Paul Ricoeur’s Case for Hermeneutics Against Symbolic Logic

Reproduced from a Print Copy, and Posted by Cain Pinto

Paul Ricoeur

*This excerpt is taken in entirety from Paul Ricoeur’s magisterial Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970).

 …what advantages can the hermeneutician adduce when faced with formal logic? To the artificiality of logical symbols, which can be written and read but not spoken he will oppose an essentially oral symbolism, in each instance received and accepted as a heritage. The man who speaks in symbols is first of all a narrator; he transmits an abundance of meaning over which he has little command. This abundance, this density of manifold meaning, is what gives him food for thought and solicits his understanding; interpretation consists less is suppressing ambiguity than in understanding it and explicating its richness. It may also be said that logical symbolism is empty, whereas symbolism in hermeneutics is full; it renders manifest the double meaning of worldly or psychical reality…[S]ymbols are bound: the sensible sign is bound by the symbolic meaning that dwells in it and gives it transparency and lightness; the symbolic meaning is in turn bound to its sensible vehicle, which gives it weight and opacity. One might add that this is also the way symbols bind us, viz. by giving thought a content, a flesh, a density.

These distinctions and oppositions are not false; they are merely unfounded. A confrontation which restricts itself to the symbolic texture of symbols and does not face up to the question of their foundation in reflection will soon prove embarrassing to the advocate of hermeneutics. For the artificiality and emptiness of logical symbolism are simply the counterpart and condition of the true aim of this logic, viz. to guarantee the nonambiguity of arguments; what the hermeneutician calls double meaning is, in logical terms, ambiguity, i.e. equivocity of words and amphiboly of statements. A peaceful juxtaposition of hermeneutics and symbolic logic is therefore impossible; symbolic logic quickly makes any lazy compromise untenable. Its very “intolerance” forces hermeneutics to radically justify its own language.
We must therefore understand this intolerance in order to arrive a contrario at the foundation of hermeneutics.

If the rigour of symbolic logic seems more exclusive than that of traditional formal logic, the reason is that symbolic logic is not a simple prolongation of the earlier logic. It does not represent a higher degree of formalization; it proceeds from a global decision concerning ordinary language, the amphibolous character of its construction, the confusion inherent in metaphor and idiomatic expressions, the emotional resonance of highly descriptive language. Symbolic logic despairs of natural language precisely at the point where hermeneutics believes in its implicit “wisdom”.

This struggle begins with the exclusion from the properly cognitive sphere of all language that does not give factual information. The rest of discourse is classified under the heading of emotive and horatory functions of language; that which does not give factual information expresses emotions, feelings or attitudes, or urges others to behave in some particular way.

Reduced thus to the informative function, language still has to be divested of the equivocity of words and the amphiboly of grammatical constructions; verbal ambiguity must be unmasked so as to eliminate it from arguments and to employ coherently the same words in the same sense within the same argument. The function of definitions that succeed in doing this are scientific ones. These are not content with pointing out the meaning of words already have in usage, independently of their definition; instead they very strictly characterise an object in light of a scientific theory (for example, the definition of force as the product of mass and acceleration in the context of Newtonian theory).

But symbolic logic goes further. For it, the price of univocity is the creation of a symbolism with no ties to natural to language. This notion of a symbol excludes the other notion of symbol. The recourse to a completely artificial symbolism introduces in a logic a difference not only of degree but also of nature; the symbols of the logician intervene precisely at the point where arguments of classical logic, formulated in ordinary language, run into an invincible and, in a way, residual ambiguity. Thus the logical disjunction sign ∨ eliminates the ambiguity of words that express disjunction in ordinary language (Eng., or; Ger., oder; Fr., ou); ∨ expresses only the particular meaning common to the inclusive disjunction (the sense of the Latin vel) according to which at least one is false; ∨ resolves the ambiguity by formulating the inclusive disjunction as the part common to the two modes of disjunction. Likewise the symbol ⊃ resolves the ambiguity inherent in the notion of implication (which may denote formal implication, either logical, definitional, or causal); the symbol ⊃ formulates the common partial meaning, namely, that any hypothetical statement with a true antecedent and a false consequent must be false; the symbol is thus an abbreviation of a longer symbolism which expresses the negation of the conjunction of the truth value of the antecedent and the falsity of the consequent: ∼ (p. ∼ q).

Thus the artificial language of logical symbolism enables one to determine the validity of arguments in all cases where a residual ambiguity can be ascribed to the structure of ordinary language. The precise point where symbolic logic cuts across and contests hermeneutics, therefore, is this: verbal equivocity and syntactical amphiboly—in short, the ambiguity of ordinary language—can be overcome only at the level of a language whose symbols have a meaning completely determined by the truth table whose construction they allow. Thus the sense of the symbol ∨ is completely determined by its truth function, inasmuch as it serves to safeguard the validity of the disjunctive syllogism; likewise the sense of the symbol ⊃ completely exhausts its meaning in the construction of the truth table of the hypothetical syllogism. These constructions guarantee that the symbols are completely unambiguous, while the nonambiguity of the symbols assures the universal validity of arguments.

As long as the logic of multiple meaning is not guaranteed in this reflective function, it necessarily falls under the blows of formal and symbolic logic. In the eyes of the logician, hermeneutics will always be suspected of fostering a culpable complacency toward equivocal meanings, of surreptitiously giving an informative function to expressions that have merely an emotive or horatory function. Hermeneutics thus falls under the fallacies of relevance which a sound logic denounces.

The only thing that can come to the aid of equivocal expressions and truly ground a logic of double meaning is the problematic of reflection. The only thing that can justify equivocal expressions is their a priori role in the movement of self-appropriation by self which constitutes reflective activity. This a priori function pertains not to a formal but to a transcendental logic, if by transcendental logic is meant the establishing of the conditions of possibility of a domain of objectivity in general. The task of such a logic is to extricate by a regressive method the notions presupposed in the constitution of a type of experience and a corresponding type of reality. Transcendental logic is not exhausted in the Kantian a priori. The connection we have established between reflection upon the I think, I am qua act, and the signs scattered in the various cultures of that act of existing, opens up a new field of experience, objectivity, and reality. This is the field to which the logic of double meaning pertains—a logic we have qualified above as complex but not arbitrary, and rigorous in its articulations. The principle of limitation to the demands of symbolic logic lies in the structure of reflection itself. If there is no such thing as the transcendental, there is no reply to the intolerance of symbolic logic; but if the transcendental is an authentic dimension of discourse, then new force is found in the reasons that can be opposed to the requirement of logicism that all discourse be measured by its treatise of arguments. These reasons, which seemed to us to be left hanging in the air for want of a foundation, are as follows:

1. The requirement of univocity holds only for discourse that presents itself as argument: but reflection does not argue, it draws no conclusion, it neither deduces or induces; it states the conditions of possibility whereby empirical consciousness can be made equal to thetic consciousness. Hence, “equivocal” applies only to those expressions that ought to be univocal in the course of a single “argument” but are not; in the reflective use of multiple-meaning symbols there is no fallacy of ambiguity: to reflect upon these symbols and to interpret them is one and the same act.
2. The understanding developed by reflection upon symbols is not a weak substitute for definition, for reflection is not a type of thinking that defines and thinks according to “classes.” This brings us back to the Aristotelian problem of the “many meanings of being.” Aristotle was the first to see clearly that philosophical discourse is not subject to the logical alternative of univocal-equivocal, for being is not a “genus”
   ; and yet, being is said; but it “is said in many ways”.
3. Let us go back to the very first alternative considered above: a statement that does not give factual information, we said, expresses only the emotions or attitudes of a subject. Reflection, however, falls outside this alternative; that which makes possible the appropriation of the I think, I am is neither the empirical statement not the emotive statement, but something other than either of these.

This case for interpretation rests entirely on the reflective function of interpretative thought. If the double movement of symbols towards reflection and of reflection towards symbols is valid, interpretative thought is well grounded. Hence it may be said, at least, negatively, that such thought is not measured by a logic of arguments; the validity of philosophical statements cannot be arbitrated by a theory of language conceived as syntax; the semantics of philosophy is not swallowed up by a symbolic logic.

These propositions concerning philosophic discourse do not enable us, however, to say positively what a philosophical statement is; such an affirmation could be fully justified only by its actually being said. At least we can affirm that the indirect, symbolic language of reflection can be valid, not because it is equivocal, but in spite of its being equivocal”.

Bibliography  

Paul Ricoeur. Trans. Denis Savage. “Book I. Problematic: Reflection and Equivocal Language”. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 1970. P. 47- 54

The Genital Utopian: Wilhelm Reich

Review: Adventures in the Orgasmatron: The Invention of Sex

 Cain Pinto

 

The legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a tool for social analysis, rather than personal therapy alone, obtains from its study of linguistic subject matter as a starting point; meaningful experiences and banal, timorous or ecstatic, achieve their necessary signifying, symbolic import by passing through language—the shared strata of societal totality and individual selves is, after all, linguistic[1]. The sober task of general psychoanalysis, then, is the mere collation, arrangement and fidelious systematisation of collective and individual experiences so that specific deadlocks, repressions and maladaptations of society, and of the self, can be understood, and then, redressed in conjunction with a newly enriched perspective of reality in relation to the social and personal inner life. Of course, Wilhelm Reich thought otherwise: finding that all maladaptations were repressions of sexual desire [according to Freudian dogma], he imagined all repression could be eliminated by abrogating social controls which regulated genital sexuality[2]—a task for which he found his own reactionary brand of orgasmic psychoanalysis especially suited. His psychoanalysis sought to make society orgastically potent, and thus achieve a world peaceful and free from the perversions of men under sway of Eros and Thanatos.

 

“Of course we are exciting patients sexually,” Reich told an audience of coworkers assembled in his Forest Hills Home, in response to [the charge of carrying out orgies at his clinic],…“but not with their dirty fantasy…And we don’t manipulate the patient’s genitals; but if we did, again, we wouldn’t do it with their dirty fantasy.”

—Turner, Christopher. Adventures in the Orgasmatron: The Invention of Sex. London, GB: Fourth Estate, 2012.

 

It is more than a little ironic, schizoid perhaps, that Reich for all his raging antipathy for Nazi fascism,—and Communism which he came to christen “Red Fascism” after he was ousted for smuggling in his outré project of a genital utopia[3] under the guise of Communist ideology—, would later come to become so megalomaniacal as to compel his disciples to sign Confessionals avowing his asinine, abyssal theoretical leaps. Giving credit where it is due, for Reich, will entail a grudging acceptance of the fact that some imbeciles do change the world for the better with their iconoclasm. Reich was the first psychoanalyst to align himself with a political cause, first as a Socialist and then as a Communist— at cost of being fired by each of his vocational obsessions turn by turn. He also put the Sexual Revolution in motion with his dictum: “…a room of his own for every adolescent”, issuing impassioned sermons about the dire need for twenty somethings to have gotten their rocks off lest their vile, emotionally plaguey virginity “…lead to problems later on[4]…”

 

A disapprover of marriage, when caught in his relationship with a pregnant Ilse Ollendorff headed on toward certain nuptials, Reich had to answer an American judge about certain volumes of Lenin and Trotsky found in his possession in 1941. After having professed his present political benignity, driven as he was these days by his neat para-political philosophy—an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away—of orgone induced orgastic empowerment for genital utopians of the future, and his prestigious membership in the International Society of Plasmogeny to demonstrate his innocence in a Red-crazed America, the stenographer betrayed Reich’s true genital predilection and posturing by mistyping the same as International Society of Polygamy[5]. Among his crazier capers were the dubious distinction of having introduced an orgone accumulator, a crudely built wooden box lined with several layers of steel wool and metal plating, to transmit orgone energy from the atmosphere and make the naked and huddled user orgastically potent, cure his common colds, cancers, and warts and all; a certain type of chiropractic-analytical therapeutic session where he kneaded away repressions from buttocks, jaws and stomachs, he said he’d never seen a neurotic without a repressed, stiff and plaguey stomach; and, ambitiously building a cloud-buster which performed many a fortuitous task like clearing storm clouds, bringing rain on order etc.

 

All in all an inveterate, schizoid and true romantic, Reich blew the lid off of psychoanalysis’ then still apolitical orientation, opening the way to more out of the [orgone accumulator] box interventions across philosophy and emancipatory politics. Christopher Turner’s book is sharp, uproariously funny, and surprisingly empathetic treatment of a scandalous prophet and clown.

 

Bibliography

Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Savage, Denis. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 1970. Print.

 

Turner, Christopher. Adventures in the Orgasmatron: The Invention of Sex. London, GB: Fourth Estate, 2012. Print.

---

[1] Ricoeur, Paul. Trans. Savage, Denis. “§ I. The Placing of Freud; Ch. I. Language, Symbol and Interpretation”. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, 1970. P. 5- 6.

[2] Turner, Christopher. “Europe”. Adventures in the Orgasmatron: The Invention of Sex. P. 106.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid. P. 133.

[5] Ibid. P. 288.

Review of Erik Davis’ “TechGnosis” (1998)

By Cain Pinto

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information(1998) by Erik Davis is a level headed exploration of the collective fetishes and taboos of our technocratic agon. Let not the book’s breezy tone and tongue in cheek yet pyrotechnic proclivity for floating self-conscious portmanteaux like ‘eschatechnology’ and ‘datapocalypse’ among its serious enumerations be an impediment to the receipt of delightful, well considered and erudite insights that are packed in for good measure.

Erik Davis: Author of TechGnosis

The thesis of the book is not original but is fleshed out in a highly persuasive way and is wide in its reach of resources and analytical framework: that the project of the Enlightenment, seeking to dethrone religiomystical ways of understanding the world, by the use of instrumental reason, perpetuated magical ways of thinking while occulting them into the deeper ordering, unconscious structures of technological rationality is a proposition we have been made by theorists before. All in all, the dispassionate eye of Davis is an excellent vantage for the uninitiated and a succinct recapitulation to the blasé psychonaut and acquisitive dabbler.

The profusion of cults, the rash like irruption of mass entertainment products that gather attention across the globe among diverse audiences, the giddy ecstasy of communication and the tenacious optimism of cutting edge science which rivals the mystical pull of the numinous hearken back to a tribalism that never really ceased to breathe animating pneuma into the erstwhile deus ex machina of bellow-and-cudgel positivism. This book, though several years old in a world that ages by the minute, in sync with sound bites and giga, has aged remarkably well, and I suspect it will remain relevant until man’s elusive pursuit of the apocalypse will meet its resolution by coinciding with some trite prophecy.

Davis’ work is a fine piece of writing, capable of entertaining D & D nerds and tree-hugging ecofeminists alike, while cozying up with oddball, well read history buffs and pop culture connoisseurs. It is must read for the terminally optimistic empiricists of today, as a word of caution, a grain of salt, an obsidian mirror, a quick read in fast times.

 

My Rating: *** ½

                                                                                                         Work Cited

Davis, Erik. (2004). TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York, NY: Harmony Books.

Print.

Marginalia on Skeptical Thinking: Interview with Steven Gibson on the limitations of skepticism as a movement

He is a small-town entrepreneur who is by nature at odds with “the man.” The man says he is unemployable, and he is increasingly comfortable with that reality. He has been self-employed in video production and multimedia for the last decade. It was there that he wrote the well-reviewed novel of big and skeptical ideas “A Secret of the Universe: a Story of Love, Loss, and the Discovery of an Eternal Truth.”  Before that he ran a small office products dealership for a decade. Now he has started what will hopefully be the occupation for his next decade–a boutique car and driver service for independent seniors and busy professionals. Between all of that he questions everything and enjoy time with friends, his significant other, and his kids. I first came across him five years ago on his old podcast, Truth-Driven thinking.  Recently Steven Gibson has been more concerned with popular fallacies in economics, and over-claims in regards to religion and politics that are not often covered in the general skeptic’s community, or are covered only in a standard “Democratic Party” liberal or libertarian matter.  His honest struggling with the implications let me to want to talk with him on the issues in the community and the problems with skepticism as a “movement.”

C.Derick Varn:  What are the major “skeptical issues” that concern you that you don’t think get covered in the greater skeptic community?

Steven Gibson: ether it can be called a major “skeptical” issue or not is unclear; most of the “major issues” do seem to be adequately covered, almost by definition. That said, there remain many important areas of everyday life that appear to lack critical analysis. Economics and politics come to mind, though admittedly they are complex, “softer” areas of inquiry, so difficulties abound. That said, it seems to me that many, many assumptions exist about how our complex economies and markets work, and that economists don’t understand them nearly as well as advertised. Trickle that down to we everyday pundits and skeptical non-economists, and contrary to what we might expect, we see solutions promoted confidently–often quite certainly as ”obvious” truths. But it is clear that ideological biases are attached, perhaps hinting at how we wish the world worked.

