Over at An und Fur Sich, Adam Kotsko has written a response to my defense of naturalism and materialism (here and here), accusing me of everything from believing that science gives us unmediated access to reality, is capable of explaining everything, and seeks to reduce everything, to advocating totalitarianism. Anyone familiar with what I argue in my ontology and epistemology will find this to be a peculiar set of charges, but so it goes. I posted a lengthy response there, but I’ll post it here as well:
I’m hesitant to respond here as Adam has already said he didn’t want to lure me over and that he’s found discussion with me unedifying, but I feel compelled to say something as I have difficulty recognizing myself in what is described in this post. Nowhere do I make the claim that science explains everything, that we have an unmediated access to the real, that everything should be reduced to elementary particles, genes, or neurons, or that we should ignore our knowledge producing practices. In fact, the ontology and epistemology I propose, the opposite is entailed. I argue that nothing has direct access to anything else. This would include scientific researchers in their relationship to the world. My central argument for the independence of objects– drawn from philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar –revolves around the experimental setting and how knowing requires us to carefully construct closed systems in which we perturb objects in a variety of ways to determine how they respond under these conditions. Here I would disagree somewhat with Adam. Science is not just conceptual. It involves instruments and practices as well and these contribute as much to our knowledge of beings as concepts. Indeed, often the way in which entities respond to our instruments and actions upon them ends up undermining concepts.
The philosophy of science and epistemology I’ve defended is based on the work of sociologists of science such as Pickering and Latour. As others have noted in this thread, these philosophies of knowledge are perfectly in accord with what Adam argues here. They are sensitive to the political and social contexts in which knowledge is produced, they emphasize the way in which knowledge is constructed, and they are attentive to how the history of ideas inform how we see the world. Their difference from hardcore social constructivists such as Luckmann and Berger in The Social Construction of Reality is that they refuse to treat construction as issuing from power, concepts, narratives, and discourse alone. The entities investigated, the materials used, the instruments used, etc., play a role that cannot, in their view, be reduced to the conceptual, social, and semiotic. Latour and Pickering’s constructivism is closer to what takes place in building a house and spinning out being from ideas and signs. Part of building a house will involve conceptual elements such as ideas found in engineering and architecture, part will involve social and political elements such as laws and cultural traditions in architecture, part will be real materials used such as the tools, the wood, nails, etc., and part the techniques or practices that construction workers have learned. Their point is that we need to avoid social constructivism that sees only ideas, power, signs, concepts, etc., as constructing being and also take into account the role that nonhuman entities play. I suspect many here– including Adam, I hope –would see this as a perfectly sensible proposal.
read on!
Nor do I advocate reductionism. In my published work and numerous blog posts I have again and again defended the irreducibility of entities. Societies can’t be reduced to human individuals, nor to neurons and genes. Trees cannot be reduced to cells, nor atoms or particles or strings. Mind cannot be reduced to neurons. Biological development can’t be reduced to the unfolding of genes as they contribute to the assembly of proteins. None of these things are possible without these other things, but at each level of scale we have the appearance of powers or capacities and qualities that we don’t find at the lower-levels. H2O, for example, is able to do things that neither oxygen nor hydrogen are capable of doing. There are dynamics of society that aren’t found at the level of human individuals.
In defending naturalism and materialism, all I’ve claimed is that whatever else being might be, it is natural and material. Even culture, for me, is a natural and material phenomena. That doesn’t somehow entail that history and culture disappear, that we can ignore what Bhaskar calls the “transitive” dimension of knowledge (the succession of theories throughout history, as well as how knowledge-producers are subjectivized), the role that power and politics plays in knowledge-production, etc. Nor does it entail that science is appropriate for explaining everything. It’s difficult, for example, to see what science has to tell us about novels and works of art.
I don’t think however, that we can or should simply ignore the natural sciences. We are living in the midst of the greatest period of scientific discovery in human history. Neurology, biology, physics, chemistry, cognitive science, astronomy, and contemporary mathematics, etc., have revealed things about ourselves and the world that were unimaginable a hundred years ago. We should be bringing our intellectual tools and talents to bear to think about the implications of these things and what they tell us about ourselves and the nature of being. Like Plato with the new mathematics, Aristotle with biology, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant with the new physics, etc., we should be asking ourselves how these things call for us to transform our philosophical understanding of ourselves, our place in the universe, and the nature of being. We should also, as is always the case in the Continental tradition, bring our tools of critique to bear, calling out ideologies in common understandings of knowledge-production, and revealing the blind spots in knowledge production (especially in how neurology, mental health, and genetics are often deployed in the political sphere). The problem as I see it, is that too much of Continental thought behaves as if these things don’t even exist and as if they’re not worthy of thought (Badiou, Deleuze, Stengers, Latour, Serres, and Haraway among others excepted). I think this is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst the result of science envy and insecurity, borne out of the fear that there might be nothing left for the humanities (fears that I think are completely unfounded).
