The MSWV - or what I have learned today
I am not sure about whether to post the following observations or not. The direct motivation for it is a heated exchange between two colleagues at my department in Leiden. Part of the exchange was philosophical, part of it was of a deep personal nature, so I run the danger of meddling. I don't mean to. I just want to comment on the philosophical disagreement, to the extent that I understood what it was all about.
My two colleagues both work in a broadly phenomenological tradition. I don't, so I may very well completely misrepresent their views.
With this caveat, I can now move to what seemed to be the common ground between them. Both seemed to believe that the Modern Scientific World View (MSWV) is a threat to philosophy. Colleague A seems to think that MSWV, with its emphasis on reduction renders philosophy obsolete, meaningless and experiences this as a loss. Colleague B agree that MSWV is antithetical to doing philosophy, but seems to think that nobody can entirely ambrace MSWV for it is impossible to live that way.
The exchange is interesting, but I don't really understand the root of the problem in the first place. The idea that MSWV is the enemy of 'real' philosophy is very hard to grasp. Why would you think that MSWV makes philosophy impossible? Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that MSWV is in essence reductive. A good scientific theory is reductive apparently. So, for example, we have learned that behind matter, as we experience it in our daily lives, lie atoms, protons and quarks. Love, we are told, is nothing but an evolutionary instilled drive to procreate and as some cognitive neurologists recently tried to convince us, free will does not exist, because we start acting before we intend to do so. This reduction should somehow affect how we perceive ourselves and our place in the world.
It already starts there. I fail to see why this necessarily should do so. The physicist tells me that this keyboard is nothing but a collection of elemental particles with lots of space between them. So should that tell me that this keyboard does not exist? The biologist might tell me that my love for my son is nothing but a paternal instinct the existence of which can be explained by reference to ultimate evolutionary pressures on the evolution of mankind. Does that reduce my love for him or make me doubt my motives for doing so? The neurologist just told me that free will does not exist. So does that mean that I do not have to make up my mind and decide what to do? Finally, the philosopher, in the grip of MSWV and quite dazzled by it all, confronts me with the grim truth: there is no such thing as duty. Goodness is nothing but a self-deluded projection of my own interests on stuff that contributes to my relative fitness as a biological being. The meaning of my life is nonsense: like witches and magic, there is no such thing.
The first three folks are easily answered: of course there are tables! In fact, he just told me so: a table consists of clumps of elemental particles -- so there are tables. Of course I love my son and I won't do this any less (or more) just because neurons are firing in my brain and hormones subtly influence my behavior! So the threat of the MSWV -- if there is any -- does not come here.
Instead, it is the philosopher who responds in this skeptical manner to the MSWV who is most seriously deluded. Of course duty 'exists': you ought not to commit willful murder, you ought not to rape your daughter, you ought not to cheat on your exam, etc. If my conviction in these things is the inevitable causal result of evolutionary history, than that could not diminish my belief that it is wrong to murder, rape and what have you. Just like the physicist who wanted to convince me that table don't exist, this philosopher fails.
But that is not the worry. For notice that the philosopher has told me nothing about duty, he has only told me the cause of my belief. The suggestion is that the belief is false. And the realization that I have systematically false beliefs like this will affect these beliefs. Again, that seems an exaggeration to me. First, people have many false beliefs. That fact does not change my own beliefs, even though I am human and therefore I am bound to have many false beliefs. Secondly, the skeptical reaction is exaggerated because there are various alternative theories of the nature of duty. Non-cognitivists, for example, don't think that our moral convictions are beliefs in the first place. They are neither true nor false because they are not truth-apt. Or take naturalists who argue that the property of being right or wrong, of being one's duty, etc., are complex composites of all kinds of mental and world states. In fact, the only thing that seems hard to square with the MSWV is a kind of platonic intuitionism where values, obligations, duties and what have you hover around in hyperspace, but even here some very clever folks have found ways of making ethics and philosophy compatible with MSWV.
Instead of fearing and cowering before MSWV, philosophers should welcome it and see it as a challenge. There is nothing to fear from the MSWV: sometimes it is completely irrelevant (like for the assessment of my belief that I am typing these words), sometimes is helps us finding our way among difficult discussions in philosophy (like the discussion between intuitionists and others), but most of the times, the MSWV seems compatible with just about anything a clear-headed common sensical approach to philosophy.
