-44). Readers will notice that Wills does not even try to defend those claims in his (2018b).

Fourth, whether Wills cares about quantity or has opinions on the matter is completely beside the point. With all due respect, Wills’ opinions about research output in academic disciplines are worthless, especially when we have data on research output in scientific and non-scientific disciplines. The data show that scientific disciplines produce more research than non-scientific disciplines and that scientific research has a greater impact than non-scientific research (Mizrahi 2017a, 357-359; Mizrahi 2018a, 20-22; Mizrahi 2018b, 42-44).

Wills (2018b, 35) thinks that the following is a problem for Weak Scientism: “what if it were true that Shakespeare scholars produced more papers than physicists?” (original emphasis) Lacking in good arguments, as in his previous attack on Weak Scientism, Wills resorts to making baseless accusations and insults, calling me “an odd man” for thinking that literature would be better than physics in his hypothetical scenario (Wills 2018b, 35). But this is not a problem for Weak Scientism at all and there is nothing “odd” about it.

What Wills fails to understand is that Weak Scientism is not supposed to be a necessary truth. That is, Weak Scientism does not state that scientific knowledge must be quantitatively and qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge. Rather, Weak Scientism is a contingent fact about the state of academic research. As a matter of fact, scientific disciplines produce better research than non-scientific disciplines do.

Moreover, the data we have (Mizrahi 2017a, 357-359; Mizrahi 2018a, 20-22; Mizrahi 2018b, 42-44) give us no reason to think that these trends in research output and research impact are likely to change any time soon. Of course, if Wills had read my original defense of Weak Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a), and my replies to Brown, he would have known that I have discussed all of this already (Mizrahi 2017b, 9-10; 2018a, 9-13).

Likewise, contrary to what Wills (2018b, 36, footnote 2) seems to think, there is nothing odd about arguing for a thesis according to which academic research produced by scientific disciplines is superior to academic research produced by non-scientific disciplines, “while leaving open the question whether non-scientific knowledge outside the academy may be superior to science” (original emphasis). If Wills were familiar with the literature on scientism, he would have been aware of the common distinction between “internal scientism” and “external scientism.”

See, for example, Stenmark’s (1997, 16-18) distinction between “academic-internal scientism” and “academic-external scientism” as well as Peels (2018, 28-56) on the difference between “academic scientism” and “universal scientism.” Again, a serious scholar would have made sure that he or she is thoroughly familiar with the relevant literature before attacking a research paper that aims to make a contribution to that literature (Graff and Birkenstein 2018, 1-18).

Wills also seems to be unaware of the fact that my quantitative argument for Weak Scientism consists of two parts: (a) showing that scientific research output is greater than non-scientific research output, and (b) showing that the research impact of scientific research is greater than that of non-scientific research (Mizrahi 2017a, 356-358). The latter is measured, not just by publications, but also by citations. Wills does not address this point about research impact in his attacks on Weak Scientism. Since he seems to be proud of his publication record, for he tells me I should search for his published papers on Google (Wills 2018b, 35), let me to illustrate this point about research impact by comparing Wills’ publication record to a colleague of his from a science department at his university.

According to Google Scholar, since completing his doctorate in Religious Studies at McMaster University in 2003, Wills has published ten research articles (excluding book reviews). One of his research articles was cited three times, and three of his research articles were cited one time each. That is six citations in total.

On the other hand, his colleague from the Physics program at Memorial University, Dr. Svetlana Barkanova, has published 23 research articles between 2003 and 2018, and those articles were cited 53 times. Clearly, in the same time, a physicist at Wills’ university has produced more research than he did (130% more research), and her research has had a greater impact than his (783% more impact). As I have argued in my (2017a), this is generally the case when research produced by scientific disciplines is compared to research produced by non-scientific disciplines (Table 1).

Table 1. H Index by subject area, 1999-2018 (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

H Index
Physics 927
Psychology 682
Philosophy 161
Literature 67

Reflecting on One’s Own Knowledge

In his first attack on Weak Scientism, Wills (2018a, 23) claims that one “can produce a potential infinity of knowledge simply by reflecting recursively on the fact of [one’s] own existence.” In response, I pointed out that Wills (2018a, 23) himself admits that this reflexive procedure applies to “ANY fact” (original capitalization), which means that it makes no difference in terms of the quantity of knowledge produced in scientific versus non-scientific disciplines.

As I have come to expect from him, Wills (2018b, 35) resorts to name-calling again, rather than giving good arguments, calling my response “sophism,” but he seems to miss the basic logical point, even though he admits again that extending one’s knowledge by reflexive self-reflection “can be done with any proposition at all” (Wills 2018b, 35). Of course, if “it can be done with any proposition at all” (Wills 2018b, 35; emphasis added), then it can be done with scientific propositions as well, for the set of all propositions includes scientific propositions.

To illustrate, suppose that a scientist knows that p and a non-scientist knows that q. Quantitatively, the amount of scientific and non-scientific knowledge is equal in this instance (1 = 1). Now the scientist reflects on her own knowledge that p and comes to know that she knows that p, i.e., she knows that Kp. Similarly, the non-scientist reflects on her knowledge that q and comes to know that she knows that q, i.e., she knows that Kq. Notice that, quantitatively, nothing has changed, i.e., the amount of scientific versus non-scientific knowledge is still equal: two items of scientific knowledge (p and Kp) and two items of non-scientific knowledge (q and Kq).

Wills might be tempted to retort that p may be an item of scientific knowledge but Kp is not because it is not knowledge that is produced by scientific procedures. However, if Wills were to retort in this way, then it would be another indication of sloppy scholarship on his part. In my original paper (Mizrahi 2017a, 356), and in my replies to Brown (Mizrahi 2017b, 12-14; Mizrahi 2018a, 14-15), I discuss at great length my characterization of disciplinary knowledge as knowledge produced by practitioners in the field. I will not repeat those arguments here.

Baseless Accusations of Racism and Colonialism

After raising questions about whether I am merely rationalizing my “privilege” (Wills 2018a, 19), Wills now says that his baseless accusations of racism and colonialism are “not personal” (Wills 2018b, 35). His concern, Wills (2018b, 35) claims, is “systemic racism” (original emphasis). As a white man, Wills has the chutzpah to explain (or white-mansplain, if you will) to me, an immigrant from the Middle East, racism and colonialism.

My people were the victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide, lived under British colonial rule, and are still a persecuted minority group. Since some of my ancestors died fighting the British mandate, I do not appreciate using the term ‘colonialism’ to describe academic disputes that are trifle in comparison to the atrocities brought about by racism and colonialism.

Perhaps Wills should have used (or meant to use) the term ‘imperialism’, since it is sometimes used to describe the expansion of a scientific theory into new domains (Dupré 1994). This is another sign of Wills’ lack of familiarity with the literature on scientism. Be that as it may, Wills continues to assert without argument that my “defense of weak-scientism is ideologically loaded,” that it implies “the exclusion of various others such as women or indigenous peoples from the socially sanctioned circle of knowers,” and that I make “hegemonic claims for science from which [I] stand to benefit” (Wills 2018b, 36).

In response, I must admit that I have no idea what sort of “ideologies” Weak Scientism is supposed to be loaded with, since Wills does not say what those are. Wills (2018b, 36) asserts without argument that “the position [I] take on scientism has social, political and monetary implications,” but he does not specify those implications. Nor does he show how social and political implications (whatever those are) are supposed to follow from the epistemic thesis of Weak Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a, 353). I am also not sure why Wills thinks that Weak Scientism implies “the exclusion of various others such as women or indigenous peoples from the socially sanctioned circle of knowers” (Wills 2018b, 36), since he provides no arguments for these assertions.

Of course, Weak Scientism entails that there is non-scientific knowledge (Mizrahi 2018b, 41). If there is non-scientific knowledge, then there are non-scientific knowers. In that case, on Weak Scientism, non-scientists are not excluded from “the circle of knowers.” In other words, on Weak Scientism, the circle of knowers includes non-scientists, which can be women and people of color, of course (recall Dr. Svetlana Barkanova). Contrary to what Wills seems to think, then, Weak Scientism cannot possibly entail “the exclusion of various others such as women or indigenous peoples from the socially sanctioned circle of knowers” (Wills 2018b, 36).

In fact, if it is “the exclusion of various others” that Wills (2018b, 36) is genuinely concerned about, then he is undoubtedly aware of the fact that it is precisely white men like him who are guilty of systematically excluding “various others,” such as women (Paxton et al. 2012) and people of color (Botts et al. 2014), from the academic discipline of philosophy (American Philosophical Association 2014). As anyone who is familiar with the academic discipline of philosophy knows, “philosophy faces a serious diversity problem” (Van Norden 2017b, 5). As Amy Ferrer (2012), Executive Director of the American Philosophical Association (APA), put it on Brian Leiter’s blog, Leiter Reports:

philosophy is one of the least diverse humanities fields, and indeed one of the least diverse fields in all of academia, in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. Philosophy has a reputation for not only a lack of diversity but also an often hostile climate for women and minorities (emphasis added).

In light of the lack of diversity in academic philosophy, some have gone as far as arguing that contemporary philosophy is racist and xenophobic; otherwise, argues Bryan Van Norden (2017a), it is difficult to explain “the fact that the rich philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are completely ignored by almost all philosophy departments in both Europe and the English-speaking world.”

In fact, Wills’ attacks on Weak Scientism illustrate how white men like him attempt to keep philosophy white and “foreigner-free” (Cherry and Schwitzgebel 2016). They do so by citing and discussing the so-called “greats,” which are almost exclusively Western men. Citations are rather scarce in Wills’ replies, but when he cites, he only cites “the greats,” like Aristotle and Augustine (see Schwitzgebel et al. 2018 on the “Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy”).

As for his claim that I “stand to benefit” (Wills 2018b, 36) from my defense of Weak Scientism, I have no idea what Wills is talking about. I had no idea that History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) “can often assert hegemony over other discourses” (Wills 2018b, 36). I bet this will come as a surprise to other HPS and STS scholars and researchers. They will probably be shocked to learn that they have that kind of power over other academic disciplines.

More importantly, even if it were true that I “stand to benefit” (Wills 2018b, 36) from my defense of Weak Scientism, nothing about the merit of my defense of Weak Scientism would follow from that. That is, to argue that Weak Scientism must be false because I stand to benefit from it being true is to argue fallaciously. In particular, it is an informal fallacy of the circumstantial ad hominem type known as “poisoning the well,” which “alleges that the person has a hidden agenda or something to gain and is therefore not an honest or objective arguer” (Walton and Krabbe 1995, 111).

It is as fallacious as arguing that climate change is not real because climate scientists stand to benefit from climate research or that MMR vaccines are not safe (e.g., cause autism) because medical researchers stand to benefit from such vaccines (Offit 2008, 213-214). These are the sort of fallacious arguments that are typically made by those who are ignorant of the relevant science or are arguing in bad faith.

In fact, the same sort of fallacious reasoning can be used to attack any scholar or researcher in any field of inquiry whatsoever, including Wills. For instance, just as my standing to benefit from defending Weak Scientism is supposed to be a reason to believe that Weak Scientism is false, or Paul Offit’s standing to gain from MMR vaccines is supposed to be a reason to believe that such vaccines are not safe, Wills’ standing to benefit from his attacks on Weak Scientism (e.g., by protecting his position as a Humanities professor) would be a reason to believe that his attacks on Weak Scientism are flawed.

Indeed, the administrators at Wills’ university would have a reason to dismiss his argument for a pay raise on the grounds that he stands to benefit from it (Van Vleet 2011, 16). Of course, such reasoning is fallacious no matter who is the target. Either MMR vaccines are safe and effective or they are not regardless of whether Offit stands to benefit from them. Climate change is real whether climate scientists stand to benefit from doing climate research. Likewise, Weak Scientism is true or false whether or not I stand to benefit from defending it.

Image by Maia Valenzuela via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Revisiting the Joyce Scholar

Wills (2018b, 36) returns to his example of the Joyce scholar as an example of non-scientific knowledge “that come[s] from an academic context.” As I have already pointed out in my previous reply (Mizrahi 2018b, 41-42), it appears that Wills fails to grasp the difference between Strong Scientism and Weak Scientism. Only Strong Scientism rules out knowledge that is not scientific. On Weak Scientism, there is both scientific and non-scientific knowledge. Consequently, examples of non-scientific knowledge from academic disciplines other than scientific ones do not constitute evidence against Weak Scientism.

Relatedly, Wills claims to have demonstrated that I vacillate between Strong Scientism and Weak Scientism and cites page 22 of his previous attack (Wills 2018a, 22). Here is how Wills (2018a, 22) argues that I vacillate between Strong Scientism and Weak Scientism:

Perhaps it is the awareness of such difficulties that leads Mizhari [sic] to his stance of ‘Weak Scientism’. It is not a stance he himself entirely sticks to. Some of his statements imply the strong version of scientism as when he tells us the [sic] knowledge is “the scholarly work or research produced in scientific fields of study, such as the natural sciences, as opposed to non-scientific fields, such as the humanities” [Mizrahi 2018a, 22].

However, the full passage Wills cites as evidence of my vacillation between Strong Scientism and Weak Scientism is from the conclusion of my second reply to Brown (Mizrahi 2018a) and it reads as follows:

At this point, I think it is quite clear that Brown and I are talking past each other on a couple of levels. First, I follow scientists (e.g., Weinberg 1994, 166-190) and philosophers (e.g., Haack 2007, 17-18 and Peels 2016, 2462) on both sides of the scientism debate in treating philosophy as an academic discipline or field of study, whereas Brown (2017b, 18) insists on thinking about philosophy as a personal activity of “individual intellectual progress.” Second, I follow scientists (e.g., Hawking and Mlodinow 2010, 5) and philosophers (e.g., Kidd 2016, 12-13 and Rosenberg 2011, 307) on both sides of the scientism debate in thinking about knowledge as the scholarly work or research produced in scientific fields of study, such as the natural sciences, as opposed to non-scientific fields of study, such as the humanities, whereas Brown insists on thinking about philosophical knowledge as personal knowledge.

Clearly, in this passage, I am talking about how ‘knowledge’ is understood in the scientism debate, specifically, that knowledge is the published research or scholarship produced by practitioners in academic disciplines (see also Mizrahi 2017a, 353). I am not saying that non-scientific disciplines do not produce knowledge. How anyone can interpret this passage as evidence of vacillation between Strong Scientism and Weak Scientism is truly beyond me. To me, this amounts to “contextomy” (McGlone 2005), and thus further evidence of arguing in bad faith on Wills’ part.

Wills also misunderstands, as in his previous attack on Weak Scientism, the epistemic properties of unity, coherence, simplicity, and testability, and their role in the context of hypothesis testing and theory choice. For he seems to think that “a masterful exposition of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man will show the unity, coherence and simplicity of the work’s design to the extent that these are artistically desired features” (Wills 2018b, 36). Here Wills is equivocating on the meaning of the terms ‘unity’, ‘coherence’, and ‘simplicity’.

There is a difference between the epistemic and the artistic senses of these terms. For example, when it comes to novels, such as A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, ‘simplicity’ may refer to literary style and language. When it comes to explanations or theories, however, ‘simplicity’ refers to the number of entities posited or assumptions taken for granted (Mizrahi 2016). Clearly, those are two different senses of ‘simplicity’ and Wills is equivocating on the two. As far as Weak Scientism is concerned, it is the epistemic sense of these terms that is of interest to us. Perhaps Wills fails to realize that Weak Scientism is an epistemic thesis because he has not read my (2017a), where I sketch the arguments for this thesis, or at least has not read it carefully enough despite claiming to be a practitioner of “close reading” (Wills 2018b, 34).

When he says that the Joyce scholar “tests [what he says] against the text,” Wills (2018b, 37) reveals his misunderstanding of testability once again. On Wills’ description of the work done by the Joyce scholar, what the Joyce scholar is doing amounts to accommodation, not novel prediction. I have already discussed this point in my previous reply to Wills (Mizrahi 2018b, 47) and I referred him to a paper in which I explain the difference between accommodation and novel prediction (Mizrahi 2012). But it appears that Wills has no interest in reading the works I cite in my replies to his attacks. Perhaps a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the difference between accommodation and prediction would be more accessible (Barnes 2018).

Wills finds it difficult to see how the work of the Joyce scholar can be improved by drawing on the methods of the sciences. As Wills (2018b, 37) writes, “What in this hermeneutic process would be improved by ‘scientific method’ as Mizrahi describes it? Where does the Joyce scholar need to draw testable consequences from a novel hypothesis and test it with an experiment?” (original emphasis)

Because he sees no way the work of the Joyce scholar can benefit from the application of scientific methodologies, Wills thinks it follows that I have no choice but to say that the work of the Joyce scholar does not count as knowledge. As Wills (2018b, 37) writes, “It seems to me that only option for Mizrahi here is to deny that the Joyce scholar knows anything (beyond the bare factual information) and this means, alas, that his position once again collapses into strong scientism.”

It should be clear, however, that this is a non sequitur. Even if it is true that scientific methodologies are of no use to the Joyce scholar, it does not follow that the work of the Joyce scholar does not count as knowledge. Again, Weak Scientism is the view that scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge. This means that scientists produce knowledge using scientific methods, whereas non-scientists produce knowledge using non-scientific methods, it’s just that scientists produce better knowledge using scientific methods that are superior to non-scientific methods in terms of the production of knowledge. Non-scientists can use scientific methods to produce knowledge in their fields of inquiry. But even if they do not use scientific methods in their work, on Weak Scientism, the research they produce still counts as knowledge.

Moreover, it is not the case that scientific methodologies are of no use to literary scholars. Apparently, Wills is unaware of the interdisciplinary field in which the methods of computer science and data science are applied to the study of history, literature, and philosophy known as the “Digital Humanities.” Becoming familiar with work in Digital Humanities will help Wills understand what it means to use scientific methods in a literary context. Since I have already discussed all of this in my original paper (Mizrahi 2017a) and in my replies to Brown (Mizrahi 2017b; 2018a), I take this as another reason to think that Wills has not read those papers (or at least has not read them carefully enough).

To me, this is a sign that he is not interested in engaging with Weak Scientism in good faith, especially since my (2017a) and my replies to Brown are themselves instances of the use of methods from data science in HPS, and since I have cited two additional examples of work I have done with Zoe Ashton that illustrates how philosophy can be improved by the introduction of scientific methods (Ashton and Mizrahi 2018a and 2018b). Again, it appears that Wills did not bother to read (let alone read closely) the works I cite in my replies to his attacks.

Toward the end of his discussion of the Joyce scholar, Wills (2018b, 37) says that using scientific methods “may mean better knowledge in many cases.” If he accepts that using scientific methods “may mean better knowledge in many cases” (Wills 2018b, 37), then Wills thereby accepts Weak Scientism as well. For to say that using scientific methods “may mean better knowledge in many cases” (Wills 2018b, 37) is to say that scientific knowledge is generally better than non-scientific knowledge.

Of course, there are instances of bad science, just as there are instances of bad scholarship in any academic discipline. Generally speaking, however, research done by scientists using the methods of science will likely be better (i.e., quantitatively better in terms of research output and research impact as well as qualitatively better in terms of explanatory, predictive, and instrumental success) than research done by non-scientists using non-scientific methods. That is Weak Scientism and, perhaps unwittingly, Wills seems to have accepted it by granting that using scientific methods “may mean better knowledge in many cases” (Wills 2018b, 37).

Inference to the Best Explanation

In my (2017a), as well as in my replies to Brown (Mizrahi 2017b; 2018a) and to Wills (Mizrahi 2018b), I have argued that Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is used in both scientific and non-scientific disciplines. As McCain and Poston (2017, 1) put it:

Explanatory reasoning is quite common. Not only are rigorous inferences to the best explanation (IBE) used pervasively in the sciences, explanatory reasoning is virtually ubiquitous in everyday life. It is not a stretch to say that we implement explanatory reasoning in a way that is “so routine and automatic that it easily goes unnoticed” [Douven 2017].

Once this point is acknowledged, it becomes clear that, when judged by the criteria of good explanations, such as unity, coherence, simplicity, and testability, scientific IBEs are generally better than non-scientific IBEs (Mizrahi 2017a, 360; Mizrahi 2017b, 19-20; Mizrahi 2018a, 17; Mizrahi 2018b, 46-47).

In response, Wills tells the story of his daughter who has attempted to reason abductively in class once. Wills (2018b, 38) begins by saying “Let me go back to my daughter,” even though it is the first time he mentions her in his (2018b), and then goes on to say that she once explained “how Scriabin created [the Prometheus] chord” to the satisfaction of her classmates.

But how is this supposed to be evidence against Weak Scientism? In my (2017a), I discuss how IBE is used in non-scientific disciplines and I even give an example from literature (Mizrahi 2017a, 361). Apparently, Wills is unaware of that, which I take to be another indication that he has not read the paper that defends the thesis he seeks to criticize. Again, to quote Wills (2018b, 38) himself, “All disciplines use abduction,” so to give an example of IBE from a non-scientific discipline does nothing at all to undermine Weak Scientism. According to Weak Scientism, all academic disciplines produce knowledge, and many of them do so by using IBE, it’s just that scientific IBEs are better than non-scientific IBEs.

Wills asserts without argument that, in non-scientific disciplines, there is no need to test explanations even when IBE is used to produce knowledge. As Wills (2018b, 38) writes, “All disciplines use abduction, true, but they do not all arrive at the ‘best explanation’ by the same procedures.” For Wills (2018b, 38), his daughter did not need to test her hypothesis about “how Scriabin created [the Prometheus] chord.” Wills does not tell us what the hypothesis in question actually is, so it is hard to tell whether it is testable or not. To claim that it doesn’t need to be tested, however, even when the argument for it is supposed to be an IBE, would be to misuse or abuse IBE rather than use it.

That is, if one were to reason to the best explanation without judging competing explanations by the criteria of unity, coherence, simplicity, testability, and the like, then one would not be warranted in concluding that one’s explanation is the best among those considered. That is just how IBE works (Psillos 2007). To say that an explanation is the best is to say that, among the competing explanations considered, it is the one that explains the most, leaves out the least, is consistent with background knowledge, is the least complicated, and yields independently testable predictions (Mizrahi 2017a, 360-362).

Wills (2018b, 39) seems to grant that “unity, simplicity and coherence” are good-making properties of explanations, but not testability. But why not testability? Why an explanation must be simple in order to be a good explanation, but not testable? Wills does not say. Again (Mizrahi 2018b, 47), I would urge Wills to consult logic and reasoning textbooks that discuss IBE. In those books, he will find that, in addition to unity, coherence, and simplicity, testability is one of the “characteristics that are necessary conditions for any explanation to qualify as being a reasonable empirical explanation” (Govier 2010, 300).

In other words, IBE is itself the procedure by which knowledge is produced. This procedure consists of “an inference from observations and a comparison between competing hypotheses to the conclusion that one of those hypotheses best explains the observations” (Mizrahi 2018c). For example (Sinnott-Armstrong and Fogelin 2015, 196):

  • Observation: Your lock is broken and your valuables are missing.
  • Explanation: The hypothesis that your house has been burglarized, combined with previously accepted facts and principles, provides a suitably strong explanation of observation 1.
  • Comparison: No other hypothesis provides an explanation nearly as good as that in 2.
  • Conclusion: Your house was burglarized.

