Science Behind the Scenes

Thursday

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Science has become central to industrial-technological civilization. I would define at least one of the properties that distinguishes industrial-technological civilization from agriculturalism or nomadism as the conscious application of science to technology, and the conscious application in turn of technology to industrial production. Prior to industrial-technological civilization there were science and technology and industry, but the three were not systematically interrelated and consciously pursued with an eye toward steadily increasing productivity.

The role of science within industrial-technological civilization has given science and scientists a special role in society. This role is not the glamorous role of film and music and athletic celebrities, and it is not the high-flying role of celebrity bankers and fund managers and executives, but it is nevertheless a powerful role. As Shelley once said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, we can say that scientists are the unacknowledged legislators of industrial technological civilization. Foucault came close to saying this when he said that doctors are the strategists of life and death.

I have previously discussed the ideological role of science in the contemporary world in The Political Uses of Science. Perhaps the predominant ideological function of science today is the role of “big science” — enormous research projects backed by government, industry, and universities that employ the talents of hundreds if not thousands of scientists. When Kuhnian normal science has this kind of backing, it is difficult for marginal scientific enterprises to compete. Big science moves markets and moves societies not because it is explicitly ideological in character, but because it is effective in meeting practical needs (though these needs are socially defined by the society in which science functions as a part).

Despite the fact that progress in scientific research is driven by the falsification and revision of theories through the expedient of experimentation, the scientific community has been surprisingly successful in closing ranks behind the most successful scientific theories of our time and presenting a united front that does not really give an accurate impression of the profound differences that separate scientists. Often a scientist spends an entire career trying to get a hearing or his or her idea, and this effort is not always successful. There are very real and bitter differences between the advocates of distinct scientific theories. The scientist sacrifices a life to research in a way not unlike the soldier who sacrifices his life on the battlefield: each uses up a life for a cause.

I have some specific examples in mind when I say that scientists have been successful as closing ranks behind what Kuhn would have called “normal science.” I have written about big bang cosmology and quantum theory in this connection. In Conformal Cyclic Cosmology I noted at least one theory seeking empirical evidence for the world prior to the big bang, while in The limits of my language are the limits of my world I discussed some recent experiments that seem to give us more knowledge of the quantum world that traditional interpretations of quantum theory would seem to suggest is possible.

No one of a truly curious disposition could ever be satisfied with the big bang theory, except in so far as it is but one step — and an admittedly very large step — toward a larger natural history of the universe. Given that the entire observable universe may be the result of a single big bang, any account of the world beyond or before the universe defined by the big bang presents possibly insuperable difficulties for observational cosmology. But the mind does not stop with observational cosmology; the mind does not stop even when presented with obstacles that initially seem insuperable. Slowly and surely the mind seeks the gradual way up what Dawkins called Mount Improbable.

Despite the united front that supports fundamental scientific theories (the sorts of science that Quine would have placed near the center of the web of belief), we know from the examples of Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology and the recent experiments attempting to simultaneously measure the position and velocity of quantum particles that scientists are continuing to think beyond the customary interpretations of theories.

The often-repeated claims that space and time were created simultaneously in the big bang and that it is pointless to ask what came before the big bang (as earlier generations were assured that it was illegitimate to ask “Who made God?”), and the claims of the impossibility of simultaneous measurements of a quantum particle’s position and velocity have not stopped the curious from probing beyond these barriers to knowledge. One must, or course, be careful, for there is a danger of being seen as a crackpot, so such inquiries are kept quiet quiet until some kind of empirical evidence can be produced. But before the evidence can be sought, there needs to be an idea of what to look for, and an idea of what to look for comes from a theory. That theory, in turn, must exceed the established interpretations of science if it is too look for anything new.

We know what happens when scientists not only say that something is impossible or unknowable, but also accept that certain things are impossible or unknowable and actually cease to engage in inquiry, and make no attempt to think beyond the limits of accepted theories: we get a dark age. A recent book has spoken of the European middle ages as The Closing of the Western Mind. (In the Islamic world a very similar phenomenon was called “Taqlid” or, “the closing of the gates of Ijtihad“.) When scientists not only say that noting more can be known, but they actually act as though nothing more can be known, and cease to question normal science, this is when intellectual progress stops, and this has happened several times in human history (although I know that this is a controversial position to argue; cf. my The Phenomenon of Civilization Revisited).

It is precisely the fact that science continues to be consciously and systematically pursued in the modern era despite many claims that everything knowable was known that sets industrial-technological civilization apart from all previous iterations of civilization.

Science goes on behind the scenes.

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Commensurable Perspectives

Sunday

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There is an ancient parable from India about several blind men who encounter an elephant. The story is well known in many different versions, in all of which the blind men disagree as the nature of the animal — one touches its leg and says that an elephant is like a tree; another touches its ear and says that an elephant is like a fan; another touches its trunk and says an elephant is like a snake, and so forth.

We know that the elephant is one and whole, but the blind men of the parable do not know the elephant as a single reality; they are blind in more than one sense.

The same problem — the problem of appearance and reality — has been central to Western metaphysics since the beginning of philosophy to the present day. I have previously written about the philosophical antipathy and rivalry between Henri Bergson and Bertrand Russell in the early part of the twentieth century (in Epistemic Space: Mapping Time). Both of these antagonistic figures treated the same problem. Here is Bergson’s version:

There is in this something very like what an artist passing through Paris does when he makes, for example, a sketch of a tower of Notre Dame. The tower is inseparably united to the building, which is itself no less inseparably united to the ground, to its surroundings, to the whole of Paris, and so on. It is first necessary to detach it from all these; only one aspect of the whole is noted, that formed by the tower of Notre Dame. Moreover, the special form of this tower is due to the grouping of the stones of which it is composed; but the artist does not concern himself with these stones, he notes only the silhouette of the tower. For the real and internal organization of the thing he substitutes, then, an external and schematic representation. So that, on the whole, his sketch corresponds to an observation of the object from a certain point of view and to the choice of a certain means of representation.

Now beneath all the sketches he has made at Paris the visitor will probably, by way of memento, write the word “Paris.” And as he has really seen Paris, he will be able, with the help of the original intuition he had of the whole, to place his sketches therein, and so join them up together. But there is no way of performing the inverse operation; it is impossible, even with an infinite number of accurate sketches, and even with the word “Paris” which indicates that they must be combined together, to get back to an intuition that one has never bad, and to give oneself an impression of what Paris is like if one has never seen it.

Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics

And here is Russell’s version (which I previously quoted in Appearance and Reality in Cosmology):

With the naked eye one can see the grain, but otherwise the table looks smooth and even. If we looked at it through a microscope, we should see roughnesses and hills and valleys, and all sorts of differences that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Which of these is the ‘real’ table? We are naturally tempted to say that what we see through the microscope is more real, but that in turn would be changed by a still more powerful microscope. If, then, we cannot trust what we see with the naked eye, why should we trust what we see through a microscope? Thus, again, the confidence in our senses with which we began deserts us.