Among my favorite commentators happens to be a Hayekian, Austrian-leaning economist from the not-so-left George Mason University, Russ Roberts. He hosts “Econtalk,” and is generally a shining example of how to discuss and disagree while employing intellectual honesty (there are a few exceptions). He often has guest economists from other “schools” who disagree with him. But what I enjoy most is that he seems to readily admit that although he finds his math and arguments more compelling, others are just as convinced their math and arguments are far superior. And the truth is that these very limited models of hugely complex and unpredictable systems appear relatively poorly understood. In fact that is a fundamental message of Nassim Taleb (“The Black Swan” among his great books), who has also been a guest on the program.

Many argue that economics as a discipline, is not a predictive science, and thus should be off the hook for its astonishing failures to predict the things that really matter–such as busts like the global financial collapse of 2008. You might recall that most of the leaders of our economy touted the solid footings of the economy, and dismissed the sub-prime mortgage meltdown as quite isolated (from Bernanke and Geithner to Greenspan and Krugman). The simple fact is that for something as vital as how finance and economics systems work and are managed, we simply don’t understand how they really work in the real world. And yet we make all sorts of moral judgments based upon our almost faith-based narratives of what works and what does not.

Steve Keen’s new models, and thinkers like Nassim Taleb, and maybe a few others like Alan Harvey are at least banging their heads on the established clergy and encouraging rigor and dialogue, but there is a long way to go, it would appear. How about a little humility. Doesn’t the fact that an entire discipline completely missed, and cannot explain, the most significant of events in their economic lifetime imply the need for a little humility? A little introspection?

On the political front I will be more brief. It probably doesn’t even need to be summarized again, but from fact-checking to confirmation bias, we can quickly set our skepticism aside when it is “our guy.”

 

As always, my observations are purely anecdotal, based perhaps too heavily on Facebook exchanges and other interactions; and I admit to being guilty myself. My concern is that we too seem to fall prey to tribally- and ideologically-driven biases, filters of data, and downright flawed reasoning–just like anyone else. Whether that is objectivism, free market worship, or equally strong Marxist or populist views, we are not immune. Yet we do not discuss these real-world implications of lack of ”skepticism” enough as a community.

For me, all roads lead to Rome. All the smaller, hard-science questions about how the world works are wonderful, but to me the goal would be to work up the chain to god questions, economics, happiness, and philosophical arguments. We should dabble in what is, and what could be. Unfortunately for this average guy from the Midwest, who has discovered just how little he knows, many of these disciplines are far over my head. That’s why I count on you and your readers. All I can tell you is that everywhere I look I see complexity and lack of understanding, but the appearance from others–including skeptics–of dogmatic certainty.

C.D.V.:  So what do you make of the relative decline of new atheism within the skeptics movement?

S.G.:   Gosh, that’s a tough question because of some built-in assumptions and definitions. If we stipulate that there is a skeptic movement, I’m a bit more hesitant to confess knowledge of the intimate link to new atheism, or of a decline in new atheism within that community. That said, if there is a decline it could be related to the natural cycle of things–there were a few bestselling books for a spell there that ignited conversations; that’s a great thing but momentum ebbs and flows. So I’m not certain about the premise.

It might be that the core of your question, however, focuses on whether or not atheism and skepticism are related; whether they should be; or better still if we run the risk of being scientistic when we spend lots of time on the god questions. At the risk of writing a book here, and showing my ignorance, I’ll take only a quick shot.

Atheism and skepticism are very much intertwined to the degree that supernatural explanations are used to describe natural events and make falsifiable (or potentially falsifiable) claims about how the natural world works. Taking actions based upon untrue assumptions can have horrible consequences. A sick child is refused a transfusion because god has told the parents to not allow it, and that this personal god actively will suspend the cause and effect of the world and move cells or molecules–without other known or unknown earthly cause–and thus heal him another way if we obey? That is a problem, and skeptics and scientists should be all over it. Great harm can come when any imagined claim about reality is acted upon without some degree of critical thinking, naturalistic testing, or thought. (Note: This is quite different than early intuition, thinking outside the box, and creativity or great insights or breakthroughs. (These appear to come from the same parts of the brain that religion does; one can be very “spiritual”, artsy, creative, intuitive, and even irrational, without resorting to defining the sources of such non-linear, non-reasoned creativity as supernatural.)

When “god claims” involve virgin births, causes of earthquakes, moving your pencil, or healing disease, it seems very cool to try to understand those mechanisms and falsify or prove the claim using earthly, naturalistic methods of science. The more we understand about earthly, natural “reality,” (always provisionally), the better off we are. Knowledge is a good thing, and improved knowledge of how the world really works, of causes and effects, always has accompanied forward progress and reduced human suffering. Always.

But beyond falsifiable claims, science has limits that should be recognized so as not to turn it into a religion or philosophy, without very clear disclaimers and delineations that we have entered a new realm (and maybe not even then; see naturalism.org as an admirable effort in that direction). Yes, one can probabilistically make guesses about the unknown based on the entirety of human knowledge, experience, observation, and testing–and thus suggest that a personal god who manipulates atoms is highly unlikely; but one cannot make definitive statements of certainty about that which is beyond our naturalistic, testable knowledge–at least it seems to me. We must be agnostic about mystical, non-falsifiable beliefs, as I believe even the great skeptic Marvin Gardner is said to have argued through his deistic beliefs. While I lean materialist, I realize that becomes a belief, and not the domain of science; . I have much to learn, but that is the thumbnail of my current thinking.

And to bring it full circle, to me it appears that new atheism gains traction slowly but surely when it stays in the realm of natural science, even when refuting claims of religion about testable claims. Where it seems to get itself in trouble is when it dips its toe too far over the line into scientism–which I might add that it does not do very often, but does do.

As for the “ought” part, I still say that all roads lead to Rome (the big questions), and that certainly religious claims made about cause and effect in the natural world are fair game and should be part of skeptical inquiry. But that ought to be engaged in carefully, compassionately, and kindly, with an eye on dialogue that makes the world better and affects meaningful improvements in the human condition. To simply badger or belittle, even with all the facts on your side, gets us nowhere.

C.D.V.:  To be fair, Steve, that was a trick question.  What do you think are the problems with the privileging of science over all other means of discourse for moral and aesthetics questions that often happens in the “skeptic’s community”  through use of disciplines which are themselves problematic as to demarcation as being scientific?  In this I would include things such as the use of simple evolutionary psychology or Dawkin’s memetics or Harris’s claims that morality is analogous to medical sceince to  the claims that the laws of evolution may apply to physics as being prime offenders?

S.G.:  So you are asking about the tendency of even skeptics to use soft or “sketchy” science (e.g. social science research, evolutionary psychology, etc.) in the arguments that science itself should be privileged above other means of answering moral and aesthetic questions? I’m a simple guy from Kalamazoo, and am probably over my head here so will simply say that I’m, well, skeptical of such arguments, and even dubious as to the motives for making them. Mix the demarcation problem with which philosophers of science have long wrestled, the dangers of groupthink and tribalism, and add the seductive power of a great narrative that makes so much sense that it “must” be true—and you have the potential for undermining the search for truth (via both the sketchy science itself, and the use of sketchy assumptions to oversell science, and its epistemological value).

I’ve long argued that one of the reasons we try to find truth in the world is so that we can take actions based upon how the world really works, which will minimize unanticipated consequences and make the world a better place (or less bad—depending on your perspective); conversely, when we take actions based on untruths, we get into all sorts of trouble. Simple. We want to seek truth, and need to be ever rigorous and vigilant of our claims, and avoid overselling what we actually know. But to take it another step, it’s my sense that science loses credibility when it crosses a line into scientism, and starts writing checks that just aren’t cashable (yet).

So it’s a simple answer that I would give: Sam Harris or others could certainly argue that science has the potential to answer moral and aesthetic questions, but as someone on the outside who owns and claims his ignorance on the topic, I can only say that so far I personally do not see any reason to yield too much ground to science on moral and aesthetic questions, especially where such arguments are based upon convenient but far-from-certain narrative hypotheses about what is really true. But again, I’m a non-academic observer and just one person on the jury of billions of humans who get to have opinions and votes; mine could be way wrong, but I’m saying that for good reason or bad, science has some convincing to do on me yet.

C.D.V.: How did you experiment in a Truth Driven Life community on line go?  Why do you think it didn’t take off?

S.G.:  Well I should probably explain what it was, and what the vision was. The goal was to create a “skeptic” learning community, and the “Bloomfire” technology behind it offered some promise to streamline multimedia and webcam exchanges, archival, and indexing such that participants could learn from the posts and exchanges. Those posts and video-heavy exchanges would then remain there for future members. I had noticed that too often we rehash old discussions in forums or “in-groups,” new members don’t know that we’ve already covered that, and the group or discussion never moves forward. But more than that, my suspicion was—and is—that for many people in today’s world it can be difficult to find authentic, open-minded, and intelligent people with whom I can have safe, substantive, stimulating, and open conversations—where emotion is mastered such that all honest thoughts and inquiries are fair game. So it was both a social tool, and a learning environment (dare I say “like church”?).

While I’m painfully aware of the dangers of in-group thinking and groupthink, I have also long argued that everyone needs a community—a safe place where likeminded people can grow and explore. The idea was to combine the power of peer learning with access to subject-matter experts, guest bloggers, great minds, and exclusive content—while supporting the Truth-Driven Thinking programming and mission. I envisioned more than a “forum”—rather a place where authentic people could gather socially, almost as if physically (via webcam elements of the platform), submit content; read; watch; learn; share; support one another; debate; and ask big questions.

We could also have some rules about tone, demeanor, and civil exchanges. This would be more of a “knowledge club” than a public square. Maybe even invitation, and maybe even with some dues to cover admin and membership, and contribute toward my then podcast.

So why did it fail? Probably for many reasons. 1) My time and resources became scarce, so I couldn’t give it a fair shot; 2) People have Facebook and other places to be social online—so who really needs one more; 3) the Bloomfire creators sold the company, went “enterprise,” and I believed that the platform wouldn’t be around for long in that form; 4) I’m not sure it was as technologically “there” as I’d hoped; 5) Eventually the utopian community probably doesn’t exist anyway—but part of me would still like to try someday.

 C.D.V.:   Why do you think that the skeptical community has such a limited range of political options expressed in it?  Is this an indication that politics has replaced religion as an ideological framework within the movement?

S.G.: Based upon only anecdotes and gut, I will try to speculate. (Data driven? Who, me?) That said, I do think the skeptical community has a narrow range of political options that are expressed in it. And yes, I believe this is an indication that politics has replaced religion as an ideological framework within “the movement”.

Due to my retrenchment and restructuring of my income and life, most of my interaction with skeptics, listeners to my former podcast, and readers of my novel of skeptical ideas come via Facebook these days. So my anecdotes are drawn heavily from those interactions, but also from my broader body of exchanges over the years with many self-identified skeptics around the world. That said, I will hastily categorize my experience of skeptics into two main groups: radical libertarian, free-market, Ayn Randian or Hayekian Objectivists on one side—and general Democratic party enthusiasts in the other cluster. These groups find common ground on social issues: getting the government out of vaginas, etc., however they tend to differ on economic issues, ethical questions of fairness and wealth redistribution, effects of economic policy (Krugman vs. Laffer), and the very philosophical ethics that underpin those views—if they’ve ever even really thought about it that way.

Time and again we skeptics pay lip service to the idea that my “beliefs” won’t own me, that emotional involvement and confirmation bias are to be guarded against, that no notion should be held above critical scrutiny, and that we will follow the evidence wherever it leads us—happily, and on any issue. But I simply don’t see humans, and skeptics are certainly human, behave that way. Our “beliefs” most certain to own us and blind us to pursuit of truth.

Economics is a wonderful example, as is the “issue” of anthropogenic global warming. In the economics sphere, one of my favorite scholarly voices is Russ Roberts, who hosts a podcast called EconTalk (Econtalk.org). What I love is not only his affinity for genuine intellectual exchanges among people who differ on their interpretations of economic theory (hypotheses)—but his experienced voice in articulating the limits of the discipline. Yet few economists would be as honest. In short, and I’m trying to be careful stating someone else’s views, Roberts admits that on the big questions—we just don’t know! That’s right, he sees major fights between “schools” of economic thought, where everyone has their data and believes their data are the best, and has their regression analysis and their hugely complex data sets and multivariate equations—but the reality is that they are simply inconclusive and unresolved questions! These are experts at rhetoric, but deeply divided by school, tribe, gang, or whatever you want to call it, which biases them and creates the illusion of certainty.

Add famed thinker Nassim Taleb or Australian economist Steve Keen (http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/), who passionately and persuasively argues that much of the neoclassical economic model is completely oversimplified and unsupported by the data (from aggregate demand to the critical role of total debt/shadow banking leverage in the system)—and you get my point. There is great doubt. But we don’t ever see academics or talking heads speaking as if there is any doubt whatsoever. Everywhere we see certainty. We are no different than those who are religious, we need narratives and structure, and will mold reality to fit them. We will then coalesce into tribes based on those “beliefs”.

So to tie this back to skeptics, and the question of politics having replaced religion as a narrative ideological framework, I see this play out routinely with both the objectivist/libertarian grouping, and the Krugman-ish liberal culture side. But what if both are wrong on this issue? What if rather than spending vs. revenue, we had a more sophisticated understanding of complex dynamics? Some of the same elements are at play in the global warming “debates”, but you get the point.

Again and again I think we have to pause and ask ourselves what would happen if it turned out that we were wrong, and then specifically examine how that would make us feel? Are we that pastor who has so tightly defined our role in the cosmos to a single school of thought or religion that we are blind to the other options? Are we so unwilling to challenge our very sense of self definition and how we interact with the world that we would succumb to the confirmation bias? Are we so afraid of something being taken from us that we cannot see the starving masses? What is the reality about what motivates humans? I don’t know, but I’m comfortable saying that.

The way I hear skeptics speak (and write) on a routine basis makes me think that even the most educated, rhetorically brilliant among us might simply be delusional and tribal at a higher level. Sometimes I lose the will to scale that wall. Frankly, it gets depressing, because I see it in myself as well. It’s human nature.

And that is my longwinded take on your question as to “why” we have a limited range of political options: we are human. We are tribal. We cluster.

C.D.V.: Do you see the passion in the various skeptics communities waning as divisions within the communities are getting more exposed in social network groups?

S.G.: It’s hard to know and I could be biased by my own skeptic friends and experiences, but in my humble opinion the passion does seem to be waning, perhaps as a result of the exposed divisions. The unity and “family feel” seem threatened. Divisions like “elevator gate” and disagreements over style (a.k.a. “don’t be a dick”—in Phil Plait’s terms), and even over scientistic overreaches do indeed take a toll.  But it seems possible to me that other natural factors contribute to ebbs and flows as well.

For a long while I’ve wondered if skepticism for any individual doesn’t have a bit of a predictable trajectory and life cycle—perhaps not unlike that of a new adopter of a religion. (No, I am not equating them, per say.) Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be religious de-conversion. There is often a period of strife and upheaval, or at least some emotional wrestling with a good dose of social side effects. There is also new beauty, and new joy, and perhaps a new sense of connection with new friends and people who think very differently than you used to—refreshingly so. But as with church, the power of that initial transition wanes over time. It might be in our own minds or it might be there is a real reduction in attention and outreach from the community as the dust settles and everyday life settles in. But one way or another we revert to the norms, or regress to the mean, of human behaviors and everyday experiences. Normalcy rules, and there are great people, assholes, and everything in between within a “community” that has very few shared beliefs, cultures, or norms to hold them together. (And see my prior thoughts on how we tribally segregate and remain quite fallible to all sorts of very human behaviors.)

So perhaps the initial trajectory of the experiential curve flattens, and individuals go from raging fire and front-of-mind consciousness, to the warm glow of a naturalistic worldview that shall sustain and enrich them for a lifetime perhaps—albeit at maybe a somewhat less intense level. So could that micro-level effect, if real, also affect and play out on the macro level? Just a thought.

The good news, and my hope, is that there are new people and new passions being introduced to the process on an ongoing basis, and that more and more people are adopting more reason-driven and skeptical worldviews. It does seem to me that this is happening at the same time as our current ebbing, as supported by several recent surveys. So I am not without hope, and not without great gratitude for what skeptic groups and passionate individuals accomplish.