As we can see, the procedure itself requires that we compare competing hypotheses. As I have mentioned already, “common standards for assessing explanations” (Sinnott-Armstrong and Fogelin 2015, 195) include unity, coherence, simplicity, and testability. This means that, if the hypothesis one favors as the best explanation for observation 1 cannot be tested, then one would not be justified in concluding that it is the best explanation, and hence probably true. That is simply how IBE works (Psillos 2007).

Contrary to what Wills (2018b, 39) seems to think, those who reason abductively without comparing competing explanations by the criteria of unity, coherence, simplicity, and testability are not using IBE, they are misusing or abusing it (Mizrahi 2017a, 360-361). To reason abductively without testing your competing explanations is as fallacious as reasoning inductively without making sure that your sample is representative of the target population (Govier 2010, 258-262).

Image by Specious Reasons via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

The Defense Rests

Fallacious reasoning, unfortunately, is what I have come to expect from Wills after reading and replying to his attacks on Weak Scientism. But this is forgivable, of course, given that we all fall prey to mistakes in reasoning on occasion. Even misspelling my last name several times (Wills 2018a, 18, 22, 24) is forgivable, so I accept Wills’ (2018b, 39) apology. What is unforgivable, however, is lazy scholarship and arguing in bad faith. As I have argued above, Wills is guilty of both because, despite claiming to be a practitioner of “close reading” (Wills 2018b, 34), Wills has not read the paper in which I defend the thesis he seeks to attack (Mizrahi 2017a), or any of the papers in my exchange with Brown (Mizrahi 2017b; 2018a), as evidenced by the fact that he does not cite them at all (not to mention citing and engaging with other works on scientism).

This explains why Wills completely misunderstands Weak Scientism and the arguments for the quantitative superiority (in terms of research output and research impact) as well as qualitative superiority (in terms of explanatory, predictive, and instrumental success) of scientific knowledge over non-scientific knowledge. For these reasons, this is my second and final response to Wills. I have neither the time nor the patience to engage with lazy scholarship that was produced in bad faith.

Contact details: mmizrahi@fit.edu

References

Ashton, Zoe and Moti Mizrahi. “Intuition Talk is Not Methodologically Cheap: Empirically Testing the ‘Received Wisdom’ About Armchair Philosophy.” Erkenntnis 83, no. 3 (2018a): 595-612.

Ashton, Zoe and Moti Mizrahi. “Show Me the Argument: Empirically Testing the Armchair Philosophy Picture.” Metaphilosophy 49, no. 1-2 (2018b): 58-70.

American Philosophical Association. “Minorities in Philosophy.” Data and Information on the Field of Philosophy. Accessed on August 13, 2018. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/resmgr/data_on_profession/minorities_in_philosophy.pdf.

Barnes, Eric Christian. “Prediction versus Accommodation.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), edited by E. N. Zalta. Accessed on August 14, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/prediction-accommodation/.

Botts, Tina Fernandes, Liam Kofi Bright, Myisha Cherry, Guntur Mallarangeng, and Quayshawn Spencer. “What Is the State of Blacks in Philosophy?” Critical Philosophy of Race 2, no. 2 (2014): 224-242.

Cherry, Myisha and Eric Schwitzgebel. “Like the Oscars, #PhilosophySoWhite.” Los Angeles Times, March 04, 2016. Accessed on August 13, 2018. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0306-schwitzgebel-cherry-philosophy-so-white-20160306-story.html.

Douven, Igor. “Abduction.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta (Summer 2017 Edition). Accessed on August 14, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/abduction/.

Dupré, John. “Against Scientific Imperialism.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994, no. 2 (1994): 374-381.

Ferrer, Amy. “What Can We Do about Diversity?” Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, December 04, 2012. Accessed on August 13, 2018. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/12/what-can-we-do-about-diversity.html.

Govier, Trudy. A Practical Study of Argument. Seventh Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010.

Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. Fourth Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018.

Haack, Susan. Defending Science–within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. New York: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.

Kidd, I. J. “How Should Feyerabend Have Defended Astrology? A Reply to Pigliucci.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 6 (2016): 11-17.

McCain, Kevin and Ted Poston. “Best Explanations: An Introduction.” In Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, edited by K. McCain and T. Poston, 1-6. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

McGlone, Matthew S. “Contextomy: The Art of Quoting out of Context.” Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 4 (2005): 511-522.

Mizrahi, Moti. “Why the Ultimate Argument for Scientific Realism Ultimately Fails.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 43, no. 1 (2012): 132-138.

Mizrahi, Moti. “Why Simpler Arguments are Better.” Argumentation 30, no. 3 (2016): 247-261.

Mizrahi, Moti. “What’s So Bad about Scientism?” Social Epistemology 31, no. 4 (2017a): 351-367.

Mizrahi, Moti. “In Defense of Weak Scientism: A Reply to Brown.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11 (2017b): 9-22.

Mizrahi, Moti. “More in Defense of Weak Scientism: Another Reply to Brown.” Social

Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 4 (2018a): 7-25.

Mizrahi, Moti. “Weak Scientism Defended Once More.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018b): 41-50.

Mizrahi, Moti. “The ‘Positive Argument’ for Constructive Empiricism and Inference to the Best Explanation. Journal for General Philosophy of Science (2018c): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-018-9414-3.

Offit, Paul A. Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Paxton, Molly, Carrie Figdor, and Valerie Tiberius. “Quantifying the Gender Gap: An Empirical Study of the Underrepresentation of Women in Philosophy.” Hypatia 27, no. 4 (2012): 949-957.

Peels, Rik. “The Empirical Case Against Introspection.” Philosophical Studies 17, no. 9 (2016): 2461-2485.

Peels, Rik. “A Conceptual Map of Scientism.” In Scientism: Prospects and Problems, edited by J. De Ridder, R. Peels, and R. Van Woudenberg, 28-56. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Psillos, Stathis. “The Fine Structure of Inference to the Best Explanation. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74, no. 2 (2007): 441-448.

Rosenberg, Alexander. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Scimago Journal & Country Rank. “Subject Bubble Chart.” SJR: Scimago Journal & Country Rank. Accessed on August 13, 2018. http://www.scimagojr.com/mapgen.php?maptype=bc&country=US&y=citd.

Schwitzgebel, Eric, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Andrew Higgins, Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera. “The Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses.” Philosophical Papers 47, no. 1 (2018): 21-48.

Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter and Robert Fogelin. Understanding Arguments. Ninth Edition. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015.

Stenmark, Mikael. “What is Scientism?” Religious Studies 33, no. 1 (1997): 15-32.

Van Norden, Bryan. “Western Philosophy is Racist.” Aeon, October 31, 2017a. Accessed on August 12, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-western-philosophical-canon-is-xenophobic-and-racist.

Van Norden, Bryan. Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017b.

Van Vleet, Jacob E. Informal Logical Fallacies: A Brief Guide. Lahman, MD: University Press of America, 2011.

Walton, Douglas N. and Erik C. W. Krabbe. Commitment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature. New York: Random House, 1994.

Wills, Bernard. “Why Mizrahi Needs to Replace Weak Scientism With an Even Weaker Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018a): 18-24.

Wills, Bernard. “On the Limits of any Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 7 (2018b): 34-39.

[1] I would like to thank Adam Riggio for inviting me to respond to Bernard Wills’ second attack on Weak Scientism.

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On the Limits of Any Scientism, Bernard Wills

SERRC —  July 24, 2018 — 6 Comments

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, bwills@grenfell.mun.ca.

Wills, Bernard. “On the Limits of Any Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 7 (2018): 34-39.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Zn

See also:

Image by Vancouver Island University via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Mizrahi is, alas, still confused though that perhaps is my fault. I did not attribute to him the view that non-scientific disciplines do not produce knowledge.[1] I am sorry if a cursory glance at my article created that impression but what I thought I had said was that this was the position known as strong scientism. Indeed, looking over my paper it seems that I made it quite clear that this position was ‘strong scientism’ and that Mizrahi defended something called ‘weak scientism’. According to this latter view the humane disciplines do indeed produce knowledge only of a qualitatively and quantitatively inferior kind. If this is not what weak scientism says I confess I don’t know what it says.

Thus, the opening salvo of his response, where he answers at some length a charge I did not make, has sailed clean over its intended target. (Mizrahi, 41-42) In my paper I distinguished weak scientism from strong scientism precisely on these grounds and then argued that the weaknesses of the former still dogged the latter: Mizrahi does not address this in his response. Here is a place where Mizrahi could have learned from humanities scholars and their practices of close reading and attended to the rhetorical and argumentative structure of my essay.

I began by critiquing ‘strong scientism’ which I said was not Mizrahi’s view and I did this by way of setting up my actual argument which was that Mizrahi’s proposed replacement ‘weak scientism’ suffered from the same basic flaws. I ask Mizrahi to read my response again and ask himself honestly if I accused him of being a proponent of ‘strong scientism’ rather than of ‘weak scientism’. To help him let me include the following citation from my piece:

I will focus, then, on the qualitative question and particularly on the claim that science produces knowledge and all the other things we tend to call knowledge are in fact not knowledge at all but something else. I will then consider Mr. Mizrahi’s peculiar version of this claim ‘weak scientism’ which is that while there may be knowledge of some sort outside of the sciences (it is hard, he thinks, to show otherwise) this knowledge is of a qualitatively lesser kind. (Wills, 18)

Asking Why Quantity of Production Matters

Mizrahi is still on about quantity. (Mizrahi, 42) I really have no idea why he is obsessed with this point. However, as he regards it as essential to ‘weak scientism’ I will quote what I said in a footnote to my essay: “Does Mizrahi mean to say that if a particular sub-discipline of English produces more articles in a given year than a small subfield of science then that discipline of English is superior to that subfield of science? I’m sure he does not mean to say this but it seems to follow from his words.” This point is surely not lost on him.

I have no firm opinion at all as to whether the totality of the sciences have produced more ‘stuff’ than the totality of the humanities between 1997 and 2017 and the reason is that I simply don’t care. I don’t accept quantity as a valid measure here unless it is backed up by qualitative considerations and if Mizrahi can’t make the case on qualitative grounds then quantity is simply irrelevant for the reason I gave: there are more commercials than there are artistic masterpieces. However, if Mizrahi still wants to fuss over quantitative metrics he faces the problem I raised.

While science in a global sense may indeed produce more sheer bulk of material than English, say, if there are subfields of science that do not produce more knowledge than subfields of English by this measure these must be inferior. Plus, what if it were true that Shakespeare scholars produced more papers than physicists? Would that cause Mizrahi to lower his estimate of physics? He would be an odd man if he did.

At any rate, there are all kinds of extrinsic reasons why scientific papers are so numerous that include the interests of corporations, governments, militaries and so on. The fact that there is so much science does not by itself indicate that there is anything intrinsically better about science and if science is intrinsically better that fact stands no matter how much of it there happens to be.

On the Power of Recursivity

To my argument that recursive processes can produce an infinite amount of knowledge he replies with an ineffectual jibe: “good luck publishing that!” (46) Well I am happy to inform him that I have indeed published ‘that’. I have published a number of papers on ancient and early modern philosophy that touch on the question of reflexivity and its attendant paradoxes as Mizrahi can find out by googling my name. Since he is so concerned about purely extrinsic measures of scholarly worth he will have to admit that there are in fact journals happy to ‘publish that’ and to that extent my point stands by his own chosen metric.

At any rate, in a further answer to this charge we get the following sophism: Besides, just as “recursive processes can extend our knowledge indefinitely in the field of mathematics,” they can also extend our knowledge in other fields as well, including scientific fields. That is, one “can produce a potential infinity of knowledge simply by reflecting recursively on the” (Wills 2018, 23) (sic) Standard Model in physics or any other scientific theory and/or finding. For this reason, Wills’ objection does nothing at all to undermine Weak Scientism.” (46)

Of course we can extend our knowledge indefinitely by reflecting on the standard model in physics just as Augustine says. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a proposition is scientific or not. It can be done with any proposition at all. Nor is recursive doubling a scientific procedure in the terms described by Mizrahi. This is why quantitative claims about the superiority of science can never succeed unless, as I have said many times, they are backed up with qualitative considerations which would render a quantitative argument unnecessary.

On the Intentionality of the Ism

Mizrahi makes the standard response to the concerns I raised about sexism and colonialism. He denies he is a racist and indeed, Fox News style, turns the charge back on me. (44-45) He should understand, however, that my concern here is not personal but systemic racism. The version of scientific ideology he proposes has a history and that history is not innocent. It is a definition of knowledge and as such it has a social and political dimension. Part of this has been the exclusion of various others such as women or indigenous peoples from the socially sanctioned circle of knowers. This is the ‘privilege’ I refer to in my paper.

Mizrahi, as a participant in a certain tradition or practice of knowledge that claims and can often assert hegemony over other discourses, benefits from that privilege. That is not rocket science. Nor is the fact that, rightly or wrongly, Mizrahi is making hegemonic claims for science from which he himself stands to benefit. It is nothing to the point for Mizrahi to proclaim his innocence of any such intention or to use the ‘you are the real racist for calling me a racist’ ploy. As anyone familiar with the discourse about racism and colonialism can tell him, intention is not the salient feature of this sort of analysis but overall effect.

Also he has not distinguished an ideological critique from an ad hominem attack. I am not attacking him as a person but simply pointing that the position he takes on scientism has social, political and monetary implications that make his defense of weak-scientism ideologically loaded. And let me emphasize again that this has nothing whatsoever to do with Mizrahi’s intentions or personal feelings: I am happy to consider him a perfect gentleman. Perhaps a consideration of Marx would help him see this point a bit better and I can assure Mizrahi that Marx’s impact rating is stellar.

So Who Is Correct?

Of course, as Mizrahi says, all this is forgivable if his overall thesis is correct. (45) Apparently, I truly did not understand that “Even if it is true that “craft knowledge has roughly 3 million-year head start,” it is irrelevant to whether Weak Scientism is true or false. This is because Weak Scientism is a thesis about academic knowledge or research produced by academic fields of study (Mizrahi 2017a, 356; Mizrahi 2017b, 11; Mizrahi 2018a, 12). (46) I admit this point did escape me.[2]

This means that if I find knowledge produced outside the academy with qualities comparable to scientific knowledge that is irrelevant to the argument. Well, by all means then, let me limit my consideration to the academy since Mizrahi has defined that as his sole battleground. I gave many examples of knowledge in my paper that come from an academic context. Let us consider these with respect to Mizrahi’s chosen criteria for “good explanations, namely, unification, coherence, simplicity, and testability (Mizrahi 2017a, 360-362; Mizrahi 2017b, 19-20; Mizrahi 2018a, 17).” (47) (46)

Mizrahi seems to think this applies to a statement I made about Joyce scholars. (47) Let me take them as my ‘academic’ example. I take it as a given that a masterful exposition of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man will show the unity, coherence and simplicity of the work’s design to the extent that these are artistically desired features. What about testability? How does a Joyce scholar test what he says? As I said he tests it against the text. He does this in two ways.

First on the level of direct observation he establishes what Stephen Daedalus, say, does on page 46. This is, as far as I can see, a perfectly reputable kind of knowledge and if we can answer the question about page 46 directly we do not need to resort to any more complex explanatory processes. The fact that such a procedure is perfectly adequate to establish the truth means that scientific procedures of a more complex kind are unnecessary. The use of scientific method, while it may mean better knowledge in many cases, does not mean better knowledge here so Mizrahi’s complaint on this score is beside the point. (47)

Statue of James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland
Image by Loic Pinseel via Flickr / Creative Commons

What Can Improve Knowledge?

Of course, the Joyce scholar will also have an interpretation of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is where he answers broader questions about the work’s meaning, structure, unity and so on. This also entails the test of looking at the text not at any particular point but as a whole. What in this hermeneutic process would be improved by ‘scientific method’ as Mizrahi describes it? Where does the Joyce scholar need to draw testable consequences from a novel hypothesis and test it with an experiment? What would that even mean in this context?

His test is close reading as this is practiced in the discipline of English literature and he has peers who judge if he has done this well or badly. What is amiss with this process that it could be improved by procedures that have nothing to do with determining the meaning and significance of books? How on this question could science even begin to show its supposed ‘superiority’? It seems to me the only option for Mizrahi here is to deny that the Joyce scholar knows anything (beyond bare factual information) and this means, alas, that his position once again collapses into strong scientism.

I think, however, that I see where Mizrahi’s confusion lies. He seems to think I am saying the following: Joyce scholars look at a book to determine a fact just as scientists look at the world to determine a fact ergo Joyce scholars are scientists. (47) Let me reassure him I am not so jejune. Of course, field notes and other forms of direct observation are part of the arsenal of science. Plus, scientific statements are, at the end of the day, brought into relationship with observation either directly or indirectly. Still, Joyce scholars do not just look at page numbers or what characters are wearing in Chapter 2. They formulate interpretations of Joyce.

In this way too scientists not only observe things but formulate and test hypotheses, construct theories and so on. In some ways these may be comparable processes but they are not identical. Hermeneutics is not just an application of hyothetico-deductive method to a book. Conclusions about Joyce are not products of experimental testing and I can conceive of no way in which they could be strengthened by them except in a purely ancillary sense (ie. we might learn something indirect about Ulysses by exhuming Joyce’s bones).

Thus, Mizrahi’s argument that scientific explanations have more ‘good-making properties’ overall (47) is, whether true or not, irrelevant to the myriad of cases in which scientific explanations are either A. unnecessary or B. inapplicable. Once again we teeter on the brink of strong scientism (which Mizrahi rejects) for we are now forced to say that if a scientific explanation of a phenomenon is not to be had then there can be no other form of explanation.

There Are Radical Differences in How Knowledge Is Produced

Let me go back to my daughter who was not out in a field or cave somewhere but in a university classroom when she presented her analysis of Scriabin’s Prometheus chord. This, I hope, satisfies Mizrahi’s demand that I confine myself to an ‘academic’ context. Both her instructor and her classmates agreed that her analysis was sound. Why? Because it was the clearest, simplest explanation that answered the question of how Scriabin created this chord. It was an abduction that the community of knowers of which she was a part found adequate and that was the end of the story.

The reason, let me emphasize again since Mizrahi has such trouble with the point, is that this was all the question required. Kristin did not deduce a “…consequence that follows from a hypothesis plus auxiliary hypothesis” (47) to be made subject of a testable prediction. Why? Because that is not how knowledge is produced in her domain and such a procedure would add no value to her conclusion which concerned not facts about the natural world but Scriabin’s thought processes and aesthetic intentions.

Again it seems that either Mizrahi must concede this point OR adopt the strong scientist position that Kristin only seems to know something about Scriabin while actually there is nothing to be known about Scriabin outside the experimental sciences. So, to make his case he must still explain why science can produce better results in music theory, which IS an academic subject, than explanatory procedures currently used in that domain. Otherwise the superiority of science is only contextual which is a trivial thesis denied by no one.

Thus, Mizrahi is still bedeviled by the same problem. How is science supposed to show its superiority in domains where its explanatory procedures are simply not necessary and would add no value to existing explanations? I do not think Mizrahi has established the point that:”…if distinct fields of study have the same aim (i.e., to explain), then their products (i.e., explanations) can be evaluated with respect to similar criteria, such as unification, coherence, simplicity, and testability (Mizrahi 2017a, 360-362; Mizrahi 2017b, 19-20; Mizrahi 2018a, 17). Mizrahi says ‘similar’ but his argument actually depends on these criteria being ‘identical’ such that we can judge all explanations by one pre-set standard: in this case hypothetico-deductive method.

But this is nonsense. All disciplines use abduction, true, but they do not all arrive at the ‘best explanation’ by the same procedures. Their procedures are analogical not univocal. Failure to see this distinction seems to be at the root of Mizrahi’s errors. Differing explanatory processes can be compared but not identified as can be seen if we imagine a classicist taking his copy of the Iliad down to the chemistry lab to be analyzed for its meaning. The Chemistry lab here is the classicist’s brain! To use a less flippant example though there are sciences such as paleontology that make liberal use of narrative reconstruction (i.e. how those hominid bones got in that tiny cave) which is a form of abduction that does not correspond simply to the standard H/D model. Still, the story the paleontologist reconstructs, if it is a good one, has unity, simplicity and coherence regardless of the fact that it has not achieved this by a robotic application of H/D but rather by another, less formalized, form of inference.

Thus, I think Mizrahi’s reforming zeal (48) has got the better of him. He does not help his case by issuing the Borg-like boast that ‘resistance is futile’. If I recall my Trek lore correctly, the boast that ‘resistance is futile’ ended in ignominious defeat. One final point. One should never proofread one’s own papers, I did indeed misspell Mizrahi for which I heartily apologize.

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

Mizrahi, Moti. “Weak Scientism Defended Once More.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 41-50.

Wills, Bernard. “Why Mizrahi Needs to Replace Weak Scientism With an Even Weaker Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 18-24.

[1] Though, as I point out in my response (Wills, 22), he clearly vacillates on this point.

[2] It is an odd kind of scientism that holds science is superior within the academy while leaving open the question of whether non-scientific knowledge outside the academy may be superior to science. However, if that is Mizrahi’s position I will not quibble.

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The (Lack of) Evidence for the Kuhnian Image of Science, Moti Mizrahi

SERRC —  July 17, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Moti Mizrahi, Florida Institute of Technology, mmizrahi@fit.edu

Mizrahi, Moti. “The (Lack of) Evidence for the Kuhnian Image of Science.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 7 (2018): 19-24.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Z5

See also:

Image by Narcis Sava via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Whenever the work of an influential philosopher is criticized, a common move made by those who seek to defend the influential philosopher’s work is to claim that his or her ideas have been misconstrued. This is an effective move, of course, for it means that the critics have criticized a straw man, not the ideas actually put forth by the influential philosopher. However, this move can easily backfire, too.

For continued iterations of this move could render the ideas in question immune to criticism in a rather ad hoc fashion. That is to say, shouting “straw man” every time an influential philosopher’s ideas are subjected to scrutiny is rather like shouting “wolf” when none is around; it could be seen as an attempt to draw attention to that which may not be worthy of attention.

The question, then, is whether the influential philosopher’s ideas are worthy of attention and/or acceptance. In particular, are Kuhn’s ideas about scientific revolutions and incommensurability worthy of acceptance? As I have argued, along with a few other contributors to my edited volume, The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? (2018), they may not be because they are based on dubious assumptions and fallacious argumentation.

In their reviews of The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? (2018), both Markus Arnold (2018) and Amanda Bryant (2018) complain that the contributors who criticize Kuhn’s theory of scientific change have misconstrued his philosophy of science and they praise those who seek to defend the Kuhnian image of science. In what follows, then, I would like to address their claims about misconstruing Kuhn’s theory of scientific change. But my focus here, as in the book, will be the evidence (or lack thereof) for the Kuhnian image of science. I will begin with Arnold’s review and then move on to Bryant’s review.

Arnold on the Evidence for the Kuhnian Image of Science

Arnold (2018, 42) states that “one of the results of [his] review” is that “the ‘inductive reasoning’ intended to refute Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis (found in the first part of the book) is actually its weakest part.” I am not sure what he means by that exactly. First, I am not sure in what sense inductive reasoning can be said to refute a thesis, given that inductive arguments are the sort of arguments whose premises do not necessitate the truth of their conclusions, whereas a refutation of p, if sound, supposedly shows that p must be false.

Second, contrary to what Arnold claims, I do not think that the chapters in Part I of the book contain “‘inductive reasoning’ intended to refute Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis” (Arnold 2018, 42). Speaking of my chapter in particular, Chapter 1 (Mizrahi 2018b, 32-38), it contains two arguments intended to show that there is no deductive support for the Kuhnian thesis of taxonomic incommensurability (Mizrahi 2018b, 32), and an argument intended to show that there is no inductive support for the Kuhnian thesis of taxonomic incommensurability (Mizrahi 2018b, 37).