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Similar difficulties arise when we consider the sense of touch. It is true that the table always gives us a sensation of hardness, and we feel that it resists pressure. But the sensation we obtain depends upon how hard we press the table and also upon what part of the body we press with; thus the various sensations due to various pressures or various parts of the body cannot be supposed to reveal directly any definite property of the table, but at most to be signs of some property which perhaps causes all the sensations, but is not actually apparent in any of them. And the same applies still more obviously to the sounds which can be elicited by rapping the table.

Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very difficult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be?

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Chapter 1

Bergson later goes on to add, after his exposition of the problem:

“Both empiricists and rationalists are victims of the same fallacy. Both of them mistake partial notations for real parts, thus confusing the point of view of analysis and of intuition, of science and of metaphysics.”

It is almost as though Bergson realized that his own “empiricism” (after a fashion) might be contrasted with Russell’s “rationalism.” This is where the problem of appearance and reality meets the problem of the one and the many. Reality is one; appearance is many. How are we to understand how the one presents itself as many, and how the many are unified in the one?

There are times when the many perspectives on one and the same world seem unproblematic. The case of the blind men and the elephant can be resolved by bringing the blind men back to the elephant and directing them to feel the continuity of the various parts of the elephant with each other. And when many different scientific experiments confirm one and the same theory by testing different aspects of that theory in different ways, but all independently (and reproducibly) confirm one and the same theory, we know that we have one scientific theory that despite its many predictions concerns itself with one and the same world.

There are other times when the unity of the world and of the diverse perspectives upon the world are more problematic. Everyone, I think, is well familiar with the problems posed by competing and incommensurable narratives of what is believed to be the same sequence of events. This difficulty is encapsulated in the pop-culture dichotomy of, “he said/she said,” where the incommensurability is the incommensurability of gendered perspective.

I have elsewhere cited Thomas Nagel’s famous paper, “What is it like to be a bat?” (in Addendum on the Origins of Time) and noted that Nagel chose the example of a bat because, as a vertebrate and a mammal it is not all that different from primates (and presumably has experiences of the world not unlike those that primates have of the world), but the bat primarily experiences the world through sonar rather than through sight. That makes the bat very different from a primate, and presumably results in a dramatically different experience of the world — hence, there is something that it is like to be a bat, and this “something” is significantly different from what it is like to be a primate.

There are many ways of seeing the world, and some of these ways do not even involve “seeing.”

There is a sense in which organisms that relate to the world through fundamentally different sensory mechanisms experience a different world. The bat’s world constructed from sonar, the pit viper’s world constructed from infrared-sensing pits, the shark’s world constructed from electroreceptors, and the primate’s world of stereoscopic color vision are, in a sense, different “worlds.” But only “in a sense,” because in another sense these diverse senses reveal the same world, as is apparent when these different organisms with their distinct sensory mechanisms interact — sometimes recognizing each other (which I attempted to describe in The Eye of the Other), sometimes just avoiding each other, while at other times preying on each other or fleeing from predation.

Biodiversity means perceptual and epistemic diversity.

If we can find a way to put these different perceptions of the world together, we will have a much more comprehensive account of the world that that based on the observations of a single species. That is to say, the perspectives of other species, if only we could tap into them, would provide countervailing evidence to lessen our anthropic bias. We can think of these other perspectives as narratives, with each narrative of the world being ontologically derived from the structure of the organism, which involves both its sensory organs and its functional relationship to its environment.

If we take a naturalistic perspective and assume that the natural world is, unproblematically, as it presents itself to be, with a variety of many distinct species involved in relationships of cooperation and competition, we know that these radically distinct perspectives on the single natural world that hosts us all are in fact fully commensurable. Although no one individual, and no one species, has the synoptic perspective that includes all radically distinct forms of sensory perception, the distinct perspectives have a unity in the unity of nature.

Naturalism, then, implies the commensurability of radically distinct world-narratives that are ecologically integrated even if we cannot understand this integration or experience the world from any perspective other than that common to our species.

That the perspectives of distinct species possess a de facto commensurability despite their profound differences puts the supposedly incommensurable theoretical views of human beings into perspective. It is, of course, the position of Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science that different theoretical models of the world constitute distinct paradigms, and that these paradigms are incommensurable.

The “theories” implicit in the sensory apparatus of any two distinct species are far greater than the difference between any two theories maintained by the same species, though we must entertain the possibility that our ideas give us a dimension of differentiation that does not exist for all species, just as not all species possess sensory organs (as, for example, with micro-organisms), so that the possession of sensory organs also involves a dimension of differentiation from species lacking sensory organs.

The primate brain devotes much of its capacity to the heavy processing demands of stereoscopic color vision. The mollusk brain also processes fairly sophisticated visual stimuli, but it also devotes a significant amount of its capacity to the control of the cells on the surface of its skin, which allows octopi and cuttlefish to produce both brilliant displays and effective camouflage on demand. Given brains structured around these very different cognitive demands, I imagine that primates think and view the world very differently from the way that mollusks think and view the world — though these differences do not prevent the species from interacting, though primates and mollusks don’t interact all that much because of their distinct ecological niches.

If species possessing a cognitive architecture as profoundly different as that represented by primates and mollusks can achieve a de facto commensurability through their common participation in a single biosphere, then the incommensurability of different human points of view does not seem all that bleak.

Ecology is the master world-narrative that unifies that sub-narratives employed by individual species in virtue of their perceptual and cognitive architecture. Ultimately, astrobiology would constitute the universal narrative that would unify the ecological narratives of distinct worlds.

The naturalistic narrative has the power to unify even across species and across worlds. This power may not be particularly evident at present, but in the long term future of our species (if our species does in fact have a long term future) this power will prove to be crucial.

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Darwin’s Cosmology

Sunday

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Today is Darwin’s birthday, and therefore an appropriate time to celebrate Darwin by a mediation upon his work. No one has influenced me more than Darwin, and I always find the study of his works to be intellectually rewarding. I also read (and listen to) quite a number of books about Darwin. Recently I listened to Darwin, Darwinism, and the Modern World, 14 lectures by Dr. Chandak Sengoopta. While I enjoyed the lectures, I sharply differed from many of Dr. Sengoopta’s interpretations of Darwin’s thought. One theme that Dr. Sengoopta returned to several times was a denial that Darwin had anything to say about the ultimate origins of life. Each time that Dr. Sengoopta made this point I found myself grow more and more irritated.

To say that Darwin had nothing to say about the ultimate origins of life may be technically correct in a narrow sense, but I do not think that it is an accurate expression of Darwin’s vision of life, which was sweeping and comprehensive. While it may be a little much to say that Darwin ever entertained ideas that could accurately be called “Darwin’s cosmology,” it is obvious in reading Darwin’s notebooks, in which he recorded thoughts that never made it into his published books, his mind ranged far and wide. It is almost as though, once Darwin made the conceptual breakthrough of natural selection he had discovered a new world.