October 31, 2012 at 9:26 pm
What’s sad it that Adam is attacking ‘scientism’; or, the reductionary kind of sciences. Everything you advocate is just the opposite of this kind of reductionism. It never ceases to amaze me how many people turn your thoughts into something else that what is there in the actual statements. It seems sometimes, Levi, that you’ve become the whipping boy of a certain type of fear, a fear of OOO for certain; and, yet, also of a certain type of materialism that the opposing philosophers just can’t quite pin down, so they lump you with the old guard instead of seeing you for what you are: something different…
The naturalism that you’ve defined is not reductionary nor scientism. Just not sure what they are seeing… I noticed that Adam did not attack you per se, yet in his comments he leads one to believe that it is in face Speculative Realism/OOO that is his whipping boy…
If people would actually take the time to really ponder and think through what your saying rather than twisting it to their on ‘axes to grind’ we’d have fun blogging, rather than having to defend ourselves agains insane readings of our posts. Just my two cents….
October 31, 2012 at 10:21 pm
“It’s difficult, for example, to see what science has to tell us about novels and works of art.”
There is a literary critic out there who is quite nuts about applying an evolutionary psychological perspective to novels and other forms of literature.
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5132-reading-human-nature.aspx
Perhaps this would be a better target for Adam and worthy of response in its own right. My partner is what I would call a profoundly gifted student in her senior studying chemistry at Reed College. She’s quite passionate about this and yet usually perplexed whenever I talk to her about how critics of science think scientists think, much less what they DO. I am inclined to share some of her skepticism, especially being intimately familiar with her own work and how she talks about what she and her colleagues are doing, which isn’t to say that exceptions, and in significant numbers, don’t exist. I just wonder why they dominate the image of science, at least as the critics see it, and how little is said about the effects people’s receptiveness to scientists’ methods and results, their ability to think scientifically. It’s not like there aren’t people doing medical testing on baboons and other creatures (I know a couple Reed graduates who have done precisely that because it’s in the area), but how this comes to to seem like all they do is a real problem I think. It’s Zizek’s man who thinks he’s a chicken all over.
October 31, 2012 at 11:14 pm
Elegant, Levi. I’m into the project and up and down with the program. I only want to provide a supplement. You write,
You would say the inverse too, right? But perhaps differently: just because neurons, atoms, particles, strings, genes are correlated with the scientific practices that built them into matters of fact and matters of concern, doesn’t mean they aren’t real. That’s Latour’s commandment, one that takes naturalism as an achievement, hard work, and no less true for being something humans do (and not only humans but humans too): thou shalt not freeze frame (reduce) cascades of objects, at all scales, both human and non-human. Harman’s version: thou shalt neither overmine nor undermine.
So, then, if wholes can’t be reduced to parts, and if parts can’t never be exhausted by the whole they’re been “convinced” to join, and if any whole can be a part of an even greater whole, then what’s the task of philosopher? To get into the middle, i.e., between the so-called individual and so-called society, to reassemble the networks, to limn formal causation, to, as you would say, show us the machines.
November 1, 2012 at 12:11 am
Just a brief comment. If you are interested in how Darwinism can be applied to the understanding of literature, ignore the idiot reductionism of Joseph Carrol (recommended by Joe in comment 2 above) and look instead at COMEUPPANCE by William Flesch (described here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=612).
November 1, 2012 at 12:30 am
Dr Sinthome, this discussion isn’t about nature vs nurture, this discussion is about Dr. Kotsko’s Republican theological closed mind feeling itself threatened by your Democratic Enlightened open mind. Which would be fine – great ideas mostly come out of friction – were it not for the ressentiment you feel in Dr. Kotsko’s voice: ”And just to prove those perverted libertines that they will end up rottin’ in HELL, I went to a scientific course!!!”
November 1, 2012 at 12:51 am
I have read both Adam’s post on his website and Levi’s response, and I think I would like to take Levi’s defense a step further.
Here is the fundamental problem I have: Adam speaks of being against science’s attempts to explain everything, or reduce everything to scientific terms. This whole argument seems to me to rest upon an identification between science as a method for examining the world, with its current state, or its current theories.