These arguments are deductive, not inductive, for their premises, if true, guarantee the truth of their conclusions. Besides, to argue that there is no evidence for p is not the same as arguing that p is false. None of my arguments is intended to show that p (namely, the Kuhnian thesis of taxonomic incommensurability) is false.

Rather, my arguments show that there is no evidence for p (namely, the Kuhnian thesis of taxonomic incommensurability). For these reasons, as a criticism of Part I of the book, Arnold’s (2018, 42) claim that “the ‘inductive reasoning’ intended to refute Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis (found in the first part of the book) is actually its weakest part” completely misses the mark.

Moreover, the only thing I could find in Arnold’s review that could be construed as support for this claim is the aforementioned complaint about straw-manning Kuhn. As Arnold (2018, 43) puts it, “the counter-arguments under consideration brought forward against his model seem, paradoxically, to underestimate the complexity of Kuhn’s claims.”

In other words, Kuhn’s theory of scientific change is so complex and those who attempt to criticize it fail to appreciate its complexity. But why? Why do the criticisms fail to appreciate the complexity of Kuhn’s theory? How complex is it such that it defies interpretation and criticism? Arnold does not say. Instead, he (Arnold 2018, 43) states that “it is not clear, why Kuhn’s ‘image of science’ should be dismissed because […] taxonomic incommensurability ‘is the exception rather than the rule’ [Mizrahi 2018b,] (38).”

As I argue in Chapter 1, however, the fact that taxonomic incommensurability “is the exception rather than the rule” (Mizrahi 2018b, 38) means that Kuhn’s theory of scientific change is a bad theory because it shows that Kuhn’s theory has neither explanatory nor predictive power. A “theory” with no explanatory and/or predictive power is no theory at all (Mizrahi 2018b, 37-38). From his review, however, it is clear that Arnold thinks of Kuhn’s image of science as a theory of scientific change.

For instance, he talks about “Kuhn’s epistemology” (Arnold 2018, 45), “Kuhn’s theory of incommensurability” (Arnold 2018, 46), and Kuhn’s “complex theory of science” (Arnold 2018, 42). If Kuhn’s thesis of taxonomic incommensurability has no explanatory and/or predictive power, then it is a bad theory, perhaps not even a theory at all, let alone a general theory of scientific knowledge or scientific change.

In that respect, I found it rather curious that, on the one hand, Arnold approves of Alexandra Argamakova’s (2018) criticism of the universal ambitions of Kuhn’s image of science, but on the other hand, he wants to attribute to Kuhn the view that “scientific revolutions are rare” (Arnold 2018, 43). Arnold quotes with approval Argamakova’s (2018, 54) claim that “distinct breakthroughs in science can be marked as revolutions, but no universal system of criteria for such appraisal can be formulated in a normative philosophical manner” (emphasis added).

In other words, if Argamakova is right, then there can be no philosophical theory of scientific change in general, Kuhnian or otherwise. So Arnold cannot be in agreement with Argamakova without thereby abandoning the claim that Kuhn’s image of science is an “epistemology” (Arnold 2018, 45) of scientific knowledge or a “complex theory of science” (Arnold 2018, 42).

Arnold (2018, 45) also asserts that “the allegation that Kuhn developed his theory on the basis of selected historical cases is refuted” by Kindi (2018). Even if that were true, it would mean that Kuhn’s theory has no inductive support, as I argue in Chapter 1 of the book (Mizrahi 2018b, 32-38). So I am not sure how this point is supposed to help Arnold in defending the Kuhnian image of science. For if there is no inductive support for the Kuhnian image of science, as Arnold seems to think, and there is no deductive support either, as I (Mizrahi 2018b, 25-44) and Park (2018, 61-74) argue, then what evidence is there for the Kuhnian image of science?

For present purposes, the important point is not how Kuhn “developed his theory” (Arnold 2018, 45) but rather what supports his theory of scientific change. What is the evidence for a Kuhnian theory of scientific change? If I am right (Mizrahi 2018b), or if Park (2018) is right, then there is neither deductive support nor inductive support for a Kuhnian theory of scientific change. If Argamakova is right, then there can be no general theory of scientific change at all, Kuhnian or otherwise.

It is also important to note here that Arnold (2018, 45) praises both Kindi (2018) and Patton (2018) for offering “a close reading of Kuhn’s work,” but he does not mention that they offer incompatible interpretations of that work, specifically, of the evidence for Kuhn’s ideas about scientific change. On Kindi’s reading of Kuhn, the argument for the Kuhnian image of science is a deductive argument from first principles, whereas on Patton’s reading of Kuhn, the argument for the Kuhnian image of science is an inference to the best explanation (see Patton 2015, cf. Mizrahi 2018a, 12-13; Mizrahi 2015, 51-53).

Bryant on the Evidence for the Kuhnian Image of Science

Like Arnold, Bryant (2018, 1) wonders whether Kuhn’s views on scientific change can be pinned down and criticized or perhaps there are many “Thomases Kuhn.” Again, I think we do not want to make Kuhn’s views too vague and/or ambiguous (Argamakova 2018, 47-50), and thus immune to criticism in a rather ad hoc fashion. For that, in addition to being based on dubious assumptions and fallacious argumentation, would be another reason to think that Kuhn’s views are not worthy of acceptance.

Bryant (2018, 1) also wonders “whether the so-called Kuhnian image of science is really so broadly endorsed as to be the potential subject of (echoing Kuhn’s own phrase) a ‘decisive transformation’.” As I see it, however, the question is not whether the Kuhnian image of science is “broadly endorsed.” Rather, the question is whether “we are now possessed” by it. When Kuhn wrote that (in)famous first line of the introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the image of science by which we were possessed was a positivist image of science according to which science develops “by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions” (Kuhn 1962/1996, 2). Arguably, philosophers of science were never possessed by such a positivist image of science as much as they are possessed by the Kuhnian image of science.

This is evidenced by the fact that no positivist work in philosophy of science has had as much impact as Kuhn’s seminal work (Mizrahi 2018a, 1-2). Accordingly, even if the Kuhnian image of science is not “broadly endorsed,” it is quite clear that philosophers of science are possessed by it. For this reason, an “exorcism,” or a “decisive transformation,” is required in order to rid ourselves of this image of science. And what better way to do so than by showing that it is based on dubious assumptions and fallacious argumentation.

As far as the evidence (or lack thereof) for the Kuhnian image of science, Bryant (2018, 2) claims that “Case studies can be interesting, informative, and evidential” (emphasis added). I grant that case studies can be interesting and informative, but I doubt that they can be evidential. From “Scientific episode E has property F,” it does not follow that F is a characteristic of scientific episodes in general. As far as Kuhn is concerned, it is clear that he used just a few case studies (e.g., the phlogiston case) in support of his ideas about scientific change and incommensurability.

The problem with that, as I argue in Chapter 1 of the book (Mizrahi 2018b, 32-38), is that no general theory of scientific change can be derived from a few cherry-picked case studies. Even if we grant that the phlogiston case is a genuine case of a so-called “Kuhnian revolution” and taxonomic incommensurability, despite the fact that there are rebutting defeaters (Mizrahi 2018b, 33-36), no general conclusions about the nature of science can be drawn from one (or even a few) such cases (Mizrahi 2018b, 36-37).

From the fact that one (or a few) cherry-picked episode(s) from the history of science exhibits a particular property, it does not follow that all scientific episodes have that property; otherwise, from the “Piltdown man” episode we would have to conclude that fraud characterizes scientific discovery in general (Mizrahi 2018b, 37-38).

Speaking of scientific discovery, Bryant (2018, 2) takes issue with the fact that I cite “just two authors, Eric Oberheim and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, who use the language of discovery to characterize incommensurability.” For Bryant (2018, 2), this suggests that “it isn’t clear that the assumption Mizrahi takes pains to reject is particularly widespread” (emphasis added). I suppose that “the assumption” in question here is that Kuhn “discovered” incommensurability.

If so, then I would like to clarify that I mention the fact that Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene talk about incommensurability in terms of discovery, and claim that Kuhn “discovered” it, not to argue against it (i.e., to argue that Kuhn did not discover incommensurability), but rather to show that some of the elements of the Kuhnian image of science, such as incommensurability, are sometimes taken for granted. When it is said that someone has discovered something, it gives the impression that what has been discovered is a fact, and so no arguments are needed.

When it comes to incommensurability, however, it is far from clear that it is a fact about scientific change, and so good arguments are needed in order to establish that episodes of scientific change exhibit taxonomic incommensurability. If I am right, or if Park (2018) and Sankey (2018) are right, then there are no good arguments that establish this.

Not Conclusions, But Questions

In light of the above, I think that the questions raised in the edited volume under review remain urgent (cf. Rehg 2018). Are there good reasons or compelling evidence for the Kuhnian model of theory change in science? If there are no good reasons or compelling evidence for such a model, as I (Mizrahi 2018b), Park (2018), and Sankey (2018) argue, what’s next for philosophers of science? Should we abandon the search for a general theory of science, as Argamakova (2018) suggests? Are there better models of scientific change? Perhaps evolutionary (Marcum 2018) or orthogenetic (Renzi and Napolitano 2018) models?

• • •

I would like to thank Markus Arnold and Amanda Bryant for their thoughtful reviews. I am also grateful to Adam Riggio and Eric Kerr for organizing this book symposium and for inviting me to participate.

Contact details: mmizrahi@fit.edu

References

Argamakova, Alexandra. “Modeling Scientific Development: Lessons from Thomas Kuhn.” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 45-59. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Arnold, Markus. “Is There Anything Wrong With Thomas Kuhn?” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 42-47.

Bryant, Amanda. “Each Kuhn Mutually Incommensurable.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 1-7.

Kindi, Vasso. “The Kuhnian Straw Man.” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 95-112. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Third Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962/1996.

Marcum, James A. “Revolution or Evolution in Science? A Role for the Incommensurability Thesis?” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 155-173. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Mizrahi, Moti. “A Reply to Patton’s ‘Incommensurability and the Bonfire of the Meta-Theories.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 10 (2015): 51-53.

Mizrahi, Moti. “Introduction.” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 1-22. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018a.

Mizrahi, Moti. “Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis: What’s the Argument?” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 25-44. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018b.

Park, Seungbae. “Can Kuhn’s Taxonomic Incommensurability be an Image of Science?” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 61-74. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Patton, Lydia. “Incommensurability and the Bonfire of the Meta-Theories: Response to Mizrahi.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 7 (2015): 51-58.

Patton, Lydia. “Kuhn, Pedagogy, and Practice: A Local Reading of Structure.” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 113-130. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Rehg, William. “Kuhn’s Image of Science.” Metascience (2018): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-018-0306-2.

Renzi, Barbara G. and Giulio Napolitano. “The Biological Metaphors of Scientific Change.” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?, edited by Moti Mizrahi, 177-190. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

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Weak Scientism Defended Once More, Moti Mizrahi

SERRC —  June 28, 2018 — 5 Comments

Author Information: Moti Mizrahi, Florida Institute of Technology, mmizrahi@fit.edu

Mizrahi, Moti. “Weak Scientism Defended Once More.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 41-50.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Yx

See also:

One of Galileo’s original compasses, on display at the Museo Galileo, a feature of the Instituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, Italy.
Image by Anders Sandberg via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Bernard Wills (2018) joins Christopher Brown (2017, 2018) in criticizing my defense of Weak Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a, 2017b, 2018a). Unfortunately, it seems that Wills did not read my latest defense of Weak Scientism carefully, nor does he cite any of the other papers in my exchange with Brown. For he attributes to me the view that “other disciplines in the humanities [in addition to philosophy] do not produce knowledge” (Wills 2018, 18).

Of course, this is not my view and I affirm no such thing, contrary to what Wills seems to think. I find it hard to explain how Wills could have made this mistake, given that he goes on to quote me as follows: “Scientific knowledge can be said to be qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge insofar as such knowledge is explanatorily, instrumentally, and predictively more successful than non-scientific knowledge” (Mizrahi 2018a, 7; quoted in Wills 2018, 18).

Clearly, the claim ‘Scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge’ entails that there is non-scientific knowledge. If the view I defend entails that there is non-scientific knowledge, then it cannot also be my view that “science produces knowledge and all the other things we tend to call knowledge are in fact not knowledge at all but something else” (Wills 2018, 18).

Even if he somehow missed this simple logical point, reading the other papers in my exchange with Brown should have made it clear to Wills that I do not deny the production of knowledge by non-scientific disciplines. In fact, I explicitly state that “science produces scientific knowledge, mathematics produces mathematical knowledge, philosophy produces philosophical knowledge, and so on” (Mizrahi 2017a, 353). Even in my latest reply to Brown, which is the only paper from my entire exchange with Brown that Wills cites, I explicitly state that, if Weak Scientism is true, then “philosophical knowledge would be inferior to scientific knowledge both quantitatively (in terms of research output and research impact) and qualitatively (in terms of explanatory, instrumental, and predictive success)” (Mizrahi 2018a, 8).

If philosophical knowledge is quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to scientific knowledge, then it follows that there is philosophical knowledge. For this reason, only a rather careless reader could attribute to me the view that “other disciplines in the humanities [in addition to philosophy] do not produce knowledge” (Wills 2018, 18).

There Must Be Some Misunderstanding

Right from the start, then, Wills gets Weak Scientism wrong, even though he later writes that, according to Weak Scientism, “there may be knowledge of some sort outside of the sciences” (Wills 2018, 18). He says that he will ignore the quantitative claim of Weak Scientism and focus “on the qualitative question and particularly on the claim that science produces knowledge and all the other things we tend to call knowledge are in fact not knowledge at all but something else” (Wills 2018, 18). Wills can focus on whatever he wants, of course, but that is not Weak Scientism.

Weak Scientism is not the view that only science produces real knowledge; that is Strong Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a, 353). Rather, Weak Scientism is the view that, “Of all the knowledge we have [i.e., there is knowledge other than scientific knowledge], scientific knowledge is the best knowledge” (Mizrahi 2017a, 354). In other words, scientific knowledge “is simply the best; better than all the rest” (Mizrahi 2017b, 20). Wills’ criticism, then, misses the mark completely. That is, it cannot be a criticism against Weak Scientism, since Weak Scientism is not the view that “science produces knowledge and all the other things we tend to call knowledge are in fact not knowledge at all but something else” (Wills 2018, 18).

Although he deems the quantitative superiority of scientific knowledge over non-scientific knowledge “a tangential point,” and says that he will not spend time on it, Wills (2018, 18) remarks that “A German professor once told [him] that in the first half of the 20th Century there were 40,000 monographs on Franz Kafka alone!” Presumably, Wills’ point is that research output in literature exceeds that of scientific disciplines. Instead of relying on gut feelings and hearsay, Wills should have done the required research in order to determine whether scholarly output in literature really does exceed the research output of scientific disciplines.

If we look at the Scopus database, using the data and visualization tools provided by Scimago Journal & Country Rank, we can see that research output in a natural science like physics and a social science like psychology far exceeds research output in humanistic disciplines like literature and philosophy. On average, psychology has produced 15,000 more publications per year than either literature or philosophy between the years 1999 and 2017. Likewise, on average, physics has produced 54,000 more publications per year than either literature or philosophy between the years 1999 and 2017 (Figure 1). 

Figure 1. Research output in Literature, Philosophy, Physics, and Psychology from 1999 to 2017 (Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank)

Contrary to what Wills seems to think or what his unnamed German professor may have told him, then, it is not the case that literary scholars produce more work on Shakespeare or Kafka alone than physicists or psychologists produce. The data from the Scopus database show that, on average, it takes literature and philosophy almost two decades to produce what psychology produces in two years or what physics produces in a single year (Mizrahi 2017a, 357-359).

In fact, using JSTOR Data for Research, we can check Wills’ number, as reported to him by an unnamed German professor, to find out that there are 13,666 publications (i.e., journal articles, books, reports, and pamphlets) on Franz Kafka from 1859 to 2018 in the JSTOR database. Clearly, that is not even close to “40,000 monographs on Franz Kafka alone” in the first half of the 20th Century (Wills 2018, 18). By comparison, as of May 22, 2018, the JSTOR database contains more publications on the Standard Model in physics and the theory of conditioning in behavioral psychology than on Franz Kafka or William Shakespeare (Table 1).

Table 1. Search results for ‘Standard Model’, ‘Conditioning’, ‘William Shakespeare’, and ‘Franz Kafka’ in the JSTOR database as a percentage of the total number of publications, n = 12,633,298 (Source: JSTOR Data for Research)

  Number of Publications Percentage of JSTOR corpus
Standard Model 971,968 7.69%
Conditioning 121,219 0.95%
William Shakespeare 93,700 0.74%
Franz Kafka 13,667 0.1%

Similar results can be obtained from Google Books Ngram Viewer when we compare published work on Shakespeare, which Wills thinks exceeds all published work in other disciplines, for he says that “Shakespeare scholars have all of us beat” (Wills 2018, 18), with published work on a contemporary of Shakespeare (1564-1616) from another field of study, namely, Galileo (1564-1642). As we can see from Figure 2, from 1700 to 2000, ‘Galileo’ consistently appears in more books than ‘William Shakespeare’ does.

Figure 2. Google Books results for ‘William Shakespeare’ and ‘Galileo’ from 1700 to 2000 (Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer)

Racking Up the Fallacies

Wills continues to argue fallaciously when he resorts to what appears to be a fallacious ad hominem attack against me. He asks (rhetorically?), “Is Mr. Mizrahi producing an argument or a mere rationalization of his privilege?” (Wills 2018, 19) It is not clear to me what sort of “privilege” Wills wants to claim that I have, or why he accuses me of colonialism and sexism, since he provides no arguments for these outrageous charges. Moreover, I do not see how this is at all relevant to Weak Scientism. Even if I am somehow “privileged” (whatever Wills means by that), Weak Scientism is either true or false regardless.

After all, I take it that Wills would not doubt his physician’s diagnoses just because he or she is “privileged” for working at a hospital. Whether his physician is “privileged” for working at a hospital has nothing to do with the accuracy of his or her diagnoses. For these reasons, Wills’ ad hominem is fallacious (as opposed to a legitimate ad hominem as a rebuttal to an argument from authority, see Mizrahi 2010). I think that SERRC readers will be better served if we focus on the ideas under discussion, specifically, Weak Scientism, not the people who discuss them.

Speaking of privilege and sexism, however, it might be worth noting that, throughout his paper, Wills refers to me as ‘Mr. Mizrahi’ (rather than ‘Dr. Mizrahi’ or simply ‘Mizrahi’, as is the norm in academic publications), and that he has misspelled my name on more than one occasion (Wills 2018, 18, 22, 24). Studies suggest that addressing female doctors with ‘Ms.’ or ‘Mrs.’ rather than ‘Dr.’ might reveal gender bias (see, e.g., Files et al. 2017). Perhaps forms of address reveal not only gender bias but also ethnic or racial bias when people with non-white or “foreign” names are addressed as Mr. (or Ms.) rather than Dr. (Erlenbusch 2018).

Aside from unsubstantiated claims about the amount of research produced by literary scholars, fallacious appeals to the alleged authority of unnamed German professors, and fallacious ad hominem attacks, does Wills offer any good arguments against Weak Scientism? He spends most of his paper (pages 19-22) trying to show that there is knowledge other than scientific knowledge, such as knowledge produced in the fields of “Law and Music Theory” (Wills 2018, 20). This, however, does nothing at all to undermine Weak Scientism. For, as mentioned above, Weak Scientism is the view that scientific knowledge is superior to non-scientific knowledge, which means that there is non-scientific knowledge; it’s just not as good as scientific knowledge (Mizrahi 2017a, 356).

The Core of His Concept

Wills finally gets to Weak Scientism on the penultimate page of his paper. His main objection against Weak Scientism seems to be that it is not clear to him how scientific knowledge is supposed to be better than non-scientific knowledge. For instance, he asks, “Better in what context? By what standard of value?” (Wills 2018, 23) Earlier he also says that he is not sure what are the “certain relevant respect” in which scientific knowledge is superior to non-scientific knowledge (Wills 2018, 18).

Unfortunately, this shows that Wills either has not read the other papers in my exchange with Brown or at least has not read them carefully. For, starting with my first defense of Weak Scientism (2017a), I explain in great detail the ways in which scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge. Briefly, scientific knowledge is quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge in terms of research output (i.e., more publications) and research impact (i.e., more citations). Scientific knowledge is qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge in terms of explanatory, instrumental, and predictive success (Mizrahi 2017a, 364; Mizrahi 2017b, 11).

Wills tries to challenge the claim that scientific knowledge is quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge by exclaiming, “Does science produce more knowledge that [sic] anything else? Hardly” (Wills 2018, 23). He appeals to Augustine’s idea that one “can produce a potential infinity of knowledge simply by reflecting recursively on the fact of [one’s] own existence” (Wills 2018, 23). In response, I would like to borrow a phrase from Brown (2018, 30): “good luck getting that published!”

Seriously, though, the point is that Weak Scientism is a thesis about academic knowledge or research. In terms of research output, scientific disciplines outperform non-scientific disciplines (see Figure 1 and Table 1 above; Mizrahi 2017a, 357-359; Mizrahi 2018a, 20-21). Besides, just as “recursive processes can extend our knowledge indefinitely in the field of mathematics,” they can also extend our knowledge in other fields as well, including scientific fields. That is, one “can produce a potential infinity of knowledge simply by reflecting recursively on the” (Wills 2018, 23) Standard Model in physics or any other scientific theory and/or finding. For this reason, Wills’ objection does nothing at all to undermine Weak Scientism.

Wills (2018, 23) tries to problematize the notions of explanatory, instrumental, and predictive success in an attempt to undermine the claim that scientific knowledge is qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge in terms of explanatory, instrumental, and predictive success. But it seems that he misunderstands these notions as they apply to the scientism debate.

As far as instrumental success is concerned, Wills (2018, 23) asks, “Does science have (taken in bulk) more instrumental success than other knowledge forms? How would you even count given that craft knowledge has roughly 3 million-year head start?” Even if it is true that “craft knowledge has roughly 3 million-year head start,” it is irrelevant to whether Weak Scientism is true or false. This is because Weak Scientism is a thesis about academic knowledge or research produced by academic fields of study (Mizrahi 2017a, 356; Mizrahi 2017b, 11; Mizrahi 2018a, 12).

Solving the Problem and Explaining the Issue

As far as explanatory success is concerned, Wills (2018, 23) writes, “Is science more successful at explanation? Hardly, if science could solve problems in literature or history then these fields would not even exist.” There are a couple of problems with this objection. First, explaining and problem solving are not the same thing (Mizrahi and Buckwalter 2014). Second, what makes scientific explanations good explanations are the good-making properties that are supposed to make all explanations (both scientific and non-scientific) good explanations, namely, unification, coherence, simplicity, and testability (Mizrahi 2017a, 360-362; Mizrahi 2017b, 19-20; Mizrahi 2018a, 17).

I have already made this point several times in my replies to Brown, which Wills does not cite, namely, that Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is used in both scientific and non-scientific contexts (Mizrahi 2017a, 362). That is, “IBE is everywhere” (Mizrahi 2017b, 20). It’s just that scientific IBEs are better than non-scientific IBEs because they exhibit more of (and to a greater extent) the aforementioned properties that make any explanation a good explanation (Mizrahi 2018b).