In characterizing Darwin’s thought in this way I am immediately reminded of a famous letter that Janos Bolyai wrote to his father after having independently arrived at the idea of non-Euclidean geometry:

“…I have discovered such wonderful things that I was amazed, and it would be an everlasting piece of bad fortune if they were lost. When you, my dear Father, see them, you will understand; at present I can say nothing except this: that out of nothing I have created a strange new universe. All that I have sent you previously is like a house of cards in comparison with a tower. I am no less convinced that these discoveries will bring me honor than I would be if they were complete.”

Darwin, too, discovered wonderful things and created the strange new universe of evolutionary biology, though it came on him rather slowly — not in a youthful moment that could be recorded to a letter in his father, and not in a fit of fever, as the idea of natural selection came to Wallace — as the result of many years of ruminating on his observations. But the slowness with which Darwin’s mind worked was repaid with thoroughness. Even though Darwin was the first evolutionist in the modern sense of the term, he must also be accounted among the most complete of all evolutionary thinkers, having spent decades thinking through his idea with a Platonic will to follow the argument wherever it leads.

Given that Darwin himself thought that making the idea of natural selection public was like “confessing to a murder,” the fragments of Darwin’s cosmology must be sought in his latter and notebooks as much as in his published works. As for the origins of life, narrowly considered, apart from the cosmological implications of life, Darwin openly speculated on a purely naturalistic origin of life in a letter to Joseph Hooker:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, — light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Darwin’s 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker

What has widely come to be known as “Darwin’s warm little pond” sounds like nothing so much as the famous Stanley L. Miller electrical discharge experiment.

Darwin revealed his consistent naturalism in his rejection of teleology in a letter to Julia Wedgwood, where he indirectly refers to his slow, steady, cumulative mode of thinking (quite the opposite of revelation):

“The mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed; yet, where would one most expect design, viz. in the structure of a sentient being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design.”

Darwin’s letter of 11 July 1861 to Miss Julia Wedgwood

This same refusal continues to a sticking point to the present day, since, like so much that we learn from contemporary science, appearances are deceiving, and the reality behind the appearance can be so alien to the natural constitution of thue human mind that it is rejected as incomprehensible or unthinkable. That Darwin was able to think the unthinkable, and to so with a unparalleled completeness at a time when no one else was doing so, is testimony to the cosmological scope of his thought.

One of the most memorable passages in all of Darwin’s writings is the last page or so of the Origin of Species, which touches not a little on cosmological themes. Take, for instance, the “tangled bank” passage:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

Besides anticipating the evolutionary study of ecology and complex adaptive systems long before these disciplines became explicit and constituted their own sciences, Darwin here subtly invokes a law-like naturalism that both suggests Lyell’s uniformitarianism while going beyond it.

Darwin places this law-governed naturalism in cosmological context in the last two sentences of the book, here also implicitly invoking Malthus, whose influence was central to his making the breakthrough to the idea of natural selection:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This famous passage from Darwin reminds me of a perhaps equally famous passage from Immanuel Kant, who concluded The Critique of Practical Reason with this thought:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first starts at the place that I occupy in the external world of the senses, and extends the connection in which I stand into the limitless magnitude of worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems, as well as into the boundless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation. The second begins with my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world that has true infinity, but which can only be detected through the understanding, and with which . . . I know myself to be in not, as in the first case, merely contingent, but universal and necessary connection. The first perspective of a countless multitude of worlds as it were annihilates my importance as an animal creature, which must give the matter out of which it has grown back to the planet (a mere speck in the cosmos) after it has been (one knows not how) furnished with life-force for a short time.”

Both Darwin and Kant invoke both the laws of the natural world (and both, again, do so by appealing to grandeur of the heavens) and a humanistic ideal. For Kant, the humanistic ideal is morality; for Darwin, the humanistic ideal is beauty, but what Kant said of morality and the moral law is equally applicable, mutatis mutandis, to beauty. Darwin might equally well have said of “the fixed law of gravity” and of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that he saw them before himself and connected them immediately with the consciousness of his existence. Kant might equally well have said that there is “grandeur in this view of life” that embraces both the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

Darwin did not express himself (and would not have expressed himself) in these philosophical terms; he was a naturalist and a biologist, not a philosopher. But Darwin’s naturalism and biology were so comprehensive to have spanned the universe and to have converged on an entire cosmology — a cosmology, for the most part, not even suspected before Darwin had done his work.

There is a sense in which Darwin fulfilled Marx’s famous pronouncement, from this Theses on Feuerbach, such that: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Darwin, however, did not change the world by fomenting a revolution; Darwin changed the world by thinking, like a philosopher. In this sense, at least, Darwin must be counted among the greatest philosophers.

I would be a rewarding project to devote an entire book to the idea of Darwin’s Cosmology. I know that I have not even scratched the surface here, and have not come near to doing justice to the idea. It would be a rewarding project to think through this idea as carefully as Darwin thought through his ideas.

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Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

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Some Formulations of Methodological Naturalism

Sunday

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In several earlier posts I have made a trial of distinct definitions of naturalism. These posts include:

● A Formulation of Naturalism
● Two Thoughts on Naturalism
● Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation, and
● Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology

I regard all of these formulations of tentative, but there may be something to learn from these tentative formulations if we employ them as a kind of experiment for understanding methodological naturalism. That is to say, each of these attempts to formulate naturalism implies a formulation of methodological naturalism. Furthermore, in so far as methodological naturalism is definitive of contemporary science, each formulation of methodological naturalism implies a distinct conception of science.

In A Formulation of Naturalism I suggested that, “Naturalism is on a par with materialism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like materialism.”

In Two Thoughts on Naturalism I suggested that “Naturalism is on a par with mechanism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like mechanism.” I also suggested that, “Naturalism entails that all ideas will first be manifest in embodied form… there are no abstract ideas that are given to us as abstract ideas; all ideas are ultimately derived from experience.”

In Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation I noted that these earlier efforts at formulations of naturalism are implicitly parsimonious, tending toward conceptual minimalism, and further suggested that, “we can characterize naturalism in terms of a quantitative parsimony, following quantitative formulations as far as they will go, and only appealing to qualitative formulations when quantitative formulations break down.” There is a sense, then, in which we can speak of deflationary naturalism. In so far as these formulations of naturalism embody the principle of parsimony, we need not separately formulate the principle of parsimony as a regulative norm of science.

In Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology I suggested that an approach to naturalism might be made by way of object oriented ontology, which I there compared to Colin McGinn’s transcendental naturalism thesis, i.e., that the world is “flatly natural” though we are unable to see this for what it is because of our perceptual and cognitive limitations.