Perhaps this relates to another of my unachieved goals. I used to call my blog “Perspectives: food for the skeptic’s sole (if there is one).” Not unlike churches, who always seem to struggle with retention, its my hope that skepticism and intellectually honest discourse can inspire more soul-feeding initiatives like TED, or The Amazing Meeting, or skeptical comedy or art, in order to feed our intellect and fulfill our social needs—such that our passion remains, and the trajectory of our individual curves don’t flatten quite so much. We are, after all, humans. We need to be connected. We need to be re-amazed. We need to be reinvigorated.

C.D.V.: Do you think this maybe because skepticism is conceive internally as a set of methodological and not an ideological movements?

S.G.: As always I’d drop a disclaimer (in addition to the one that says “what do I know anyway”): that is that it’s probably hard to say for sure how the “movement” conceives or perceives itself. But to the degree it exists might there be some waning passion in the skeptic community as the result of a reflexive and endemic in-group perception as being focused on method more than ideology? Again I’ll bite and say yes, because there are real philosophical schisms, right? Many of the divisions I mentioned (and others) have to do with substantive differences in meta-ethics, ethics, morality, and/or guiding beliefs and philosophies. But those of us who are not trained in philosophy, or who are new to it, are often unaware that our differences are at all born of ideological and philosophical assumptions. So yes, if what unites us is an affinity and affection for methodological naturalism, the fact that there are schisms, tribal divisions, or sects should probably not be surprising—especially in light of the lack of common ideology or guiding principles.

C.D.V.: What do you see as your new projects in regards to skepticism?

S.G.: Well, for the immediate future I am rather occupied with the mundane aspects of existence and survival. That said, as finances and time someday allow, I would like to return to some non-fiction book ideas that I’ve been pondering. Specifically I would like to further explore the real-world implications and practical application of a naturalistic worldview to everyday life, and even more so to the challenges of social-sexual ethics and marital customs. I touched on some of those issues and challenges in my novel of skeptical ideas, but would like to explore them in a deep and personal way in a non-fiction book. I see great pain and angst caused by our unrealistic expectations of strict monogamy for life, romantic love, and the western pressures to achieve all depth of intimate experience through a single person, exclusively, forever. Obviously there are great depths and significant complexities to be plumbed there. And as with all things, the more I learn and experience, the less I “know” for certain, and the more gray I see. But that’s another topic.

C.D.V.: Anything you’d like to say in closing?

S.G.: Just thanks for your work, posts, writings and thoughts. I readily admit that as a non-academic, my skeptic voice is truly just that of a grassroots life traveler in a state of evolving. You and other academics have so much to give and share with we who are emerging from our Midwest (Western) cocoons. Thanks for doing so, and thanks for rolling with my occasional and obvious ignorance on many levels. But I guess that’s really what it is all about, connecting and influencing a humanity that is composed of people on many different levels of their journeys, and with many different capacities. So we have our work cut out for us. Especially you.

The thick and thin as power plays in the field of Aesthetics

There are two trends dominant in academic discussions about the humanities that I find problematic, if not outright repellent. The “thin” move of the likes of E.O. Wilson and Sam Harris to claim that sense some notion of the aesthetic is evolutionary, then all that needs to be said can be said in terms of biology. The other notion is that of those of the post-Althusserian school who deny any “natural” category and subsume it all to ideology: there is “no human nature,” “no species being,” and no aesthetic categories. Both frankly are power-plays more than legitimate thinking: the later removes any empirical check to any artistic claim, while being “thick” it is also essentially putting all power in the realm of those philosophers of suspicion. The former is thin, and places power in terms of biology, but it’s claim could be said of to be even MORE foundationally true of physics. But no one would expect an electro-magnetic analysis of paint to be able to stand for all that is usefully said about art or literature, so the move seems again to suspiciously favor the field of those who make them.

The truth of the matter is probably much harder as there is no reason to assume the validity of parsimony: both biological and ideological limits exist, mediate our views, and contort our notions of truth and possibility. Both the biological and the ideological shift throughout history and change our notions of art and even of self. Yet neither can could be said to be solely determinate. The thick and thin are both necessary descriptors as the biological world is real as is the ideological world, and both are limits and as limits determine thoughts, but neither are solely determinate nor do I see evidence they they completely subordinate the will in any way. A limit is not a cause, and even a cause is not necessarily the sole cause.

Marginalia on Skeptical Thinking: Interview with Simon Frankel Pratt, Part 2

The first part of this interview is here. 

Skepoet: What do you make of Jonathan Haidt’s research that indicates ”liberals” have three spheres of value while conservatives have five? I see this related to the your second point about the function of religion. Although I should be disclose my opinion, and say that I think Haidt trans-historicizes both  liberalism and conservatism in a way that is highly problematic.

Simon Pratt:  It would be very strange to suggest that Liberals literally lacked those two spheres of value, but as an ideal typical model, I think it captures something important about the relationship between socio-economic circumstances and values. This is because Liberal and Conservative, globally, tends to correlate closely to urban and rural, and particularly so in the US. Is it surprising that people who live in nuclear families in cosmopolitan centres where diverse ethnic, economic, and linguistic groups interact daily will be less concerned with the sort of values indicative and protective of in-group chauvinism? I don’t think so. Rather than understand Haidt as trans-historicising liberalism and conservatism, I see him as revealing, perhaps by proxy, what happens when you throw people together in relatively unprecedented ways, and expose human beings to a huge array of identity categories. Unsurprisingly, Social Identity Theorists studying conflict have found that places where people meet and cooperate with members of other groups than their own usually feature less bigotry.

How does my interpretation of Haidt compare to yours?

S.:  It’s more charitable, but it is not out of sync with my suspicion that you’re right about the social and economic structure affects things more than ideological ones in the way most liberals use the term. (As Academics, we both know that Marxist and Weberians use ideology entirely differently and in a way that confuses most outsiders).   One thing I noticed Haidt had to do though was place both the far left and libertarians into a liberal camp.  This may be useful for the comparison between rural and urban social values, but it’s highly misleading to ideological battles.  That’s glossed by the categories.

Back to religion:  What do you make of the recent study that shows that middle class, educated people tend to stay religious in higher numbers than the uneducated?  It’s a recent trend, but one that bucks most of the Enlightenment predictions about American religiosity being tied to education and poverty-level.

S.P.:   Grouping libertarians and far-leftists together makes some sense if you consider the historical origins of their ideologies, in terms of how they group morally significant entities and the human conditions that are the goals of their projects. But you’re right to point to this grouping as evidence that Haidt’s categories are themselves fractured, and salient only to certain kinds of explanation. Another way to view the distinction he creates, from an anthropological perspective, is between pre-modern and modern social structures. For people in rural areas, in-group and out-group resembles much more closely the sort of tribal configurations common throughout most of human history, whereas modern social structures, be they libertarian or Marxian, depart radically from this. Perhaps according to Enlightenment and Romanticist lines, respectively? But now we’re entering territory far outside my knowledge.

I was not aware of such a study, but it doesn’t seem hugely surprising on its own. I would need to see more information about what kind of religion inheres more robustly within the middle classes, though. If it’s a particularly flexible or liberal religion, it would make perfect sense to me that it should remain. Nevertheless, a more general negative correlation appears to obtain between wealth/education and religiosity, even if that relationship does not appear in every observable instance.

S.:  Back to terrorism:  in a very broad sense, what do you think would be a good perspective for a skeptic to take in regards to Terrorism as a cultural strategy of marginal peoples?

S.P.:  I’m not quite sure what your terms mean. What is a cultural strategy and what do you mean by marginal peoples?

S.:  Well, a cultural strategy would be under the model that terrorism is not committed under the rubric of state legitimacy, therefore it is only political in a looser sense. And by marginal peoples, I mean those who do not have the dominance within a state.  Clearer?Well,  cultural strategy would be under the model that terrorism is not committed under the rubric of state legitimacy, therefore it is only political in a looser sense. And by marginal peoples, I mean those who do not have the dominance within a state.  Clearer?

S.P.:  If I understand correctly, do you mean to say that terrorism is the strategy of agents who do not have legal legitimacy to their actions? Because there’s certainly no reason why such agents cannot be analysed according to the same models and terms as official state agents can, in assessing how violence is used to achieve political goals. Cultures are not capable of holding agency, I think, and so it is wrong to assign to them the sort of intentionality and capacity for deliberation that enables strategic behaviour. But groups of people, whatever their institutional status, are capable of collective decision-making and behaviour, and terrorism, whether carried out by a state or a non-state agent, can be viewed as rational, calculated, and entirely political.

S.: The agency would not so much be the issue but the structural placement within a social system, but part of the confusion seems to be that line of agency makes one see any collective agency as political, but this type of politics has a logic that is justified through acceptable norms, which is a cultural norm as much as a political one,  I suppose I want to push you on the idea that politics here is separate from culture in that strict way.   But I suppose we must admit that we are dealing with reifications of collective action and norm setting as opposed to something slightly more concrete like a state.

Let me ask another question then, is the bombing of Dresden in World War 2 an act of terrorism?

S.P.:  I define terrorism as the deliberate generation of fear, usually through violence or the threat of it, within a political community in order to change its behaviour. This is deliberately a very broad definition, including not only the bombing of Dresden but the entire deterrent component of a community’s criminal justice system. But I would never use this definition without immediately following it with a typology, and ‘terrorism’ as its used in most popular or non-critical-theory academic conversations tends to refer to what I’d call ‘insurgent terrorism’, which is terrorism carried out by a non-state agent, either individual or organised group, to subvert or influence a government and its citizenry via extralegal means.

I don’t necessarily see states as any more concrete than the norms and institutions – merely patterns of behaviour – which constitute them. States are what we make of them. The difference to me between collectives like states and collectives like cultures is the presence of decision-making mechanisms designed to facilitate collective action according to some set of intentions. If you have such mechanisms, you can speak of their collectives as you would speak of agents, within certain situations. But as cultures do not have such mechanisms, I struggle to see a situation in which they can be coherently treated as having agency.

Of course, these reifications are useful explanatory and cognitive tools, and nothing more. They entail no ontological commitments to the reality of some entity and the referential status of my language to it.

S.:  Now we seem to be on the same page again: What are good, rational policies for dealing with insurgent terrorism if we assume the ends is to seize terrorist activity without causing more grievances that would inspire new sets of insurgents?

S.P.:  Well, there are a variety of ways to engage in effective counterterrorism. One is to have a totalitarian police state, but since you’re asking this of me, I’m going to assume a more specific question: how can societies maintain a set of Enlightenment liberal values and still secure itself from terrorism? Of course, this is a very hard question to answer, and the particulars of any answer will depend on the particulars of the terrorist threat, but we can still look for policies that achieve in a general sense the following features of government and the state in an already liberal context:

-well-funded and trained counterterrorism police forces and domestic intelligence service, with effective civilian oversight and active engagement with community leaders of subpopulations particularly likely to produce a terrorist threat.

-development and enforcement of hate speech laws, such that people and groups preaching or mobilising for a violent agenda can be legally stopped from doing so, also subject to a diverse committee of civilian oversight and review.

-training for emergency services in coping effectively with the aftermath of a terrorist attack, both in rescue and in maintaining civil order, including public relations specialists able to reassure the public while honestly communicating any extent risks.

-ongoing public discussions on terrorism including experts capable of keeping things honest and focusing discussion both on the grievances that would-be terrorists may have and in the legitimate mechanisms available for addressing those grievances

These still do not guarantee that insurgent terrorism will not take place, nor that government personnel won’t find ways to abuse the special powers granted to them in the name of security from terrorism, but I think they comprise the best arrangement of legitimate coercive powers in a liberal context.

Freedom and security are, of course, not always a dichotomy. There are ways for the presence of greater coercion – state terrorism of the legitimate variety – to enable greater freedom than a lesser level of coercion. The ‘optimal’ level of coercion will depend on the particular threats within a context, as well as the cultural resources available to make that coercion normatively acceptable and palatable for enough of the public, but as an abstract notion of governance it lies at the very heart of liberal thought.

S.:  However, that is what separates liberal as an ideological development, and liberal as a modern orientation, no?   The notion of legitimate coercion varies massively amongst those who developed out of Enlightenment liberalism as everyone from American Libertarians to Stalinist to Bakuninite anarchism are developments of that tradition.

I would tend to agree with you about coercion levels being optimal and handled by community governance.   This means that terrorism then should not have the moral weight attached to it, but should be seen as a strategy in and of itself (not an abstract value of “evil” or a mere tactic?)

S.P.: I’m not quite sure what you mean, here. Do you mean the development of a liberal mode of subjectivity as compared to the moral [and entailed political] value commitments of Enlightenment Liberalism?

S.:  That is certainly my view: terrorism is not essentially evil, and the moral character of a terrorist act depends on the case. But I am also more committed to (Rule) Utilitarianism than most people, and so even if I were confronted with a definition for terrorism that confined terrorist acts to attacks on civlians – as many definitions do – I could still not call it an essential bad. But in the real world, of course, most of what we call terrorism does seem to me to be pretty bad. There is just too much evidence to show that bombing or shooting people in markets, mosques, clubs, or planes will not be as efficient as other, less violent means in achieving any set of goals I consider worthy. A good analogy would be the so-called ‘ticking time-bomb scenario’ that apologists for torture love to trot out. As a Utillitarian I am entirely willing to endorse torture if it is less harmful than the alternative, but since torture is virtually always a worse way to get information than just about any available alternative, the thought experiment is a red herring.

S.:  I mean that Enlightenment liberalism produces very different sets of morality and governance, and the agent of legitimate coercive force and if there is ever such an agent vary greatly.  Modern liberalism is definitely rooted in the legitimate agency of a democratic Republics and generally takes a moral calculus from either modern form of virtue ethics or variants of  Utilitarianism.   Libertarians take a deontological view of such notions, and Marxists tend to deny that have a moral framework as a part of a political theory at all.

This brings me to a another point I have against Sam Harris: do you think meta-ethical justification is important?

S.P.:  From what I’ve been able to tell, almost all members of the Skeptics movements tend towards a sort of naive Utilitarianism, and see any moral system that doesn’t seek to maximise human wellbeing as absurd. This does not mean that they don’t simultaneously belief that life is an instrinsic good, despite the arguable incompatibility of the two propositions, depending on the version of Utilitarianism to which one subscribes. I’ve also noticed that Skeptics tend not to be republicans. They are in favour of political processes that serve as individual interest aggregators and adjudicators, and tend not to endorse collectivist conceptions of the public or the polity. At least here; the ones in the UK are a bit more willing to see the state prescribe morality.

I have mixed feelings about the value of meta-ethical discussions. On the one hand, I think that having them with is important because such discussions tend to produce more nihilists, expressivists, or other forms of non-cognitivists, and I think this is a good thing because moral realism is absurd and dangerous. On the other hand, that naive Utilitarianism I mentioned earlier is very likely to be what cosmopolitan folk end up developing (cf. Haidt) so we might as well leave the existential angst to the academics and apply ourselves to the practical matter of maximising human wellbeing. Just so long as we don’t wander around looking smug and heaping contempt upon those who don’t share our moral norms. As an observer and theorist on so-called political violence, I get very anxious when I see my comrades suggesting that those who disagree with our principles simply don’t know the facts.

S.:  Both Masmimo Piggliuci and myself are virtue ethicists (although his would be center left and mine would be far left), but that does have a nearly consequentialist metajustication, and I actually find collective conception of community as a norm setter for fairly persuasive, but you’re right that I would be in the minority.

So the problem with ethical realism as objective (in both Sam Harris and in say the other popular skeptical claim to absolute ethics, such as Alonzo Fyfe’s Desirism) is more related to epistemological dangers than to practical ones?

S.P.: Yes, Massimo is definitely a nuanced commentator on ethics in the Skeptics movement, though despite his status as a public intellectual within it, he doesn’t seem widely read or, at least, carefully considered. And you are definitely not a typical ‘Skeptic’ in that you are an academic in the humanities.As for ethical realism, my problems with it are threefold:

-it is ontologically absurd, as moral facts are at best social facts (in the way Searle defines social facts) and even in that optimistic scenario we are left with nothing more than ‘Quasi-Realism’ in the sense that Simon Blackburn seems to think.

-it is epistemologically weak, for all the same reasons that realist philosophies of science are epistemologically weak and then some.

-it is practically dangerous, because moral facts seem to entail an imperative power that compels action, and that has huge potential to impel atrocity.

S.: Do you see realism in science as a problem in the skeptic’s Movement as well?

S.P.:  I’ve noticed that Skeptics tend to endorse this thing they were originally taught in secondary school, called ‘The Scientific Method’, that describes a sort of naive neo-positivist falsificationism according to the H-D method. The more sophisticated – including those who are professional scientists – may bring Bayesianism into the discussion. But there seems to be a great confidence in convergent realism, reduction, and the reference of ‘theoretical terms’. In other words, Skeptics have a highly idealised and quite quaint view of science. I think this is problematic insofar as it leads to chauvinism for the natural sciences, a dismissal of the less ‘sciencey’ of the social sciences, and a sense that one set of epistemological and methodological commitments is sufficient to answer all questions.