I wish my colleagues shared this view: it would avoid so much personal aggrevation.
My two colleagues both work in a broadly phenomenological tradition. I don't, so I may very well completely misrepresent their views.
With this caveat, I can now move to what seemed to be the common ground between them. Both seemed to believe that the Modern Scientific World View (MSWV) is a threat to philosophy. Colleague A seems to think that MSWV, with its emphasis on reduction renders philosophy obsolete, meaningless and experiences this as a loss. Colleague B agree that MSWV is antithetical to doing philosophy, but seems to think that nobody can entirely ambrace MSWV for it is impossible to live that way.
The exchange is interesting, but I don't really understand the root of the problem in the first place. The idea that MSWV is the enemy of 'real' philosophy is very hard to grasp. Why would you think that MSWV makes philosophy impossible? Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that MSWV is in essence reductive. A good scientific theory is reductive apparently. So, for example, we have learned that behind matter, as we experience it in our daily lives, lie atoms, protons and quarks. Love, we are told, is nothing but an evolutionary instilled drive to procreate and as some cognitive neurologists recently tried to convince us, free will does not exist, because we start acting before we intend to do so. This reduction should somehow affect how we perceive ourselves and our place in the world.
It already starts there. I fail to see why this necessarily should do so. The physicist tells me that this keyboard is nothing but a collection of elemental particles with lots of space between them. So should that tell me that this keyboard does not exist? The biologist might tell me that my love for my son is nothing but a paternal instinct the existence of which can be explained by reference to ultimate evolutionary pressures on the evolution of mankind. Does that reduce my love for him or make me doubt my motives for doing so? The neurologist just told me that free will does not exist. So does that mean that I do not have to make up my mind and decide what to do? Finally, the philosopher, in the grip of MSWV and quite dazzled by it all, confronts me with the grim truth: there is no such thing as duty. Goodness is nothing but a self-deluded projection of my own interests on stuff that contributes to my relative fitness as a biological being. The meaning of my life is nonsense: like witches and magic, there is no such thing.
The first three folks are easily answered: of course there are tables! In fact, he just told me so: a table consists of clumps of elemental particles -- so there are tables. Of course I love my son and I won't do this any less (or more) just because neurons are firing in my brain and hormones subtly influence my behavior! So the threat of the MSWV -- if there is any -- does not come here.
Instead, it is the philosopher who responds in this skeptical manner to the MSWV who is most seriously deluded. Of course duty 'exists': you ought not to commit willful murder, you ought not to rape your daughter, you ought not to cheat on your exam, etc. If my conviction in these things is the inevitable causal result of evolutionary history, than that could not diminish my belief that it is wrong to murder, rape and what have you. Just like the physicist who wanted to convince me that table don't exist, this philosopher fails.
But that is not the worry. For notice that the philosopher has told me nothing about duty, he has only told me the cause of my belief. The suggestion is that the belief is false. And the realization that I have systematically false beliefs like this will affect these beliefs. Again, that seems an exaggeration to me. First, people have many false beliefs. That fact does not change my own beliefs, even though I am human and therefore I am bound to have many false beliefs. Secondly, the skeptical reaction is exaggerated because there are various alternative theories of the nature of duty. Non-cognitivists, for example, don't think that our moral convictions are beliefs in the first place. They are neither true nor false because they are not truth-apt. Or take naturalists who argue that the property of being right or wrong, of being one's duty, etc., are complex composites of all kinds of mental and world states. In fact, the only thing that seems hard to square with the MSWV is a kind of platonic intuitionism where values, obligations, duties and what have you hover around in hyperspace, but even here some very clever folks have found ways of making ethics and philosophy compatible with MSWV.
Instead of fearing and cowering before MSWV, philosophers should welcome it and see it as a challenge. There is nothing to fear from the MSWV: sometimes it is completely irrelevant (like for the assessment of my belief that I am typing these words), sometimes is helps us finding our way among difficult discussions in philosophy (like the discussion between intuitionists and others), but most of the times, the MSWV seems compatible with just about anything a clear-headed common sensical approach to philosophy.
I wish my colleagues shared this view: it would avoid so much personal aggrevation.
Labels: Philosophy
posted by Bruno at Sunday, February 11, 2007
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