While when I first formulated naturalism such that, “Naturalism is on a par with materialism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like materialism,” I intended naturalism as consisting of a more comprehensive scope than materialism, though when applied to the scientific method I see that it can be taken as a doctrine of limiting one’s scope to the problem at hand. This approach to science is as familiar as Newton’s aphorism, Hypotheses non fingo. Science often proceeds by providing a very limited explanation for a very limited range of phenomena. This leaves many explanatory gaps, but the iteration of the scientific method means that subsequent scientists return to the gaps time and again, and when they do so they do so from the perspective of the success of the earlier explanation of surrounding phenomena. Once a species of explanation becomes generally received as valid, the perception of the later extension of this species of explanation (perhaps already considered radical in its initial formulation) becomes more acceptable, and more explanatory power can be derived from the explanation.

Similar considerations to those above hold for the same formulation in terms of mechanism rather than materialism, or in terms of quantification rather than materialism. Initial formulations of mechanism (or quantification) can be crude and seem only to apply to macroscopic features, and is possibly seen as impossibly awkward to explain the fine-grained features of the world. As the mechanistic explanation becomes more refined and flexible, the idea of its application to more delicate matters appears less problematic.

An object-oriented ontological account of naturalism would be the most difficult to formulate and would take us the farthest from methodological concerns and the deepest into ontological concerns, so I will not pursue this at present (as I write this I can feel that my mind is not up to the task at the moment), but I will only mention it here as a viable possibility.

In any case, our formulations of methodological naturalism based on these formulations of naturalism would run something like this:

● Methodological materialism pursued as far as possible, leaving any non-material account aside

● Methodological mechanism pursued as far as possible, leaving any non-mechanistic account aside

● Methodological quantification pursued as far as possible, leaving any qualitative account aside

● Methodological flat naturalism, or transcendental naturalism, pursued as fas a possible, leaving any non-flat or non-transcendental account aside

I think that all of these approaches do, in fact, closely describe the methodology of the scientific method, especially as I mentioned above considered from the perspective of the growth of knowledge through the iteration of the scientific method.

The growth of knowledge through the iteration of the scientific method is a formulation of the historicity of scientific knowledge in terms of the future of that knowledge. The formulation of the historicity of scientific knowledge in terms of the past is nothing other than that embodied in the Foucault quote that, “A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.” (from “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault”)

All present scientific knowledge will eventually become past scientific knowledge, and it will become past knowledge through the continued pursuit of the scientific method, which is to say, methodological naturalism in some form or another.

The distant future of scientific knowledge, if only we had access to it, would seem as unlikely and as improbable as the distant past of scientific knowledge, but the past, present, and future of scientific knowledge are all connected in a continuum of iterated method.

It is ultimately the task of philosophy of see scientific knowledge whole, and to this end we must see the whole temporal continuum as the expression of science, and not any one, single point on the continuum as definitive of science. The unity of science, then, is the unity of the scientific method that is the connective tissue between these diverse epochs of science, part, present, and future.

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Methodological Naturalism and the Eerie Silence

Sunday

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Recently in Silent Worlds, Empty Worlds I mentioned that I was listening to Paul Davies’ book The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, and this is the “eerie silence” to which I refer in the title of this post. Since that earlier post, I’ve listened through Davies’ a couple of times and also consulted the print version.

While listening to Davies’ book it occurred to me that a skeptical SETI argument could be formulated on the basis of the methodological naturalism that is the working presupposition of science — and presumably the presupposition of SETI also, if indeed SETI is a science.

The argument would run like this: the remarkable success of science in describing and explaining the world from the scientific revolution of the early modern period to today is predicated upon methodological naturalism. If this methodological naturalism was an invalid presupposition, then science so predicated would never have been the wildly successful enterprise that it has been. But Science has been successful, and methodological naturalism has therefore proved itself.

Given the power of the intelligence to completely transform the environment in which it lives, as human beings have transformed the surface of the earth, an advanced extraterrestrial civilization that had managed to survive in the long term and to propagate itself at least within the confines of its solar system (as we have done to a limited extent) or perhaps also across interstellar distances, it would be the case that such an alien civilization would have transformed the environment throughout the region of space in which its influence held sway.

If any alien intelligence were to make a careful scientific study of our solar system, from the point of view of methodological naturalism certain anomalies would arise that could not be explained by purely naturalistic processes. The more detailed the study, the more anomalies would emerge. If the vast and cool and unsympathetic alien scientist got around to studying the surface of the earth, this scientist would eventually have to conclude that intelligence was at work, because natural processes could not plausibly account for cities, radio communications, and the other manifestations of technological civilization.

Similarly, when our scientists study other regions of the galaxy, methodological naturalism has proved to be a sure guide in understanding what we see. If large regions of space had been transformed under the influence of alien technology, anomalies would emerge in naturalistic explanations, and the more we looked, the more anomalies we would find. In fact, we do not find anomalies that can only be explained by recourse to explanations based upon intelligent intervention.

Michio Kaku wrote in his Physics of the Future how Kurzweil told him that he hoped to see the evidence of the technological singularity in the night sky:

“Kurzweil once told me that when he gazes at the distant stars at night, perhaps one should be able to see some cosmic evidence of the singularity happening in some distant galaxy. With the ability to devour or rearrange whole star systems, there should be come footprint left behind by this rapidly expanding singularity.”

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, Michio Kaku, 2011, Chapter 2, Future of AI: Rise of the Machines, p. 102

I have been rather critical of Kurzweil in other posts, but in this, he is correct: if anything like the technological singularity took place in the form that its expositors have given to it, we should be able to see portions of the cosmos transformed under the aspect of intelligence — sub specie intellectus.

Since this is precisely what we do not see, this constitutes a further example of what I recently called SETI as a Process of Elimination: as the scope and sophistication of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence increases over time and we continue to fail to find evidence of the same, in true inductive fashion this does not mean that we have proved that extraterrestrial intelligence and civilization does not exist, but we can exclude it from certain areas that have been searched, and the more we search the more regions of the cosmos can be declared free of peer civilizations.

In the case of the technological singularity, with its ability to reproduce itself and improve itself with each generation, thus issuing in escalating and even exponential growth, the “footprint” of obvious intelligent order wherever a technological singularity has emerged in the universe ought to be prominent and rapidly growing. We can say of intelligent machines as Fermi said of aliens: Where are they?

In the formulations of the some of the expositors of the technological singularity the effects of the singularity sound frighteningly similar to Stalinist gigantism, and if this is the case then the footprint of a technological singularity ought to be as visible as an enormous and vulgar Palace of the Soviets — a beacon to the cosmos of the paradise of the machines. Of course, machines may have better taste than earth-bound tyrannies.

An important note: in the bigger picture, the emergence of intelligence as the result of natural processes (as has happened on the earth) is itself a natural process, and the order the intelligence imposes upon its environment as as “natural” as that intelligence itself. However, we know that naturally occurring forms of order differ strikingly from forms of order imposed by intelligence. We know this intuitively, but it is extraordinarily difficult to give an explicit account of it.

If you travel to an unfamiliar place and look out over the landscape, you will likely know immediately whether or not other human beings make their home there: the presence of human habitation alters the landscape. Also, most of us are familiar with what wilderness looks like, and it does look anything like civilization.