As far as predictive success is concerned, Wills (2018, 23) asks, “Does science make more true predictions? Again how would you even count given that for millions of years, human beings survived by making hundreds of true predictions daily?” There are a few problems with this objection as well. First, even if it is true that “for millions of years, human beings survived by making hundreds of true predictions daily,” it is irrelevant to whether Weak Scientism is true or false, since Weak Scientism is a thesis about academic knowledge or research produced by academic fields of study (Mizrahi 2017a, 356; Mizrahi 2017b, 11; Mizrahi 2018a, 12).

Second, contrary to what Wills (2018, 24) seems to think, testing predictions in science is not simply a matter of making assertions and then checking to see if they are true. For one thing, a prediction is not simply an assertion, but rather a consequence that follows from a hypothesis plus auxiliary hypotheses (Mizrahi 2015). For another, a prediction needs to be novel such that we would not expect it to be the case except from the vantage point of the theory that we are testing (Mizrahi 2012).

As I have advised Brown (Mizrahi 2018, 17), I would also advise Wills to consult logic and reasoning textbooks, not because they provide support for the claim that “science is instrumentally successful, explanatory and makes true predictions,” as Wills (2018, 23) erroneously thinks, but because they discuss hypothesis testing in science. For Wills’ (2018, 24) remark about Joyce scholars suggests a failure to understand how hypotheses are tested in science.

Third, like Brown (2017, 49), Wills (2018, 23) admits that, just like science, philosophy is in the explanation business. For Wills (2018, 23) says that, “certainty, instrumental success, utilitarian value, predictive power and explanation all exist elsewhere in ways that are often not directly commensurable with the way they exist in science” (emphasis added). But if distinct fields of study have the same aim (i.e., to explain), then their products (i.e., explanations) can be evaluated with respect to similar criteria, such as unification, coherence, simplicity, and testability (Mizrahi 2017a, 360-362; Mizrahi 2017b, 19-20; Mizrahi 2018a, 17).

In other words, there is no incommensurability here, as Wills seems to think, insofar as both science and philosophy produce explanations and those explanations must exhibit the same good-making properties that make all explanations good explanations (Mizrahi 2018a, 17; 2018b).

“You Passed the Test!”

If Wills (2018, 24) wants to suggest that philosophers should be “testing their assertions in the ways peculiar to their disciplines,” then I would agree. However, “testing” does not simply mean making assertions and then checking to see if they are true, as Wills seems to think. After all, how would one check to see if assertions about theoretical entities are true? To test a hypothesis properly, one must derive a consequence from it (plus auxiliary assumptions) that would be observed only if the hypothesis (plus the auxiliary assumptions) is true.

Observations and/or experimentation would then indicate to one whether the consequence obtains or not (Mizrahi 2012). Of course, some philosophers have been doing just that for some time now (Knobe 2017). For instance, some experimental philosophers test hypotheses about the alleged intuitiveness of philosophical ideas and responses to thought experiments (see, e.g., Kissinger-Knox et al. 2018). I welcome such empirical work in philosophy.

Contrary to what Wills (2018, 19) seems to think, then, my aim is not to antagonize philosophers. Rather, my aim is to reform philosophy. In particular, as I have suggested in my recent reply to Brown (Mizrahi 2018a, 22), I think that philosophy would benefit from adopting not only the experimental methods of the cognitive and social sciences, as experimental philosophers have done, but also the methods of data science, such as data mining and corpus analysis (see, e.g., Ashton and Mizrahi 2018a and 2018b).

Indeed, the XPhi Replicability Project recently published a report on replication studies of 40 experimental studies according to which experimental studies “successfully replicated about 70% of the time” (Cova et al. 2018). With such a success rate, one could argue that the empirical revolution in philosophy is well under way (see also Knobe 2015). Resistance is futile!

Contact details: mmizrahi@fit.edu

References

Ashton, Z., and Mizrahi, M. “Intuition Talk is Not Methodologically Cheap: Empirically Testing the ‘Received Wisdom’ About Armchair Philosophy.” Erkenntnis 83, no. 3 (2018a): 595-612.

Ashton, Z., and Mizrahi, M. “Show Me the Argument: Empirically Testing the Armchair Philosophy Picture.” Metaphilosophy 49, no. 1-2 (2018b): 58-70.

Brown, C. M. “Some Objections to Moti Mizrahi’s ‘What’s So Bad About Scientism?’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 8 (2017): 42-54.

Brown, C. M. “Defending Some Objections to Moti Mizrahi’s Arguments for Weak Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 2 (2018): 1-35.

Cova, Florian, Brent Strickland, Angela G Abatista, Aurélien Allard, James Andow, Mario Attie, James Beebe, et al. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental Philosophy.” PsyArXiv, April 21, 2018. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/SXDAH.

Erlenbusch, V. “Being a Foreigner in Philosophy: A Taxonomy.” Hypatia 33, no. 2 (2018): 307-324.

Files, J. A., Mayer, A. P., Ko, M. G., Friedrich, P., Jenkins, M., Bryan, M. J., Vegunta, S., Wittich, C. M., Lyle, M. A., Melikian, R., Duston, T., Chang, Y. H., Hayes, S. M. “Speaker Introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds: Forms of Address Reveal Gender Bias.” Journal of Women’s Health 26, no. 5 (2017): 413-419.

Google. “Ngram Viewer.” Google Books Ngram Viewer. Accessed on May 21, 2018. https://books.google.com/ngrams.

JSTOR. “Create a Dataset.” JSTOR Data for Research. Accessed on May 22, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/dfr/.

Kissinger-Knox, A., Aragon, P., and Mizrahi, M. “Does Non-Moral Ignorance Exculpate? Situational Awareness and Attributions of Blame and Forgiveness.” Acta Analytica 33, no. 2 (2018): 161-179.

Knobe, J. “Experimental Philosophy.” Philosophy Compass 2, no. 1 (2007): 81-92.

Knobe, J. “Philosophers are Doing Something Different Now: Quantitative Data.” Cognition 135 (2015): 36-38.

Mizrahi, M. “Take My Advice–I Am Not Following It: Ad Hominem Arguments as Legitimate Rebuttals to Appeals to Authority.” Informal Logic 30, no. 4 (2010): 435-456.

Mizrahi, M. “Why the Ultimate Argument for Scientific Realism Ultimately Fails.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43, no. 1 (2012): 132-138.

Mizrahi, M. “Don’t Believe the Hype: Why Should Philosophical Theories Yield to Intuitions?” Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 34, no. 3 (2015): 141-158.

Mizrahi, M. “What’s So Bad about Scientism?” Social Epistemology 31, no. 4 (2017a): 351-367.

Mizrahi, M. “In Defense of Weak Scientism: A Reply to Brown.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11 (2017b): 9-22.

Mizrahi, M. “More in Defense of Weak Scientism: Another Reply to Brown.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 4 (2018a): 7-25.

Mizrahi, M. “The ‘Positive Argument’ for Constructive Empiricism and Inference to the Best Explanation.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science (2018b): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-018-9414-3.

Mizrahi, M. and Buckwalter, W. “The Role of Justification in the Ordinary Concept of Scientific Progress.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 45, no. 1 (2014): 151-166.

Scimago Journal & Country Rank. “Subject Bubble Chart.” SJR: Scimago Journal & Country Rank. Accessed on May 20, 2018. http://www.scimagojr.com/mapgen.php?maptype=bc&country=US&y=citd.

Wills, B. “Why Mizrahi Needs to Replace Weak Scientism With an Even Weaker Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 18-24.

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Philosophers and Scientists Are Social Epistemic Agents, Seungbae Park

SERRC —  June 26, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Seungbae Park, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, nature@unist.ac.kr

Park, Seungbae. “Philosophers and Scientists are Social Epistemic Agents.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 31-40.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Yo

Please refer to:

The example is from the regime of Hosni Mubarak, but these were the best photos the Digital Editor could find in Creative Commons when he was uploading the piece.

The style of examples common to epistemology, whether social or not, are often innocuous, ordinary situation. But the most critical uses and misuses of knowledge and belief remain all-too-ordinary situations already. If scepticism about our powers to know and believe hold – or are at least held sufficiently – then the most desperate political prisoner has lost her last glimmer of hope. Truth.
Image by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

In this paper, I reply to Markus Arnold’s comment and Amanda Bryant’s comment on my work “Can Kuhn’s Taxonomic Incommensurability be an Image of Science?” in Moti Mizrahi’s edited collection, The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?.

Arnold argues that there is a gap between the editor’s expressed goal and the actual content of the book. Mizrahi states in the introduction that his book aims to increase “our understanding of science as a social, epistemic endeavor” (2018: 7). Arnold objects that it is “not obvious how the strong emphasis on discounting Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis in the first part of the book should lead to a better understanding of science as a social practice” (2018: 46). The first part of the volume includes my work. Admittedly, my work does not explicitly and directly state how it increases our understanding of science as a social enterprise.

Knowledge and Agreement

According to Arnold, an important meaning of incommensurability is “the decision after a long and futile debate to end any further communication as a waste of time since no agreement can be reached,” and it is this “meaning, describing a social phenomenon, which is very common in science” (Arnold, 2018: 46). Arnold has in mind Kuhn’s claim that a scientific revolution is completed not when opposing parties reach an agreement through rational argumentations but when the advocates of the old paradigm die of old age, which means that they do not give up on their paradigm until they die.

I previously argued that given that most recent past paradigms coincide with present paradigms, most present paradigms will also coincide with future paradigms, and hence “taxonomic incommensurability will rarely arise in the future, as it has rarely arisen in the recent past” (Park, 2018: 70). My argument entails that scientists’ decision to end further communications with their opponents has been and will be rare, i.e., such a social phenomenon has been and will be rare.

On my account, the opposite social phenomenon has been and will rather be very common, viz., scientists keep communicating with each other to reach an agreement. Thus, my previous contention about the frequency of scientific revolutions increases our understanding of science as a social enterprise.

Let me now turn to Bryant’s comment on my criticism against Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science. Kuhn (1962/1970, 172–173) draws an analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms. According to evolutionary theory, organisms do not evolve towards a goal. Similarly, Kuhn argues, science does not develop towards truths. The kinetic theory of heat, for example, is no closer to the truth than the caloric theory of heat is, just as we are no closer to some evolutionary goal than our ancestors were. He claims that this analogy is “very nearly perfect” (1962/1970, 172).

My objection (2018a: 64–66) was that it is self-defeating for Kuhn to use evolutionary theory to justify his philosophical claim about the development of science that present paradigms will be replaced by incommensurable future paradigms. His philosophical view entails that evolutionary theory will be superseded by an incommensurable alternative, and hence evolutionary theory is not trustworthy. Since his philosophical view relies on this untrustworthy theory, it is also untrustworthy, i.e., we ought to reject his philosophical view that present paradigms will be displaced by incommensurable future paradigms.

Bryant replies that “Kuhn could adopt the language of a paradigm (for the purposes of drawing an analogy, no less!) without committing to the literal truth of that paradigm” (2018: 3). On her account, Kuhn could have used the language of evolutionary theory without believing that evolutionary theory is true.

Can We Speak a Truth Without Having to Believe It True?

Bryant’s defense of Kuhn’s position is brilliant. Kuhn would have responded exactly as she has, if he had been exposed to my criticism above. In fact, it is a common view among many philosophers of science that we can adopt the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it.

Bas van Fraassen, for example, states that “acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate” (1980: 12). He also states that if “the acceptance is at all strong, it is exhibited in the person’s assumption of the role of explainer” (1980: 12). These sentences indicate that according to van Fraassen, we can invoke a scientific theory for the purpose of explaining phenomena without committing to the truth of it. Rasmus Winther (2009: 376), Gregory Dawes (2013: 68), and Finnur Dellsén (2016: 11) agree with van Fraassen on this account.

I have been pondering this issue for the past several years. The more I reflect upon it, however, the more I am convinced that it is problematic to use the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it. This thesis would be provocative and objectionable to many philosophers, especially to scientific antirealists. So I invite them to consider the following two thought experiments.

First, imagine that an atheist uses the language of Christianity without committing to the truth of it (Park, 2015: 227, 2017a: 60). He is a televangelist, saying on TV, “If you worship God, you’ll go to heaven.” He converts millions of TV viewers into Christianity. As a result, his church flourishes, and he makes millions of dollars a year. To his surprise, however, his followers discover that he is an atheist.

They request him to explain how he could speak as if he were a Christian when he is an atheist. He replies that he can use the language of Christianity without believing that it conveys truths, just as scientific antirealists can use the language of a scientific theory without believing that it conveys the truth.

Second, imagine that scientific realists, who believe that our best scientific theories are true, adopts Kuhn’s philosophical language without committing to Kuhn’s view of science. They say, as Kuhn does, “Successive paradigms are incommensurable, so present and future scientists would not be able to communicate with each other.” Kuhn requests them to explain how they could speak as if they were Kuhnians when they are not Kuhnians. They reply that they can adopt his philosophical language without committing to his view of science, just as scientific antirealists can adopt the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it.

The foregoing two thought experiments are intended to be reductio ad absurdum. That is, my reasoning is that if it is reasonable for scientific antirealists to speak the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it, it should also be reasonable for the atheist to speak the language of Christianity and for scientific realists to speak Kuhn’s philosophical language. It is, however, unreasonable for them to do so.

Let me now diagnose the problems with the atheist’s speech acts and scientific realists’ speech acts. The atheist’s speech acts go contrary to his belief that God does not exist, and scientific realists’ speech acts go contrary to their belief that our best scientific theories are true. As a result, the atheist’s speech acts mislead his followers into believing that he is Christian. The scientific realists’ speech acts mislead their hearers into believing that they are Kuhnians.

Moore’s Paradox

Such speech acts raise an interesting philosophical issue. Imagine that someone says, “Snow is white, but I don’t believe snow is white.” The assertion of such a sentence involves Moore’s paradox. Moore’s paradox arises when we say a sentence of the form, “P, but I don’t believe p” (Moore, 1993: 207–212). We can push the atheist above to be caught in Moore’s paradox. Imagine that he says, “If you worship God, you’ll go to heaven.” We request him to declare whether he believes or not what he just said. He declares, “I don’t believe if you worship God, you’ll go to heaven.” As a result, he is caught in Moore’s paradox, and he only puzzles his audience.

The same is true of the scientific realists above. Imagine that they say, “Successive paradigms are incommensurable, so present and future scientists would not be able to communicate with each other.” We request them to declare whether they believe or not what they just said. They declare, “I don’t believe successive paradigms are incommensurable, so present and future scientists would not be able to communicate with each other.” As a result, they are caught in Moore’s paradox, and they only puzzle their audience.

Kuhn would also be caught in Moore’s paradox if he draws the analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms without committing to the truth of evolutionary theory, pace Bryant. Imagine that Kuhn says, “Organisms don’t evolve towards a goal. Similarly, science doesn’t develop towards truths. I, however, don’t believe organisms don’t evolve towards a goal.” He says, “Organisms don’t evolve towards a goal. Similarly, science doesn’t develop towards truths” in order to draw the analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms. He says, “I, however, don’t believe organisms don’t evolve towards a goal,” in order to express his refusal to believe that evolutionary theory is true. It is, however, a Moorean sentence: “Organisms don’t evolve towards a goal. I, however, don’t believe organisms don’t evolve towards a goal.” The assertion of such a sentence gives rise to Moore’s paradox.

Scientific antirealists would also be caught in Moore’s paradox, if they explain phenomena in terms of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it, pace van Fraassen. Imagine that scientific antirealists say, “The space between two galaxies expands because dark energy exists between them, but I don’t believe that dark energy exists between two galaxies.” They say, “The space between two galaxies expands because dark energy exists between them,” in order to explain why the space between galaxies expands.

They add, “I don’t believe that dark energy exists between two galaxies,” in order to express their refusal to commit to the truth of the theoretical claim that dark energy exists. It is, however, a Moorean sentence: “The space between two galaxies expands because dark energy exists between them, but I don’t believe that dark energy exists between two galaxies.” Asserting such a sentence will only puzzle their audience. Consequently, Moore’s paradox bars scientific antirealists from invoking scientific theories to explain phenomena (Park, 2017b: 383, 2018b: Section 4).

Researchers on Moore’s paradox believe that “contradiction is at the heart of the absurdity of saying a Moorean sentence, but it is not obvious wherein contradiction lies” (Park, 2014: 345). Park (2014: 345) argues that when you say, “Snow is white,” your audience believe that you believe that snow is white. Their belief that you believe that snow is white contradicts the second conjunct of your Moorean sentence that you do not believe that snow is white.

Thus, the contradiction lies in your audience’s belief and the second conjunct of your Moorean sentence. The present paper does not aim to flesh out and defend this view of wherein lies the contradiction. It rather aims to show that Moore’s paradox prevents us from using the language of a scientific theory without committing to the truth of it, pace Bryant and van Fraassen.

The Real Consequences of Speaking What You Don’t Believe

Set Moore’s paradox aside. Let me raise another objection to Bryant and van Fraassen. Imagine that Kuhn encounters a philosopher of mind. The philosopher of mind asserts, “A mental state is reducible to a brain state.” Kuhn realizes that the philosopher of mind espouses the identity theory of mind, but he knows that the identity theory of mind has already been refuted by the multiple realizability argument. So he brings up the multiple realizability argument to the philosopher of mind. The philosopher of mind is persuaded of the multiple realizability argument and admits that the identity theory is not tenable.

To Kuhn’s surprise, however, the philosopher of mind claims that when he said, “A mental state is reducible to a brain state,” he spoke the language of the identity theory without committing to the truth of it, so his position is not refuted by Kuhn. Note that the philosopher of mind escapes the refutation of his position by saying that he did not believe what he stated. It is also reasonable for the philosopher of mind to escape the refutation of his position by saying that he did not believe what he stated, if it is reasonable for Kuhn to escape the refutation of his position by saying that he did not believe what he stated. Kuhn would think that it is not reasonable for the philosopher of mind to do so.

Kuhn, however, might bite the bullet, saying that it is reasonable for the philosopher of mind to do so. The strategy to avoid the refutation, Kuhn might continue, only reveals that the identity theory was not his position after all. Evaluating arguments does not require that we identify the beliefs of the authors of arguments. In philosophy, we only need to care about whether arguments are valid or invalid, sound or unsound, strong or weak, and so on.

Speculating about what beliefs the authors of arguments hold as a way of evaluating arguments is to implicitly rely on an argument from authority, i.e., it is to think as though the authors’ beliefs determine the strength of arguments rather than the form and content of arguments do.

We, however, need to consider under what conditions we accept the conclusion of an argument in general. We accept it, when premises are plausible and when the conclusion follows from the premises. We can tell whether the conclusion follows from the premises or not without the author’s belief that it does. In many cases, however, we cannot tell whether premises are plausible or not without the author’s belief that they are.

Imagine, for example, that a witness states in court that a defendant is guilty because the defendant was in the crime scene. The judge can tell whether the conclusion follows from the premise or not without the witness’s belief that it does. The judge, however, cannot tell whether the premise is plausible or not without the witness’s belief that it is. Imagine that the witness says that the defendant is guilty because the defendant was in the crime scene, but that the witness declares that he does not believe that the defendant was in the crime scene. Since the witness does not believe that the premise is true, the judge has no reason to believe that it is true. It is unreasonable for the judge to evaluate the witness’s argument independently of whether the witness believes or not that the premise is true.

In a nutshell, an argument loses its persuasive force, if the author of the argument does not believe that premises are true. Thus, if you aim to convince your audience that your argument is cogent, you should believe yourself that the premises are true. If you declare that you do not believe that the premises are true, your audience will ask you some disconcerting questions: “If you don’t, why should I believe what you don’t? How can you say to me what you don’t believe? Do you expect me to believe what you don’t?” (Park, 2018b: Section 4).

In case you still think that it is harmless and legitimate to speak what you do not believe, I invite you to imagine that your political rival commits murder to frame you. A false charge is brought to you, and you are tried in court. The prosecutor has a strong indictment against you. You state vehemently that you did not commit murder. You, however, have no physical evidence supporting your statement. Furthermore, you are well-known as a person who speaks vehemently what you do not believe. Not surprisingly, the judge issues a death sentence on you, thinking that you are merely speaking the language of the innocent. The point of this sad story is that speaking what you do not believe may result in a tragedy in certain cases.

A Solution With a Prestigious Inspiration

Let me now turn to a slightly different, but related, issue. Under what condition can I refute your belief when you speak contrary to what you believe? I can do it only when I have direct access to your doxastic states, i.e., only when I can identify your beliefs without the mediation of your language. It is not enough for me to interpret your language correctly and present powerful evidence against what your language conveys.

After all, whenever I present such evidence to you, you will escape the refutation of what you stated simply by saying that you did not believe what you stated. Thus, Bryant’s defense of Kuhn’s position from my criticism above amounts to imposing an excessively high epistemic standard on Kuhn’s opponents. After all, his opponents do not have direct access to his doxastic states.

In this context, it is useful to be reminded of the epistemic imperative: “Act only on an epistemic maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal one” (Park, 2018c: 3). Consider the maxim “Escape the refutation of your position by saying you didn’t believe what you stated.” If you cannot will this maxim to become a universal one, you ought not to act on it yourself. It is immoral for you to act on the maxim despite the fact that you cannot will it to become a universal maxim. Thus, the epistemic imperative can be invoked to argue that Kuhn ought not to use the language of evolutionary theory without committing to the truth of it, pace Bryant.

Let me now raise a slightly different, although related, issue. Recall that according to Bryant, Kuhn could adopt the language of evolutionary theory without committing to the truth of it. Admittedly, there is an epistemic advantage of not committing to the truth of evolutionary theory on Kuhn’s part. The advantage is that he might avoid the risk of forming a false belief regarding evolutionary theory. Yet, he can stick to his philosophical account of science according to which science does not develop towards truths, and current scientific theories will be supplanted by incommensurable alternatives.

There is, however, an epistemic disadvantage of not committing to the truth of a scientific theory. Imagine that Kuhn is not only a philosopher and historian of science but also a scientist. He has worked hard for several decades to solve a scientific problem that has been plaguing an old scientific theory. Finally, he hits upon a great scientific theory that handles the recalcitrant problem. His scientific colleagues reject the old scientific theory and accept his new scientific theory, i.e., a scientific revolution occurs.

He becomes famous not only among scientists but also among the general public. He is so excited about his new scientific theory that he believes that it is true. Some philosophers, however, come along and dispirit him by saying that they do not believe that his new theory is true, and that they do not even believe that it is closer to the truth than its predecessor was. Kuhn protests that his new theory has theoretical virtues, such as accuracy, simplicity, and fruitfulness. Not impressed by these virtues, however, the philosophers reply that science does not develop towards truths, and that his theory will be displaced by an incommensurable alternative. They were exposed to Kuhn’s philosophical account of science!

Epistemic Reciprocation

They have adopted a philosophical position called epistemic reciprocalism according to which “we ought to treat our epistemic colleagues, as they treat their epistemic agents” (Park, 2017a: 57). Epistemic reciprocalists are scientific antirealists’ true adversaries. Scientific antirealists refuse to believe that their epistemic colleagues’ scientific theories are true for fear that they might form false beliefs.