It might be impossible to explain everything with the current conceptual apparatus of science as it exists today, but science has shown a remarkable ability to alter its basic conceptual apparatus when necessary, or when it proves to be inadequate.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, critiqued the scientific theories of behavior in The Structure of Behavior, but he was not attacking “science”. The problem was not that people were trying to give scientific explanations of behavior which (for some reason?) is incapable of being explained scientifically. The problem was that scientists were identifying “science” with particular metaphysical commitments even though their own experiments were showing them the inadequacy of those metaphysical commitments. Merleau-Ponty was simply arguing that one should not identify “science” with those metaphysical commitments. It was possible to abandon those commitments and still remain scientific.
One of the things that makes science so powerful is that it is not wedded to any particular conceptual apparatus. Science is not against teleological causes, for example, because “efficient causality” is a part of the definition of scientific explanation. Science is opposed to teleological causality because it has found no evidence of teleological causality in the world. If science were to discover phenomena that could only be explained through teleological causality it would be perfectly capable of accepting teleological causality while still remaining science. The vitalists were scientists before they were proven wrong. Science is only opposed to vitalism because it was a mistaken scientific theory, not because science is inherently tied to mechanical explanations.
The mistake that Adam seems to me to be making is this: because not everything can be explained by mechanical causality, that means that science itself is incapable of explaining everything. But if mechanism is really incapable of explaining everything this should be something that, in principle at least, science can discover for itself. Scientists are just not going to take criticisms of philosophers very seriously. They are not going to abandon their own conceptual apparatus as inadequate to the phenomena unless they discover that inadequacy for themselves.
The main objection I have in relation to Heidegger, etc. is that they associate science with a particular form of conceptuality which happened to exist at the time they were writing, and then attempt to determine the limits of science by examining the limits of that particular form of conceptuality (enframing, etc.). No one can say what science is capable of because no one can say what science will become. No one can say what its inherent limits are. It is not tied to any particular form of conceptuality.
For example, Levi wrote “It’s difficult to see…what science has to tell us about novels and works of art.” This may be true. Perhaps science can tell us little about such things, but this claim seems to me to be premised on a claim like this: we cannot say anything about works of art by analyzing their molecular structure, or by studying neurons in the brain. But if these things are incapable of explaining works of art, it seems to me this is something that science itself should be capable of discovering. It may invent new forms of explanation for such phenomena. It might be capable of telling us, for example, a great deal about what drives human creativity. Why do humans create art in the first place?
Can science tell us what is good art and bad art? Maybe not, but who knows? I just do not like what I consider to be attempts to limit what science can do based on its current form. Science has changed a great deal through the centuries, and it is going to continue to change.
At any rate, I have been following these naturalism discussions with a great deal of interest. It is a subject I am very interested in.
November 1, 2012 at 2:14 am
Just to be clear I wasn’t really recommending the Carroll book as an example to follow so much as to consider in terms of ‘not getting science’.
November 1, 2012 at 2:31 am
Noir,
It’s interesting to see how all these narratives about science suddenly come out when these things are discussed. We have an elaborate body of critical theory that questions ideological formations, yet somehow it doesn’t get applied here even where something like what is described in that post isn’t remotely defended.
November 1, 2012 at 2:40 am
I think it rather proves my point about continental attitudes towards science, but apparently if I say that I’m making a “heads I win, tails you lose” argument. Strange such critique is only illegitimate here.
November 1, 2012 at 3:05 am
And we need to recognize that there’s an element of futility in all this as well. If organized religion could do no more than blunt scientific encroachment on what it perceived to be its domains then, really, what will a bunch of wankers like us accomplish? The issue isn’t what are the limits of science, its what will science *do.*
Does anyone think it’ll actually stop at demarcation points labelled ‘art’ or ‘mind’ or ‘meaning’? Maybe. But I see no way of determining such a thing beforehand. Things could get ugly. They usually do when science rides into town.
November 1, 2012 at 3:16 am
Rsbakker,
I find claims that science is “totalitarian” strange to say the least. A major difference between science and religion (at least in its monotheistic variants) is that the former is willing to change, abandon theories, and revise in the face of new evidence (as per your remark about teleology in your post). The same is not true in monotheistic religion. If anything, I think scientists are often too cautious. Here I have in mind climate scientists that always blunt their claims with respect to governmental policy.
At any rate, I think the main thing to remember is that science is a process and way of thinking, not a body of beliefs. These criticisms seem based on the idea that science is a body of belief rather than a practice and process. I just don’t understand how we can ignore all of these revolutions in thought in an a priori fashion. Phenomenology yes, but in the way Merleau-Ponty practiced it.