S.:  What was bothered me about this move is that many of the natural sciences don’t even meet naive positivist view, and this is just ignored.  Is this a case of group think functioning as false simplication?

S.P.: There are certainly a great many professional scientists who would describe what they do in similar terms, I think. But I’m not sure that psychological terms such as ‘group think’ are appropriate for describing or explaining the way that Skeptics view science. False simplification, sure.

S.: Socially consistent false simplification?   Group think is a vulgar term for that but if it the psychological heuristic shoe fits.

Anyway, thanks for up your time, I have enjoyed it.  Anything you’d like to say in closing?

S.P.:  Well, been fun and delight, both for the chance to share some of my thoughts on the Skeptics and to rant a bit about its less attractive qualities to a sympathetic audience.

Marginalia on Skeptical Thinking: A dialogue with Rob Tarzwell

Rob Tarzwell is a doctor of nuclear medicine and a psychiatrist, a skeptic, and a health advocate.

Skepoet: How long have you been involved with the “skeptic’s community” in Canada?

Rob Tarzell: My involvement with skepticism in Canada in any identifiable sense began informally via Skeptics in the Pub in about April 2009. I then attended a Skepticamp, again just as an observer, and then the annual JREF conference, TAM, in Las Vegas that summer.

Formal, participatory involvement started in Fall 2009. This was sparked by the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic. A lot of fear arose about the vaccine, stoked by deliberately uninformed anti-vax fear-mongering. Although the information was false, it did result in genuine fear, and I attempted to address those fears with short notes on Facebook about the flu, flu shots, adjuvants, and additives. I also dove into discussions about swine flu and vaccination on various discussion threads, which is how we first became acquainted, since there was a rip-roaring thread churning away on your profile. These notes and discussions ended up being somewhat widely distributed, and anecdotal feedback suggests they were helpful to some individuals.

This led to an invitation to give a pubic lecture on vaccine safety at UBC and then a live radio debate on Radio Freethinker. Apparently, people aren’t tired of me yet, and I’ve been asked to co-convene a series of public lectures on vaccine safety on behalf of Green College, UBC, during fall and winter terms 2012/13.

The short answer to your question is: 3 years.

S: What do you think about the relationship between scientific Skepticism as a “movement” and “new” atheism as a “movement”?

R.T.: The relationship between scientific Skepticism and atheisms new and old is at once simple and deeply complex. In terms of addressing the simple proposition, “God exists,” skepticism as a method of inquiry brings exactly the same sorts of tools to bear as it would to questions like, “Bigfoot exists,” or, “Electron microscopes exist.” Evidence and arguments are marshaled and scrutinized. The skeptical method is simply to apportion belief in proportion to evidence in favour of a proposition. Most skeptics would say the evidence for a divine being doesn’t pass muster.

The complexity emerges from Skepticism and New Atheism as social phenomena. While atheism itself is at least as old as the Greek Sophists–”Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras–this linking of atheism with activism, at least here in the West, is new. My sense of it is, “We’re not going to politely let you hide behind the cover of faith or sacred belief when you say something that has important social consequences.” At least, that’s the message I take from Harris, Hitchens, and to some degree, Dawkins.

I’m ok with that. When theological ideas infuse policy and law, we have a huge problem, in my view. Bluntly, we’re then trying to govern society with false ideas. So, that gets my hackles up, and that’s the point where I get involved.

But something unfortunate has happened. I worry that a kind of arrogance has crept into the movement. In some cases, PZ Myers comes to mind most readily, religions are not just to be dispassionately analyzed and stopped when they enter the polis, but they are to be ridiculed. And not only are they to be ridiculed, but if you think otherwise, you’re an “accomodationist,” something akin to a yellow traitor. This seems to be the closest the Skeptical community has ever come to frank thought-policing, because you do not want to be so-labelled by the superstars du jour like Myers or Jerry Coyne, or suddenly you might find your ideas ridiculed and even your motives questioned.

An example who comes readily to mind is Alain de Botton, the English philosopher who has explored what religions do well. He grants right up front that theological conclusions are nonsense, but then he says we need to pay attention to religious methods of inspiration and education, because these seem to have been rather successful. I’m not sure if de Botton is correct, but surely this is a non-controversial, straightforwardly empirical claim. It is clear, it is falsifiable, and I even grant that it is very interesting. However, de Botton is endlessly labelled an “accomodationist.” It’s also de rigeur to declare he simply must be angling for a Templeton prize, the implication being he has sold his intellectual honesty for dirty money.

I think this is really problematic, for two principal reasons. First, if the real goal is to try and bring about a society which is governed more rationally than not, we need to model rational behaviour. McCarthyesque pissing-contests about who the real rationalists are is really not reflecting wellon big-S Skepticism. Second, to achieve that society, you need to win “the hearts and minds.” Well, you aren’t going to get that done by ridicule.

It fascinates me that we’re in the midst of a ridiculous debate about confrontationalism and accomodationism. Again, let’s be empirical and look to the evidence about what actually works at winning someone over. If you don’t want to look at the evidence, here’s a quick thought experiment: hands up everybody who wooed their current beloved via ridicule.

S.: What do you think about the charge of scientism against Dawkins and Harris? This seems like an entirely different problem than the Coyne/Meyers one. In fact, in recent claims Harris has made about the is/ought distinction and a softer demarcation line, both Meyers and Coyne took more moderate positions than Dawkins and Harris and stood by the Humean distinction.

R.T.: I think against Harris, the charge sticks. We can empirically discover what values people actually hold via anthropology. We even discover how and why they priorize their values via the methods Jonathan Haidt has developed. Where empirical methods fail is when we take two lists of priorized values and seek to determine which is the better ordering.

In medical ethics, we broadly place a premium on patient autonomy, but not so long ago, we priorized physician paternalism. That seems repugnant to us now, but it didn’t in the 1940′s, when patients were routinely *not* told about grave diagnoses, for fear that would overwhelm them with hopelessness needlessly. Were we right then, or are we right now? It’s a great question, and I think it is even answerable. How neuroscience contributes to that, I have no idea. I think we’re likely to get better engagement with the problem from cultural historian and ethicists than PET scanners.

That’s not to say PET scanners have no role in ethical explorations. They may, for instance, help us answer intriguing questions about why individuals and groups publicly endorse one set of values while privately adhering to another. Writing off that kind of behaviour as “hypocrisy” may be smugly satisfying, but it hardly constitutes an inquiry. If Harris, as a trained neuroscientist, focused his efforts on those sorts of problems, I’d be very interested in the results.

Within Skepticism, there certainly has been a heavy emphasis on rationalisitc, scientific inquiry in an almost Victorian, reductionistic sense. That sort of scentism or at least priorization of scientific methodology is changing. It’s great to see new voices emerging, like Natalie Reed who writes in a wonderfully rational way about LGBT issues, or Ian Cromwell applying skeptical methods to overt and covert racism. It’s really refreshing to see the movement getting beyond Bigfoot!

S.: What do you make on the problems raised by the Rebecca Watson/Richard Dawkins spat a few years back?

R.T.: That whole incident was a real eye-opener. A quick recap for your audience is in order.

In the original video, Rebecca describes having been at a conference in Ireland where a topic of one panel was being emotionally sensitive to another person’s feelings when making sexual advances. She’s out until 4 after the day’s events and announces she’s going to bed. A chap she never names follows her to the elevator and invites her up for coffee. She says she found that creepy and mildly exhorts the men: “Guys, don’t do that.” Then she briefly explains what it was like on the receiving end and moves on to other topics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKHwduG1Frk (starts at about 4:00)

Well, then the furies begin howling, with a lot of sharp division, all the way up to death threats against Watson. Dawkins posted a satirical letter to an imagined female, Muslima, about how she should stop whining about genital mutilation, because American women are getting invited for coffee in elevators. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/always_name_names.php (Comment #75)

Although in the main people lined up for Watson, there was a surprisingly loud and strident support for Dawkins, among both men and women. She has been accused of holding a double-standard, along two distinct lines (and I’m paraphrasing here): 1) “You don’t like that this guy did this, but I bet it would be ok if he was hot and rich;” and 2) “Double standard! Guys wouldn’t mind if girls did this, so girls shouldn’t mind if guys do it!”

Now this is genuinely surprising. Apparently, at least with some individuals in the skeptical community, it’s simply impermissible to describe circumstances which you find anxiety-provoking and request that they not occur. This has been described as privilege-blindness, and perhaps it is, but that does not explain the numerous females who rallied to Dawkins or just generally against Watson with accusations of hypocrisy. There was massive attribution to Watson of all sorts of motives which are patent nonsense when examined in the clear light of day.

In my line of work, when someone gets attacked for saying what makes them feel vulnerable, the term is emotional abuse. Another is identifying with the aggressor. Something about Watson’s honesty triggered an enormous and hostile reaction in some quarters. As a community, some of us absolutely fell from the standard of rational inquiry, including rational inquiry into our own behaviours and genuine motives.

While it was perhaps right to call Dawkins out in no uncertain terms, or to call out the really nasty and abusive responses, there was far too little, “Hmm, Dawkins said that. Now, that’s really interesting. Why did he say that? What are the arguments for and against that stance?” So, maybe this is another take-away: we’re not very rational as a community when it comes to turning our rational gaze upon ourselves. It’s far easier dissecting homeopathy and the anti-vaccine cranks.

To his credit, Dawkins announced that the Richard Dawkins Foundation would pay for child-care at future TAM’s (the annual meeting in Las Vegas hosted by the James Randi Educational Foundation) specifically so that single mothers could attend and engage in the rational community. I asked Rebecca in a chat thread whether she thought that might constitue an indirect form of apology from Dawkins, and she speculated that it might.

S.: Why do you think the spectrum of skeptics runs liberal to libertarian politically now. This was not always the case historically. Many of the philosophical icons of the skeptics movement prior to its current incarnation being socialists ( Bertrand Russell) to Marxist (Stephan J. Gould) to even moderate conservative. Why do you think the political spectrum now is more narrow and liberal in the European sense of the word.

R.T.: Oh, that’s a *really* interesting question. I’d be dishonest if I said I had definitive, expert insights into this, but perhaps I can offer what looks like a perspective in political culture.

Within Canadian skepticism, we are by far overwhelmingly liberal, which may in part explain the rise of Canadian skeptical bloggers looking at specifically liberal topics, from a liberal perspective, like the aforementioned Ian Cromwell on race or Natalie Reed on transgenderism. Is that a product of a generally more liberal, Canadian society? Possibly. We’re single-payers on health-care in our very bones and opted in favour of gay marriage in the mid-90s, right around the time we banned smoking in bars and restaurants. Abortion was decriminalized in the 80′s, and we gave capital punishment the boot in the 70′s. The skeptics that Canada produces may be more liberal simply by virtue of marinating in this.

The American story is a much more interesting one to watch. The early composition of some of the earliest skeptical organizations, like, say, CSICOP, would certainly have found a congenial mix of liberals, conservatives, moderates, and perhaps libertarians or anarchists. To the degree that skepticism becomes linked to atheism, then it also becomes linked to folks like Ayn Rand, and that probably makes the link to libertarianism. Rand never really caught on in Canada the way she did in the US, and it’s interesting that libertarian skepticism seems almost singularly an American phenomenon. I meet all kinds of libertarians, Randians, and various other flavours of soft and hard Objectivists at TAM, and sometimes have to act as a kind of cultural interpreter for European skeptics who come to Vegas.

Another hunch I have about this is that whereas in the 60′s and 70′s it was the left which had renounced science, today it seems to be the right. Climate change is the most obvious example of this departure, though certainly we lefties have our share of loonies: anti-vaxers come to mind, or alt-med adherents. But on the big culturally and politically relevant questions of the day–global warming, evolution, “choosing” to be gay–the right is just flat-out bonkers wrong on the science. Since skeptics of various political stripes are surprisingly unified on the science, this is going to repel people who have prior ideological commitments.

As a side note, it’s refreshing and fun to chat intelligently about global warming with a political conservative who advocates for free-market solutions to the problem, as it is to grumble with Berkeley flower-power lefties about all their neighbours who don’t vaccinate the kids. Science, because of its open model of truth-seeking, has a capacity to draw us all together in the movement, by providing a common touchstone of agreement.

S.: Marxists never renounced scientific thought. For example, I have many, many problems with the Sokal hoax and the books that it spawned, but Sokal was a Marxist. Still the relationship to vulgar postmodernism is interesting. For clarification, the Canadian liberals are left liberal, as in liberal in the American sense, no?

R.T.: Broadly, yes, we’re mostly left-liberals. Even a majority on the right here would support gay rights single-payer health, and social regulation over things like where we can smoke in public. Many of the former Progressive Conservatives worry about the hard-right social swing the Conservative Party of Canada caucus keeps trying to reinvigorate. To his credit, our conservative Prime Minister Harper has been opposed to reopening debates on abortion and gay marriage. He got caught in a parliamentary procedural snag that basically forced an hour of debate on a private member’s bill about fetal personhood recently, and both he and the party whip spoke unequivocally in opposition to the private motion. That would look positively alien, if not repugnant to most Republicans, methinks.

Have Marxists always been pro-science? One example that comes to mind of a potential exception would be Lysenkoism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko). To be strictly fair, you might just as easily link that to Stalinist excesses as to Marxism proper, but where do we ever find a pure political strain?

S.: Lysenkoism is not post-modernism. It’s not a denial of science as a discipline, it was bad science that was politically enforced. There is a pretty substantive difference there. I mean I can go off on liberal bad science now: Neo-classical economics has pretense to science, or how polygenism was pushed in North America by liberals and conservatives for racist reasons, or that frankly many European liberals enforced bad anthropology to maintain their beliefs about race and their justification for colonial expansion. This would be to weaken my own point. When people talk about the left turn against science in the 1960s and 1970s, they mean specific readings of continental philosophers who broke with the Marxist tradition (Deleuze, Foucault, and Lacan), although I actually think outside of some of the Lacanian stuff, a lot of the scientific criticisms didn’t really understand the philosophers they were criticizing, but those philosophers were being used that way, so perhaps it was fair. This also gets tied into the “Science Wars,” which was about sociology within science and the functioning of the community. Some of this did get taken in an anti-science direction, but some of the criticisms of this seem to be me opportunistic. The scientific method does not protect one from all the logical failings inherent in community power-relationships.The idea that science can bring you together though seems optimistic to me. For example, what is was proven through game theory or through observational data that the free market can’t solve climate problems? Would your friend change? Behavioral economics cast a long shadow over readings of rationality in micro-economics, and I have to admit that even many Marxist have ignored this. So to put in your terms, how would holding on to that belief not be like holding onto Lysenkoism for political reasons? It seems like the anti-science bent of conservatives and liberals has lowered the bar.The American libertarians, for example, often compare evolution to the market, but this is no less unscientific than way Sokal criticized Deleuze for using biological terms metaphorically. Evolution isn’t like the market: It’s massively inefficient and prone to failure of catastrophic variety for the individual and gene centered point of view. If the market is evolutionary in a pure sense, then it would an argument against the very function most people ascribe to it: efficiency in the “knowledge problem.” Yet I don’t see a lot of skeptic’s pointing this out–although I do see some–because it would alienate the libertarian element in North America and the liberal (in the European sense) in the UK and Australia.So the umbrage taking seems highly selective, or if not, then opportunistic to keep the coalition of ideologies going. Honestly, this was the kind of thing the sociology of science people were first interested in pointing out.

Your thoughts?

R.T.: I believe I may see what you mean. Essentially, if I read you correctly, there is selective attention within Skepticism (and within other formal movements you’ve outlined) given to certain topics while others are ignored, perhaps willfully, perhaps not. I suspect that’s true. Other topics are grossly misunderstood or oversimplified. The easy explanation is, it’s simply impossible for any group to be interested in all things at all times. That wouldn’t be a group anymore, rather, it would be the entire population of the planet.

The harder explanation regarding what catches our interest and why is still unfolding. It may ultimately never find a satisfactory answer. There are hints, perhaps, in the founding of various skeptical organizations. When James Randi began turning his attention toward psychics and faith-healers, it really bothered him that people were being swindled by self-proclaimed miracle-workers whose miracles often amounted to little more than the same kinds of conjuring he was using to entertain his audience. I’m speculating, but perhaps he was motivated by moral indignation against swindlers, the misuse of his own profession’s skills, and compassion for desparate individuals seeking out, say, psychics, to help them cope with their own grief over a lost loved one.