In return, epistemic reciprocalists refuse to believe that scientific antirealists’ positive theories are true for fear that they might form false beliefs. We, as epistemic agents, are not only interested in avoiding false beliefs but also in propagating “to others our own theories which we are confident about” (Park, 2017a: 58). Scientific antirealists achieve the first epistemic goal at the cost of the second epistemic goal.

Epistemic reciprocalism is built upon the foundation of social epistemology, which claims that we are not asocial epistemic agents but social epistemic agents. Social epistemic agents are those who interact with each other over the matters of what to believe and what not to believe. So they take into account how their interlocutors treat their epistemic colleagues before taking epistemic attitudes towards their interlocutors’ positive theories.

Let me now turn to another of Bryant’s defenses of Kuhn’s position. She says that it is not clear that the analogy between the evolution of organisms and the development of science is integral to Kuhn’s account. Kuhn could “have ascribed the same characteristics to theory change without referring to evolutionary theory at all” (Bryant, 2018: 3). In other words, Kuhn’s contention that science does not develop towards truths rises or falls independently of the analogy between the development of science and the evolution of organisms. Again, this defense of Kuhn’s position is brilliant.

Consider, however, that the development of science is analogous to the evolution of organisms, regardless of whether Kuhn makes use of the analogy to defend his philosophical account of science or not, and that the fact that they are analogous is a strike against Kuhn’s philosophical account of science. Suppose that Kuhn believes that science does not develop towards truths, but that he does not believe that organisms do not evolve towards a goal, despite the fact that the development of science is analogous to the evolution of organisms.

An immediate objection to his position is that it is not clear on what grounds he embraces the philosophical claim about science, but not the scientific claim about organisms, when the two claims parallel each other. It is ad hoc merely to suggest that the scientific claim is untrustworthy, but that the philosophical claim is trustworthy. What is so untrustworthy about the scientific claim, but so trustworthy about the philosophical claim? It would be difficult to answer these questions because the development of science and the evolution of organisms are similar to each other.

A moral is that if philosophers reject our best scientific theories, they cannot make philosophical claims that are similar to what our best scientific theories assert. In general, the more philosophers reject scientific claims, the more impoverished their philosophical positions will be, and the heavier their burdens will be to prove that their philosophical claims are dissimilar to the scientific claims that they reject.

Moreover, it is not clear what Kuhn could say to scientists who take the opposite position in response to him. They believe that organisms do not evolve towards a goal, but refuse to believe that science does not develop towards truths. To go further, they trust scientific claims, but distrust philosophical claims. They protest that it is a manifestation of philosophical arrogance to suppose that philosophical claims are worthy of beliefs, but scientific claims are not.

This possible response to Kuhn reminds us of the Golden Rule: Treat others as you want to be treated. Philosophers ought to treat scientists as they want to be treated, concerning epistemic matters. Suppose that a scientific claim is similar to a philosophical claim. If philosophers do not want scientists to hold a double standard with respect to the scientific and philosophical claims, philosophers should not hold a double standard with respect to them.

There “is no reason for thinking that the Golden Rule ranges over moral matters, but not over epistemic matters” (Park, 2018d: 77–78). Again, we are not asocial epistemic agents but social epistemic agents. As such, we ought to behave in accordance with the epistemic norms governing the behavior of social epistemic agents.

Finally, the present paper is intended to be critical of Kuhn’s philosophy of science while enshrining his insight that science is a social enterprise, and that scientists are social epistemic agents. I appealed to Moore’s paradox, epistemic reciprocalism, the epistemic imperative, and the Golden Rule in order to undermine Bryant’s defenses of Kuhn’s position from my criticism. All these theoretical resources can be used to increase our understanding of science as a social endeavor. Let me add to Kuhn’s insight that philosophers are also social epistemic agents.

Contact details: nature@unist.ac.kr

References

Arnold, Markus. “Is There Anything Wrong with Thomas Kuhn?”, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 42–47.

Byrant, Amanda. “Each Kuhn Mutually Incommensurable”, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 1–7.

Dawes, Gregory. “Belief is Not the Issue: A Defence of Inference to the Best Explanation”, Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2013): 62–78.

Dellsén, Finnur. “Understanding without Justification or Belief”, Ratio: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy (2016). DOI: 10.1111/rati.12134.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. The University of Chicago Press, (1962/1970).

Mizrahi, Moti. “Introduction”, In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? Moti Mizrahi (ed.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, (2018): 1–22.

Moore, George. “Moore’s Paradox”, In G.E. Moore: Selected Writings. Baldwin, Thomas (ed.), London: Routledge, (1993).

Park, Seungbae. “On the Relationship between Speech Acts and Psychological States”, Pragmatics and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2014): 340–351.

Park, Seungbae. “Accepting Our Best Scientific Theories”, Filosofija. Sociologija 26, no. 3 (2015): 218–227.

Park, Seungbae. “Defense of Epistemic Reciprocalism”, Filosofija. Sociologija 28, no. 1 (2017a): 56–64.

Park, Seungbae. “Understanding without Justification and Belief?” Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 21, no. 3 (2017b): 379–389.

Park, Seungbae. “Can Kuhn’s Taxonomic Incommensurability Be an Image of Science?” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? Moti Mizrahi (ed.), London: Rowman & Littlefield, (2018a): 61–74.

Park, Seungbae. “Should Scientists Embrace Scientific Realism or Antirealism?”, Philosophical Forum (2018b): (to be assigned).

Park, Seungbae. “In Defense of the Epistemic Imperative”, Axiomathes (2018c). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-018-9371-9.

Park, Seungbae. “The Pessimistic Induction and the Golden Rule”, Problemos 93 (2018d): 70–80.

van Fraassen, Bas. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1980).

Winther, Rasmus. “A Dialogue”, Metascience 18 (2009): 370–379.

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Each Kuhn Mutually Incommensurable, Amanda Bryant

SERRC —  June 5, 2018 — 3 Comments

Author Information: Amanda Bryant, Trent University, amandabryant@trentu.ca

Bryant, Amanda. “Each Kuhn Mutually Incommensurable.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 6 (2018): 1-7.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3XM

Image by Denis Defreyne via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

This volume is divided into four parts, in which its contributors variously Question, Defend, Revise, or Abandon the Kuhnian image of science. One immediately wonders: what is this thing, the Kuhnian Image of Science? It isn’t a question that can be decisively or quickly settled, of course. Perhaps one of the reasons why so much has been written on Kuhn’s philosophy of science is that it gives rise to such rich interpretive challenges.

Informed general philosophy of science readers will of course know the tagline version of Kuhn’s view — namely, that the development of science unfolds in wholesale revolutions of scientific paradigms that are in some sense incommensurable with one another. However, one might think that whatever the image of science at issue in this volume is, it should be a sharper image than that.

Many Thomases Kuhn

But of course there isn’t really a single, substantive, cohesive, uncontroversial image at issue. Alexandra Argamakova rightly points out in her contribution, “there exist various images of science belonging to different Thomas Kuhns at different stages of his work life and from different perspectives of interpretation, so the target for current analysis turns out to be less detectable” (46). Rather, the contributors touch on various aspects of Kuhn’s philosophy, variously interpreted — and as such, multiple Kuhnian images emerge as the volume unfolds. That’s just as it should be. In fact, if the volume had propped up some caricature of Kuhn’s views as the Kuhnian image of science, it would have done a disservice both to Kuhn and to his many interpreters.

One wonders, too, whether the so-called Kuhnian image of science is really so broadly endorsed as to be the potential subject of (echoing Kuhn’s own phrase) a ‘decisive transformation’. In his introduction, Moti Mizrahi emphasizes Kuhn’s undeniable influence. Kuhn has, Mizrahi points out, literally tens of thousands of citations; numerous books, articles, and journal issues devoted to his work; and a lasting legacy in the language of academic and public discourse. While all of this signals influence, it’s clearly no indication of agreement.

To be fair, Mizrahi acknowledges the “fair share” of Kuhn critics (2). Nevertheless, if the prospect of decisively transforming the Kuhnian image of science were to be a serious prospect, then the image would have to be widely accepted and enjoy a lasting relevance. However, Argamakova again rightly emphasizes that Kuhn’s philosophy of science “never fully captured the intellectual market” (45) and “could not be less attractive for so many minds!” (47). Moreover, in a remarkable passage in his contribution, Howard Sankey describes a central component of the so-called Kuhnian image of science as as an old battlefield and a dead issue:

Returning to the topic from the perspective of the contemporary scene in the philosophy of science is like visiting a battlefield from a forgotten war. The positions of the warring sides may still be made out. But the battlefield is grown over with grass. One may find evidence of the fighting that once took place, perhaps bullet marks or shell holes. But the fighting ceased long ago. The battle is a thing of the past.

The problem of incommensurability is no longer a live issue. The present chapter has taken the form of a post-mortem examination of a once hotly debated but now largely forgotten problem from an earlier period in the philosophy of science. (87)

If the same holds true for the rest of the Kuhnian image (or images), then the volume isn’t exactly timely.

But dead philosophical issues don’t always stay dead. Or rather, we’re not always right to pronounce them dead. In 1984, Arthur Fine famously proclaimed scientific realism “well and truly dead” (in The Natural Ontological Attitude), and clearly he was quite wrong. At any rate, we may find interest in an issue, dead or not, and there is certainly much of it to be found in this volume. I have been asked to focus my comments on the second half of the book. As such, I will discuss the Introduction, as well as Parts I and II in brief, then I will discuss parts III and IV at greater length.

On the Incommensurable

In his Introduction, Mizrahi argues that, far from initiating a historical turn in the philosophy of science, Kuhn was ‘patient zero’ for anecdotiasis — “the tendency to use cherry-picked anecdotes or case studies… to support general claims (about the nature of science as a whole)” (3). Mizrahi argues that anecdotiasis is pervasive, since significant proportions of articles in the PhilSci-Archive and in leading philosophy of science journals contain the phrase ‘case study’.

But neither using the phrase ‘case study’ nor doing case studies is inherently or self-evidently problematic. Case studies can be interesting, informative, and evidential. Of course the challenges are not to ignore relevant problem cases, not to generalize hastily, and not to assign undue evidential weight to them. But if we are to suppose that all or most philosophers of science who use case studies fail to meet those challenges, we will need a substantial body of evidence.

Part I begins with Mizrahi’s contribution, which the successive contributions all engage. In it, he defines taxonomic incommensurability as conceptual incompatibility between new and old theories. Against those who claim that Kuhn ‘discovered’ incommensurability, Mizrahi argues that there are no good deductive or inductive arguments for taxonomic incommensurability. He cites just two authors, Eric Oberheim and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, who use the language of discovery to characterize incommensurability. As such, it isn’t clear that the assumption Mizrahi takes pains to reject is particularly widespread.

Nevertheless, even if everyone universally agreed that there are no legitimate cases of incommensurability, it would still be useful to know why they’d be justified in so thinking. So the work that Mizrahi does to establish his conclusion is valuable. He shows the dubious sorts of assumptions that arguments for the taxonomic incommensurability thesis would hang on.

Argamakova’s helpful and clear contribution lays out three general types of critique with respect to Kuhn’s view of scientific development — ambiguity, inaccuracy, and limitation — and raises, if tentatively, concerns about Kuhn’s universalist ambitions. She might have been more explicit with respect to the force and scope of her comments on universalism — in particular, whether she sees the flaws in Kuhn’s theory as ultimately stemming from his attempts at universal generalizations, and to what extent her concerns extend beyond Kuhn to general philosophy of science.

Seungbae Park advances several arguments in response to Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis. One such argument takes up Kuhn’s analogy in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (henceforth Structure) between the development of science and the evolution of organisms. Park suggests that in drawing the analogy, Kuhn illicitly assumes the truth of evolutionary theory. He doesn’t consider that Kuhn could adopt the language of a paradigm (for the purposes of drawing an analogy, no less!) without committing to the literal truth of that paradigm.

Park also claims that “it is self-defeating for Kuhn to invoke a scientific theory to give an account of science that discredits scientific claims” (66), when it’s not clear that the analogy is at all integral to Kuhn’s account. Kuhn could, for instance, have ascribed the same characteristics to theory change without referring to evolutionary theory at all.

Sankey’s illuminating contribution fills in the interpretive background on incommensurability — the semantic version of Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis, in particular. He objects, with Mizrahi, to the language of discovery used by Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene with respect to incommensurability. He argues, convincingly, that the purported paradigm shift that allowed Kuhn to finally comprehend Aristotle’s physics isn’t a case of incommensurability, but rather of comprehension after an initial failure to understand. While this doesn’t establish his conclusion that no cases of incommensurability have been established (76), it does show that a historically significant purported case is not genuine.

Vasso Kindi fills in some historical detail regarding the positivist image of science that Kuhn sought to replace and the “stereotypical” image attributed to him (96). She argues that Kuhn’s critics (including by implication several of her co-contributors) frequently attack a strawman — that, notwithstanding Kuhn’s avowed deference to history, the Kuhnian image of science is not meant to be a historical representation, and so doesn’t need to be supported by historical evidence. It is, rather, a “a philosophical model that was used to challenge an ideal image of science” (95).

Finally, Lydia Patton emphasizes the practical dimension of Kuhn’s conception of paradigms in Structure. It ought to be uncontroversial that on Kuhn’s early characterization a paradigm is not merely a theory, but a series of epistemic, evaluative, and methodological practices, too. But Patton argues that there has been too strong a semantic tendency in the treatment of Kuhnian paradigms (including by the later Kuhn himself). She argues for the greater interest and value of a practical lens on Kuhn’s project for the purposes of understanding and explaining science.

Vectors of Glory

Andrew Aberdein’s contribution deals with the longstanding and intriguing question of whether there are revolutions in mathematics. He imports to that discussion distinctions he drew in previous work among so-called glorious, inglorious, and paraglorious revolutions, in which, respectively, key components of the theory are preserved, lost, or preserved with new additions. Key components are, he says, “at least all components without which the theory could not be articulated” (136).

He discusses several examples of key shifts in mathematical theory and practice that putatively exemplify certain of these classes of revolution. The strength of the paper is its fascinating examples, particularly the example of Inter-Universal Teichmüller theory, which, Aberdein explains, introduces such novel techniques and concepts that some leading mathematicians say its proofs read as if they were “from the future, or from outer space” (145).

Aberdein doesn’t falsely advertise his thesis. He acknowledges that “it is not easy to determine whether a given episode is revolutionary” (140), and claims only that certain shifts “may be understood” as revolutionary (149) — that the cases he offers are putative mathematical revolutions. As to how we should go about identifying putative mathematical revolutions, Aberdein suggests we look directly for conceptual shifts (or ‘sorites-like’ sequences of shifts) in which key components have been lost or gained.

A fuller discussion of these diagnostics is needed, since the judgment of whether there are revolutions (genuine or putative) in mathematics will hang largely on diagnostics such as these. Is any key conceptual shift sufficient? If so, have we really captured the spirit of Kuhn’s view, given that Kuhn seems to ascribe a certain momentousness to revolutions? If the conceptual shift has to be substantial, how substantial, and how should we gauge its substantiality? Without some principled, non-arbitrary, and non-question-begging standards for what counts as a revolution, we cannot hope to give a serious answer to the question of whether there are, even putatively, revolutions in mathematics.

The paper would also have benefited from a more explicit discussion of what a mathematical paradigm is in the first place, especially as compared to a scientific one. We can infer from Aberdein’s examples that conceptions of number, ratio, proportion, as well as systems of conjecture and mathematical techniques belong to mathematical paradigms — but explicit comment on this would have been beneficial.

Moreover, Aberdein sees an affinity between mathematics and science, commenting toward the end of the paper that the methodology of mathematics is not so different from that of science, and that “the story we tell about revolutions [should] hold for both science and mathematics” (149). These are loaded comments needing further elaboration.

The Evolution of Thomas Kuhn

In his contribution, James Marcum argues that Kuhn’s later evolutionary view is more relevant to current philosophy of science (being ‘pluralistic and perspectival’) than his earlier revolutionary one. On Kuhn’s later evolutionary view, Marcum explains, scientific change proceeds via “smaller evolutionary specialization or speciation” (155), with a “gradual emergence of a specialty’s practice and knowledge” (159). On this view, scientific development consists in “small incremental changes of belief” rather than “the upheaval of world-shattering revolutions” (159).

Marcum uses the emergence of bacteriology, virology, and retrovirology to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of Kuhn’s evolutionary view. Its main strength, he says, is that it illuminates the development of and relationships among these sorts of scientific specialties; its weakness is that it ascribes a single tempo — Darwinian gradualism — and a single mode — speciation — to the evolution of science. Marcum adopts George Gaylord Simpson’s “richer and more textured approach” (165), which distinguishes several tempos and modes. Since these refinements better enable Kuhn’s view to handle a range of cases, they are certainly valuable.

According to Marcum, current philosophy of science is ‘pluralistic and perspectival’ in its recognition that different sciences face different philosophical issues and in its inclusion of perspectives from outside the logico-analytic tradition, such as continental, pragmatist, and feminist perspectives (166). Marcum seems right to characterize current philosophy of science as pluralistic, given the move away from general philosophy of science to more specialized branches.

If this pluralism is to be embraced, one might wonder what role (if any) remains for general philosophy of science. Marcum makes the interesting suggestion that a general image of science, like Kuhn’s evolutionary image, while respecting our contemporary pluralistic stance, can at the same time offer “a type of unity among the sciences, not in terms of reducing them to one science, but rather with respect to mapping the conceptual relationships among them” (169).

One of Marcum’s central aims is to show that incommensurability plays a key explanatory role in a refined version of Kuhn’s evolutionary image of science. The role of incommensurability on this view is to account for scientific speciation. However, Marcum shows only that we can characterize scientific speciation in terms of incommensurability, without clearly establishing the explanatory payoff of so doing. He does not succeed in showing that incommensurability has a particularly enriching explanatory role, much less that incommensurability is “critical for conceptual evolution within the sciences” or “an essential component of… the growth of science” (168).

All a Metaphor?

Barbara Gabriella Renzi and Giulio Napolitano frame their contribution with a discussion of competing accounts of the nature and role of metaphor. They avow the commonly accepted view that metaphors are not merely linguistic, but cognitive, and that they are ubiquitous. They claim, I would think uncontroversially, that metaphors shape how individuals approach and reason about complex issues. They also discuss historical empiricist attitudes toward metaphor, competing views on the role of models and metaphor in science, and later, the potential role of metaphor in social domination.

Renzi and Napolitano also address Kuhn’s use of the metaphor of Darwinian evolution to characterize scientific change. They suggest that an apter metaphor for scientific change can be made of the obsolete orthogenetic hypothesis, according to which “variations are not random but directed by forces regulated and ultimately directed by the internal constitution of the organism, which responds to environmental stimuli” (184).

The orthogenetic metaphor is a better fit for scientific change, they argue, because the emergence of new ideas in science is not random, but driven by “arguments and debates… specific needs of a scientist or group of scientists who have been seeking a solution to a problem” (184).

The orthogenetic metaphor effectively highlights a drawback of the Darwinian metaphor that might otherwise be overlooked, and deserves further attention. The space devoted to discussing metaphor in the abstract contributes little to the paper, beyond prescriptions to take metaphor seriously and approach it with caution. Much of that space would have been better devoted to using historical examples to compare Kuhn’s Darwinian metaphor to the proposed orthogenetic alternative, to make concrete the fruitfulness of the latter, and to flesh out the specific kinds of internal and external pressures that Renzi and Napolitano see as important drivers of scientific change.

Methodological Contextualism

Darrell Rowbottom offers a summary and several criticisms of what he sees as Kuhn’s early-middle period image of science. By way of criticism, he points out that it isn’t clear how to individuate disciplinary matrices in a way that preserves a clear distinction between normal and extraordinary science, or ensures that what Kuhn calls ‘normal science’ is really the norm. Moreover, in linking the descriptive and normative components of his view, Kuhn implausibly assumes that mature science is optimal.

Rowbottom suggests a replacement image of science he calls methodological contextualism (developed more fully in previous work). Methodological contextualism identifies several roles — puzzle-solving, critical, and imaginative — which scientific practitioners fulfill to varying degrees and in varying combinations. The ideal balance of these roles depends on contextual factors, including the scientists available and the state of science (200).

The novel question Rowbottom considers in this paper is: how could piecemeal change in science be rational from the perspective of methodological contextualism? I have difficulty seeing why this is even a prima facie problem for Rowbottom’s view, since puzzle-solving, critical and imaginative activities are clearly consonant with piecemeal change. I suppose it is because the view retains some of Kuhn’s machinery, including his notion of a disciplinary matrix.

At any rate, Rowbottom suggests that scientists may work within a partial disciplinary matrix, or a set of partially overlapping ones. He also makes the intriguing claim that “scientists might allow inconsistency at the global level, and even welcome it as a better alternative than a consistent system with less puzzle-solving power” (202). One might object that Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis seems to block the overlapping matrix move, but Rowbottom proclaims that the falsity of Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis follows “as a consequence of the way that piecemeal change can occur” (201). One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, as they say.

A Digestible Kuhn

The brevity of the contributions makes them eminently digestible and good potential additions to course syllabi at a range of levels; on the other hand, it means that some of the most provocative and topical themes of the book — such as the epistemic and methodological status of generalizations about science and the role of general philosophy of science in contemporary philosophy — don’t get the full development they deserve. The volume raises more questions than it satisfactorily addresses, but several of them bring renewed relevance and freshness to Kuhnian philosophy of science and ought to direct its future course.

Contact details: amandabryant@trentu.ca

References

Mizrahi, Moti (Ed.) The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

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Is There Anything Wrong with Thomas Kuhn?, Markus Arnold

SERRC —  May 31, 2018 — 2 Comments

Author Information: Markus Arnold, University of Klagenfurt, markus.arnold@aau.at

Arnold, Markus. “Is There Anything Wrong with Thomas Kuhn?.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 42-47.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references: Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Xs

Image by Rob Thomas via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Twenty-two years after his death, Thomas Kuhn’s work is still able to provoke lively debates, where arguments are exchanged and competing interpretations of his theories are advanced. The Kuhnian Image of Science is a good example, as the book brings together ten scholars in a debate for and against Thomas Kuhn’s legacy. The question, the edited volume raises, is straightforward:

“Does the Kuhnian image of science provide an adequate model of scientific change? If we abandon the Kuhnian picture of revolutionary change and incommensurability […], what consequences would follow from that vis-à-vis our understanding of science as a social, epistemic endeavor?” (7)

In this review I will concentrate on the first two parts of the book, i.e. and in particular on the debate between those who are questioning (Mizrahi, Argamakova, Park, Sankey), and those who are defending Kuhn (Kindi, Patton), since their arguments are closely related. Therefore, I will discuss some of their major arguments in topological order.

Debating Kuhn’s Evidence

The editor Moti Mizrahi opens the debate in his introduction with a confrontational thesis: Kuhn, in his opinion, is responsible for an “infectious disease” (3), for “the pathological state of the field of philosophy of science in general, and general philosophy of science in particular” (3). Kuhn’s vice is his use of case studies (from the history of science) as arguments, although – according to Moti Mizrahi – they are nothing more than “anecdotal evidence” leading to “hasty generalizations” and “fallacious inductive reasoning” (6).

Hearing the trumpets of the troops ready to battle one is eager to learn how to do it right: How the standards of inductive reasoning within philosophy of science are re-erected. Yet, anticipating one of the results of this review, the “inductive reasoning” intended to refute Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis (found in the first part of the book) is actually its weakest part.