Exactly what the difference is between what we might call organic forms of order on the one hand, and on the other hand mechanistic forms of order, however obvious it may be on an intuitive level, is something that we might reasonably expect from a philosophy of technology.

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The Truth is Out There

Sunday

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It is a demonstration of the perennial character of philosophical thought that one of the fundamental distinctions that has defined Western philosophy — the distinction between realism and idealism — finds itself clearly instantiated in contemporary popular culture. For realism may be adequately summarized as the view that “the truth is out there” while idealism (which admittedly takes many forms) is equally well summarized either by the “new age” idea that you make your own reality, or by the academic parallel to this, which is deconstructivism, in which anything can mean anything. Everything old is new again.

I just finished listening to Timothy Ferris book, Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril. Timothy Ferris is one of my favorite science writers, and indeed his earlier book The Red Limit is one of my favorite books.

While Ferris frequently invokes the kind of anti-philosophy that I have become accustomed to encountering in the writings of scientists, he also cites philosophers has diverse as Hegel and Wittgenstein (the latter of whom he has read thoroughly enough to even know his wartime journal, which is not widely read). Despite these philosophical citations, his philosophical formulations remain true to scientific anti-philosophy in their thoroughly naive spirit. For example, he frequently employs the idiom of the objects of astronomy being “really out there” as a kind of visceral reminder of realism:

“Once the sky was fully dark I had a look at the Triangulum galaxy, which at a distance of less then three million light-years from Earth is a local object by intergalactic standards. Its rangy spiral arms, tangled with glowing clouds of gas, spilled out beyond the field of view. As often happens, I was struck by the fact that all these things, unimaginably big or small or hot or cold as they may be, really are out there. Like giant squid or loaves of French bread — and unlike, say, postmodernism or public opinion polls — they confront us with the regality of the materially real.”

Timothy Ferris, Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril, 2003, p. 64

For Timothy Ferris, the truth is out there, as poignantly palpable as any any visceral sensation. Which leads us to another, better known, visceral assertion of realism, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”

James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson

The responses of Samuel Johnson and Timothy Ferris may be charitably characterized as an embodied philosophical doctrine, a practical realism arising from an engagement with the world. This practical realism is better known as scientific realism, which is an ontological doctrine. The corollary of scientific realism as expressed in scientific practice is methodological naturalism.

Acts of practical realism, as engagements with the world, constitute what Bertrand Russell called the enlargement of the self. I previously discussed Russell’s conception of the enlargement of the self in Too see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. It is important to understand that Russell is not talking about the enlargement of the ego, but rather the antithesis of this. Russell also calls this an ethic of impersonal self enlargement: “when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects.”

This is the moral component of science, which makes practical realism not only an intellectual imperative but also a moral imperative, and by way of the moral imperative — being primarily intellectual and intangible — we draw closer to a purely theoretical realism.

It is interesting to note that Russell employed the idiom of “objects” in the Russell quote above, since this point of view shares some similarities with object oriented ontology in its various forms. I have discussed this recent philosophical school in several posts, and I suggested a moral interpretation, an object oriented axiology, in Metaphysical Responsibility.

In Russell’s sense of an impersonal enlargement of the self through scientific understanding we have a concern for objects for their own sake, which “adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects.” Russell felt a metaphysical responsibility to the objects of science. I think that Boswell felt a metaphysical responsibility to the perennial character of stones, as Ferris feels a metaphysical responsibility to the stars and the galaxies.

The astronomer takes responsibility for planets, stars, and galaxies and seeks to give an account of them that gets them right for their own sake. The paleontologist takes responsibility for bones and fossils and seeks to give an account of them that gets them right for their own sake. The physicist takes responsibility for fundamental particles and the mathematician takes responsibility for numbers and each seeks to give an account of their chosen field of endeavor that gets the objects right for their own sake.

All of these are examples from the natural sciences, sometimes also called the “hard” sciences, and although it would be a little more difficult to give the parallel formulations for the social sciences, with certain qualifications I think that the parallel cases hold.

In Object Disoriented Axiology I cited a short quote from Jung, “No one has any obligations to a concept…” as embodying the antithesis of the perspective of object oriented axiology. Jung’s claim was simply a special case of moral nihilism — a moral nihilism directed exclusively at those who employ concepts, which is ultimately and eventually all of us.

The formulations above from the physical sciences, taking as my examples the astronomer, the paleontologist, the physicist, and the mathematician, have their conceptual parallel in the philosopher. The philosopher takes responsibility for concepts and seeks to give an account of them that gets them right for their own sake. In this parallelism of science and philosophy, we can see also a parallelism between practical realism and theoretical realism. The philosopher formulates a pure theoretical realism in light of his responsibilities to concepts. In so doing, the philosopher gives the science of concepts, as scientists give the philosophy of non-conceptual objects.

Thus, despite the fashionable anti-philosophy of many scientists, that often leads them to say unkind things about purely philosophical inquiry, I see the enterprises of science and philosophy as parallel undertakings, and I grant the scientists their due in this endeavor. A complete account of the world cannot be written without the contributions of scientists, who give an account of scientific objects from the point of view of those who feel an obligation to these objects. But a complete view of the world is equally elusive without the contribution of those who give an account of non-scientific objects.

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Transcendental Non-Naturalism

Sunday

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Some time ago in Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology I cited the view of Colin McGinn from his book Problems in philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry which he calls Transcendental Naturalism:

“Philosophy is an attempt to get outside the constitutive structure of our minds. Reality itself is everywhere flatly natural, but because of our cognitive limits we are unable to make good on this general ontological principle. Our epistemic architecture obstructs knowledge of the real nature of the objective world. I shall call this thesis transcendental naturalism, TN for short.” (pp. 2-3)

While for those who pay little attention to philosophy this might sound like an unremarkable claim, for a philosopher is a quite remarkable claim, because what McGinn is saying is that there are some things that we just can’t understand no matter how hard we try. Human minds simply aren’t put together in such a way that they can be reliably counted on to solve the venerable puzzles that have occupied philosophers.

While McGinn calls this a form of naturalism, and for him it seems to be so, there is more than a little resemblance between McGinn’s position and Plantinga’s rejection of naturalism. I earlier wrote about Plantinga in A Note on Plantinga. In what is sometimes called Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, his approach is similar to McGinn’s in so far as he argues that the human mind was constituted under certain natural conditions, and these conditions that begat human minds come with no guarantee that we are going to understand the world, its structure, or our place in it. The conditions under which the human mind evolved certain do imply that human beings will be good at hunting and gathering, but a mind that is optimized for hunting and gathering is not necessarily optimized, or even remotely suitable, for philosophical conundrums.

(I realize now, as I write this, that claims of this nature are related to some of the arguments that I recently made in I Dreamed a Dream… — the intermingling of ontology and natural history — but apart from noting this at present, I will not further consider it. Fate willing, I will return to it. As I reread my above-referenced post on Plantinga I also see that I have criticized his psychologistic presuppositions of his argument, and this was also a theme of my I Dreamed a Dream… post.)