One needn’t look too far to see that the early members of CSICOP were most certainly motivated by a moral mission. It really troubled them that the Uri Gellers of the world were making scandalous amounts of money through pure fakery, even securing government grants for research into spooky mental action at a distance. Project Alpha or Carlos stand as brilliant demonstrations of the human capacity to be fooled by conjuring, a kind of reminder to us that we’re perhaps not half so clever as we imagine. That bug in the mental software is something Randi takes seriously, as do, I think, many of the more morally motivated within the various organizations.

Speaking personally for a moment, I’ll admit that a lot of my fuel for tilting against anti-vaxxers or alt-med proponents comes from the intentional misuse and appropriation of scientific language and terminology, the frank abuse of rhetorical techniques (“Your ‘science’ is a closed paradigm!”), leading to real harms in the real world. Thanks to dropping vaccination rates, there’s a massive outbreak of Whooping Cough where I live, probably the largest outbreak since we introduced effective vaccines. It’s a disease that kills infants or can permanently maim. This is horrendous! If people had effective strategies to notice and then undo pernicious rhetorical techniques, that would literally save children’s lives.

So, yes, selective for sure. It drives me a bit crazy at times in certain quarters. Haven’t we heard enough about UFO’s and bigfoot? There are real problems in the world which deserve critical attention that needn’t even be at the level of specialists. Basic critical thinking skills will do.

S.: This focus on basic critical thinking skills is good, but this is why I am cautious about things like the Harris version of new atheism, or the Dawkin’s promotion of memetics. These actually don’t seem to be all that far off from bad philosophy using science language and scientific evidence out of context. Is that fair? Why do you think these had so much attraction in the beginning of the movement? Why does popular evo-psyche catch on, for example?

R.T.: Indeed! To some degree, there may still be an element of excessive deference to Harris or Dawkins in some regards, but there’s also an interesting self-correcting mechanism that pops up in unexpected ways. One example would be the rapid backlash about Dawkins’s satirical letter. Another would be Phil Plait’s “Don’t be a Dick” speech from TAM 2010, which drew both praise and sharp reactions.

Other new voices are also rising to take on Harris’s ideas about Islam, warfare, and profiling, exposing what essentially amounts to simplistic racism. John Shook has taken Harris to task quite effectively, right on the Centre For Inquiry website. This is important and healthy. All the dirty laundry needs to be right out in the open.It’s crucial, I think, that criticisms are beginning to arise not just about the methodology but about the ideas themselves, and from new voices. One of the most interesting yet under-noticed critics of Sam Harris is a grad student in strategic studies who also has a background in analytic philosophy, Simon Pratt. His academic interests include terror and assassination within a strategic context, and his blog recently included a really important and clarifying discussion of suicide bombing which shows almost immediately how facile Harris’s analysis remains.

So, in a sense, while we’re inevitably always behind the curve, the reasoned voices of dissension are arising. I’m very much looking forward to Skepticism 3.0!

S.: I have found Massimo Pigluicci’s blog, Rationally Speaking, to be a corrective to a lot of this sort of thing. Now, I still think many in the Skeptic’s movement don’t take “Continental” philosophy seriously enough, but I understand why. When I first came into the skeptic’s movement there was a hostility to almost any sort of philosophy aside from Dan Dannett, but that has changed. However, I also feel like there are move divides within the “movement.”I think the Watson issue really illustrated that there were political tensions and problematic normative assumptions. I have a question though, do you see scientism as a real threat to skeptic’s movement? I found the denial of the concept in many of my skeptic friends problematic. Of course, I would say “undialectical,” but I will avoid the jargon of my philosophical leanings. I actually think scientism is dangerous to science because my demolishing clear ideas of demarcation and justification, it makes science look “just” like another social practice and thus appear entirely relativistic. It’s almost like an inversion of the post-modern critique that validates it. I remember in the Sokal and Bricmont book, they defined science as “rigorous common sense” and I have trouble seeing how that could possibly be true: it seemed like a move to avoid the issues, but in a way, it does the opposite of what it is designed to do.What do you think on this matter?

R.T.: Right away I’m going to sound more weaselly than I’d like to and say, it depends on which concept of scientism we’re referring to. I think there certainly are some versions of scientism which do attach to some skeptics at some times, and Pigliucci is an important astringent to this process. It does bother me that a lot of skeptics have little time or patience for philosophy, because I think it has an inescapably important role, actually, as outlined by Pigliucci himself in a recent post.

S.: The same with Eco-psyche, which Coyne and Pigliucci both have said major problems logically and methodologically in the comparative biological field. So this seems much larger than just Austrian economics. String theory is another example of a science that is completely non-empirical, although one without social consequences.

It is interesting to me that Dennett is okay because he uses memetic theory, a theory that is also non empirical and frankly seems to be a way to avoid sociology and more developed social theory in favor of something that looks like evolutionary biology. The fact that Dawkins speculated on memetics early on seems to be a place where this came in. While memetics seems to have reached it high tide, the journal of memetics having closed down, and there still being nothing stronger than a metaphor for the mechanism, but it still has much pull in the community.

Do you see why I think this is a bigger problem than just with libertarians?

Hard scientism, the idea that only scientific approaches can yield knowledge succumbs to the same kind of critique which brought hard positivism down: there’s no way to scientifically the statement that “only scientific approaches can yield knowledge.” Even so, it’s strangely common among more strident and uncritical skeptics. I sometimes wonder if even Dawkins himself might be some varietal of the species, given his notorious impatience with philosophy of science, Dennett being the single exception.

I can see what motivates the stance. As soon as you open the door to non-empirical methods of inquiry, perhaps the worry is that you let theology and parapsychology in the door. The trouble is, of course, non-empirical methods already are in the door: von Mises and the Austrian school of economics come immediately to mind, particularly among US right-libertarian skeptics. Somehow, he gets a pass while Freud and psychoanalysis get the boot. Fascinating!

R.T.: Ahh, ok, yes, now I see what you mean. I think ePsy is indeed very problematic, and I’m hardly an outlier. No less a light than Gould considered ePsy essentially a farce and not even worthy of the label “science.” It’s all a bunch of post-hoc stuff with various levels of plausibility. Niles Eldredge’s book, “Why We Do It” is a wonderful critique of ePsy as applied to human sexual behaviour. Yes, sadly, it’s got great traction within Skepticism. Perhaps it is precisely the kind of theory that appeals to non-expert but nonetheless intelligent lay audiences. It is simple, has elegance, and it appears to have broad explanatory power. There may even be limited applications where it is genuinely useful and offers real lift.

Memetics is another field. It seemed like there was a time in the late 90′s when you could hardly turn a corner without running into another book about memes. Like ePsy, it certainly looks like an elegant and easily understood theory which unfortunately lacks falsifiability. This isn’t to say it’s wrong or even bad. However, if it is to be understood as some kind of science, it certainly isn’t hypothetico-deductive science. Rather, it’s more along the lines of psychoanalysis, ePsy, and Austrian economics.

These aren’t bad things in themselves, but they’re not *empirical* things. Perhaps once the movement has demonstrated a capacity to accept that there can be non-Popperian kinds of science, it will be able to look more dispassionately at all knowledge claims and methodologies and judge them on their own merits, not on crude versions of scientific realism. The recent rise of non-scientific writers and concerns within Skepticism is a source of hope that these types of critiques may arise.

S.: Well, Popper’s falsification criterion cannot apply to any form of statistical analysis as probability can never be completely falsified empirically or experimentally. So the fact it has so much hold in the community seems problematic. But I have seen a slow shift too, but the shift has left rifts in the community.

Another worrying trait is that I see postmodernism used as a strawman to attack any thick and qualitative analysis in the humanities as “anti-scientific” to favor statistical analysis which is necessarily thin and cannot account for qualia in any way.

This I actually think is a bad strategy: most of us continental philosophy/critical theory people do believe in science as a methodology for physical understanding, even if we may take a Kuhnian view of its conception or be critical of attempts to destroy the is/ought distinction; however, the contempt that some seem to hold out enterprise in seems to be a double standard. When people like Harris or Sokal assert that there is no meta-ethical or meta-scientific point worth making, this looks like a cultural power grab and an attempt to naturalize particular perspectives. It makes the vulgar relativists suspicion that science is veil for cultural power look legitimate. If anyone in the humanities said that “humanities are universal because the humanities is just what humanists do” or “the humanities is just rigorous common sense,” the patent absurdity and circularity of that would be laughed at. Yet I have seen those claim made for science by people in the skeptic’s community.

So how do you think the community can police itself on these points? Obviously, I think some of this is actually happening now as you point out. In fact, that is the very point of our dialogue.

R.T.: Self-policing is likely only going to occur among the willing. I think we’re still somewhat too reliant on our rock-stars to guide our thought, in the main at least. This is one of the issues which Pigliucci has been making louder and louder noises about, and I applaud that. I’m not sure why Dawkins and Krauss are so pig-headed when it comes to the value of philosophy. They don’t even seem to know, or even care to know, what it is that philosophers do. This is despite both getting on famously with Dennett, who I imagine must be mounting some sort of lobbying campaign. It’s really astonishing that Krauss criticizes philosophy for not making scientific contributions. Nobody expects Krauss to be making philosophical contributions.

The irony is, Krauss makes all sorts of philosophical statements, as does Dawkins, and they seem to do so quite obliviously, since in neither case are they saying anything terribly novel. Hume already laid far more sophisticated groundwork for the limits of empiricism and induction centuries ago. I think even Aquinas would have been bored, or at least no more than mildly amused, with Dawkins’s philosophical efforts. So, it’s a pity, but there’s the Dunning-Krueger effect for you, writ large. There’s nothing new or exceptional about this, but what it does is tend to also disincline the Skeptical faithful against philosophy, except for Dennett, who carries the imprimatur of “sciencey” philosophy, though of course, Dennett’s *not* doing science, and I wish Dawkins would stop saying that Dennett is a scientist.

If the only thing we managed to accomplish was getting everybody driving in their own lane with appropriate humility, a lot of these misguided critiques of Kuhn et al would vanish like morning dew. Now, that’s not to say we could actually interest skeptical folk, who in the main are still 20- and 30-something white, bearded, male IT guys in the broader philosophical debate, but it’d be nice if we could at least ratchet down the mockery.

S.: Let’s move back to some policy issues: The state of Washington in the US seems to having some real issues with anti-vaccination ideology leading to communities without herd immunity, to use a technically correct, but horrible public relations term. What do you think we can do about it? Are you seeing anything similar in Canada?

R.T.: Ha! Yes, it would actually be harder to come up with a *worse* PR term than “herd immunity.”

As it happens, a Whooping Cough outbreak hit both the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and Washington State essentially simultaneously. Since those are neighbours which share a border, it’s instructive to compare responses. As of 8 days ago, Washington had recorded about 1300 cases, about 10 times the normal amount, and climbing. BC at its peak had about 230, which is 2.5 to 3 times typical, and that number is falling.

I think policy differences are interesting in these jurisdictions. In both places, public health officials were aware quite early of the rising number of cases in the early part of the year. Both regions also recognize multifactorial issues in the outbreak. Vaccine refusal is higher than it’s ever been, and it may well be the largest component, but also, infants who have insufficient immune maturity can’t benefit from the vaccine and so are ineligible. Also, the immunity wears off after 5 years, so boosters are required. Essentially, pertussis is a real pain in the ass to keep down in a population. So, why is it skyrocketing in Washington and waning in BC?

We’ll only know the whole story in retrospect, but in Washington, a lot of uninsured families simply can’t afford the shot, and it was only 2 weeks ago that the Washington State government released emergency funding and declared an epidemic. In BC, by sharp contrast, from when the outbreak was detected, local health authorities rapidly defined at-risk groups and offered free boosters. Risk groups were defined very broadly, even including anyone with the potential to have contact with children under 18 months of age. Essentially, who doesn’t qualify at that point?

Just like with SARS in 2003, which hit Toronto hard but was hardly noticed in Vancouver, it was a case of early detection, early response.

What lessons can skeptics draw from this? The most obvious one is, get vaccinated! But there are subtler lessons here: policy matters. What makes good policy? Well, that’s quickly becomes a discussion of values. Crudely, this could be seen as a test-match of individualist (American) values vs collectivist (Canadian) values. Maybe you could make the case that collectivism won the day here, but that might be only a superficial analysis. Both public health authorities knew what was up. Perhaps the greater budgetary autonomy in the BC CDC vs the Washington State CDC made the difference, and it essentially came down to speed, but in both cases driven by the same values. However, you do the analysis, though, what *did* happen was influenced by prior views of policy-makers as to what *ought* to happen.

I’m not sure I articulated that very clearly. Do you see what I mean?

S.: You know I actually don’t buy this individualism difference as the prime identifier, I do and continue to think it is more governmental than cultural, and not just in the mild social democratic tenor of Canada. The congressional as opposed to parliamentary politics leads to more options for policy.

However, the rise of libertarianism in the US does seem based on a type of pseudo-individualism that is kind self-deluding. But as far as public policy goes, I definitely can see which has better outcomes in healthcare.

What do you think the case is of the spike in popularity of this anti-vax nonsense?

R.T.: Fair enough, and I’ll admit that’s nothing more than loose speculation on my part, plus an effort to demonstrate the pervasiveness of is/ought distinctions.

Why is anti-vax on the rise? This is a really important question. I think anthropologists will have much more useful things to say than I do, but I’ll offer an interested layman’s opinion. First, it’s important to observe that not just anti-vax is on the rise. It is only one boat rising in a tide of misinformation. Other bad ideas on the ascent appear to include moon-landing deniers and 9/11 truthers. There’s even a newly emerging interest in geocentrism!

Now, I find it impossible to believe that we’ve suddenly become dumber as an entire culture. I wonder if it isn’t simply something like the Internet being a universally available megaphone for anybody to pick up and shout out their ideas. Ideas then end up finding receptive audiences, inevitably a discussion board arises, and you’re already rounding 3rd base on the way to creating a new society for the promotion of a ridiculous idea.

In the vaccine story, take all the above, and add in the incredibly primal fear parents feel when it comes to the safety of their children. I think fear is the real psychological battleground, which makes it an asymmetric war. An anti-vaxxer is able to stoke fear, and once that’s stirred up, rational analysis is paralyzed. All a guy like me can do is try to de-escalate that a bit.

S.: Anything you’d like to say in closing?

R.T.: A few things: first, my apologies for leaving you with such gargantuan blocks of unedited text, largely of questionable worth! Next, thanks for the questions. It’s helped me think through some issues I hadn’t paid enough attention to, particularly my unease with the New Atheist trend in Skepticism.

I’m seeing “New Atheism” as more of a reactionary movement and methodology than I had previously. In the heady days of ’03 to ’06, it was great fun seeing polemic after polemic hit the press. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, for me at least, hit a felt need: why *do* I need to be respectfully silent when someone plays the religion card? That was great. I think these guys genuinely came to believe, unfortunately, that they had done all the hard work, religion was demolished, and ta-da! I’m overstating the case, but I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Dawkins, and certainly Harris really believe they’ve offered something dialectically new.

They just haven’t.

Dawkins is a biologist, not a philosopher or theologian, yet there’s little evidence that he has realized this. Harris continues to make ridiculous pronouncements on whatever strikes his fancy, and I find his rationalized racism nothing short of repugnant. His thoughts on security are just bloody stupid, and yet the man really thinks he’s offering something golden and important. The principal two tricks the NA’s seem to deploy is to offer polemics as dialectics and to devalue fields in which they lack expertise. This arrogant attitude is beginning to leak well beyond the boundaries of Skepticism and is beginning to do more harm than good. I see early signs of this reversing, but it will take some time. Not too much time, I hope, because I’m getting tired of having to undo the Dawkins-damage whenever a religious person bristles at my mention of being an unbeliever. We can’t even get started until I assure them I’m not there to ridicule them. This is an unfortunate change in the culture, and one we can’t be rid of quickly enough.