November 1, 2012 at 3:31 am
Not apriori. Just a pessimistic induction. And premised on an understanding of science as a concrete institutional process, one that has a trackrecord of replacing traditional discourses when entering a domain, the way science has breached the intentional game preserve of the human.
You agree it has such a trackrecord?
November 1, 2012 at 4:03 am
Sure, I kinda think that’s what’s great about science!
November 1, 2012 at 11:39 am
So far maybe! Hence my question: Do you think the sciences will actually stop at demarcation points labelled ‘art’ or ‘mind’ or ‘meaning’?
Like I say, I see no way of determining such limits beforehand.
November 1, 2012 at 1:32 pm
I don’t think I’m drawing an a priori line that science is supposed to obey. I’m saying I haven’t seen the sciences say anything interesting about literature, etc. that could always change.
November 1, 2012 at 2:53 pm
So you accept that all philosophy now, at this particular historical juncture at least, has to be prepared to accommodate scientific information as it becomes available? Or put differently, that the ‘metaphysical’ must now accommodate the empirical?
November 1, 2012 at 3:05 pm
Yes, I said as much in my post.
November 1, 2012 at 4:30 pm
I realize, but I just wanted to be clear. Because you also say quite a few things that are hard to square with this commitment. To whit:
“Societies can’t be reduced to human individuals, nor to neurons and genes. Trees cannot be reduced to cells, nor atoms or particles or strings. Mind cannot be reduced to neurons. Biological development can’t be reduced to the unfolding of genes as they contribute to the assembly of proteins. None of these things are possible without these other things, but at each level of scale we have the appearance of powers or capacities and qualities that we don’t find at the lower-levels. ”
This is a curiously ontological way of looking at ‘reduction.’ In a sense, it’s trivial, insofar as the whole is generally more than the sum of its parts, particularly with complicated phenomena. So I’m going to assume you mean ‘intertheoretic reduction’ as it is commonly used. Whether the theories describing one set of phenomena can be translated (or ‘reduced’) into theories describing another is precisely one of these things I can’t see how we can determine in advance one way or the other. Emergence is a complication, certainly, there’s nothing to say that emergent phenomena can’t be captured through theoretical extensions of some more ‘basic’ theory – or perhaps through a boggling amount of computational work. Quantum field theory, after all, explains a whole helluva alot across a variety of ‘levels’!
The point is, the question of whether any theory reduces to another is not one that can be answered in advance. Do general relativity and quantum mechanics reduce to constructor theory, to some extension of M-theory? This is an *empirical* question.
Becoming a naturalist means getting used to walking around epistemologically nude. You can’t dress your levels up and declaim, ‘Thou are autonomous, one from the other.’ Science, whatever the hell it is, is a shambling flux involving theoretical proliferation and *condensation.* What if, for instance, Lisi’s right? Can you say in advance that E8 theory has to be wrong because, if right, it would collapse the cosmological and the microscopic?
November 1, 2012 at 8:48 pm
Levi Bryant wrote “science is a process and way of thinking, not a body of beliefs. These criticisms seem based on the idea that science is a body of belief rather than a practice and process.”
Exactly! This was exactly the point I was trying to make in my post. I also find the “totalitarian” charge strange. Totalitarianism seems to me to be rooted in an irrational adherence to a doctrine against all contrary evidence. The Nazis clung to a ridiculous racial ideology that had no scientific support. Science itself is perfectly capable of critiquing those kinds of irrational ideologies. The problem with the Nazis (and other totalitarians) was not that they were too scientific, but that they were not scientific enough! Not only that but scientists engage in self-criticism constantly, which is why I am not sure why it should be the job of philosopher’s to criticize science?
I just do not think that the antagonistic relationship between philosophy and science is the most fruitful way to view the relationship. I do not think we gain anything by turning science into the enemy since, as rsbakker points out, it is naive to think that the criticisms of philosophers are going to halt the progress of science. So why not learn from science? Why not take what science has to say into consideration and respond to it creatively, rather than beginning from the premise that the job of philosophy is to criticize science?
It seems to me the critics of science are simply attempting to create an island where they are able to continue thinking without having to take science into account. It seems to me that the argument “science is incapable of grasping phenomenon x” is similar to saying “I want to be free to continue thinking about phenomenon x without worrying about what science has to say on the subject”. Science may not be able to tell the whole story, but, as rsbakker has been arguing, this cannot be determined a priori, and as David Roden has been arguing on Adam’s forum, scientific theories should, at the very least, be considered as constraints on the theories put forward by philosophers. Viewing science as a partner, rather than an adversary, seems much more fruitful to me.