Plantinga takes unknowability — shall we go so far as to call it ineffability? — rooted in human cognitive structures in the direction of anti-naturalism; McGinn takes unknowability rooted in human cognitive structures in the direction of naturalism. Clearly we can see here the unity of their approach, however divergent the results.

I have characterized non-naturalistic conceptions of the world as being rooted in an eschatological conception of history, and in yesterday’s Naturalism and Suffering I considered some of the views of Bart D. Ehrman on the question of a eschatological conception of history — specifically, the need to frame our understanding and responses to suffering in eschatological terms because a naturalistic framing of suffering is seen as inadequate — retained despite Ehrman’s abandonment of earlier held eschatological views.

It occurred to me that Ehrman’s position could be characterized, in contradistinction to McGinn’s transcendental naturalism, as transcendental non-naturalism. Here is a quote from Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer:

“I tend to agree with scholars like Ken Surin — who is easily as brilliant as any of the theodicists he attacks — that many of the attempts to explain evil can, in the end, be morally repugnant. I can even sympathize with theologians like Terrence Tilley, who argues that a believer’s response to theodicy should be to renounce it as an intellectual project.” (p. 122)

In other words, we can’t explain evil, so we probably can’t really, truly understand evil, and therefore attempts to explain evil are illusory, and they look suspiciously like “explaining away” evil, which is an insult to those who suffer.

Ehrman explicitly notes Tilley’s condition that this ought to be a believer’s response, and, again, Ehrman makes it abundantly clear that he is no longer a believer.

Recently I checked out of the library a wonderful series of six one hour videos called A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, as presented by Diarmaid MacCulloch. The show was well worth watching, and in fact I watched the whole thing through three times. In the final episode of the series, Professor MacCulloch says that while he cannot call himself a Christian, he instead thinks of himself as a “candid friend of Christianity.” This seems to also sum up Ehrman’s position — a position that both Ehrman and MacCulloch seem to have come to by way of an extensive and intensive study of history.

The implicit transcendental non-naturalism of Ehrman and MacCulloch combines elements of an eschatological conception of history with elements of a naturalistic conception of history. We don’t and can’t really know what’s going on, but at least we know must do justice to human experience by framing it in a non-naturalistic context.

This is not at all an unusual position to take, and it is familiar to anyone who has been involved in one of those frustrating arguments in which eschatological positions are first presented as an explanation as to why the world is as it is, and then, when pressed, the world is consigned to the category of divine mystery because, in the final analysis, it doesn’t make sense, and we can’t make it make sense.

If one is going to invoke the divine as an explanation of anything, or make claims about the eschatological structure of the world, then one cannot consign the world to the status of divine mystery. Contrariwise, if one is going to consign the world to the category of divine mystery, one cannot then invoke the divine as an explanation of anything. Or, rather, one can do so, but at the cost of one’s intellectual integrity.

Everyone named above, however, at least aware of the difficulty, and I not seeking to impugn their intellectual integrity.

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Naturalism and Suffering

Saturday

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Lisbon was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 1755.

The scale of destruction and suffering caused by the earthquake and tsunami that has just struck the northern part of Hokkaido in Japan (2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami — 東北地方太平洋沖地震), cannot but remind us of other natural disasters, some of them in the recent past, and some long past. It is likely that the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of 26 December 2004 was the worst natural disaster that has (or will) occur in my lifetime, in terms of total casualties, with almost a quarter million dead, most as a result of the tsunami following the earthquake.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 became a point of contention between a naturalistic view of history and an eschatological view of history.

The most famous earthquake and tsunami in Western history is the disaster that struck Lisbon in 1755. I previously mentioned this in The Rational Reconstruction of Cities. I mentioned in that post Nicholas Shrady’s book, The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which presented in some detail the intellectual controversy that emerged following the disaster. Shrady cited the work of Gabriel Malagrida, whose 1756 pamphlet, “An Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake” (“Juizo da verdadeira causa do terramoto”), argued that the disaster in Lisbon was divine retribution for the sins of the people of Lisbon:

“Learn, Oh Lisbon, that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapours and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena. Tragic Lisbon is now a mound of ruins. Would that it were less difficult to think of some method of restoring the place; but it has been abandoned, and the refugees from the city live in despair. As for the dead, what a great harvest of sinful souls such disasters send to Hell! It is scandalous to pretend the earthquake was just a natural event, for if that be true, there is no need to repent and to try to avert the wrath of God, and not even the Devil himself could invent a false idea more likely to lead us all to irreparable ruin. Holy people had prophesied the earthquake was coming, yet the city continued in its sinful ways without a care for the future. Now, indeed, the case of Lisbon is desperate. It is necessary to devote all our strength and purpose to the task of repentance. Would to God we could see as much determination and fervour for this necessary exercise as are devoted to the erection of huts and new buildings! Does being billeted in the country outside the city areas put us outside the jurisdiction of God? God undoubtedly desires to exercise His love and mercy, but be sure that wherever we are, He is watching us, scourge in hand.”

There are probably people who continue to think such things today, and a few who say so in private, but this is not the dominant narrative today. We certainly bear traces of a past dominated by an eschatological conception of history, but civilization has largely moved beyond this. Now, whether we like it or not, or whether we know it or not, Occidental civilization today embodies a naturalistic conception of history. The transition from medievalism to modernism was also a transition from an eschatological Weltanschauung to a naturalistic Weltanschauung. This does not mean that we have “solved” the problems of an earlier era, but only that we have moved on to other problems.

As I said above, we bear the traces of our history, and some of us bear these traces more heavily than others. Recently I have been listening to Bart D. Ehrman’s book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer. Ehrman is a serious scholar of early Christianity, and, by his own account, someone who started out as a sincerely and devoutly believing Christian, only to find that he had lost his faith after many years of study and confronting the problem of suffering.

Ehrman writes:

Over the years I’ve talked with a lot of people about issues pertaining to suffering, and I am struck by the kinds of reactions I get.

After briefly discussing avoidance of the issue of suffering altogether and those responses to the problem of suffering that he considers to be answers that are “too pat” to be satisfying, Ehrman moves on to a third category of responses to suffering that he cannot accept:

Other people — including some of my brilliant friends — realize why it’s a religious problem for me but don’t see it as a problem for themselves. In its most nuanced form (and for these friends everything is extremely nuanced), this view is that religious faith is not an intellectualizing system for explaining everything. Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems. (p. 15)

In Ehrman’s formulation of this view that he cannot accept, there is an echo of a famous passage from Hume, who wrote in his essay on miracles:

“…we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.”

This passage from Hume has become a standard point of reference not only for those who followed Hume and formulated the naturalistic conception of the world that dominates our thinking today, but also fideists who see in this the last remaining legitimate form of an uncompromising expression of faith: faith is a miracle, therefore proof in and of itself of what faith wants to believe. Thus this from Hume is, at once, both purple passage and locus classicus.

David Hume is the source of the empiricism in philosophy that eventually become contemporary scientific naturalism.