Some thoughts on Marriage:

I have been toying with sociological data on marriage shift in the larger society, and here are some trends. The first trend is that college educated people are increasingly more likely than the uneducated to get married, according to a Pew Study. :

Throughout the 20th century, college-educated adults in the United States had been less likely than their less-educated counterparts to be married by
age 30. In 1990, for example, 75% of all 30-yearolds who did not have a college degree were married or had been married, compared with just 69% of those with a college degree.As those numbers attest, marriage rates among adults in their 20s have declined sharply since 1990 for both the college-educated and those without a college degree. But the decline has been much steeper for young adults without a college education. Young adults who do not have a college degree are delaying marriage to such an extent that the median age at first marriage in 2008 was, for the first time ever, the same for the college-educated and those who were not
college-educated: 28. As recently as 2000, there had been a two-year gap, with the typical college-educated adult marrying for the first time at 28 and the typical adult lacking a college degree marrying for the first time at Among the possible explanations for this shift are the declining economic fortunes of young men without a college degree and their increasing tendency to cohabit with a partner rather than marry. From 1990 to 2008, the inflation-adjusted median annual earnings of college-educated men ages 25 to 34 rose by 5% (to $55,000 in 2008 from $52,300 in 1990), while the median annual earnings of those with only a high school diploma declined by 12% (to $32,000 in 2008 from $36,300 in 1990).

But it was moderated by this bit of information:

A major finding from the above analysis is that college appears to deter marriage for men and women from the least advantaged social backgrounds. For least advantaged individuals college attendance lessened men’s and women’s odds of marriage by 38 percent and 22 percent, respectively. For individuals enjoying status in the highest stratum college attendance increased their marriage chances by 31 percent for men and women by 8 percent.

Another important finding is the pattern of increasing marriage homogamy with increasing social advantage and consistent with a mismatch hypothesis, the authors found the more disadvantaged college attendees were less likely to be matched on education with their spouse.

So marriage is increasingly becoming a classed commodity. This leads me to another thought, the way we view the present in light of the immediate (but not very distant) past, and the distant past in light of the immediate past and the present. We think, for example, the nuclear family, which its love marriage and male provider, was an American norm prior to the 1960s, but was unique to the 1950s as a social creation. On in which female property was beginning to be liberalized and liberated from assumed ownership from men, but was predicated on stronger sexual differentiation than was held prior by most people. There are a lot of factors into this, and it is too easy to play reduce it to just one idea (liberalization of divorce, predominance of love marriage, the economic need for nuclear families for increased mobility within the US, etc), but there is some evidence that married people have tended to be less social than single people and less involved in the larger community. There is also evidence, however, that marriage bonds are pretty much the only social networks that are really strong by the time most people reach their 40s.

This is all very modern. I was reading Philip Larkin’s Ardunel Tomb and then doing research on the family of the tomb it describes. The love match Larkin is talking about was a political second marriage, the countess had probably never met the Earl of Ardunal when he was engaged to her, and his first wife had died in child birth. Larkin though makes the assumption that he didn’t love her, and it that was a show but that seems problematic too. There is evidence to the contrary in the posture, rare among married aristocracy, of the tomb.

The problem is that our ideas of love are based off of love marriage, which seems to privilege the dopamine phases of human sexual interaction, which fade off in most people after a few years. However, sexual bonding between humans does lead, in most cultures, to oxytocin bonds, which may be why arranged marriages have such high satisfaction rates (but then again, it may also be because other options just aren’t common). The privileging of our notions of love to the media portraits and romantic notions which are all based on dopamine reactions, and culturally primed ones at that.

What people say about history also seems to apply to human nature, we rhyme with our ancestors as much as merely replicate them. We are objects of and subjects to history, but we also produce it to paraphrase Marx and Hegel.

The idea that human nature is eternal and unchanging privileges the present, but the idea that we are radically and unknowably “other” to the humans to the past is so discontinuous with my experience of the natural world that it leads me to see the “Chomsky” and “Foucault” positions (Chomsky, human beings are innately what they are and Foucault, human beings are completely historical contingent) as both being sort of a false dichotomy. We are social by our “nature,” and thus primed by social cues, but these cue change us. They change mating habits, change environmental reactions, and even can cause stress hormone releases with change specific manifestations of genes. We are different from our ancestors, but in very consistent ways.

So in a way, we see that marriage has always been about the production of “society” which is to say, it is human relations that reproduce human relations: not just in the form of children. So it should be no surprise how much economic changes affect it, and our ideas about love, which in turn, affects economics. One can see the pull and push here.

Marginalia on Skeptical Thinking: A Dialogue with Jamie McAfee, part 3

This is the third  part of an interview series. I strongly suggest you read the first part and second part prior to this.

Skepoet:  I find the rhetoric of the rhetoricians quite interesting.   I feel like we are diverging on the topic, but I keep meaning to point out that there is a danger to high level specialized academic discourses and that is one can forget that other academic discourses may completely reject the terms of engagement.    For example, the way literary historicists u e Foucault without interrogating his notion of power which Foucault rejected any attempt to pin down as reductive. This has always seemed to me to be a cop-out.    Here’s another example: your tropes of meaningful, colonizing, imply normative boundaries that you can’t make without a coherent social epistemology which is something you are bracketing out.

This is why I reject the idea of “science as rigorous common sense” in that those notions are over-filled signifiers semiotically which have almost no cognitive meaning to demarcate them even in “everyday” language. What does it mean to say science is “rigorous common sense” and this seems like saying “We don’t need any normative constrains on method and thus any rigorous applications about what is none science,” and it seems to me that the bracketing that is done methodologically in rhetorical science studies makes that impossible.

Again, I feel like we have similar problems with the Skeptic’s community, but for reasons of method, we can’t make the same critiques nor can we even recognize the validity of the critiques.   This allow puts out the necessary for structural demarcations and not just the borrowing of political-philosophical language to talk about ideas.  I suspect this is why there is some hostility between rhetorical scholars and leftists in practice:  one uses the other’s categories but uses them to almost opposite ends.

I want to push you on another assertion: What is the substantive difference that invalidates Lacan? How is Science Studies in Rhetoric avoiding it, particularly when using frameworks from liberal post-Marxist who extensively use Lacan like LaClau?

Jamie McAfee:  You’re losing me a bit here.

“What does it mean to say science is ‘rigorous common sense’ and this seems like saying “We don’t need any normative constrains on method and thus any rigorous applications about what is not science.’ and it seems to me that the bracketing that is done methodologically in rhetorical science studies makes that impossible.”

I’m perplexed. What is “rigor” if is doesn’t include normative constraints? As I discussed way back, rules and norms make science science. I’m not trying to be glib, but I don’t see where this is coming from. I’m deferring, as a rhetorician, to scientists about what the norms are. I’m not saying there are none. Sokal was, as a scientist, saying that there rules that defined what he did. (Well, that’s my charitable interpretation. If he meant something lazier, then up against the wall with him.)

I’d concede that I’m unable, as a the kind of rhetorician that I am, to comment on what the norms are. I don’t have any interest, as a rhetorician, in doing so. I can understand why they are and what they afford though. I can talk about the discrepancy between why the norms are, and they are justified, and I can talk about how arguments that flow from those discrepancies are problematic. Arguments are safely rhetoric, so I think I’m okay if I can get to that point.

“I want to push you on another assertion: What is the substantive difference that invalidates Lacan? How is Science Studies in Rhetoric avoiding it, particularly when using frameworks from liberal post-Marxist who extensively use Lacan like LaClau?”

Well, I don’t think anybody has “invalidated Lacan.” I just meant that some of the trendy science studies that was trotted out during the science wars is stuff that rhetoricians don’t read very much. I’ve never seen anybody reference heavily Lacanian science studies article in rhetoric. I’ve never seen Irigaray cited in a rhetoric article of any kind, for example. Laclau is something that I’m interested in. It’s not actually very popular, although not unheard of, in rhetoric. That was just sort of an aside about the science wars stuff. Some of the very technical Lacan business, about math for example, that’s been pored over isn’t really stuff that defines science studies as I know it. So I’m not sure there’s an issue there, unless you think Lacan should be discussed in science studies for some reason that I’m not catching

You’re making an excellent point here by the way about the appropriation of bits of theory out of context. Within rhetoric (and withing literary criticism before I switched over for my PhD program), it was something I tried to deal with to the extend that I could with the resources I had at the time. The magpie approach to theory that people in English departments do can be really problematic. There’s a limit to how deeply we need to get into the weeds as we are rhetoricians and not philosophers, but we need to go deeper than we often do.

“I suspect this is why there is some hostility between rhetorical scholars and leftists in practice:  one uses the other’s categories but uses them to almost opposite ends . . .It would be mutual in a sense because critical theory does build on rhetoric but doesn’t address it as such and rhetoric seems to using the concepts and boundaries of critical theory while bracketing out the epistemology and political economy that under-girds them. I suppose this is the hostility that only related fields could have to one and other. “

I’d like you explain this more, as I’m interested. There’s plenty of complaint about aspects of leftist theory in some corners of rhetoric. One of the few rhetoricians I know who calls himself a Marxist, not just as a scholar, but as a person, is sometimes pretty brutal about the failures of Marxists theorists. I’m somebody in rhetoric who is particularly interested in some leftist theory, and I fell the friction as well, and not just as a scholar.

I don’t quite follow what your take is, but I’d like to hear more about your take on this divide, as I find it a little puzzling.

S.:  I think you’re losing me too:  I am saying that critiquing something without defining it as a set of social practices but even as a set of social practices that are recongizable as such you have to have a normative definition.   Since science itself lacks a hegemonic
singular epistemological justification at the moment “accepting science’s norms” seems hopelessly confused.   The language about colonization and colonization of other discourses implies meta-demarcations between them and that requires a coherent
epistemology, which are not spelling out for methodological reasons. The rhetoric of rhetoric seems incompatible here with the bracketing.This tension is always there.   I  don’t think its cagey, I think there is a ideological apparatus at work in rhetorical language being employed here that assumes a philosophical framework without at once bracketing it out.

This is the crucial frustration is that langauge employed, as you acknowledge, actually assumes a framework but its a framework that cannot be addressed within rhetoric.  That’s fine in a way: that’s true of say physics too (which assumes methodological naturalism and a universal metaphysics that is coherent with mathematics in a consistent way.)  Philosophy itself has such limitations and many checks, but the order of checks seem different.   But it seems like one cannot just assume that there are different discourse communities that are coherent in their social practices when there isn’t always consensus (or even awareness of conflict) within the field.

Now put myself in rhetorical mode for a second, I can totally see how frustrating this is for the rhetorician who thinking, “Man, I am just pointing problematic assumptions that is betrayed by the language of the community” and in a way the critical theorist would do that without thinking as consistently on language as rhetoricians do.  Yet I would say that this frustrates the relationship between critical theory and rhetoric/literary theory.  It seems like there are bracketing out of the very epistemological and political economic categories that created the concepts’  specificity. For example, ”Hegemony” without some notion of class conflict seems odd to me.   It seems like there has been a move to use that rubric, but to disconnect it from real social conflicts between groups of people over various forms of valuation.  So when we talk about “hegemony” in science, Iwant to go for whom as I don’t see scientists are a class or even a coherent enough community, but mainly as  a set of practices with a specific aim and specific limitations.  The definition I am working with though see to agree with yours until the last instances of ”specific limitations” while merely descriptive approach can’t really set.

Here’s what I do like about your posture though: It actually avoids the “linguistic turn” in philosophy in a way by pointing out that this really is the domain of rhetoric and cannot deal with truth.  Badiou would call this an acknowledgement of anti-philosophy, and he wouldn’t consider it an insult.   I actually think this is important admission. It just seems that there are some many assumptions in the language that we trip up.   It is infuriating though to see Marxist theory being divorced from political economy in a way that makes it amendable to ignoring productive and structural elements of  class, and it seems   like methodologically rhetoricians can’t address that and maybe that this can lead to the sort of left-liberal tendency one sees in popular
uses of rhetoric. You can see how this would completely frustrate Marxists and anarchists who think that material conditions would have to be changed for serious  identity change to happen.  It would seem to be losing “our” (if anyone can have a claim to discourse) weapon in a way that doesn’t fight the battle “we” “designed” it for, no?

Anyway, we need to refocus on our common concern: Why do you think the New Atheist movement and the Skeptic’s movement has been increasingly co-terminus over time?

J.M.:  Ah. I gotcha. This is an interesting digression, but it’s not what we set out to talk about, so I’ll be quick.

“Since science itself lacks a hegemonic singular epistemological justification at the moment ‘accepting science’s norms’ seems hopelessly confused. . . but it seems like one cannot just assume that there are different discourse communities that are coherent in their social practices when there isn’t always consensus (or even awareness of conflict) within the field.”

Yes. We tend to study controversies in science or think about agency in terms of change. I’m not sure why you’d think that I think that “science” or even a discipline is monolithic. I think this gets at where we might be talking past each other. I didn’t mean to suggest that “science” had “a” set of norms necessarily. I think you have to talk about science as locally and specifically as you can.  I’d respond by saying that if science doesn’t have a single epistemological justification, I’m not sure how it’s a problem to think about it in social terms, particularly in terms of thinking about how people argue. Our starting point is “science is messy, let’s not accept the coherent, neat ways people talk about it and look at what people do instead.”

“It don’t think its cagey, I think there is a ideological apparatus at work in rhetorical language being employed here that assumes a philosophical framework without at once bracketing it out.” Yeah. I’m glossing stuff. The alternative way to look at this is to say that rhetoric purposefully blackboxes certain philosophical baggage.

I’m borrowing a technological metaphor here. A machine is a blackbox, and when it works, you don’t open the box. I scan my page in the copying machine and copies come out. It the machine isn’t working right, I open it and see where the paper is stuck. There are many, many moments in rhetoric when people open the box, but in order to “do rhetoric,” you are going to have to close it. The same it true of any intellectual activity. I want to bracket things that you don’t.

The specific complaint you make here is not a new to me though, and I’ve indirectly referenced the problem during the conversation. Rhetorical Hermenuitics, which is an anthology about Dillip Goankar’s essay about rhetoric of science is all about this issue. There are many efforts in there to deal directly with what you’re saying. I won’t claim it’s been solved, but it’s not new territory. The “ideological apparatus at work in rhetorical language” is what Goandar is worried about.  (Again, you are very much on the ball if you are making that complaint.)

You’re point about hegemony is astute, and I like it. Hegemony is, to be clear, my imposition. Talking about modern culture as a hegemony is not a widespread thing in rhetoric. It’s something that I’m working out, and I agree with you about the class thing. There is a response to that in Laclau and Mouffe, but I’m not really getting that into the discussion yet. I’m revealing thinking in progress there. I agree with your critique. I think using hegemony as I am trying to us it is not wrongheaded, but I’m happy to admit I haven’t worked it out. Your comment is a good one, and helpful.

The worry about what happens when we use Marxist theory is a good one, and I’ve complained quite a bit about it (in graduate school, not here).  There is a crisis communication article I know that describes Nike as a subaltern, so I feel your pain. I’m trying to be a lot more contentious than some rhetoricians about using leftist theory, but you are right that our differences in what to explore and what to blackbox, and the anti-philosophical nature of rhetoric is going to make some tension. (I think that antiphilosohpical stance IS the goal, by the way. I saw a presentation from the little Latour cadre at a conference that explicated Latour’s version of anti-philosopihcal. He is against “critique,” and is very emphatic about looking at “surfaces.”)

But enough of that. I think I see our differences better. I appreciate your perspective quite a bit, and this was useful for me. I hope it was, at least, entertaining for you.

Back to our charge. . . . there was an older and smaller group of public skeptics out there, and I think the Atheist thing offered a more ideologically driven position that has created the bigger and more political Skeptic movement.

There has been, for example, a Skeptic society and a Randi orginazation for a long time, and folks like that used to concern themselves with “critical thinking about popular culture” and debunking hokum. Randi going after faith healers, for example. The first Shermer book I read was all about cults, groupthink, and superstition, not about the more political stuff he’s been into in recent years. (Interestingly enough, he talks about having been an Evangelical Christian and then an Objectivist. Micheal Shermer is an interesting guy.)

New Atheism, I think, allowed skepticism to become a movement. It wasn’t just explaining away fringy parlor trick stuff or sensational pop culture hokum or aliens, but a serious complaint about the power that religion has in society. I can’t imagine a Skeptic movement as big as what we’ve got without new atheism. Like, there would there be a widespread movement to complain about fortune tellers? The two aren’t exactly inseparable, but from where I’m sitting, they are damn near close.

I think the materialist point of view and the concern about the influence of religion predate New Atheism, but that stuff wasn’t articulated into something resembling politics before New Atheism got rolling.

Here’s an interesting exercize. Go to The “List of Episodes” page on wikipedia for Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit.” The show starts off, in 2003, firmly in the tradition of James Randi, with episodes about psychics and Near Death Experience. By 2006, you’ve got very serious episodes about the Death Penalty and the religious influence on the Boy Scouts. (That is not an orderly progression, as they did some political topics early on, and they kept doing silly hokum stuff until the end of the show.) If we put them in the context of New Atheism in popular culture, in 2006, the Blasphemy Challenge was going strong. The tipping point had been reached by then, I think. There were probably other reasons for for the changes in that show (like running through all of the usual targets for debunking. . . I don’t think they ever did a holocaust denier show though, or P and T getting more self important or self indulgent as the show went along), but I do think there was in increasingly political point of view that Bullshit that became felt along with the rise of New Atheism. Like, these guys who were in the tradition of magic performers to debunk things (which came from Houdini, although he wasn’t a magician) ended up being political commentators. Penn has made appearances on Fox news, and he’s become a popular online personality who talks about politics, ethics and religion. I think that without new athiesm, he’d have remained a magician.