November 2, 2012 at 12:29 am
I remain dumbly astounded that two people whose work I so admire (AK and LB) can be so vociferously and consistently at loggerheads.
cpc, Kotsko is an advocate, at the explicit level at least, of Marxist and communist models.
November 2, 2012 at 5:03 am
Do we really have good reasons to think that quantum field theory will eventually explain the phenomena of a Shakespeare play? Or even supplant other sciences, like geology and paleontology and chemistry? I don’t even think quantum physicists are trying to do that…
November 2, 2012 at 1:53 pm
@ Goodson: The point is that we can’t predict, that we have no ‘apriori’ (if there is such a thing) way securing the autonomy (from science) of any discursive domain. To a posthuman, Shakespeare might well be comparable to a kindergarten crayon sketch, more the province of ‘developmental psychology’ than their *art,* which we would find incomprehensible. Who’s to say?
All we have to go on is history: thus my Big Fat Pessimistic Induction. Now that the technical capabilities of the sciences have penetrated the black box of the brain, it seems safe to presume that the prescientific discourses of the ‘soul’ are going to be revolutionized the way all other prescientific discourses were. The humanities *as we know them* are pretty clearly doomed.
This is, without exaggeration, the most conceptually uncertain time in the history of the human race – enough to make the Old Enlightenment look like a sewing circle! We are finally learning what we are, and things ain’t looking pretty for all the old yardsticks.
At the same time, it’s a profoundly exciting time, especially if you’re a young grad student. While the nooconservatives continue rummaging through their keepsakes, the rest of us have a chance to say something genuinely new. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure there’s anything quite so sexy as a blackboard wiped clean.
November 2, 2012 at 8:03 pm
Joseph, I would also add that explaining something scientifically is not necessarily the same thing as reducing everything to physics. Geology is a science despite the fact that geologists have not reduced geology to quantum field theory (and, in my opinion, they never will). Explanations have to take place on the level to which the phenomena belong. Roy Bhaskar makes this point. In order to explain, for example, the proliferation of colored objects in nature, it is necessary to make reference to the laws of natural selection. The four fundamental physical forces are not enough. The same could, at least potentially, be true in regard to literature.
I admit that I am somewhat skeptical myself about whether science will ever have anything interesting to say about literature or a Shakespeare play. But as rsbakker says, we cannot determine that a priori. Science may develop a new form of explanation (similar to natural selection) that would apply to the literary domain. It would have been impossible to predict the principle of natural selection before it was developed.
This criticism seems to me to be based on taking a snapshot of science at a particular moment and identifying it with “science itself”. There was a time when “science” and “Newtonian science” were virtually synonymous, and there were lots of things that could not be explained by Newtonian science. At the time people could argue that “science itself” was incapable of explaining those phenomena. Of course there were those at the time who were saying Newtonian science itself was capable of explaining everything. In relation to those people the critics of science happened to be correct. And I happen to think that the critics of science today are often correct when they say “science as it exists today is incapable of saying anything about x”. This is the complaint that people make when they say “not everything can be explained by genes”. The mistake in my opinion is to move from that to “science will never be able to say anything about x”. In my opinion, if “genes” really cannot explain everything, science should be capable of discovering that for itself. Science is not eternally tied to explanation in terms of genes.
One thing I will say: if science is ever able to say anything about a Shakespeare play, the “explanation” will have to be adequate to the phenomenon. If the “explanation” reduces the play out of existence, it will be a very bad explanation. It would, for example, be ridiculous to “explain” a Shakespeare play by analyzing the molecular structure of the paper it is written on. This would not be an explanation of the play at all, because it would leave out the play (which is what we are trying to explain in the first place). I think many of the criticisms of science are based on the fear that science will reduce what it wants explained out of existence (which would certainly happen if we explained a Shakespeare play with quantum field theory).
I just do not think that science is synonymous with this form of reductionism, so I think the fear is unfounded. If there is ever a scientific explanation of a play it will not succeed by reducing the play out of existence. Rather, it will tell us MORE than we already knew about the play. The fear is that by telling us MORE about the play than what we already knew, somehow science will turn the play into something LESS than what we took it to be (a Shakespeare play will no longer be a moving piece of art, but just a collection of atoms, etc.). I think this fear is unfounded, because I think any explanation of a play which turns the play into something less than what it is, will be a bad explanation, and science should be capable of discovering that. I just do not think that the prospect of learning MORE than we already know about a Shakespeare play is a prospect that should frighten or worry us.
November 2, 2012 at 10:57 pm
http://parodycentrum.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-blawg-buzz-2-11-2012.html