However, to understand the intricacy of this difficult task, we have to recognize, that it is not easy to support or falsify inductively a complex theory of science. Broadly speaking, in Kuhn’s account we should empirically observe sciences displaying at least four different manifestations: (1.) “proto-science” in the pre-paradigm phase, when there is no general consensus about theories, methods and standards, (2.) “normal science”, when scientists are most of the time focused on preserving, but also adapting existing paradigms to new problems and new scientific fields, (3.) sciences in a state of crisis, when more and more “anomalies” occur, which defy explanations in conformity with established procedures, and finally (4.) on rare occasions a “revolutionary” state, when different paradigms compete with each other and scientific theories based on one paradigm are to some extent “incommensurable” with those based on another paradigm.

There are good reasons to suppose that Kuhn’s somehow schematic and ideal-typical description of scientific change is too simple compared with the complexities shown by many historical case studies. Nevertheless, the counter-arguments under consideration brought forward against his model seem, paradoxically, to underestimate the complexity of Kuhn’s claims. For example, in Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis Mizrahi decides to discuss scientific change only in general.  He claims that Kuhn argues:

“Scientific change (specifically, revolutionary change) is characterized by taxonomic incommensurability.” (33)

The compounded phrase “[s]cientific change (specifically, revolutionary change)” indicates that, in Mizrahi’s interpretation, for Kuhn not all scientific change is per definition revolutionary. But then arguments against Kuhn’s theory should consider at least two kinds of scientific change separately: revolutionary change and those (commensurable) non-revolutionary scientific changes within “normal science.”

Keeping in mind that for Kuhn theory change is possible to a certain degree within normal science (only changing paradigms must be averted)[1], it is not clear, why Kuhn’s “image of science” should be dismissed because “as far as theory change is concerned” taxonomic incommensurability “is the exception rather than the rule” (38).[2]

Or another example, in Can Kuhn’s Taxonomic Incommensurability Be an Image of Science? where Seungbae Park comes to the conclusion that historical evidence shows that “scientific revolution is rare, taxonomic incommensurability is rare, and taxonomic commensurability is common” (61). It is, for similar reasons, unclear why this conclusion should not be commensurable with Kuhn’s description of normal science, since Kuhn claimed that normal science is common and scientific revolutions are rare.

However, this is not Park’s last argument about scientific change: He asks furthermore if we should not distinguish between the distant scientific past, when scientific revolutions were more common, and the recent past, “since most recent past theories have been stable, most present theories will also be stable” (70). Kuhn’s theory of revolutionary paradigm change is, in his opinion, first of all not appropriate for understanding the development of contemporary and future science.

Incommensurable Paradigms of Language?

After a discussion of the critical reception of Thomas Kuhn’s and Paul Feyerabend’s work and the objections raised against their claim that scientific theories or paradigms are incommensurable, Howard Sankey admits in The Demise of the Incommensurability Thesis that:

“the idea that there is conceptual change in science now seems commonplace. But the much-feared consequences, such as incomparability, communication breakdown, and irrationality now all seem to have been greatly overblown.” (88)

Prima facie it seems like a self-critical admission of an inappropriate former reception of Kuhn’s theory of incommensurability, especially by those philosophers of science who tried to fight “irrationality” with the means of referential semantics. However, Sankey seems to think that the dissolution of the exaggerated accusations of Kuhn’s critics somehow makes now Kuhn’s theory of incommensurability obsolete. Hence, Sankey can summarize:

“with the demise of the incommensurability thesis, the debate about scientific realism is free to proceed in a manner that is unencumbered by the semantic concerns about wholesale referential discontinuity that were prompted by the incommensurability thesis.” (88)

For Sankey, Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability is dead (87). He seems to blame Kuhn for the misguided interpretations of his opponents. It comes down to the argument: if it’s not possible to criticize Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability as “irrational” anymore, then Kuhn’s concept cannot claim any relevance for future discussions.

However, more importantly: These arguments against Kuhn are based on referential semantics, i.e. semantic concerns about referential continuity. Hence, what their objections against Kuhn’s incommensurability theory inadvertently show is, paradoxically, the incommensurability of competing paradigms of language. This becomes apparent, for example, when Mizrahi criticizes Kuhn’s sometimes-vague formulations, especially in his early Structure. Mizrahi refers to statements where Kuhn argues with caution:

“The normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often [sic] actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.” (Kuhn 1996, 103)

Formulations such as this prompt Mizrahi to ask: If taxonomic incommensurability (TI):

“is not a general thesis about the nature of scientific change, then what is its explanatory value? How does (TI) help us in terms of understanding the nature of scientific change? On most accounts of explanation, an explanans must have some degree of generality […] But if (TI) has no degree of generality, then it is difficult to see what the explanatory value of (TI) is.” (37)

Kuhn could have responded that his arguments in Structure are explicitly based on Wittgenstein’s theory of “language games” with its central concept of “family resemblance”, which by definition does not allow the assumption that there are unambiguous conceptual boundaries and a distinguishing characteristic, which all or even most of the phenomena aligned by a concept have in common.[3]

Indeed, understanding Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” is central to understand Kuhn’s theory of “paradigms”, “paradigm shifts”, and the meaning of “incommensurability”.[4] Yet, it is possible to come to similar conclusions without referring to the late Wittgenstein: For example, Alexandra Argamakova despite of her negative evaluation of many of Kuhn’s arguments, unlike Mizrahi, is closer on this issue to Kuhn where she claims in Modeling Scientific Development: “distinct breakthroughs in science can be marked as revolutions, but no universal system of criteria for such appraisal can be formulated in a normative philosophical manner” (54).

Defending Kuhn’s Epistemology

In two of the book’s most interesting discussions of Kuhn’s epistemology, Vasso Kandi’s The Kuhnian Straw Man and Lydia Patton’s Kuhn, Pedagogy, and Practice, the allegation that Kuhn developed his theory on the basis of selected historical cases is refuted. Furthermore, Kindi, defending the innovative character of Kuhn’s work asks “for a more faithful reading”:

“Kuhn’s new image of science, which is actually a mosaic of different traditions, was not put together by generalizing from instances; it emerged once attention was drawn to what makes scientific practice possible, namely paradigms and what follows from them (normal science, anomalies, revolutions). In accordance with Kuhn’s own understanding of scientific revolutions, his revolution in the perception of science did not have to summon new facts or make new discoveries; it only needed a new perspective.” (104)

While Lydia Patton forcefully argues that:

“Kuhn’s original work did not restrict ‘paradigm’ to ‘theoretical framework’, nor did he restrict the perspective of scientific practice to the content of propositions with a truth-value. And it is mainly because Kuhn’s arguments in Structure are outside the semantic view, and focus instead on the practice of science, that they are interesting and fresh.” (124)

Both, Patton and Kindi, offer a close reading of Kuhn’s work, trying to give new perspectives on some of the more contested concepts in Kuhn’s epistemology.

The Social in Social Epistemology

One explicit aim of this edited volume is, as the editor asserts, to outline what consequences would follow from this debate for “our understanding of science as a social, epistemic endeavor” (7). But for this reviewer it is not obvious how the strong emphasis on discounting Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis in the first part of the book should lead to a better understanding of science as a social practice.

Kuhn’s theory of incommensurability of competing paradigms is precisely the point within his epistemology where value judgments and social decisions come into play. While traditionally those who defended the “progress of science” (cf. Sankey: 87) against what they saw as Kuhn’s “anti-realist” position were often those who wanted to defend the objectivity of science by excluding “external” influences, like the “social” and the political, from the scientific core.[5]

It is therefore important when talking about incommensurability of paradigms, and the possibility of a “communication breakdown”, to distinguish between two distinct meanings: (a) the impossibility to communicate at all because people do not understand each other’s language or paradigms and (b) the decision after a long and futile debate to end any further communication as a waste of time since no agreement can be reached. It is this second meaning, describing a social phenomenon, which is very common in science. Sankey argues against the first meaning when he declares:

“Given that scientists are able to understand what is said by theories whose terms are untranslatable into their own, no insuperable obstacle stands in the way of full communication between the ‘proponents of competing paradigms.’” (87)

While Sankey “wonders what all the fuss was about” (87), he has only shown (in accordance with Kuhn: cf. Kuhn 2000) that in theory full communication may be possible, but not that communication breakdowns are not common between scientists working with different paradigms. While on a theoretical level these workday problems to communicate may seem, for some philosophers of science, trivial. However, on the social level for working scientists, such communication breakdowns are often not only the reason for fraught relations between colleagues, but also for disciplinary segmentation and sometimes for re-drawing boundaries of scientific disciplines.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that in this volume those who discuss social as well as epistemological practices of scientists are not those who criticize incommensurability from a semantic point of view. Social and epistemological practices are considered in one way or the other by those defending Kuhn, like Kindi and Patton, and those whose main concern is to revise certain aspects of Kuhn’s image of science, like James A. Marcum, Barbara Gabriella Renzi & Giulio Napolitano, and David P. Rowbottom.

However, as I confined this review to the discussion of the first six articles I can only point out that the four remaining articles go beyond the topics discussed thus far and would deserve not only attentive readers but also a thorough discussion. They analyze, for example, scientific revolutions in mathematics (Andrew Aberdein), the role of evolutionary metaphors (Gabriella Renzi/Napolitano, Marcum) and of methodological contextualism in the philosophy of science (Rowbottom). Hence, although this edited volume has some weaknesses, there are several contributions, which open new avenues of thought about Kuhn, and are worth reading for those interested in Kuhn and in philosophy of science.

Contact details: markus.arnold@aau.at

References

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Kuhn, Thomas S. „Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability,“ In Thomas S. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Road Since Structure. Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, 33-57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Mizrahi, Moti (Ed.) The Kuhnian Image of Science. Time for a Decisive Transformation? Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations. Transl. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

[1] Kuhn discusses this type of theory change, for example, as divergent „articulation(s) of the paradigm“ (Kuhn 1996, 83; cf. Kuhn 1996, 23, 29-34, 122).

[2] Always on condition that, like Moti Mizrahi in this argument, we accept the concept of „incommensurability“ as defined by referential semantics. On some problems with „referential continuity“ as main argument against incommensurability see further below.

[3] “Instead of pointing out something common to all […], I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all – but there are many different kinds of affinity between them“ (Wittgenstein 2009, § 65) “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family – build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth – overlap and criss-cross in the same way.” (§ 67)

[4] Cf. Kuhn 1996, Ch. 5. Later, Kuhn argued explicitly against referential semantics but then on the basis of a hermeneutic (holistic) theory of language (Kuhn 2000; but cf. Kuhn 1996, 128f.).

[5] This, despite the fact that Kuhn himself tried to restrict the relevant „social“ factors in his epistemology to social dynamics within scientific communities.

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Why Mizrahi Needs to Replace Weak Scientism With an Even Weaker Scientism, Bernard Wills

SERRC —  May 15, 2018 — 4 Comments

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

Wills, Bernard. “Why Mizrahi Needs to Replace Weak Scientism With an Even Weaker Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 18-24.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3WS

See also:

Image by Matt via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Moti Mizrahi has been defending something he calls ‘weak scientism’ against Christopher Brown in a series of exchanges in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. His animus seems to be against philosophy in particular though he asserts that other disciplines in the humanities do not produce knowledge either. He also shows remarkable candor in admitting that it all comes down to money: money spent on philosophy would be better spent on the sciences because scientific knowledge is better qualitatively (i.e. because it makes true predictions) and quantitatively (scientists pump out more stuff than philosophers). (11)

Measuring Success

As he tells us: “Scientific knowledge can be said to be qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge insofar as such knowledge is explanatorily, instrumentally and predictively more successful than non-scientific knowledge.” (Mizrahi; 7). Furthermore: “Scientific knowledge can be said to be quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge insofar as scientific disciplines produce more impactful knowledge- in the form of scholarly publications-than non-scientific disciplines (as measured by research output and research impact)” (7)

The relevance of this latter claim seems to me unclear: surely by a quantitative measure, Shakespeare scholars have all of us beat.[1] A German professor once told me that in the first half of the 20th Century there were 40,000 monographs on Franz Kafka alone! I will not, however, spend time scratching my head over what seems a tangential point. The quantity of work produced in the sciences would be of little significance were it not valuable by some other measure. No one would think commercials great works of art on the grounds that there are so many of them.

Then again some concerned by the problem of over-specialization might view the sheer quantity of scientific research as a problem not an advantage.  I will focus, then, on the qualitative question and particularly on the claim that science produces knowledge and all the other things we tend to call knowledge are in fact not knowledge at all but something else. I will then consider Mr. Mizrahi’s peculiar version of this claim ‘weak scientism’ which is that while there may be knowledge of some sort outside of the sciences (it is hard, he thinks, to show otherwise) this knowledge is of a qualitatively lesser kind.

He says this is so “in certain relevant aspects”. (10) I’m not sure what he means by this hedge. What makes an aspect relevant in this context? I will proceed though on the assumption that whatever these relevant aspects are they make for an over-all context independent superiority of science over non-science.[2]

Of course, were I a practitioner of the hermeneutic of suspicion I would point out the glaring conflict of interest in Mr. Mizrahi making these claims from the fastness of a technical institute. If someone pops up claiming that only half the university really earns its keep it is a little bit suspect (if not surprising exactly) when that half of the university happens to the very one in which he resides. I might also point out the colonialist and sexist implications of his account, which is so contrived to conveniently exclude all sorts of ‘others’ from the circle of knowledge. Is Mr. Mizrahi producing an argument or a mere rationalization of his privilege?

However, as Mr. Mizrahi seems unlikely to be overly impressed by such an analysis I will stick to something simpler.[3] Does science alone produce knowledge or do other epistemic forms produce knowledge as well? This is the question of whether ‘strong scientism’ is correct. Secondly, if strong scientism is not correct does weak scientism offer a more defensible alternative or does it suffer from the same drawbacks? Accordingly, I will refute strong scientism and then show that weak scientism is vulnerable to precisely the same objections.

Politicized Words and Politicizing Ideas

There are dangers to antagonizing philosophers. We may not be pulling in the big grants, true , but we can do a great deal of damage regardless  for when the ‘scientistic class’ is not accusing philosophy of being useless and ineffectual it is accusing it of corrupting the entire world with its po-mo nonsense.[4] This is because one of the functions of philosophy is the skeptical or critical one. When scientists go on about verification and falsification or claim the principle of induction can be justified by induction philosophers perform the Socratic function of puncturing their hubris. Thus, one of the functions of philosophy is deflationary.

A philosopher of science who makes himself unpopular with scientists by raising questions the scientist is unequipped to answer and has no time for anyway is only doing her job. I think this is a case in point. Since Descartes at least we been fascinated by the idea of the great epistemic purge. There is so much ‘stuff’ out there claiming to be knowledge that we need to light a great bonfire and burn all of it. This bonfire might be Cartesian doubt. It might be ‘scientific method’. Either way all the ‘pretend’ knowledge is burned off leaving the useful core. This may well be a worthwhile endeavour and in the time of Descartes it surely was.

However, I suspect this tradition has created a misleading impression. The real problem is not that we have too little knowledge but too much: as a phenomenologist might say it is a saturated phenomenon. Knowledge is all around us so that like bats our eyes are blinded by the sun. This is why I find the idea that only scientists produce knowledge the very definition of an ivory tower notion that has no basis in experience. To show this let me make a list of the kinds of non-scientific knowledge people have.

As we shall see, the problem is not making this list long but keeping it short. I offer this list to create an overwhelming presumption that strong scientism at very least is not true (I shall then argue that weak scientism is in no better a case).  This procedure may not be decisive in itself but I do think it puts the ball in the court of the ‘strong scientist’ who must show that all the things I (and most everybody else) call knowledge are in fact something else.

What is more, the ‘strong scientist’ must do this without violating the criterion of strong scientism itself: he cannot avail himself of any but scientific arguments. Moreover, he must show that science itself meets the criterion of knowledge he sets out which is not an easy task given such well known difficulties as the problem of induction. At any rate, prima facie, there seems overwhelming empirical evidence that strong scientism is incorrect: a claim so extraordinary should have an unusually strong justification, to paraphrase Hume. Let’s see if the ‘strong scientist’ can produce one.

Making a Problem of “Results”

To begin, I should point out is that there are bodies of knowledge that produce ‘results’ not through scientific method but through analysis and application to cases. Two prominent examples would be Law and Music Theory, practitioners of which use an established body of theory to solve problems like whether Trinity Western should have a law school or how Scriabin invented the ‘Prometheus chord’. What sense of ‘know’ can we appeal to in order to show that my daughter, who is a music theory student, does not ‘know’ that the Prometheus chord was derived from the over-tone series?

Secondly, there is knowledge about the past that historians uncover through the interpretation of primary documents and other evidence. In what sense do we not ‘know’ that the Weimar Republic fell? This claim is even more remarkable given there are sciences that deal with the past, like Paleontology, which ‘interpret’ signs such as fossils or tools in a manner much more like historians (there is hermeneutic judgment in science which functions no differently than hermeneutic judgment elsewhere).

Thirdly, there is first person knowledge which is direct. “Did that hurt?” asks the doctor because without accepting first-person reportage he cannot proceed with treatment. This is a kind of knowledge without which we could not even do science so that if Strong scientism wants to deny this is knowledge science itself will be the primary victim. Again science can go nowhere without direct factual knowledge (the strip turned green when I put it in water) that is not produced by science but which science itself rests upon.

What about know how? Craftsmen and engineers know all kinds of things by accumulated experience. They know how a shoe is made or what makes for good beer. They also built the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids. What are we to make of disciplines like mathematics, geometry or logic? What about ethical or aesthetic or critical judgments? In what sense does a translator not ‘know’ Japanese? Does anyone really think literature scholars don’t ‘know’ anything about the texts they discuss even on a factual level? What scientific justification does the claim “Marlowe did not write King Lear’ have or even require?  And while we are at it may well be that philosophers do not know much but they do know things like ‘logical positivism fails its own criterion of meaning’ or ‘Berkeley cannot be refuted by kicking a stone’. [5]

It could well be that in regarding all the above as instances of knowledge I am missing something fundamental. If so I wish someone would point it out to me. Let’s take a hypothetical knower, Jill: Jill knows she is feeling cold, knows how to repair watches, knows why the Weimar Republic fell, knows how to speak Portuguese, knows there are 114 Surahs in the Quran, knows how Beethoven transformed the sonata form, has extensive topographical knowledge of places she has travelled, prefers the plays of Shakespeare to those of Thomas Preston, can identify Barbara as valid syllogism, considers racial prejudice indefensible, understands how attorney client privilege applies to the Stormy Daniels affair, can tell an stone age arrowhead from a rock, can comment on the philology of Hebrew, can understand Euclid’s proofs, is engaged in correcting the received text of Finnegans Wake , can explain the Quine/Duhem thesis and its relevance to the question of falsification, has written a commentary on Kant’s third critique and on top of all this is performing experiments in chemistry.

Strong scientism may be correct that only the last endeavour constitutes Jill’s ‘knowledge’ but on what grounds can it defeat what to me looks like the overwhelming presumption that Jill is not just a Chemist who wastes her time at hobbies but a genuine polymath who knows many things in many fields along with all the ordinary knowledge all humans possess?

Problems of Both the Strong and the Weak

The ‘strong scientist’ has surprisingly few options here. Will he point out that science makes true predictions? So have craftsmen for millennia. Further, many of these forms of knowledge do not need to make true predictions: I don’t need to test the hypothesis that there 114 Surahs in the Quran because I know already having checked.[6] Is science more certain of its conclusions? According to the post-Popper consensus at least, scientific statements are always tentative and revisable and in any case first person knowledge so surpasses it in certainty that some of it is arguably infallible. Is science more instrumentally successful?

Craftsmen and hunters kept the species alive for millennia before science even existed in difficult circumstances under which no science would have been possible. What is more some craft knowledge remains instrumentally superior to science to this day: no baseball player chooses a physicist over a batting coach.[7] At any rate success is relative to one’s aims and lawyers successfully produce legal arguments just as philologists successfully solve problems of Homeric grammar.

Now as Aristotle would say science does have the advantage over craft of being explanatory but is explanation unique to science? No; because hermeneutic practices in history, literature, classics and so on also produce explanations of the meaning of things like documents and if the ‘strong scientist’ wants to say that these explanations are tentative and changing (abductions as it were not inductions) then the same is true of a great deal of science. In short, none of the features that supposedly make for the superiority of science are unique to science and some are not even especially exemplified by it. It seems then that there is no criterion by which scientific claims can be shown to be knowledge in a unique and exclusive sense. Until such a criterion is identified it seems to me that my initial presupposition about Jill being a polymath rather than a chemist with distractions stands.   

Perhaps it is the awareness of such difficulties that leads Mizrahi to his stance of ‘Weak Scientism’. It is not a stance he himself entirely sticks to.  Some of his statements imply the strong version of scientism as when he tells us the knowledge is “the scholarly work or research produced in scientific fields of study, such as the natural sciences, as opposed to non-scientific fields, such as the humanities.” (22)[8] Still, when pushed, he seems content with the position that all the things I mentioned above might count as knowledge in a weaker sense but that scientific knowledge is still better and, presumably, more worthy of grants.

Unfortunately, the exact same objections which tell against strong scientism tell against weak scientism too. It is interesting that at this point Mizrahi employs a kind of knowledge I did not discuss above: to defend weak scientism he appeals to the authority of textbooks! (17) These textbooks tell him that science is instrumentally successful, explanatory and makes true predictions. He then tells us that while other disciplines may also betray these traits they do not do so to the same extent so that any money spent on them would be better spent on science on the maxim of prudence (another knowledge form I did not discuss) that one should seek the most bang for one’s buck.

Mizrahi gains little by this move for the question immediately arises better how and at what? Better in what context? By what standard of value? Just take the example of quantity so favored by Mizrahi. Does science produce more knowledge that anything else? Hardly. As Augustine pointed out I can produce a potential infinity of knowledge simply by reflecting recursively on the fact of my own existence. (City of God; XI, 26) Indeed, I can do this by reflecting recursively on my knowledge of ANY fact. Similar recursive processes can extend our knowledge indefinitely in the field of mathematics.

Does science have (taken in bulk) more instrumental success than other knowledge forms? How would you even count given that craft knowledge has a roughly 3 million-year head start? This does not even count the successful record of problem solving in law, politics, or art.[9] Is science more successful at explanation? Hardly, if science could solve problems in literature or history then these fields would not even exist. Science only explains the things it is good at explaining which is no more and no less than one can say of any other discipline. This is why many proponents of scientism tacitly assume that the explanations produced in other disciplines only concern frilly, trivial things that science needn’t bother about anyway.[10]

Does science make more true predictions? Again how would you even count given that for millions of years, human beings survived by making hundreds of true predictions daily? What is more, the inductive procedures of science seem relatively useless in the many endeavours that do not involve true prediction but some other method of justification like deduction or direct observation.

Thus, weak scientism seems in no better a case than strong scientism for the same reasons: there is no clearly applicable, context-independent, criterion that shows the superiority the ‘weak scientist’ claims: certainty, instrumental success, utilitarian value, predictive power and explanation all exist elsewhere in ways that are often not directly commensurable with the way they exist in science. As I told someone once (who asserted the superiority of the French language over all others) French is indeed the best language for speaking French in.[11] Science is the best way to do science.

Why Make Science an Ism at All?