S.:  It found it interesting that some many in the New Atheist movement were actually attracted and assumed to be true some really questionable (by anyone’s standards) science like Evolutionary Psychology and memetics. This is not entirely true for the skeptic’s movement in which memetic and evo-psyche are actually high points for debate and have many within the movement considering them either proto-science or even psuedo-science, but with the New Atheist movement it seemed like evolutionary psychology and memetics were used to push evolutionary biology into the social sciences and the humanities.  I have seen this in narratology where increasingly you see evolutionary psychology used to read literature.  I found this problematic because it seemed to stem from the same disrespect for any demarcation line of discplines in a way that was really scientistic. I also noticed increasingly after Shermer a movement to talk about markets as if they were memes or even evolutionary which is something
one had seen in Von Hayek and in, frankly, in social Darwinism. Now I do know biologists who pushed back on this:  evolution is not efficient and if that comparison is being done then some primary economic assumptions even by neo-liberals can’t be shared with evolution. Do you see this drift? It is interesting to me because I have seen real push back within the Skeptic’s movement itself on evolutionary psyche and I hear fewer and fewer people pushing memes around as a serious science, but now I see it more in the humanities.  What do you make of these tendencies?

J.M.: Yeah. That pushback is maybe a way to kinda untangle the New Atheism thing from the broader Skeptic thing. I seems to me that some of New Atheism’s roots in the sciences (what I mean is simply that some of those guys are professional scientists who became being public intellectuals) have lead to efforts to appropriate, really, science rhetoric as a way to talk about philosophy, religion, or politics. The bizarre hubris of some of those guys, and the really cavalier way they make huge claims, seems to come from confidently using the wrong tools for the jobs they are trying to do. (Here’s my physics hammer that I’m going to unscrew this theology screw . . . ., and then Sam’s gonna come out with his neurology broom to replace the morality light bulbs.)

I’d have to do a lot more study and deeper reading to really make the case, but some of the more problematic scientism that I see in Skepticism seems to be coming from there. I haven’t gotten down in the weeds with that stuff in a while.

As for people in the humanities messing around with claims about  evolution. . . . ug. I haven’t read that stuff, but I’ve heard of it. It seems like the latest version of  something like early psychoanalytic criticism or archetype-oriented criticism or structuralism that some other schools that maybe tried to do to uncover some underlying “truth” in literature. I’m not familiar with the stuff you’re talking about (except for having had previous conversations with you about it), so I’m not sure what it looks like, but that move doesn’t seem that novel. Silly, but not unprcidented. (These are outside of my areas of expertise.  My interests back when I was a literature guy were really different. I haven’t read Nothrop Frye in years, and was never an expert.)

It seems like this speaks to some authority (we’ll not call it “hegemony,” but it’s some legitimacy granting sparkle dust that we seen to believe in) that science has. Like, if we can enroll ourselves in the physical, even if it’s some indirect semiotic structural way, we’re getting at an underlying reality. I know this problem a little better, oddly enough, in some social sciences and in medicine than in the humanities. There was a fallout recently in Anthropology between the social people and the “sciency” people (I don’t know what to call them).  The DSM is now supposed to be “evolutionary,” and whenever they work on a new edition, there is an outcry from therapists and researchers who see their work as being social. Or the sometimes whacky ontology of medicine. (I think by the way, that this psychical/social division is a really screwed up way to categorize things, but that’s where the fault lines of argument are. I’d say that those fault lines are problems for talking about how people do things.)

Not a “rhetorical” question: while there is pushback from skeptic people against some of the abuse of scientific rhetoric that some of the New Atheists have committed, are there people arguing for the validity of knowledge that makes no effort to do the sparkle dust thing? That, for me, would be the move that would align skepticism more in line with the arguments I’d want to make about legitimacy of practice. As was the reason for our discussion, I’ve dropped out of the skeptic thing except for reading about the occasional flashpoint, so I don’t know exactly what the conversations are right now.

S.:  I find the humanities aping the sciences problematic, and it always seems to be done with a prior paradigm is just lingering too long. In this case, I think this comes from a push back to dominant historicism. Still what bothers me is that this doesn’t seem to be the same kind of theoretical enterprise, the claim is that we are making literary studies scientific by using the sciences, not scientific by adopting their methodology. That seems to indicate that the humanities have already fell into some of this cache. Now I come with a harder sense of the demarcation line, but I see this move as invalidating in two fronts: One it weakens to humanities separate project and two it weakens clear demarcations.  To use your rhetoric, it’s self-colonization.

Do you see this as a problem?

J.M:  Probably so.

One of “our” (rhetoric’s) answers for identity/demarcation stuff is an insistence on some idea of a classical heritage, which tends to mean that we define problems according to our vocabulary. So, like, when I read Collins and Evans, for example, I want to use it to figure it out how to discuss ethos or agency. Of course, this gets us back to the Goankar problem, since that vocabulary comes with ideology. (It’s very “thin” theory, though, that can be built upon in different ways.) Actually, some of the liberal-rhetorical vs. cultural theory tension might come from that. I think the dialogue between those two ways of thinking about relationships between discourse and material culture is harder than, I think, many rhetoricians let on. (Of course, lost of folks aren’t interested in that.) And, I think, that common exigency is the reason those ways of thinking are important, and why I think they should be in dialogue. (Although, again, it’s a bear though. We’ve, I think, found differences though this conversation that I’m not sure rhetoric has thought about very much. At least not in the professional communication areas where I am.)

Arguing for the strength of the humanities (or social science that doesn’t do the magic phsycialist sparkles) as a way to know things (as opposed to it being a pedagogical or aesthetic tradition or something) without appropriating problematically or doing some other odd thing is, frankly, really tough. Not just for “cultural” or institutional reasons, but because it can be tough to argue for the legitimacy of recursive social ways of knowing that don’t end up as some kind of “linguistic turn” defense. I think the kind of literary studies you’re describing (which, again, I don’t know much about) is a major misstep in trying to think about this problem.

S.:  Anything that you would like to say in closing?

J.M.: One tricky thing about this discussion that we didn’t explicitly talk about is the difficulty in defining a “Skeptic movement.” Is is the active online communities who participate, the public intellectuals, the activists, or something else? My having “dropped out” a few years back makes me less in touch with the conversations going on at the moment, but I think I’d be a little fuzzy on that even if I were reading the blogs every day and going to events. I’m glad you pointed out that its not a monolithic perspective. One issue that we didn’t get into is that we might talk about it as a kind of identity politics, or at least, there’s some identity politics involved. That I don’t identify with.

I think many of the issues that have come up in this discussion, both in terms of talking about lenses through which we can discuss science, and in terms of the ways that science discouse is used, might be understood in terms of the constraints/affordance theme that I recognize in my rhetoric. Of course, by focusing on that theme I’m giving up other possibilities. And with the shadow of the meta creeping up again, I’ll call it a day.

Thanks for the invitation, and I really appreciate your toughness. For me, the most valuable part of this has been seeing your more political take on the Goankar problem. You’ve cogently elaborated problems in trying to think across the rhetoric/Marxian theory gap.

Marginalia on Skeptical Thinking: A Dialogue with Jamie McAfee, part 2

This is the second part of an interview series. I strongly suggest you read the first part prior to this.

Skepoet:  So moving you away from epistemology or avoiding it:  Do you think the skeptical movement is just naive about both the philosophy and the sociology of science, or is there something more generally problematic going on?  I am particularly interested in the assumption of sort of center-left or libertarian liberalism as a default assumption, and also roblematics around gender relations within the  movement.

Jamie McAfee:  Ha. More or less, yeah.

I’ve been persuaded that epistemology is a bit of a tarpit that isn’t productive to get into. One thing about all of the sociological approaches I’m referring to is that they tend to be really emphatic about rolling their eyes at epistemological debating in favor of evaluating science, to paraphrase the bible, based on the fruit it produces. Collins and Evans and Latour are in very different camps withing sociology, but they both make the emphatic move of tossing epistemology aside. (I mean that they explicitly say “we think epistemology isn’t helpful.) Scientists are good at doing stuff, so lets talk about it as people doing stuff. They can make arguments based on the stuff they did (like making matter behave in particular ways), which is where rhetoric, in the diminished, conservative sense of “arguing,” comes in. You could, I guess, use argumentation theory, which is a lot more like philosophy than the “rhetoric” that I do, to talk modestly about epistemological issues if you wanted. I’d go along with that. Epistemology is always creeping up, and I think we have to be careful when claiming not to imply claims about epistemology, since we might be doing so. I guess the length of my last answer is what “boundary policing” might look like in my subfield. I’d like to keep myself away from epistemology, or to manage it so I can do other things. I don’t really want to make claims about it.

It’s naivete, but hubris as well. Not to get too meta, but the problem in the Skeptic movement is, I think, a lack of respect for the disciplining that takes place in the humanities. When I see Dawkins, Harris, or an internet troll straying into philosophical debate, the word “precocious” comes to mind. I don’t expect public intellectuals, or anybody not writing in a scholarly journal, to perform scholarly literature reviews in their writing, but I do expect them to approach conversations with either some familiarity with what people who have expertise in a topic have said or with modesty. I’m not saying you have to be a professional philosopher to talk about philosophy. I’m saying you probably shouldn’t write books about it or start a movement about it. Skeptic folks dive right into debates without doing the work required to become expert. They certainly have some expertise in what they are talking about, since they are generally speaking to broad questions that relate to anyone. Since Collins and Evans are on the table, we can call the experience they have “ubiquitous” experience. But ubiquitous experience doesn’t make you a philosopher.

Modernism is a hegemony, which is, I think, why a naive celebration of reason and science allows people to charge ahead confidently and wrongly. As I discussed a bit in my last answer, science is a very institutional thing that is obviously well articulated to power. I’m not claiming that because people have respect for (or participate in) institutions, their ideas will be predetermined. I am, however, claiming that that kind of critical, in the “capital C” sense that cultural studies people mean it, work is deliberate and requires some real engagement with power and culture (when I say “culture” here I don’t mean something that is apart from materialism). That is work that Skeptics seem unwilling to do.

When you charge into debates demanding that everything behave like “science,” and you are unwilling to do the work to understand how other people think about the world, you are going to end up in some of our default small “c” conservative categories. I’d say that center left or libertarian liberalism are those. I’d say that being suspicious of people who want to interrogate gender is one of those. These are “commonsensical” ways of seeing the world. To make matters somewhat worse, Skeptics embrace and ethos of commonsense (in opposition to superstition, etc.) and they embrace the idea that reason is unproblematic. Political radicals and feminists are in violation of that common sense, and for people who define themselves as primarily “rational,” that stuff is just not to be taken seriously. (Coincidentally, or not, perhaps, a lot of conservative rhetoric is based around some form of common sense. “Conservative prudence” for example. Were American conservatism not so overly inane, I’d guess there’d be more Skeptics over there. Oh, and the religion thing, of course.)

So, for example, when feminists are concerned about privilege or objectification, that’s a step too far for common sense.”Equality” (of.  . .something?) is fine, but asking people to question the power that comes with gender is out of bounds. So you end up with Richard Dawkins finding it preposterous that someone might be (mildly, originally) offended by an inappropriate proposition, or to use a more extreme example, you end up with the Amazing Atheist ridiculing rape victims. (Yeah, yeah, conversations about those issues can be problematic on the feminist end too, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a “there” there.) The way Shermer reifies capitalism is, in my mind, the same thing.

One more thought:

Since I’m talking about rhetoric, I’ll throw out the analogy sometiemes called “Burke’s parlor,” after Kenneth Burke. Burke wrote:

“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

That’s how scholarship, or any kind of serious intellectual work, happens. The trouble, for me, with the Skeptic movement is an unwilliness to “listen for a while” and “catch the tenor of the argument” when they talk about things that other people are talking about. Their movement is, because it doesn’t have the patience to become serious, remakably shallow and remarkably beholden to a liberal status quo.

 S.:  I am going to go back to the epistemology question:  In this way the sociologist of science you are citing and Sam Harris sound alike, honestly.   “The meta-ethics is too boring, let’s skip it move” Sam Harris has done on morality since he started talking about objective morality, which is funny given that Harris is the only one of the new atheists outside of Dan Dennett to have any formal training in philosophy is similar to a lot of the dismissal I am seeing you do in epistemology.    I must call you out on it because it seems like are
trying to say “We’re bracketing that it” and “it’s impossible” at the same time.  The later is a philosophically substantive claim; the former is not.   However, I am going to charitable read you as saying the former for now.

I, however, really do like your other points here:  One)  since the demarcation lines of science are under-developed at best and philosophically impossible at worse, it does seem problematic to  ignore it. Two)  There is a hubristic problem of completely ignoring non-scientific expertise, which given the problematic standing of the demarcation line is science right now can’t work.  Three) This leads to all sorts of ideological and psychological heuristics being presumed as a sort of baseline of truth.  Ironically, the last bit would be an anti-scientific move itself.

You made an assertion about modernity I find interesting:  would you like to go into how you see the Skeptic’s movement as a philosophically modernist project?  Also I think there has been, to defend the “Skeptic’s movement” for a moment, some push back on this political assumptions.  For example,  there were many within the movement who started agreeing with me on Sam Harris with his last book,  and there were many who took Rebecca Watson’s side in the Watson/Dawkin dispute.  What do you see going on there?  Do you think there could be a skeptic’s movement that learned from the sociology of science and dealing with the philosophy of science seriously? Massimo Pigliucci, for example, has definitely taken on the problem of ”scientism” within the skeptic’s community.

J.M.:  First of all ” Ironically, the last bit would be an anti-scientific move itself” is something I agree with a lot. I think I’ve been pretty consistent in trying, even in cases where I disagree with science, to respect that people “do science” for good reason, and I hope it’s implicit that I think science is uniquely capable of certain kinds of decision making and exploration. I hope it goes without saying that I think that science should inform philosophy, politics, etc.also  What I’m against using scientific rhetoric (for the lack of a better phrase) irresponsibly, and I’m against the hubris of scientism, which is, as you say, really at odds with science itself.

I’ll start with some clarification about the epistemology thing, since that is related to the modernism thing. While I insist on being disinterested in epistemology, getting away from it is an important “move” in a lot of the literature from which I’m drawing my ideas about science, so it’s important. That move is, as I think we’ve made clear, important for justifying a sociological/rhetorical approach for discussing what science is. I do mean to bracket it, and I do not to say it’s impossible. I also mean to bracket it deliberately, not so skip it as Harris skips stuff. (Although I generally don’t dwell on it as we’ve done here.)

I would, however, say that trying to work out “epistemology” seems to lead to endless debate and discussions of problems that don’t seem to be useful to think about. Rorty’s prolonged explication of that stuff in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” or Latour’s various efforts to contrast a more modest epistemology (if you want to call it that) with Cartesian problems or Collins’s and Evans’s deference to “expertise,” or various efforts by rhetoricians to reclaim parts of some kind of Aristotelian or Roman worldview  are all various ways of trying to get some traction that epistemology doesn’t offer. Some of the “thin” theory that is rhetoric is similar.

The comparison to Sam Harris’s meta ethics (or lack thereof) I can see, but I think there’s a huge difference between trying to carefully (and recursively, by the way) bracket something because it’s not useful and plowing through without acknowledging your assumptions. To borrow a metaphor from actor network theory (since we’re talking about that), you have to blackbox things. You can’t have everything in play all the time. But you should be able to justify the choices you make, and to, when problems arise, go back into those blackboxes and do work there. There’s a parallel between what I’m doing and what Harris does, but the people who’ve persuaded me to make that move are a whole lot more conscientious than he is. I hope I’ve satisfactorily explained why I’m don’t think epistemology “is impossible” but, rather “it’s a useful a point of departure and not a thing to be solved.”  It’s down in the weeds, but it does matter since I’m complaining about scientism.