Ehrman writes that he respects this view and sometimes wishes that he could share it, but ultimately he cannot share it. He writes, “The God that I once believed in was a God who was active in this world.” He makes it clear that his confrontation with suffering was crucial to his loss of faith, and he further makes explicit that his remarks about his faith are all in the past tense, so there is no question of an equivocation in his belief; he is not about to say that he will change his mind if only someone can show him an intellectually legitimate way to formulate the problem of human suffering.

The eschatological conception of history assumes non-human agency in the world, and any human agency under this conception is mediated by non-human agency.

Ehrman is living a conundrum. He has abandoned the faith that the world has a particular metaphysical and eschatological structure, but he hangs on to the idea that our suffering must be expressed in eschatological terms, and our response to that suffering must also be expressed in eschatological terms. If it is not so expressed, according to Ehrman, it is avoidance, too pat, or a naturalism that he cannot share. But he has nothing to offer in place of naturalism, except strong feelings of its inadequacy.

I have encountered this attitude elsewhere, and when I thought about it I realized that I had written about it. In my post Cosmic War: An Eschatological Conception I wrote:

Because a cosmic war does not occur in a cosmic vacuum, but it occurs in an overall conception of the world, the grievances too occur within this overall conception of history. If we attempt to ameliorate grievances formulated in an eschatological context with utilitarian and pragmatic means, no matter what we do it will never be enough, and never be right. An eschatological solution is wanted to grievances understood eschatologically, and that is why, in at least some cases, religious militants turn to the idea of cosmic war. Only a cosmic war can truly address cosmic grievances.

Ehrman does not express himself in terms of war, but there is a close parallel between those who reject utilitarian and pragmatic assistance because it does not come wrapped up like an eschatological care package, and those who cannot accept a naturalistic conception of human suffering because it does not answer their deepest needs and longing to do justice to a noble and honorable conception of man, but a conception rooted in an eschatological conception of history that is no longer defensible in rational terms.

For Ehrman, human suffering is a cosmic grievance, and a cosmic grievance can only be addressed by a cosmic remedy. I don’t think that Ehrman is alone in this. Indeed, what makes his view interesting is that he is able to give eloquent expression to something that is sharply and poignantly felt by many who do not have the means to express themselves so well.

The question, then, as I see it, it not how to give the proper cosmic response to the cosmically formulated dilemma, but rather this: is our modern naturalism merely a superficial overlay, so that the vital forces that drive life remain profoundly and unalterably eschatological, or is the kind of attitude Ehrman expresses typical of a transitional age, indicating that we still have a long way to go in coming to terms with the naturalism formulated by visionaries like Hume? There are, of course, other possibilities as well — and interesting possibilities at that. The only reason I am going to bring this post to an end at this time is not because I am satisfied with what I have said, but only because I am tired.

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The Naturalistic Conception of History

Tuesday

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The three conceptions of history I have been discussing in previous posts are now...

In a couple of recent posts, Three Conceptions of History and Revolution and Human Agency, I discussed conceptions of history based on a tripartitie distinction in theories of war put forth by Anatol Rapoport in his introduction to Clausewitz’s On War. His three theories of war were the political, the cataclysmic, and the eschatological. Parallel to this I proposed three conceptions of history, the political, the cataclysmic, and the eschatological. In formulating these conceptions of history I made no pretense to originality or completeness.

...four conceptions of history, with the addition of the naturalistic conception.

I analyzed the political conception of history into that which prioritizes the role of human agency, the cataclysmic conception of history as that which prioritizes the lack of human agency, and the eschatological conception of history as that which prioritizes the role of non-human agency. Logically, this leaves a fourth possibility, that of non-human non-agency. I briefly speculated about this possibility as follows:

If we understand the political conception of history to be predicated upon the presumption of human agency in the world, the cataclysmic conception of history to be predicated upon a presumption of the lack of human agency in the world (i.e., human non-agency), and the eschatological conception of history to be predicated upon the presumption of the agency of non-human agents in the world (i.e., non-human agency), then there remains the possibility of non-human non-agency. This latter possibility could be identified as an Epicurean conception of history, since Epicurus maintained that the Gods were utterly indifferent to the deeds and fates of men. However, Epicurus did not maintain that the Gods were unable to intervene in the world, only that they were uninterested in doing so. There is also a sense in which non-human non-agency can be identified either with naturalism or Stoicism. This is a very interesting question, but I will not pursue it further at this time.

Now the time has come to pursue this, and I have realized, the more I have thought about it, that non-human non-agency — that is to say, the denial of causal agency in history to supernatural forces — is to be identified with the naturalistic conception of history. This, then, gives us a full suite of four conceptions of history: the naturalistic, the political, the cataclysmic, and the eschatological. This nicely rounds out some main trends in how human beings come to reflectively understand their history, and by filling in the gap with naturalism we come closest to that conception of history that is the theoretical basis of my own reflections on history as presented in this forum. (Though I hasten to point out that, while the naturalistic conception of history does fill in a gap left in our previous expositions, I still make no pretense to completeness; other conceptions of human history are always possible.)

Naturalistic history: humanity set in the context of the natural world of which it is a part.

The naturalistic conception of history is history understood in terms of philosophical naturalism, that is to say, history sub specie natura. I have posted several attempts to define or refine the kind of philosophical naturalism that I have in mind, among them A Formulation of Naturalism, Two Thoughts on Naturalism, Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation, and even Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology. All of these formulations are tentative. It is the nature of philosophical inquiry that it rejects dogma and therefore does not converge upon final formulations that lie beyond dispute. Our understanding of naturalism will change and advance with the continuing advance of scientific knowledge.

The cataclysmic conception of history.

That being said, we can still make some broad distinctions within naturalism. For example, I recently stumbled across a blog, mors dei, with an interesting series of posts on naturalism, distinguishing biological naturalism, methodological naturalism, and ontological naturalism. This is a sound exposition of a tripartite distinction among naturalisms that is widely recognized in contemporary analytical philosophy. I might also point out that one’s formulation of a naturalistic conception of history might have subtle differences depending upon whether one primarily conceives naturalism as biological, methodological, or ontological. However it is important to point out that these senses are in not way mutually exclusive. One could think of biological, methodological, and ontological realism as three ways of interpreting a naturalistic narrative of history.

The eschatological conception of history.

Let me try to give you an example of what I mean by this. In his now famous letter to Can Grande, Dante gave an astonishingly straight-forward account of the levels of interpretation that one might bring to his Comedia. Dante’s Divine Comedy is more than a mere story; it admits of several levels of interpretation, but as the great work of literature that it is, these many interpretations are simply perspectives on a undivided whole. Dante distinguishes four interpretations, including the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical (or metaphysical). Dante also points out that all the senses of interpretation other than the literal can be considered allegorical, so we can make a simple distinction between the literal and the allegorical, but there are also different allegorical methods of interpreting the text.

The political conception of history.

