Responses to Pinker’s argument have been varied
and revealing. A quick round-up of some interesting posts:
·
Ross Douthat at the New York Times responds here, arguing that Pinker’s claims are deeply flawed and lacking in self-awareness.
For instance, he rather mocks the idea that if the universe has no inherent
meaning, then everyone must adopt the liberal cosmopolitanism that Pinker
himself embraces. Indeed, according to Douthat, Pinker’s argument is entirely
based on a present-ism that posits recent improvements in quality of life as the
fruit of science and secularism and ignores the long and troubled history of
scientifically advanced nations. He also points out that Pinker “mistakes a
real-but-complicated historical
relationship between science and humanism for a necessary intellectual line in which the latter vindicates the former, or at
least militates strongly in its favor. And his invocation of “the scientific
facts” to justify what is, at bottom, a philosophical preference for Mill over
Nietzsche is the pretty much the essence of what critics mean by scientism:
Empirically overconfident, intellectually unsubtle, and deeply incurious about
the ways in which human beings can rationally disagree.”
·
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at New
Republic, responded with this video, arguing that it is bad methodology to
indiscriminately apply scientific methods to humanistic questions. In some
ways, this response represents a common view that interdisciplinary inquiry
between science and the humanities has little to offer.
·
The blog American
Science responds
by pointing out a number of oddities about Pinker’s argument and then analyzing
the “toolkit” model of interdisciplinary engagement. For instance, they point
out that humanists who integrate science into their work are often held in high
status and have much better chances for grants, even though Pinker likes to
portray science advocates as rebels fighting against the establishment. They
also note that Pinker rails against postmodernism – which Pinker claims is the
main cause of the humanities’ supposed “self-destruction” – but that Pinker’s
understanding of what humanists do (close reading and thick description) come largely
from postmodern thinkers. Additionally, they question the underlying assumption
that science and other methods should be thought of as a “toolkit” used by
individual agents, viewed as largely divorced from epistemic and historical
contexts.
·
Jon Brock reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun, explaining how Jacob
Bronowski's The Common Sense of Science gave us Pinker’s argument in1951. (Personally, from these quotes at least,
I find Bronowski to be more reasonable in his assumptions than Pinker).
·
At Pharyngula,
PZ Myers slams the assumptions, misinformation, and overall hubris of Pinker’sessay. He argues that given the topic, he
expected from the article “an explanation that science is one valid path to
knowledge with wide applicability, so simply applying science is not the same
as scientism; and an acknowledgment that other disciplines have made
significant contributions to human well-being, and therefore we should not
pretend to be all-encompassing.” Myers also comments: “that opening…could he
possibly have been more arrogant, patronizing, and ahistorical? Not only is he
appropriating philosophers into the fold of science, but worse, he’s placing
them in his favored disciplines of cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary
psychology, and social psychology. Does the man ever step outside of his office
building on the Harvard campus? Descartes and Hume were not evolutionary
psychologists. He’s doing great violence to the intellectual contributions of
those men — and further, he’s turning evolutionary psychology into an amorphous
and meaningless grab-bag which can swallow up every thought in the world. The
latter, at least, is a common practice within evo psych, but please. Hume was a
philosopher. He was not a psychologist, a biologist, or a chemist. He
was not doing science, even though he thought a lot about science…. He’s committing the fallacy of progress and
scientism. There is no denying that we have better knowledge of science and
engineering now, but that does not mean that we’re universally better, smarter,
wiser, and more informed about everything. What I know would be utterly useless
to a native hunter in New Guinea, or to an 18th century philosopher; it’s
useful within a specific context, in a narrow subdomain of a 21st
technological society. I think Pinker’s fantasy is not one of informing a
knowledgeable person, but of imposing the imagined authority of a modern
science on someone from a less technologically advanced culture. It’s actually an encounter I’d love to see
happen. I don’t think evolutionary psychology would hold up at all under the
inquisitory scrutiny of Hume…. I tried to put myself in the place of one of my
colleagues outside the sciences reading that essay, and when I did that, I
choked on the title: “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to
neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians”. How
condescending! …. Just as biologists
freely use the tools of physics, scholars in the humanities will use the tools
of science where appropriate and helpful. They do not therefore bow down
in fealty to the one true intellectual discipline, great Science. I have never
known a one to reject rigor, analysis, data collection, or statistics and
measurement…although they can get rather pissy if you try to tell them that the
basic tools of the academic are copyright Science.”
So what’s at stake in all of these conversations about scientism, science, and the humanities? I’d argue a lot:
·
The
relationship between the sciences and the humanities. Absolutely, Pinker is
right that the humanities and sciences should not be viewed as enemies, and
that there are many exciting possibilities when we think of new ways to
integrate scientific and humanistic inquiry. But Pinker makes the classic
mistake of thinking that this interaction should only go one way; he shows
little interest in or knowledge of what the humanities or indeed even the
social sciences has contributed to our understanding of what science is (one
might assume that Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, or Andrew Pickering
would be dismissed by Pinker for being polluted by postmodernism). Earlier this summer, philosopher Mark Kingwell
made an apt comment on this trend, in response to scientism and
to the claim that philosophy is useless
and has not progressed in centuries because it has not kept up with science: “I will inform my colleagues of our
demise. Meanwhile, let me say for the record that … assessing the vitality of
Discipline A as a function of its ‘keeping up with’ Discipline B is a form of
what we philosophers call begging the question, otherwise known as assuming the
very thing you need to prove.” More generally, however, it’s hard to see how
real interdisciplinary inquiry can come about if, as Pinker assumes, the
influence only goes one way – inquiry is, after all, a conversation and not a
monologue.