Thus, if Mr. Mizrahi wants a thesis to defend it may well be possible to show that science is at least somewhat better on average at certain things than other approaches. He may call that ‘even weaker’ scientism. This would be to admit after all, that science is superior only in ‘certain relevant aspects’ leaving it to be inferred that it is not superior in others and that the ‘superiority’ that science demonstrates in one context, like particle physics, may vanish in another, like film criticism. If that is what ‘scientism’ amounts to then we are all proponents of it and it is hard to escape the impression that a mountain of argument has given birth to a mouse.

What is more, he informs us: “Brown admits that both scientific and philosophical theories are instruments of explanation. To provide good explanations, then, both scientific and philosophical theories must be testable.” (17) I suppose then it remains open to say that, after all, Joyce scholars ‘test’ their assertions about Ulysses against the text of Ulysses and are to that extent scientists. Perhaps, craftsmen, music theorists, historians and (gasp!) even philosophers, all in their various ways, do likewise: testing their assertions in the ways peculiar to their disciplines. Perhaps, then, all these endeavors are just iterations of science in which case Mirhazi’s mouse has shrunk to something the size of a pygmy shrew.

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

Aristotle, Metaphysics. Trans. R. McKeon (Random House, Aristotle, 1941)

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. R. McKeon (Random House, Aristotle, 1941)

Augustine, The City of God. Trans. H. Bettenson. (Penguin Classics, London, 1984)

Mizrahi, Moti. “More in Defense of Weak Scientism: Another Reply to Brown.”  Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no 4 (2018) 7-25.   

Theocharis and Psimpoulos “Where Science Has Gone Wrong” Nature (1987) 595-597

[1] Does Mirhazi mean to say that if a particular sub-discipline of English produces more articles in a given year than a small subfield of science then that discipline of English is superior to that subfield of science? I’m sure he does not mean to say this but it seems to follow from his words.

[2] The qualitative superiority of science must be based on the value of its goals firstly (like curing disease or discovering alien life) and, secondly, its superiority in achieving those goals over all other methods. The discussion surely assumes that the things done by science must be worth doing more than their opposites. The question has of necessity an axiological component in spite of Mizrahi’s claim to the contrary (9). This means the values of science must be commensurable with the values of non-science if we are to say one is better overall than the other. Not only must science be instrumentally superior at answering scientific questions it must answer the questions of other disciplines better than those disciplines. Otherwise one is simply making the innocuous claim that science answers scientific questions better than geometry or rhetoric can. Mizrahi marshals only one example here: he tells us that the social sciences produce more knowledge about friendship than philosophy does. (19) Of course this assumes that philosophers and social scientists are asking the same or at least commensurable questions about friendship but even if I grant this there are still a vast multitude of instances where this is manifestly not the case, where non-scientists can produce better explanations on non-trivial questions than scientists can. I shall note some of these below.

[3] Mr. Mizrahi might consider, though, whether ideological self-critique might, after all, be a useful way of acquiring self-knowledge (which may not be so contemptible an attainment after all).

[4] This is the ‘Schrodinger’ phenomenon where an antagonist makes two contradictory accusations at once. (https://davewebster.org/2018/02/28/schrodingers-snowflake/) For what seems to be the fons et origo of this narrative see Theocharis and Psimpoulos “Where Science Has Gone Wrong” Nature (1987).

[5] The underlying question here is one of Platonism vs. Aristotelianism. Strong Scientism argues that there is one paradigmatic form of ‘knowledge in itself’. I argue the Aristotelian position that just as ‘being’ is said in many senses (Metaphysics;9, 992b 15) so there are many analogical forms of knowledge. What all the things I have listed have in common is that each in its own peculiar way supports beliefs by appeals to evidence or other forms of justification. Everyday discourse may be wrong to use the word knowledge for these other forms of justified belief but I think the onus is on the ‘strong scientist’ to show this. Another thing I should point out is that I do not confine the word knowledge to beliefs that are indefeasible: a knower might say “to the best of knowledge” and still be a knower. I say this to head off the problem of skepticism which asks whether the criterion of indefeasible knowledge (whatever it is said to be) is ever actually fulfilled. There are valid responses to this problem but consideration of them would take us far afield.

[6] It is silly to imagine me hypothesizing the various numbers of Surahs the Quran could contain before testing my hypothesis by opening the book. Of course, if Mizrahi wishes, I can always put ordinary factual knowledge in the form of a testable proposition. Open War and Peace and you will find it contains an account of the battle of Borodino. Why is a true prediction of this kind any different than a true prediction in science?

[7] Here in fact we get to the nub of the problem. The ultimate problem with scientism weak or strong is that in the real world different knowledge forms interact with each other constantly. Science advances with the help of craftsmen as with the invention of the telescope. Craftsmen make use of science as when a running coach consults a physician. Archeologists and paleontologists employ abduction or hermeneutic reasoning. Art historians call on chemists while biologists call on the local knowledge of indigenous peoples. In a sense there is no such thing as ‘science’ pure and simple as other knowledge forms are inherent to its own structure (even deductive reasoning, the proper province of logicians, is essential to standard accounts of scientific method). This is one reason why, in fact, there is no one superior knowledge form but rather systematic interdependence of ALL knowledge forms.

[8] This is not the only instance of Mizrahi, apparently, trying to use a persuasive definition to win what looks like a mere verbal victory. Of course you can define knowledge as “what the sciences do”, assign another word to “what the humanities do” and go home waving the flag of triumph. But why should any of the rest of take note of such an arbitrary procedure?

[9] Again the problem is that the instrumental success of science rests on the instrumental success of a multitude of other things like the knowledge of bus schedules that gets us to the lab or the social knowledge that allows us to navigate modern institutions. No science tells us how to write a winning grant proposal or informs us that for as longs as Dr. Smith is chief editor of Widgetology the truth about widgets is whatever he says it is. Thus even if we confined the question to the last 50 years it is clear that science cannot claim instrumental superiority over the myriad other anonymous, unmarked processes that make science possible in the first place.

[10] My son, when he was a toddler, ran about the playground proclaiming himself ‘the greatest’. When he failed at any task or challenge he would casually turn to his mother and say “well, the greatest doesn’t do that”! This seems to be the position of many proponents of scientism. If scientists cannot produce good explanations in a field like literature or classics, then it must be that those fields are not really knowledge.

[11] Aristotle made this point ages ago. No inquiry into ethics he tells can have the rigour of geometry any more than the geometer need employ the art of rhetoric. (Nichomachean Ethics; 3, 20,25) Ethics employs phronesis or prudential judgment not logical deduction. Each discipline is answerable to its own internal standards which do not apply outside that discipline. There is, then, no overall ‘super-science’ (like the Platonic dialectic) that embodies a universal method for dealing with all subjects. Aristotle’s world is pluralist, discontinuous and analogical. For this reason, scientists have tended to be Platonists and modern science might be viewed as the revenge of the Platonic/Pythagorean tradition against its wayward pupil. Contemporary philosophy of science, if this author understands it correctly, seems to have restored Aristotelian praxis to the centre of the scientific enterprise. Students of Wittgenstein will no doubt appreciate the point that knowledge comes in as many varieties as games do and there is no more a single account of the first than there is of the second.

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More in Defense of Weak Scientism, Moti Mizrahi

SERRC —  April 10, 2018 — 5 Comments

Author information: Moti Mizrahi, Florida Institute of Technology, mmizrahi@fit.edu

Mizrahi, Moti. “More in Defense of Weak Scientism: Another Reply to Brown.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 4 (2018): 7-25.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3W1

Please refer to:

Image by eltpics via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

In my (2017a), I defend a view I call Weak Scientism, which is the view that knowledge produced by scientific disciplines is better than knowledge produced by non-scientific disciplines.[1] Scientific knowledge can be said to be quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge insofar as scientific disciplines produce more impactful knowledge–in the form of scholarly publications–than non-scientific disciplines (as measured by research output and research impact). Scientific knowledge can be said to be qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge insofar as such knowledge is explanatorily, instrumentally, and predictively more successful than non-scientific knowledge.

Brown (2017a) raises several objections against my defense of Weak Scientism and I have replied to his objections (Mizrahi 2017b), thereby showing again that Weak Scientism is a defensible view. Since then, Brown (2017b) has reiterated his objections in another reply on SERRC. Almost unchanged from his previous attack on Weak Scientism (Brown 2017a), Brown’s (2017b) objections are the following:

  1. Weak Scientism is not strong enough to count as scientism.
  2. Advocates of Strong Scientism should not endorse Weak Scientism.
  3. Weak Scientism does not show that philosophy is useless.
  4. My defense of Weak Scientism appeals to controversial philosophical assumptions.
  5. My defense of Weak Scientism is a philosophical argument.
  6. There is nothing wrong with persuasive definitions of scientism.

In what follows, I will respond to these objections, thereby showing once more that Weak Scientism is a defensible view. Since I have been asked to keep this as short as possible, however, I will try to focus on what I take to be new in Brown’s (2017b) latest attack on Weak Scientism.

Is Weak Scientism Strong Enough to Count as Scientism?

Brown (2017b) argues for (1) on the grounds that, on Weak Scientism, “philosophical knowledge may be nearly as valuable as scientific knowledge.” Brown (2017b, 4) goes on to characterize a view he labels “Scientism2,” which he admits is the same view as Strong Scientism, and says that “there is a huge logical gap between Strong Scientism (Scientism2) and Weak Scientism.”

As was the case the first time Brown raised this objection, it is not clear how it is supposed to show that Weak Scientism is not “really” a (weaker) version of scientism (Mizrahi 2017b, 10-11). Of course there is a logical gap between Strong Scientism and Weak Scientism; that is why I distinguish between these two epistemological views. If I am right, Strong Scientism is too strong to be a defensible version of scientism, whereas Weak Scientism is a defensible (weaker) version of scientism (Mizrahi 2017a, 353-354).

Of course Weak Scientism “leaves open the possibility that there is philosophical knowledge” (Brown 2017b, 5). If I am right, such philosophical knowledge would be inferior to scientific knowledge both quantitatively (in terms of research output and research impact) and qualitatively (in terms of explanatory, instrumental, and predictive success) (Mizrahi 2017a, 358).

Brown (2017b, 5) does try to offer a reason “for thinking it strange that Weak Scientism counts as a species of scientism” in his latest attack on Weak Scientism, which does not appear in his previous attack. He invites us to imagine a theist who believes that “modern science is the greatest new intellectual achievement since the fifteenth century” (emphasis in original). Brown then claims that this theist would be an advocate of Weak Scientism because Brown (2017b, 6) takes “modern science is the greatest new intellectual achievement since the fifteenth century” to be “(roughly) equivalent to Weak Scientism.” For Brown (2017b, 6), however, “it seems odd, to say the least, that [this theist] should count as an advocate (even roughly) of scientism.”

Unfortunately, Brown’s appeal to intuition is rather difficult to evaluate because his hypothetical case is under-described.[2] First, the key phrase, namely, “modern science is the greatest new intellectual achievement since the fifteenth century,” is vague in more ways than one. I have no idea what “greatest” is supposed to mean here. Greatest in what respects? What are the other “intellectual achievements” relative to which science is said to be “the greatest”?

Also, what does “intellectual achievement” mean here? There are multiple accounts and literary traditions in history and philosophy of science, science studies, and the like on what counts as “intellectual achievements” or progress in science (Mizrahi 2013b). Without a clear understanding of what these key phrases mean here, it is difficult to tell how Brown’s intuition about this hypothetical case is supposed to be a reason to think that Weak Scientism is not “really” a (weaker) version of scientism.

Toward the end of his discussion of (1), Brown says something that suggests he actually has an issue with the word ‘scientism’. Brown (2017b, 6) writes, “perhaps Mizrahi should coin a new word for the position with respect to scientific knowledge and non-scientific forms of academic knowledge he wants to talk about” (emphasis in original). It should be clear, of course, that it does not matter what label I use for the view that “Of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the best knowledge” (Mizrahi 2017a, 354; emphasis in original). What matters is the content of the view, not the label.

Whether Brown likes the label or not, Weak Scientism is a (weaker) version of scientism because it is the view that scientific ways of knowing are superior (in certain relevant respects) to non-scientific ways of knowing, whereas Strong Scientism is the view that scientific ways of knowing are the only ways of knowing. As I have pointed out in my previous reply to Brown, whether scientific ways of knowing are superior to non-scientific ways of knowing is essentially what the scientism debate is all about (Mizrahi 2017b, 13).

Before I conclude this discussion of (1), I would like to point out that Brown seems to have misunderstood Weak Scientism. He (2017b, 3) claims that “Weak Scientism is a normative and not a descriptive claim.” This is a mistake. As a thesis (Peels 2017, 11), Weak Scientism is a descriptive claim about scientific knowledge in comparison to non-scientific knowledge. This should be clear provided that we keep in mind what it means to say that scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge. As I have argued in my (2017a), to say that scientific knowledge is quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge is to say that there is a lot more scientific knowledge than non-scientific knowledge (as measured by research output) and that the impact of scientific knowledge is greater than that of non-scientific knowledge (as measured by research impact).

To say that scientific knowledge is qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge is to say that scientific knowledge is explanatorily, instrumentally, and predictively more successful than non-scientific knowledge. All these claims about the superiority of scientific knowledge to non-scientific knowledge are descriptive, not normative, claims. That is to say, Weak Scientism is the view that, as a matter of fact, knowledge produced by scientific fields of study is quantitatively (in terms of research output and research impact) and qualitatively (in terms of explanatory, instrumental, and predictive success) better than knowledge produced by non-scientific fields of study.

Of course, Weak Scientism does have some normative implications. For instance, if scientific knowledge is indeed better than non-scientific knowledge, then, other things being equal, we should give more evidential weight to scientific knowledge than to non-scientific knowledge. For example, suppose that I am considering whether to vaccinate my child or not. On the one hand, I have scientific knowledge in the form of results from clinical trials according to which MMR vaccines are generally safe and effective.

On the other hand, I have knowledge in the form of stories about children who were vaccinated and then began to display symptoms of autism. If Weak Scientism is true, and I want to make a decision based on the best available information, then I should give more evidential weight to the scientific knowledge about MMR vaccines than to the anecdotal knowledge about MMR vaccines simply because the former is scientific (i.e., knowledge obtained by means of the methods of science, such as clinical trials) and the latter is not.

Should Advocates of Strong Scientism Endorse Weak Scientism?

Brown (2017b, 7) argues for (2) on the grounds that “once the advocate of Strong Scientism sees that an advocate of Weak Scientism admits the possibility that there is real knowledge other than what is produced by the natural sciences […] the advocate of Strong Scientism, at least given their philosophical presuppositions, will reject Weak Scientism out of hand.” It is not clear which “philosophical presuppositions” Brown is talking about here. Brown quotes Rosenberg (2011, 20), who claims that physics tells us what reality is like, presumably as an example of a proponent of Strong Scientism who would not endorse Weak Scientism. But it is not clear why Brown thinks that Rosenberg would “reject Weak Scientism out of hand” (Brown 2017d, 7).

Like other proponents of scientism, Rosenberg should endorse Weak Scientism because, unlike Strong Scientism, Weak Scientism is a defensible view. Insofar as we should endorse the view that has the most evidence in its favor, Weak Scientism has more going for it than Strong Scientism does. For to show that Strong Scientism is true, one would have to show that no field of study other than scientific ones can produce knowledge. Of course, that is not easy to show. To show that Weak Scientism is true, one only needs to show that the knowledge produced in scientific fields of study is better (in certain relevant respects) than the knowledge produced in non-scientific fields.

That is precisely what I show in my (2017a). I argue that the knowledge produced in scientific fields is quantitatively better than the knowledge produced in non-scientific fields because there is a lot more scientific knowledge than non-scientific knowledge (as measured by research output) and the former has a greater impact than the latter (as measured by research impact). I also argue that the knowledge produced in scientific fields is qualitatively better than knowledge produced in non-scientific fields because it is more explanatorily, instrumentally, and predictively successful.

Contrary to what Brown (2017b, 7) seems to think, I do not have to show “that there is real knowledge other than scientific knowledge.” To defend Weak Scientism, all I have to show is that scientific knowledge is better (in certain relevant respects) than non-scientific knowledge. If anyone must argue for the claim that there is real knowledge other than scientific knowledge, it is Brown, for he wants to defend the value or usefulness of non-scientific knowledge, specifically, philosophical knowledge.

It is important to emphasize the point about the ways in which scientific knowledge is quantitatively and qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge because it looks like Brown has confused the two. For he thinks that I justify my quantitative analysis of scholarly publications in scientific and non-scientific fields by “citing the precedent of epistemologists who often treat all items of knowledge as qualitatively the same” (Brown 2017b, 22; emphasis added).

Here Brown fails to carefully distinguish between my claim that scientific knowledge is quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge and my claim that scientific knowledge is qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge. For the purposes of a quantitative study of knowledge, information and data scientists can do precisely what epistemologists do and “abstract from various circumstances (by employing variables)” (Brown 2017b, 22) in order to determine which knowledge is quantitatively better.

How Is Weak Scientism Relevant to the Claim that Philosophy Is Useless?

Brown (2017b, 7-8) argues for (3) on the grounds that “Weak Scientism itself implies nothing about the degree to which philosophical knowledge is valuable or useful other than stating scientific knowledge is better than philosophical knowledge” (emphasis in original).

Strictly speaking, Brown is wrong about this because Weak Scientism does imply something about the degree to which scientific knowledge is better than philosophical knowledge. Recall that to say that scientific knowledge is quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge is to say that scientific fields of study publish more research and that scientific research has greater impact than the research published in non-scientific fields of study.

Contrary to what Brown seems to think, we can say to what degree scientific research is superior to non-scientific research in terms of output and impact. That is precisely what bibliometric indicators like h-index and other metrics are for (Rousseau et al. 2018). Such bibliometric indicators allow us to say how many articles are published in a given field, how many of those published articles are cited, and how many times they are cited. For instance, according to Scimago Journal & Country Rank (2018), which contains data from the Scopus database, of the 3,815 Philosophy articles published in the United States in 2016-2017, approximately 14% are cited, and their h-index is approximately 160.

On the other hand, of the 24,378 Psychology articles published in the United States in 2016-2017, approximately 40% are cited, and their h-index is approximately 640. Contrary to what Brown seems to think, then, we can say to what degree research in Psychology is better than research in Philosophy in terms of research output (i.e., number of publications) and research impact (i.e., number of citations). We can use the same bibliometric indicators and metrics to compare research in other scientific and non-scientific fields of study.

As I have already said in my previous reply to Brown, “Weak Scientism does not entail that philosophy is useless” and “I have no interest in defending the charge that philosophy is useless” (Mizrahi 2017b, 11-12). So, I am not sure why Brown brings up (3) again. Since he insists, however, let me explain why philosophers who are concerned about the charge that philosophy is useless should engage with Weak Scientism as well.

Suppose that a foundation or agency is considering whether to give a substantial grant to one of two projects. The first project is that of a philosopher who will sit in her armchair and contemplate the nature of friendship.[3] The second project is that of a team of social scientists who will conduct a longitudinal study of the effects of friendship on human well-being (e.g., Yang et al. 2016).

If Weak Scientism is true, and the foundation or agency wants to fund the project that is likely to yield better results, then it should give the grant to the team of social scientists rather than to the armchair philosopher simply because the former’s project is scientific, whereas the latter’s is not. This is because the scientific project will more likely yield better knowledge than the non-scientific project will. In other words, unlike the project of the armchair philosopher, the scientific project will probably produce more research (i.e., more publications) that will have a greater impact (i.e., more citations) and the knowledge produced will be explanatorily, instrumentally, and predictively more successful than any knowledge that the philosopher’s project might produce.

This example should really hit home for Brown, since reading his latest attack on Weak Scientism gives one the impression that he thinks of philosophy as a personal, “self-improvement” kind of enterprise, rather than an academic discipline or field of study. For instance, he seems to be saying that philosophy is not in the business of producing “new knowledge” or making “discoveries” (Brown 2017b, 17).

Rather, Brown (2017b, 18) suggests that philosophy “is more about individual intellectual progress rather than collective intellectual progress.” Individual progress or self-improvement is great, of course, but I am not sure that it helps Brown’s case in defense of philosophy against what he sees as “the menace of scientism.” For this line of thinking simply adds fuel to the fire set by those who want to see philosophy burn. As I point out in my (2017a), scientists who dismiss philosophy do so because they find it academically useless.

For instance, Hawking and Mlodinow (2010, 5) write that ‘philosophy is dead’ because it ‘has not kept up with developments in science, particularly physics’ (emphasis added). Similarly, Weinberg (1994, 168) says that, as a working scientist, he ‘finds no help in professional philosophy’ (emphasis added). (Mizrahi 2017a, 356)

Likewise, Richard Feynman is rumored to have said that “philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds” (Kitcher 1998, 32). It is clear, then, that what these scientists complain about is professional or academic philosophy. Accordingly, they would have no problem with anyone who wants to pursue philosophy for the sake of “individual intellectual progress.” But that is not the issue here. Rather, the issue is academic knowledge or research.

Does My Defense of Weak Scientism Appeal to Controversial Philosophical Assumptions?

Brown (2017b, 9) argues for (4) on the grounds that I assume that “we are supposed to privilege empirical (I read Mizrahi’s ‘empirical’ here as ‘experimental/scientific’) evidence over non-empirical evidence.” But that is question-begging, Brown claims, since he takes me to be assuming something like the following: “If the question of whether scientific knowledge is superior to [academic] non-scientific knowledge is a question that one can answer empirically, then, in order to pose a serious challenge to my [Mizrahi’s] defense of Weak Scientism, Brown must come up with more than mere ‘what ifs’” (Mizrahi 2017b, 10; quoted in Brown 2017b, 8).

This objection seems to involve a confusion about how defeasible reasoning and defeating evidence are supposed to work. Given that “a rebutting defeater is evidence which prevents E from justifying belief in H by supporting not-H in a more direct way” (Kelly 2016), claims about what is actual cannot be defeated by mere possibilities, since claims of the form “Possibly, p” do not prevent a piece of evidence from justifying belief in “Actually, p” by supporting “Actually, not-p” directly.

For example, the claim “Hillary Clinton could have been the 45th President of the United States” does not prevent my perceptual and testimonial evidence from justifying my belief in “Donald Trump is the 45th President of the United States,” since the former does not support “It is not the case that Donald Trump is the 45th President of the United States” in a direct way. In general, claims of the form “Possibly, p” are not rebutting defeaters against claims of the form “Actually, p.” Defeating evidence against claims of the form “Actually, p” must be about what is actual (or at least probable), not what is merely possible, in order to support “Actually, not-p” directly.

For this reason, although “the production of some sorts of non-scientific knowledge work may be harder than the production of scientific knowledge” (Brown 2017b, 19), Brown gives no reasons to think that it is actually or probably harder, which is why this possibility does nothing to undermine the claim that scientific knowledge is actually better than non-scientific knowledge. Just as it is possible that philosophical knowledge is harder to produce than scientific knowledge, it is also possible that scientific knowledge is harder to produce than philosophical knowledge. It is also possible that scientific and non-scientific knowledge are equally hard to produce.

Similarly, the possibility that “a little knowledge about the noblest things is more desirable than a lot of knowledge about less noble things” (Brown 2017b, 19), whatever “noble” is supposed to mean here, does not prevent my bibliometric evidence (in terms of research output and research impact) from justifying the belief that scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge. Just as it is possible that philosophical knowledge is “nobler” (whatever that means) than scientific knowledge, it is also possible that scientific knowledge is “nobler” than philosophical knowledge or that they are equally “noble” (Mizrahi 2017b, 9-10).