So too with the narrative of the world revealed to us by history: there are literal, allegorical, moral, and metaphysical senses, and in an explicitly naturalistic narrative of history we can distinguish within this overall narrative the thread of biological naturalism, the thread of methodological naturalism, and the thread of ontological naturalism. Thus the naturalistic conception of history is an undivided whole that has distinct facets that we will see depending upon the perspective we bring to the narrative whether as observers or participants (or participant observers).

Dante distinguished four levels of interpretation in his Divine Comedy -- the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical -- but the work itself is an undivided whole.

The our four conceptions of history described above, now including the naturalistic conception, taken in isolation are abstract ideas in and of themselves, and abstract ideas are rarely embodied in a recognizable form in the rough and tumble of the real world. In other words, in its pure form this quadripartite distinction is overly schematic. To make these schematic conceptions have more relevance and applicability, we must see each conception as embodying an ideal (here we mean “ideal” not in the sense of something to which we aspire, but in the sense of a pure concept of theory untrammeled by practice) that is an end point on a continuum.

Moreover, the four conceptions of history are two pairs, each of which is the antithesis of the other, so that these four conceptions two continua, each continuum anchored at each end by a conception antithetical to that at the other end point of the continuum. Thus the political (affirmation of human agency) and the cataclysmic (lack of human agency) are at opposite ends of what we may call the continuum of agency, while the eschatological (non-human agency) and the naturalistic (non-human non-agency) are at opposite ends of what we may call the continuum of agents.

On this graph, the x axis is the continuum of agents, stretching from human agents to non-human agents; the y axis is the continuum of agency, stretching from complete efficacy of agency to complete absence of agency. These two continua taken together constitute a two dimensional matrix whereupon we can plot subtle distinctions in conceptions of history.

The graph that we can formulate by crossing the continuum of agency with the continuum of agents yields a two dimensional field in which we can plot the subtler shades of meaning of various conceptions of history as they are to be found actually instantiated in the beliefs of particular human beings. In thus offering a subtler interpretation we demonstrate our understanding that the naturalistic conception of history — or any other single conception — is mixed with other conceptions, and probably all conceptions are found to a greater or lesser degree within our minds.

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Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology

Sunday

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Newton, not Kant, was the focus of the Enlightenment ideal of natural reason, as in the famous lines of Alexander Pope -- Nature and nature's laws lay hid in Night. / God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light

In several posts — A Formulation of Naturalism, Two Thoughts on Naturalism, and Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation — I have attempted to give explicit formulations of the idea of naturalism as it underlies contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. It has just occurred to me, in the wake of my recent posts about object oriented ontology — Metaphysical Responsibility, The Loss of Objecthood, and Back to shop class! — that another approach to naturalism may be made by way of object oriented ontology.

Thinking about the posited “flat” ontologies of various formulations of object oriented philosophy I recalled an evocation of flatness from a decade or more ago in Problems in philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry by Colin McGinn. Colin McGinn made a name for himself in philosophy by denying that philosophy can answer many of the traditional questions of philosophy — including, paradigmatically, the mind-body problem — but on the way to promulgating the inefficacy of philosophy McGinn outlined a number of interesting philosophical positions, for example:

“Philosophy is an attempt to get outside the constitutive structure of our minds. Reality itself is everywhere flatly natural, but because of our cognitive limits we are unable to make good on this general ontological principle. Our epistemic architecture obstructs knowledge of the real nature of the objective world. I shall call this thesis transcendental naturalism, TN for short.” (pp. 2-3)

Now this first sentence I have quoted comes off a lot like the rejection of correlationism that is central to many approaches to object oriented ontology. To have this parallel extension of Copernicanism in McGinn immediately followed by an ontological principle that appeals to the flatness of naturalism’s account of the world is almost eerie. It wouldn’t be eerie if we knew that the recent object orient philosophers had been reading McGinn or recent analytical philosophy, but they seem to spend most of their time in the company of Heidegger and his continental epigones. In any case, it is remarkable that both analytical and continental thought should be converging, from different directions, on a similar philosophical goal.

McGinn’s Transcendental Naturalism invokes a implicit flat ontology of the world as it is, apart from distortions introduced into our picture of the world by our cognitive architecture. Thus McGinn, like the object oriented philosopher, must begin with a robust metaphysics of the most traditionally Western sort, with a fundamental distinction between appearance and reality. While earlier philosophies in the Western tradition (especially since Hume and Kant) laid greater emphasis upon our perceptual architecture than our cognitive architecture, it is important see that this is a difference in emphasis and not a difference in the essential nature of the undertaking. One could discover a kind of “transcendental naturalism” in Kant as well — despite Kant’s paradigmatic correlationism — but it would need to be formulated mutatis mutandis with McGinn: “Reality itself is everywhere flatly natural, but because of our perceptual limits we are unable to make good on this general ontological principle.”

In Two Thoughts on Naturalism I maintained that naturalism takes science at face value, and it is clear that in Quentin Meillassoux’s work science once again has a central place in continental epistemology. I say “once again” because from the latter part of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century science had a problematic relationship to continental philosophy. While philosophy during this period was dominated by Marx and Freud — the former claiming to the scientific, the latter actually being scientific — the spirit animating the appropriation of Marx and Freud was not scientific, and this is one of the developments that led to a profound split between continental and analytical thought. Analytical philosophy had a very different way of being influenced by the dramatic gains in scientific knowledge that occurred in the twentieth century.

Thus with Meillassoux’s frank engagement with contemporary scientific knowledge we find ourselves in a milieu more like late Enlightenment era thought. In other words, we find ourselves in a situation more like the Kantian epoch, when the great discoveries of Newton were being assimilated by philosophy. For Kant certainly took the science of his day seriously, and he was able to distinguish the best science of his day — Newton, and all that Newton represents — and so to avoid the all-too-common philosophical pitfall of engaging with pseudo-science.

Even though the apparent unity of object oriented philosophy is to be found in its rejection of Kantian correlationism, we see that on another level an acceptance of Kantian naturalism is as much a point of agreement in the diverse body of speculative realist thought. And I will say that it is high time for a return to the ideals of the Enlightenment in continental thought. The kind of naturalism that we find in the Enlightenment has much in common with contemporary naturalism — the interest in explanatory mechanisms as well as the interest in minimalist formulations that go no further afield than necessary, which latter is certainly the spirit animating Hume — and can be clearly differentiated from the quasi-scientific naturalism of twentieth century continental thought. Just as interesting, Enlightenment naturalism is equally distinct from the science-mimicry of analytical philosophy during the twentieth century.

To posit a flat ontology is to posit a world that is flatly natural in McGinn’s sense, and to posit a flatly natural world is to posit an ontology that is flat. How one accounts for the apparent deviations from flatness then becomes a central question. There are different ways to do this, but, as I noted above, we have through this shared interest in a flat world a new convergence between continental and analytical philosophy — despite many manifestations of both that continue to be mutually exclusive — and this shared interest has much in common with the spirit of the Enlightenment as it was once expressed in philosophy.

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