·
The
truth. Or rather, what we think of truth, knowledge, and of course postmodernism.
Pinker rejects postmodernism (and all the many things the term can mean), and
asserts that science is the only route to truth. The idea that there is only
one form of inquiry that produces real knowledge is something that most forms
of scientism share with religious fundamentalism. More interestingly, however,
Pinker and many kinds of scientism share with other conservative philosophies a
rather derisive dismissal of constructivism or any questioning of traditional
narratives of progress.
·
The
Western Intellectual Tradition. As many of the articles above note, Pinker
makes a preposterous claim when he suggests that most of Western philosophy has
been science, and would have been even better if these great thinkers had
understood genetics and physics, thus implying that Western culture has always
been leading to wonders such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics,
and other fields that Pinker supports. Besides being a simply strange comment,
this claim makes a rather common rhetorical move: re-telling history to make
your own current state seem like the pinnacle and ultimate goal of all
knowledge that came before you. Notice that this rhetorical move also subtly suggests
that current philosophers and
humanists are doing knowledge the way we
used to, before we understood how the world really works. Also, claiming
your own perspective as the true heir of an entire intellectual tradition
pretty much always comes off as asshattery.
·
Scientism
and religion. Scientism is accused of being as blindly dogmatic and
superior as religious fundamentalists, and while that may be a slight
exaggeration, many responses to Pinker suggest that his argument is actually an
example of the flaws of scientism. While scientism is strongly identified with secularism,
Pinker might again do well to consider what humanists have found about science and
religion. Of course, there is the long
and widespread assertion that religion and science are not incompatible
worldviews, and that only overzealous purists think them to be. But I would like
to focus on the ways that science draws on religious ideas, assumptions, and
cultural values. For instance, Shapin and Schaffer famously found that Puritan ideas about witnessing
helped create modern notions of scientific reliability, and Donna Haraway has often noted how “Puritan
storytelling” imbues both political and scientific storytelling.
·
Scientism
vs. skepticism. One of the key critiques of scientism, for instance, is a
too-eager and unquestioning embrace of scientific methods to explore questions
of meaning, beauty, value, and ethics. I agree actually that science has the
potential to add to our knowledge of all these questions, but I would argue
that there’s still a big problem here with scientism: its proponents often don’t
distinguish between scientific fields where we know much and fields where we
know little. For instance, science has
explained a great deal about how the human heart works -- this is a topic we understand
comparatively well. Yes, there are always new discoveries – tweaks and
additions to our knowledge, new diagnostic and treatment techniques for heart
problems – but we have a relatively solid understanding of how the heart works.
Our understanding of how the brain works, on the other hand, is rapidly
increasing but is still unquestionably in the early burgeoning stages of
discovery. The brain is far more complex than the heart, as are social organizations,
cultures, and behavior patterns. It’s well known, for instance, that fields
such as evolutionary psychology are highly susceptible to problematic and unexamined ideological biases but it is
also a field whose knowledge base is very, very small compared with the overall
complexity of the problems they tackle. Fields
like evo psych and behavioral genetics and indeed the sometimes tenuous science
of economics have many critics -- especially those figures in the field who
make the most outlandish claims – but proponents of scientism (not that many
besides Pinker would name themselves as such) argue that such skepticism is an
anti-science ideology. But good science
requires some skepticism.
·
How we
understand what science is. In the view of scientism, mistrust of science is
a rejection of reason itself, an inability to understand the necessity of
rigorously testing hypotheses and results. But science is both a method of
inquiry AND an institution, one with close and complex ties to other institutions
such as government and business. Scientism adds little to the debate when it
erases historical reasons for institutional mistrust and portrays all critiques
of science as a form of anti-intellectualism. There are many cases where such
institutional mistrust is justified, but I would argue that it is always important to understand the histories
that shape belief and knowledge, especially
when the mistrust is not justified or tenable. On this note, Eula Biss has
an absolutely superb discussion
of the social, psychological, and historical contexts of the anti-vaccination
movement.
·
Whether
we can talk meaningfully about the ethics of science. According to scientism, science is the only
means to truth. An even more problematic assumption, however, is that scientism
seems to assume that this is all
science is. Consider, for example, Pinker’s claim that those who point out the
negative consequences of science are being “obtuse” by claiming that these
events are “the
unavoidable dark side of scientific progress as opposed to a universally
deplored breach,” characterizing abuses of scientific authority as a series of
entirely anomalous and isolated incidents. Again, Haraway or any number of
philosophers might be useful in explaining that knowledge is always politically
“non-innocent” – that the consequences of knowledge do not, as a rule, affect
everyone equally. Pinker’s scientism,
however, seems to suggest that science is only a force for good –
counterexamples are derided as being irrelevant to the broader conversation, as
if harmful science does not really count for science as all.
Clearly, the debate around Pinker – and the debate
around science, scientism, and the questions that help us give meaning and value
to human experience and choices – is a complex one, tied with many more
conversations. Here’s hoping that the debate includes as many approaches as
possible, not just the ones that Pinker advocates, and that it leads somewhere interesting
and new.
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