In fact, even if Brown (2017a, 47) is right that “philosophy is harder than science” and that “knowing something about human persons–particularly qua embodied rational being–is a nobler piece of knowledge than knowing something about any non-rational object” (Brown 2017b, 21), whatever “noble” is supposed to mean here, it would still be the case that scientific fields produce more knowledge (as measured by research output), and more impactful knowledge (as measured by research impact), than non-scientific disciplines.

So, I am not sure why Brown keeps insisting on mentioning these mere possibilities. He also seems to forget that the natural and social sciences study human persons as well. Even if knowledge about human persons is “nobler” (whatever that means), there is a lot of scientific knowledge about human persons coming from scientific fields, such as anthropology, biology, genetics, medical science, neuroscience, physiology, psychology, and sociology, to name just a few.

One of the alleged “controversial philosophical assumptions” that my defense of Weak Scientism rests on, and that Brown (2017a) complains about the most in his previous attack on Weak Scientism, is my characterization of philosophy as the scholarly work that professional philosophers do. In my previous reply, I argue that Brown is not in a position to complain that this is a “controversial philosophical assumption,” since he rejects my characterization of philosophy as the scholarly work that professional philosophers produce, but he does not tell us what counts as philosophical (Mizrahi 2017b, 13). Well, it turns out that Brown does not reject my characterization of philosophy after all. For, after he was challenged to say what counts as philosophical, he came up with the following “sufficient condition for pieces of writing and discourse that count as philosophy” (Brown 2017b, 11):

(P) Those articles published in philosophical journals and what academics with a Ph.D. in philosophy teach in courses at public universities with titles such as Introduction to Philosophy, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Normative Ethics, and Philosophy of Science (Brown 2017b, 11; emphasis added).

Clearly, this is my characterization of philosophy in terms of the scholarly work that professional philosophers produce. Brown simply adds teaching to it. Since he admits that “scientists teach students too” (Brown 2017b, 18), however, it is not clear how adding teaching to my characterization of philosophy is supposed to support his attack on Weak Scientism. In fact, it may actually undermine his attack on Weak Scientism, since there is a lot more teaching going on in STEM fields than in non-STEM fields.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (2017), in the 2015-16 academic year, post-secondary institutions in the United States conferred only 10,157 Bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies compared to 113,749 Bachelor’s degrees in biological and biomedical sciences, 106,850 Bachelor’s degrees in engineering, and 117,440 in psychology. In general, in the 2015-2016 academic year, 53.3% of the Bachelor’s degrees conferred by post-secondary institutions in the United States were degrees in STEM fields, whereas only 5.5% of conferred Bachelor’s degrees were in the humanities (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Bachelor’s degrees conferred by post-secondary institutions in the US, by field of study, 2015-2016 (Source: NCES)

 

Clearly, then, there is a lot more teaching going on in science than in philosophy (or even in the humanities in general), since a lot more students take science courses and graduate with degrees in scientific fields of study. So, even if Brown is right that we should include teaching in what counts as philosophy, it is still the case that scientific fields are quantitatively better than non-scientific fields.

Since Brown (2017b, 13) seems to agree that philosophy (at least in part) is the scholarly work that academic philosophers produce, it is peculiar that he complains, without argument, that “an understanding of philosophy and knowledge as operational is […] shallow insofar as philosophy and knowledge can’t fit into the narrow parameters of another empirical study.” Once Brown (2017b, 11) grants that “Those articles published in philosophical journals” count as philosophy, he thereby also grants that these journal articles can be studied empirically using the methods of bibliometrics, information science, or data science.

That is, Brown (2017b, 11) concedes that philosophy consists (at least in part) of “articles published in philosophical journals,” and so these articles can be compared to other articles published in science journals to determine research output, and they can also be compared to articles published in science journals in terms of citation counts to determine research impact. What exactly is “shallow” about that? Brown does not say.

A, perhaps unintended, consequence of Brown’s (P) is that the “great thinkers from the past” (Brown 2017b, 18), those that Brown (2017b, 13) likes to remind us “were not professional philosophers,” did not do philosophy, by Brown’s own lights. For “Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, and Hume” (Brown 2017b, 13) did not publish in philosophy journals, were not academics with a Ph.D. in philosophy, and did not teach at public universities courses “with titles such as Introduction to Philosophy, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Normative Ethics, and Philosophy of Science” (Brown 2017b, 11).

Another peculiar thing about Brown’s (P) is the restriction of the philosophical to what is being taught in public universities. What about community colleges and private universities? Is Brown suggesting that philosophy courses taught at private universities do not count as philosophy courses? This is peculiar, especially in light of the fact that, at least according to The Philosophical Gourmet Report (Brogaard and Pynes 2018), the top ranked philosophy programs in the United States are mostly located in private universities, such as New York University and Princeton University.

Is My Defense of Weak Scientism a Scientific or a Philosophical Argument?

Brown argues for (5) on the grounds that my (2017a) is published in a philosophy journal, namely, Social Epistemology, and so it a piece of philosophical knowledge by my lights, since I count as philosophy the research articles that are published in philosophy journals.

Brown would be correct about this if Social Epistemology were a philosophy journal. But it is not. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy is an interdisciplinary journal. The journal’s “aim and scope” statement makes it clear that Social Epistemology is an interdisciplinary journal:

Social Epistemology provides a forum for philosophical and social scientific enquiry that incorporates the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines who share a concern with the production, assessment and validation of knowledge. The journal covers both empirical research into the origination and transmission of knowledge and normative considerations which arise as such research is implemented, serving as a guide for directing contemporary knowledge enterprises (Social Epistemology 2018).

The fact that Social Epistemology is an interdisciplinary journal, with contributions from “Philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, cultural historians, social studies of science researchers, [and] educators” (Social Epistemology 2018) would not surprise anyone who is familiar with the history of the journal. The founding editor of the journal is Steve Fuller, who was trained in an interdisciplinary field, namely, History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), and is currently the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at Warwick University. Brown (2017b, 15) would surely agree that sociology is not philosophy, given that, for him, “cataloguing what a certain group of people believes is sociology and not philosophy.” The current executive editor of the journal is James H. Collier, who is a professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech, and who was trained in Science and Technology Studies (STS), which is an interdisciplinary field as well.

Brown asserts without argument that the methods of a scientific field of study, such as sociology, are different in kind from those of philosophy: “What I contend is that […] philosophical methods are different in kind from those of the experimental scientists [sciences?]” (Brown 2017b, 24). He then goes on to speculate about what it means to say that an explanation is testable (Brown 2017b, 25). What Brown comes up with is rather unclear to me. For instance, I have no idea what it means to evaluate an explanation by inductive generalization (Brown 2017b, 25).

Instead, Brown should have consulted any one of the logic and reasoning textbooks I keep referring to in my (2017a) and (2017b) to find out that it is generally accepted among philosophers that the good-making properties of explanations, philosophical and otherwise, include testability among other good-making properties (see, e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong and Fogelin 2010, 257). As far as testability is concerned, to test an explanation or hypothesis is to determine “whether predictions that follow from it are true” (Salmon 2013, 255). In other words, “To say that a hypothesis is testable is at least to say that some prediction made on the basis of that hypothesis may confirm or disconfirm it” (Copi et al. 2011, 515).

For this reason, Feser’s analogy according to which “to compare the epistemic values of science and philosophy and fault philosophy for not being good at making testable predications [sic] is like comparing metal detectors and gardening tools and concluding gardening tools are not as good as metal detectors because gardening tools do not allow us to successfully detect for metal” (Brown 2017b, 25), which Brown likes to refer to (Brown 2017a, 48), is inapt.

It is not an apt analogy because, unlike metal detectors and gardening tools, which serve different purposes, both science and philosophy are in the business of explaining things. Indeed, Brown admits that, like good scientific explanations, “good philosophical theories explain things” (emphasis in original). In other words, Brown admits that both scientific and philosophical theories are instruments of explanation (unlike gardening and metal-detecting instruments). To provide good explanations, then, both scientific and philosophical theories must be testable (Mizrahi 2017b, 19-20).

What Is Wrong with Persuasive Definitions of Scientism?

Brown (2017b, 31) argues for (6) on the grounds that “persuasive definitions are [not] always dialectically pernicious.” He offers an argument whose conclusion is “abortion is murder” as an example of an argument for a persuasive definition of abortion. He then outlines an argument for a persuasive definition of scientism according to which “Weak Scientism is a view that has its advocates putting too high a value on scientific knowledge” (Brown 2017b, 32).

The problem, however, is that Brown is confounding arguments for a definition with the definition itself. Having an argument for a persuasive definition does not change the fact that it is a persuasive definition. To illustrate this point, let me give an example that I think Brown will appreciate. Suppose I define theism as an irrational belief in the existence of God. That is, “theism” means “an irrational belief in the existence of God.” I can also provide an argument for this definition:

P1: If it is irrational to have paradoxical beliefs and God is a paradoxical being, then theism is an irrational belief in the existence of God.

P2: It is irrational to have paradoxical beliefs and God is a paradoxical being (e.g., the omnipotence paradox).[4]

Therefore,

C: Theism is an irrational belief in the existence of God.

But surely, theists will complain that my definition of theism is a “dialectically pernicious” persuasive definition. For it stacks the deck against theists. It states that theists are already making a mistake, by definition, simply by believing in the existence of God. Even though I have provided an argument for this persuasive definition of theism, my definition is still a persuasive definition of theism, and my argument is unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already think that theism is irrational. Indeed, Brown (2017b, 30) himself admits that much when he says “good luck with that project!” about trying to construct a sound argument for “abortion is murder.” I take this to mean that pro-choice advocates would find his argument for “abortion is murder” dialectically inert precisely because it defines abortion in a manner that transfers “emotive force” (Salmon 2013, 65), which they cannot accept.

Likewise, theists would find the argument above dialectically inert precisely because it defines theism in a manner that transfers “emotive force” (Salmon 2013, 65), which they cannot accept. In other words, Brown seems to agree that there are good dialectical reasons to avoid appealing to persuasive definitions. Therefore, like “abortion is murder,” “theism is an irrational belief in the existence of God,” and “‘Homosexual’ means ‘one who has an unnatural desire for those of the same sex’” (Salmon 2013, 65), “Weak Scientism is a view that has its advocates putting too high a value on scientific knowledge” (Brown 2017b, 32) is a “dialectically pernicious” persuasive definition (cf. Williams 2015, 14).

Like persuasive definitions in general, it “masquerades as an honest assignment of meaning to a term while condemning or blessing with approval the subject matter of the definiendum” (Hurley 2015, 101). As I have pointed out in my (2017a), the problem with such definitions is that they “are strategies consisting in presupposing an unaccepted definition, taking a new unknowable description of meaning as if it were commonly shared” (Macagno and Walton 2014, 205).

As for Brown’s argument for the persuasive definition of Weak Scientism, according to which it “is a view that has its advocates putting too high a value on scientific knowledge” (Brown 2017b, 32), a key premise in this argument is the claim that there is a piece of philosophical knowledge that is better than scientific knowledge. This is premise 36 in Brown’s argument:

Some philosophers qua philosophers know that (a) true friendship is a necessary condition for human flourishing and (b) the possession of the moral virtues or a life project aimed at developing the moral virtues is a necessary condition for true friendship and (c) (therefore) the possession of the moral virtues or a life project aimed at developing the moral virtues is a necessary condition for human flourishing (see, e.g., the arguments in Plato’s Gorgias) and knowledge concerning the necessary conditions of human flourishing is better than any sort of scientific knowledge (see, e.g., St. Augustine’s Confessions, book five, chapters iii and iv) [assumption]

There is a lot to unpack here, but I will focus on what I take to be the points most relevant to the scientism debate. First, Brown assumes 36 without argument, but why think it is true? In particular, why think that (a), (b), and (c) count as philosophical knowledge? Brown says that philosophers know (a), (b), and (c) in virtue of being philosophers, but he does not tell us why that is the case.

After all, accounts of friendship, with lessons about the significance of friendship, predate philosophy (see, e.g., the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh). Did it really take Plato and Augustine to tell us about the significance of friendship? In fact, on Brown’s characterization of philosophy, namely, (P), (a), (b), and (c) do not count as philosophical knowledge at all, since Plato and Augustine did not publish in philosophy journals, were not academics with a Ph.D. in philosophy, and did not teach at public universities courses “with titles such as Introduction to Philosophy, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Normative Ethics, and Philosophy of Science” (Brown 2017b, 11).

Second, some philosophers, like Epicurus, need (and think that others need) friends to flourish, whereas others, like Diogenes of Sinope, need no one. For Diogenes, friends will only interrupt his sunbathing (Arrian VII.2). My point is not simply that philosophers disagree about the value of friendship and human flourishing. Of course they disagree.[5]

Rather, my point is that, in order to establish general truths about human beings, such as “Human beings need friends to flourish,” one must employ the methods of science, such as randomization and sampling procedures, blinding protocols, methods of statistical analysis, and the like; otherwise, one would simply commit the fallacies of cherry-picking anecdotal evidence and hasty generalization (Salmon 2013, 149-151). After all, the claim “Some need friends to flourish” does not necessitate, or even make more probable, the truth of “Human beings need friends to flourish.”[6]

Third, why think that “knowledge concerning the necessary conditions of human flourishing is better than any sort of scientific knowledge” (Brown 2017b, 32)? Better in what sense? Quantitatively? Qualitatively? Brown does not tell us. He simply declares it “self-evident” (Brown 2017b, 32). I take it that Brown would not want to argue that “knowledge concerning the necessary conditions of human flourishing” is better than scientific knowledge in the quantitative (i.e., in terms of research output and research impact) and qualitative (i.e., in terms of explanatory, instrumental, and predictive success) respects in which scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge, according to Weak Scientism.

If so, then in what sense exactly “knowledge concerning the necessary conditions of human flourishing” (Brown 2017b, 32) is supposed to be better than scientific knowledge? Brown (2017b, 32) simply assumes that without argument and without telling us in what sense exactly “knowledge concerning the necessary conditions of human flourishing is better than any sort of scientific knowledge” (Brown 2017b, 32).

Of course, philosophy does not have a monopoly on friendship and human flourishing as research topics. Psychologists and sociologists, among other scientists, work on friendship as well (see, e.g., Hojjat and Moyer 2017). To get an idea of how much research on friendship is done in scientific fields, such as psychology and sociology, and how much is done in philosophy, we can use a database like Web of Science.

Currently (03/29/2018), there are 12,334 records in Web of Science on the topic “friendship.” Only 76 of these records (0.61%) are from the Philosophy research area. Most of the records are from the Psychology (5,331 records) and Sociology (1,111) research areas (43.22% and 9%, respectively). As we can see from Figure 2, most of the research on friendship is done in scientific fields of study, such as psychology, sociology, and other social sciences.

Figure 2. Number of records on the topic “friendship” in Web of Science by research area (Source: Web of Science)

 

In terms of research impact, too, scientific knowledge about friendship is superior to philosophical knowledge about friendship. According to Web of Science, the average citations per year for Psychology research articles on the topic of friendship is 2826.11 (h-index is 148 and the average citations per item is 28.1), and the average citations per year for Sociology research articles on the topic of friendship is 644.10 (h-index is 86 and the average citations per item is 30.15), whereas the average citations per year for Philosophy research articles on friendship is 15.02 (h-index is 13 and the average citations per item is 8.11).

Quantitatively, then, psychological and sociological knowledge on friendship is better than philosophical knowledge in terms of research output and research impact. Both Psychology and Sociology produce significantly more research on friendship than Philosophy does, and the research they produce has significantly more impact (as measured by citation counts) than philosophical research on the same topic.

Qualitatively, too, psychological and sociological knowledge about friendship is better than philosophical knowledge about friendship. For, instead of rather vague statements about how “true friendship is a necessary condition for human flourishing” (Brown 2017b, 32) that are based on mostly armchair speculation, psychological and sociological research on friendship provides detailed explanations and accurate predictions about the effects of friendship (or lack thereof) on human well-being.

For instance, numerous studies provide evidence for the effects of friendships or lack of friendships on physical well-being (see, e.g., Yang et al. 2016) as well as mental well-being (see, e.g., Cacioppo and Patrick 2008). Further studies provide explanations for the biological and genetic bases of these effects (Cole et al. 2011). This knowledge, in turn, informs interventions designed to help people deal with loneliness and social isolation (see, e.g., Masi et al. 2010).[7]

To sum up, Brown (2017b, 32) has given no reasons to think that “knowledge concerning the necessary conditions of human flourishing is better than any sort of scientific knowledge.” He does not even tell us what “better” is supposed to mean here. He also ignores the fact that scientific fields of study, such as psychology and sociology, produce plenty of knowledge about human flourishing, both physical and mental well-being. In fact, as we have seen, science produces a lot more knowledge about topics related to human well-being, such as friendship, than philosophy does. For this reason, Brown (2017b, 32) has failed to show that “there is non-scientific form of knowledge better than scientific knowledge.”

Conclusion

At this point, I think it is quite clear that Brown and I are talking past each other on a couple of levels. First, I follow scientists (e.g., Weinberg 1994, 166-190) and philosophers (e.g., Haack 2007, 17-18 and Peels 2016, 2462) on both sides of the scientism debate in treating philosophy as an academic discipline or field of study, whereas Brown (2017b, 18) insists on thinking about philosophy as a personal activity of “individual intellectual progress.” Second, I follow scientists (e.g., Hawking and Mlodinow 2010, 5) and philosophers (e.g., Kidd 2016, 12-13 and Rosenberg 2011, 307) on both sides of the scientism debate in thinking about knowledge as the scholarly work or research produced in scientific fields of study, such as the natural sciences, as opposed to non-scientific fields of study, such as the humanities, whereas Brown insists on thinking about philosophical knowledge as personal knowledge.

To anyone who wishes to defend philosophy’s place in research universities alongside academic disciplines, such as history, linguistics, and physics, armed with this conception of philosophy as a “self-improvement” activity, I would use Brown’s (2017b, 30) words to say, “good luck with that project!” A much more promising strategy, I propose, is for philosophy to embrace scientific ways of knowing and for philosophers to incorporate scientific methods into their research.[8]

Contact details: mmizrahi@fit.edu

References

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Ashton, Z., and M. Mizrahi. “Intuition Talk is Not Methodologically Cheap: Empirically Testing the “Received Wisdom” about Armchair Philosophy.” Erkenntnis (2017): DOI 10.1007/s10670-017-9904-4.

Ashton, Z., and M. Mizrahi. “Show Me the Argument: Empirically Testing the Armchair Philosophy Picture.” Metaphilosophy 49, no. 1-2 (2018): 58-70.

Cacioppo, J. T., and W. Patrick. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008.

Cole, S. W., L. C. Hawkley, J. M. G. Arevaldo, and J. T. Cacioppo. “Transcript Origin Analysis Identifies Antigen-Presenting Cells as Primary Targets of Socially Regulated Gene Expression in Leukocytes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 7 (2011): 3080-3085.

Copi, I. M., C. Cohen, and K. McMahon. Introduction to Logic. Fourteenth Edition. New York: Prentice Hall, 2011.

Brogaard, B., and C. A. Pynes (eds.). “Overall Rankings.” The Philosophical Gourmet Report. Wiley Blackwell, 2018. Available at http://34.239.13.205/index.php/overall-rankings/.

Brown, C. M. “Some Objections to Moti Mizrahi’s ‘What’s So Bad about Scientism?’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 8 (2017a): 42-54.

Brown, C. M. “Defending Some Objections to Moti Mizrahi’s Arguments Scientism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 2 (2017b): 1-35.

Haack, S. Defending Science–within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. New York: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Hawking, S., and L. Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.

Hojjat, M., and A. Moyer (eds.). The Psychology of Friendship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Hurley, P. J. A Concise Introduction to Logic. Twelfth Edition. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015.

Kelly, T. “Evidence.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/evidence/.

Kidd, I. J. “How Should Feyerabend Have Defended Astrology? A Reply to Pigliucci.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5 (2016): 11–17.

Kitcher, P. “A Plea for Science Studies.” In A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, edited by N. Koertge, 32–55. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1960.

Macagno, F., and D. Walton. Emotive Language in Argumentation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Masi, C. M., H. Chen, and L. C. Hawkley. “A Meta-Analysis of Interventions to Reduce Loneliness.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 15, no. 3 (2011): 219-266.

Mizrahi, M. “Intuition Mongering.” The Reasoner 6, no. 11 (2012): 169-170.

Mizrahi, M. “More Intuition Mongering.” The Reasoner 7, no. 1 (2013a): 5-6.

Mizrahi, M. “What is Scientific Progress? Lessons from Scientific Practice.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 44, no. 2 (2013b): 375-390.

Mizrahi, M. “New Puzzles about Divine Attributes.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5, no. 2 (2013c): 147-157.

Mizrahi, M. “The Pessimistic Induction: A Bad Argument Gone Too Far.” Synthese 190, no. 15 (2013d): 3209-3226.

Mizrahi, M. “Does the Method of Cases Rest on a Mistake?” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5, no. 2 (2014): 183-197.

Mizrahi, M. “On Appeals to Intuition: A Reply to Muñoz-Suárez.” The Reasoner 9, no. 2 (2015a): 12-13.

Mizrahi, M. “Don’t Believe the Hype: Why Should Philosophical Theories Yield to Intuitions?” Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 34, no. 3 (2015b): 141-158.

Mizrahi, M. “Historical Inductions: New Cherries, Same Old Cherry-Picking.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29, no. 2 (2015c): 129-148.

Mizrahi, M. “Three Arguments against the Expertise Defense.” Metaphilosophy 46, no. 1 (2015d): 52-64.

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Mizrahi, M. “What’s So Bad about Scientism?” Social Epistemology 31, no. 4 (2017a): 351-367.

Mizrahi, M. “In Defense of Weak Scientism: A Reply to Brown.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 11 (2017b): 9-22.

Mizrahi, M. “Introduction.” In The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? Edited by M. Mizrahi, 1-22. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017c.

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Peels, R. “The Empirical Case Against Introspection.” Philosophical Studies 17, no. 9 (2016): 2461-2485.

Peels, R. “Ten Reasons to Embrace Scientism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 63 (2017): 11-21.

Rosenberg, A. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

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Weinberg, S. Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature. New York: Random House, 1994.

Williams, R. N. “Introduction.” In Scientism: The New Orthodoxy, edited by R. N. Williams and D. N. Robinson, 1-22. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Yang, C. Y., C. Boen, K. Gerken, T. Li, K. Schorpp, and K. M. Harris. “Social Relationships and Physiological Determinants of Longevity Across the Human Life Span.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 3 (2016): 578-583.

[1] I thank Adam Riggio for inviting me to respond to Brown’s second attack on Weak Scientism.

[2] On why appeals to intuition are bad arguments, see Mizrahi (2012), (2013a), (2014), (2015a), (2015b), and (2015d).

[3] I use friendship as an example here because Brown (2017b, 31) uses it as an example of philosophical knowledge. I will say more about that in Section 6.

[4] For more on paradoxes involving the divine attributes, see Mizrahi (2013c).

[5] “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create)” (Lewis 1960, 71).

[6] On fallacious inductive reasoning in philosophy, see Mizrahi (2013d), (2015c), (2016), and (2017c).

[7] See also “The Friendship Bench” project: https://www.friendshipbenchzimbabwe.org/.

[8] For recent examples, see Ashton and Mizrahi (2017) and (2018).

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