And that point of departure is pretty closely related to this “modernism” business. “Modernism,” of course, is a messy, term that can mean a lot of different things. In the context of talking about science, I mean “Modernism” in, more or less, in Latour’s way, which is filled with odd paradoxes, some of which explain how scientistism ends up being at odds with itself. Latour’s shtick is that Modernism is the division of the cultural from the physical from the discursive, and those divisions are what enables science. He bashes this division for creating unnecessary philosophical problems, and he makes fun of Cartesian dualism a lot.  He has a lot of bad things to say about “discourse” as a category, for example, although he has come back around to celebrating “rhetoric” in recent years, which he understands as something other than postmodern “discourse.” He also points out that science, when you trace what it does, is good at bending those Modernist categories and then discursively and through practice purifying them.

Modernism is a hegemony, not a “real” thing. Nobody behaves as if they actually believe in the divisions of Modernity, but they talk as though they do. A departure I make from him (although he says this, it’s not his point) is that people who can ground their arguments in some kind of physicalist language can gather a lot of ethos for themselves, because the modern. (Before the latter stages of the Modern that we call post-modernism, but Latour insists is late modernism. . . .my interest in synthesizing Latour with rhetoric is a pretty serious departure from the “pomostrawman,” and the fact that Latour has been often lumped into the “pomo” side of the “science wars” speaks to the light/heat ratio of the science wars.)

I would argue that the Modernist, in the Latour sense, way of talking is the problem. Modernism has empowered science, but as a way of talking about knowledge, it’s a mess. The Skeptics I’m complaining about talk that way.

You are right that there is pushback. The Skeptic thing isn’t monolithic, and their core goals of arguing with fundamentalism and superstition are fine by me. I’d like to see a skeptic movement that was more feminist, that contained expertise in thinking about philosophical problems, and  that was more interested in rhetoric (not the discipline, necessarily, but persuasion). I’m aware that there are participants in the movement who are tying to do that.

The question “do I think there could be a skeptic movement that took philosophy of science seriously” however, is trickier. I’d say “yes, there COULD be, but I think it’s unlikely.” Why do I think that? I think that because it’s hard to imagine a well articulated skeptic “movement” that wasn’t rooted in that problematic commonsense stuff discussed earlier. I obviously (I hope it’s obvious) think that a pro-science, pro-skepticism position does not mean one accepts scientism, etc. However, it’s hard for me to imagine a “movement” based on that kind of a position. What’s it in opposition to? What are it’s boundaries?

Now were kinda talking about politics. Here’s an analogous issue.  . . “Christian” movements have been all over the political spectrum over the years, but more recently, “Christian” culture is really right wing Evangelicalism. That narrower, activist group has claimed the word, even though there are more Christians who are not conservative Evangelicals than who are. (I’m thinking about this because there was a flap about it yesterday.) While I’d be happy to see more pushback against that appropriation of the word “Christian,” until there is some other movement that’s articulated out of some exigency and has some clear idea “what it’s not,” I think we’re gonna keep having to remind people that not all Christians are Republicans. Christianity, as a political movement, is defined by oppositions and tensions. Skepticism is the same way. It’s hard for me to imagine a nuanced, non-scientistic Skeptic movement coming out of the U.S. right now. There are plenty of us who are, nominally, skeptics who do not embrace skepticism as a part of our identity of who have any need for a movement. The attitudes that have pushed people to embrace skepticism as a “cause” seem increasingly foreign to me.

Like, even if everybody in the Skeptic decided to embrace Massimo Pigliucci and Rebecca Watson, I’m not sure what it would be that they would do with themselves. It’s hard for me to imagine.Why people who are dissidents from scientism and anti-feminism stick around in the skeptic movement? I dunno. Sometimes people define their ideas through smart dissident positions. That’s valid. Some of those folks are probably really interested in science and like participating in the community of other people who are as well. There might be people who, like me, were attracted to the idea when it was (or seemed, anyway) more narrowly focused on pushing back against the religious right but who have invested more than I did. I’m an apprentice academic. I have plenty of outlets for talking about philosophy. Not everybody has that, and the Skeptic movement is, for all of it’s problems, one of the places in American mass culture where people have those conversations. (Libertarianism, oddly enough, is another.) They’ve created a sort of weird counterculture that looks sorta like academia in some ways. It’s oddly like the religious right, actually, in that way.

One thing that hasn’t been brought up is the overlap between the Skeptic thing and pop culture subculture like sci-fi or gamer communities. In my completely undisciplined observations, there is a lot of overlap, and some of the hostility toward the humanities and problems with gender can be an issue in those communities. I don’t mean to suggest that those are monolithically sexist communities, but there are quite a few blogs by female “geeks” and quite a bit of scholarship that suggests there are problems there. That’s about all I have to say about that, really, but it’s worth bringing up.

S.:  There is so much philosophical assumptions that I find that I am turning this into a interrogation of rhetorical claim and I do not mean do but it seems to stem from sociological categories that have philosophic roots and baggage that cannot be entirely bracketed out.   Hegemony in the Gramscian sense seems only vaguely related to sense you are using because an ideology is much more than just an illusory belief or world view, it is a fetish or representation of social relationships that has material effects.

This leads me to another philosophical question:  are you aware of the Marxist critique of Latour?

J.M.:  Anyway, an anti-scientism skeptic movement would be rooted in a skeptic’s movement that attached itself to different parts of the ”Enlightenment” tradition that Latour basically denies has a practice.  I will say I have always found Latour hyper-problematic here: there are sharp demarcations in social organization after 17th century, so one has to have a fairly strange notion of practice to embrace ”pre-modernity” as a kind counter to the way people actually operate. I think it is just clear, in a way that one sees in a thinker like
Althusser or Foucault, that historical “epochs”  have structural practices that are real but not evenly distributed among society.   So I wouldn’t reject Latour’s way of thinking outright, but I wouldn’t accept it’s conclusion either.

My point in being critical of you here is not political, but that I think there is still a problem of naturalization of practices that the empirical approach, of which bracketing out questions of philosophy necessitate, do lead to certain conceptual limitations.

That said, I think I we should talk about two key events that can be seen as points of tension in the skeptic movement:  the “Sokal Hoax” as the beginning of the hostility towards to the humanities and the Watson/Dawkin’s break as beginning of re-politicization in movement.  What do you think about the Sokal hoax?

J.M.:  I don’t know that critique, but I’m either misunderstanding it, or it’s a misreading. He’s emphatic that he is not “pre-modern” or “a-Modern.” (He coins “non-Modern.”) What he denies is that the justification that the enlightenment has of itself is accurate. He doesn’t deny that Modernism is a practice. He gets there with somewhat playful writing, so he’s prone to saying things like “Modernism never happened,”  just as he’s also prone to make fun of philosophers (Foucault, for example) even as he’s obviously drawing influence from them. He goes on at some length about not rejecting Modernism, and he makes fun of the idea that being pre-Modern is possible.

I might be missing you, but he’s pretty emphatically not making those mistakes. Now, then, you might argue that he’s implicitly making those mistakes regardless of what he claims. If there’s a good explication of that position around, it’d be interesting to read, but Latour claims rather emphatically that he’s not doing those things.

He wants us to talk differently about science and technology by insisting on them as networks, and he thinks that that move is a way out of the Cartesian trap. That’s another way to paraphrase him. The parts that rhetoric people are interested in are things like unpacking the processes of transcription or re-inscription that create data or the way that writing helps to articulate networks together. Also, his blurring of human and non human is something that some folks look at as a way to try to recover materialism in rhetoric.

The problem with historical demarcations is a problem though, as it always is when people talk that way. I’d go along with “structural practices that are real but not evenly distributed among society.”

I’m leaning on Latour here as a way to talk about modernist discourse because it’s the way that I know because that’s most informed by concern for how scientist work. It’s compatible with more narrowly rhetorical ways to do that, but I don’t want to give you impression that Latour is THE guy for us, or for even for a booster like me. He’s pretty good though. This is one part of an ongoing conversation that involves different syntheses of Latour that I’m sharing. Plenty of rhetoric folks dislike Latour. My advisor is sorta one of them, actually. I think over-focusing on him might distort my position, which is a lot more in flux than it seems, even in this response, by making it seem like I’ve put all the eggs in the Latour basket. We are having a conversation that people have withing rhetoric.

(While I’m thinking about it Pandora’s Hope has some chapters from which you might extrapolate some implicit argument about Latour’s epistemology. He works overtime to be a realist, if one who’s modest about knowledge but who glosses over many of the problems that philosophers might worry about. The Sam Harris analogy might fit at some moments there.)

“I think there is still a problem of naturalization of practices that the empirical approach, of which bracketing out questions of philosophy necessitate, do lead to certain conceptual limitations.”

I agree. Affordances and constraints are intertwined. I think Latour is useful, but when I slip into Latour mode I sacrificed the ability to make other kinds of arguments. Although I have taken issue with the specifics of what you say Latour sacrifices, I suspect you’re kinda in the ballpark. I wouldn’t know quite how to articulate Latour’s problems without re-reading it with that in mind, but yeah. When I defend him, I don’t mean to say that you aren’t getting at something important. I just don’t think you’ve put it together in a way I agree with.

“Naturalization” is actually my biggest concern with Latour. Donna Harraway is, in my view, Latour on radical and feminist steroids (and they have been in contact with each other). She’s really dense and difficult to haul around though. When I’m doing academic writing, I always try to stick here in there. I’d like to move toward here as I keep doing this stuff.

I’d be quick to note that Latour is not a philosopher by training, and I’d be happy to concede that he’s probably not put the Enlightenment to bed. Let’s leave the poor guy alone. He’s had a long day.

You assert that “Hegemony in the Gramscian sense seems only vaguely related to sense you are using because an ideology is much more than just an illusory belief or world view, it is a fetish or representation of social relationships that has material effects.”  Good call pointing out my sloppiness there. I was thinking (as always. . hey, I’m planning a dissertation, so I’m not gonna keep talking about some of the same stuff for at least another year) about Laclau and Mouffe, but I was talking sloppy. Hegemony being the fractured terrain of acceptable debate about reality. It’s not monolithic, but shifting around discourses where people argue about things. Social relationships come from interaction with these discourses. “Articulation theory” is sometimes the phrase people use for their version of hegemony because you stick together incommensurable stuff and you define yourself in relation to society when you do so. The chat about “movements” included in my last contribution to this conversation is informed by L and M as well. I dunno if you can reconcile this with the way I expressed myself earlier, that this is what I was thinking about.

As for “What do I think about the Sokal hoax?” I think it makes a lot of people look very bad.

My understanding of the Sokal hoax is that it has been, in part, misrepresented. I might be incorrect, but my understanding is that the Sokal piece was not blind reviewed in the usual way, but published, in part, out of excitement that an actual scientist was trying to participate. Given the nature of the performative writing that was going around at the time, I have no idea the degree to which Sokal actually “fooled” people and the degree to which people regarded his piece as whimsey. I am certain that he put in a lot of jokes that Social Text readers didn’t understand.  So I don’t quite “buy” the conventional account of the story. It’s cheap and kinda dumb.

Having said that, you couldn’t pay me to read an issue of Social Text from that period. I tend to be something of a defender of the Social Text side as they were doing experimental, avant guard stuff. It was also trendy and not particularly robust of good. I think Sokal killed some of the faddish postmodernism of the time, so it wasn’t all bad.

The follow up stuff Sokal wrote (and Dawkins talked up) was silly. I actually kinda sympathize with some of the points he was trying to make, both politically and about philosophy, but sheesh. The lessons that people took from the whole fiasco are wrong though. The legacy of the Sokal Hoax is to embolden people who want to embrace scientism.

This, by the way, popped up on facebook while I was typing this out, and it serves as a convenient artifact. Ug. I am holding fire on about Dawkins and Watson.

S.:  This may be a misreading of Latour, but it is a common misreading by both his enemies and his friends.   Although it is fair to point that out to me, I still find the problem of bracketing to be interesting because the nomenclature one must use does not respect the bracketing methodologically required.    But this gets to how much messy philosophy there is underneath all these issues.

I wanted to go into one of the first assumptions of Sokal and Bricmont text: It literally asserted that all philosophy of science was silly including Popper and Kuhn, not just the sociological and po-mo critiques of the science wars.  I found this fascinating because it was defending the idea that science is just rigorous common sense. What do you think that assertion?

 J.M.:  t is a very common and very understandable misreading, but unless I’m missing something, it’s a misreading. Latour is a somewhat literary writer, and he likes to come up with paradoxical ways to say things. Of course, I’m reading translation, so the issue of the authorship of his “style” is messy. (Again, I’m leaving open the possibility that folks are sometimes disagreeing with Latour about the implications of his work. The objections to him that people have in my field are different objections, so I’m not that familiar with the complaints you are relating. Certainly, they don’t match up very well with how I read Latour, even if you seem to be in the ballpark.)

It is a very interesting problem. We keep trying to get out of epistemology and keep getting sucked back in. I think that trying to get out is a good move, but I’ll acknowledge that those of us who think that was are going to keep having to perform variations of that move that over and over. Pretty much every philosopher I’ve mentioned has made versions of that move multiple times. I do, actually, appreciate being made to wrestle with it a bit. Its something that’s easy, in my field, to gloss over. That phenomenon, repeating the move of “departing” from some problem (incommensurability was a popular one for a while), is common in rhetoric, so I’m comfortable with it. I dunno how it looks to other people. Seems like something anybody with a toe in philosophy will spend time doing.

I think I agree with the assertion that science can be understood as rigorous common sense. The techne/episteme thing from Rorty I was talking about somewhere earlier is a way to say that. I think most of the people I’m drawing influence from would agree. One of the really fascinating things about the science wars (once I get past being annoyed, and once I manage to forget how they helped to empower scientism) is that there was a lot of people talking past each other. Once you take the Lacan brigade off the table (some of the complaints about them were substantive differences, and the science people had a point there), I think everybody who was arguing with each other agrees that science is rigorous common sense.

I’ve never encountered, by the way, anything with a whiff of Lacan in rhetorical science studies. We have spent a lot of time theorizing the word “practical,” so that stuff is a little far out for us to even read. I’ve seen Lacan elsewhere in rhetoric, of course, but never in science stuff. One of our saving graces, when it comes to that stuff, if that we came to science studies, in part, through technical communication. We had an inside/outside relationship to science and technology that Social Text did not. Digression over.

BUT. . . there’s the trick. . . both “rigor” and “common sense” deserve very serious interrogation.

When Latour spends months following scientists around and watches them transfer data from one place to another, isn’t that an interrogation of what counts as “rigor”? Can’t “rigor” be interrogated? When Feyeraband or Kuhn did there early work discussing communsurability, isn’t that also a discussion of rigor? I once sat through a presentation/workshop by a college dean trying to describe what “rigor” looked like in teaching. (It was a shitty presentation, as most presentations of that nature are, but it was a good topic.) I’ll go along with rigor. It seems to be a useful place to start if you want to defend science studies.

And I’ve already pointed out, and you’ve pushed me to more carefully explain, that “common sense” is an extremely loaded phrase. My dissertation research, which is why Laclau and Mouffe keep coming up, is all about “common sense” in therapeutic rhetoric that is used in politics (James Dobson). “It’s common sense” says to me that “it” needs to be unpacked and that we need to trace what “it” is, does, and where it comes from. Calling something “common sense” is putting a post it note saying “study me.” (Let’s be careful though, and say that “study me” does not mean “debunk me.” “Redescribe me” might be better)

I think, to offer some benefit of the doubt to Sokal and Bricmont, that that assertion might have been a response to some of the bolder claims of avant guardians who were trying to stake territory. Even the more modest science studies people in rhetoric were doing a lot of sloppy colonizing. That’s what early work can look like sometimes. So there’s an opening for some benefit of the doubt for them.

One counter argument I’d make against the claim that philosophy of science is silly is to point out that before Kuhn and Feyeraband, we understood science through a highly edited, retrospective point of view. “Oxygen was discovered in such and such, and that was some more science, and then somebody did and experiment using cowpox, and then. . . .”  The process of the community that is science was erased. Kuhn’s breakthrough was to imperfectly introduce that process to the discussion.

One last thought. . . . I have a former professor who does rhetoric stuff with science who is very skeptical of postmodernism, science studies, Marxian theory, etc. His argument with that stuff was that it was just too mundane, and the thought the “action” was in taking more traditionally about persuasion and public policy. I disagree with him about the value of that kind of interrogation, but his point is well taken. Meaningful science studies does more than say “THAT IS LANGUAGE” or “THAT IS HEGEMONIC.” Those are really obvious things to say, and even Sokal agrees. I think, though, that using those claims as a starting point can be useful. William Keith argues that “redescription” is a key step in scholarly work. I think that it’s a STEP, but to make that step and start spouting radical claims is silly. That premise does not mean that humanities studies of science isn’t potentially valuable.

TO be continued.  Jamie and I hash it out on epistemology for a while.  We continue to debate bracketing, and then we remember we were talking about the “Skeptic’s Movement.”