post-modernist nonsense

Here is an essay by Paul Boghossian that contains some of the ideas in his book that I recommended in the last post, and discusses the famous Sokal hoax in detail. Read it through to the end - I promise you will benefit thereby. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html

The Signature in the Cell controversy

Received from a friend:

Hi Rabbi Gottlieb, Thought you might be interested in this Wikipedia post re: "Signature in the Cell". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_in_the_Cell You will note that Meyer has posted a free 105 pg paper on his site responding to the critics.

Meyer's book [with chapters from others at Discovery] should make important reading. And the fact that Nagel nominated Signature as one of the books of the year for 2009 is extremely impressive.

social constructionism

An extremely good book:
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, Oxford University Press 2006 -
short, on a very important topic, written almost without any technical terminology, extremely clear, and very convincing. Even those without a background in philosophy should find it readable.

Also, this essay: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/ gives a good example of where philosophy is now. A clear relatively simple problem, many competing approaches, each approach has clear difficulties, and [therefore] no resolution.

The uniqueness of language

Below are excerpts from an excellent review. The parts reproduced relate to the nature of language, and the utter lack of evidence that animals possess anything resembling laguage.

« REVIEWS «Biolinguistics 2.2: 185–194, 2008ISSN 1450–3417 http://www.biolinguistics.euNovel Tools at the Service of Old IdeasJablonka, Eva & Marion J. Lamb. 2005. Evolution in Four Dimensions. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.By Massimo Piattelli–Palmarini2.
Symbols? Oh, No, Please!
As of Chapter 6, I start to disagree with J&L. They follow a very old script, onethat opens up with the appearance of symbolic systems. They duly acknowledgethat language is special, with respect to other symbolic communication systemsfound in animals, essentially because of the subtlety of syntax. That is correct, butthere is more to be said. Other crucial differences are to be found already at thelevel of the lexicon. It’s not just syntax that makes human language special, butalso the nature of individual words and the way they connect with each otherand with the world. There are at least four major differences between words andall non-linguistic symbols: (A) aspectual reference, (B) headedness, (C) internalstructure, and (D) edge features. Briefly about each one in turn:
(A) Buy and sell, fear and frighten, and a huge variety of such oppositions, in alllanguages, refer to a same objective, physical, filmable, state of affairs, buthave transparently different meanings. The same applies to nouns (destructionvs. demolition, gift versus theft) and to adjectives (thrifty vs. stingy,abundant versus excessive, and so on). Even apparently innocent words likecity embody an aspectual component, a point of view. Words refer onlyunder specific itineraries of mental access (a city can be said to be chaotic,polluted, expensive, mostly Victorian, each expression obviously referringto very different objective features; cf. Chomsky 2005). Word meanings arethrough and through intensional. No symbol used in animal communicationsystems has this property. Also many non-linguistic symbols usedby humans to communicate lack it, unless they are transparently parasiticon language.
(B) ‘The California highway commissioner report’ is a report. ‘The world tradeexchange bank’ is a bank. ‘The spy who came in from the cold’ is a spy. Therightmost noun (in English, the leftmost in other languages) heads allnominal compounds. A noun with a determiner (such as the spy) heads theDeterminer Phrase, even when the DP contains a whole sentence (who camein from the cold). Headedness also applies to Verb Phrases (in a morecomplicated way which need not detain us here; see below). The propertyof headedness is conserved by the syntactic derivation, from start to finish,and cannot be altered. It’s a crucial combinatorial valency of lexical entries,determining the category to which they belong and how the syntacticmachinery must treat them. There are, of course, many ways to make acertain symbol particularly salient in a string of non-verbal symbols (size,color, etc.), but headedness is unique to words.
(C) Words have a rich internal structure. Thematic roles are probably the mostconspicuous such structures. There was the destruction of Carthage by Scipio,but there cannot be *the sleep of the bed by Scipio. Together with headedness,thematic roles are crucial valencies for combination into larger expressions.Morphological domains within words are also central, with relations ofdominance and asymmetry. Vast, subtle, and ramified consequences of thisinternal structures ensue for syntax and semantics (Halle & Marantz 1993,di Sciullo 2005). No other system of non-linguistic symbols has any sem blanceof such property.
(D) Very simply said, words are “sticky” and so are phrasal constituents obtainedby merging two of them, and then merging this compound withother words, again and again, recursively and hierarchically. (The technicalterm for this intrinsic combinatorial power of words and phrasal constituentsin the minimalist program is “edge features”; Chomsky has rightlystressed that the appearance of edge features has been one of the centralevents in the evolution of language.) Whole linguistic expressions, andsentences in particular, are not lists of words, not even ordered lists ofwords. The point I wish to emphasize here is that words have the intrinsiccapacity to project structure “upwards” onto larger compounds. Verbs offer the richest case, but not the only one. Verbs project a stratification of“shells” in a fixed hierarchical order, specifying the place where to insertthe actants, the auxiliaries, the checking of tense, Case and agreement, andmore (ever since the seminal work of Richard Larson — cf. Larson 1988).
All in all, therefore, contrary to spontaneous intuition, contrary to the wholedomain of semiotics, and contrary to what Chapter 6 and Chapter 9 of J&Lsuggest, there is no gain in our understanding of language by assimilating it to asystem of symbols. Any attempt to reconstruct language evolution as theevolution of a symbolic system leads us badly astray. Words are, of course, insome sense, symbols, and they enter into the system of language, but the uniqueproperties summarized here above make words stand radically apart from allother symbolic systems. J&L, unbeknownst to them, seal this radical separationin the last line of their table on p. 234, when they state that the “range ofvariation” of symbolic systems is “unlimited”. I doubt that they are right evenabout symbolic systems, but surely this does not apply to language. The range ofvariation for language is quite severely limited, as J&L sketch in Chapter 8, sortof noncommittally, when speaking of the “principles and parameters” model(Baker 2001, 2003). Symbolic systems are not relevant to language, and theycannot be offered as an intermediate step in language evolution.3 . Culture and LanguageJ&L embrace a thesis that several other authors also have tried to promote: theshaping of language by culture and history. Their critique of the innatist,modularist, and highly specific nature of language has, as is often the case withthose who adopt their position, a possibilistic attitude: Why could we not, oneday, explain a lot in language by means of cultural and historical factors, communicativefunctions, motor control, and general intelligence? This line was offeredover 30 years ago already by Jean Piaget to Noam Chomsky, in a direct debate(Piattelli–Palmarini 1980).
The answer is today what it was then: No one canexclude this possibility, as a remote possibility. It is, however, eminently rationalto expect that it will not happen. The task seems even more hopeless today than itseemed 35 years ago, because we know a lot more about language than we didthen. For instance, none of the properties of words that I have sketched above canbe explained in terms of culture or history, or motor control, or factors of generalintelligence.On p. 218, J&L venture into a minefield, quite similar to the one into whichMichael Arbib also ventured in BBS recently (Arbib 2005) — a parallel betweenl anguage and mathematics:Although the speed and ease of learning [of language by the child] mayindicate that there are some preexisting specifically selected neural mechanisms,the same properties could also be due to a culturally evolved systemthat is well adapted to the brain, and therefore makes learning easy. Forexample, think how difficult it was 1200 years ago for someone in Europe todivide one number by another. Say they wanted to divide 3712 by 116 […][they point to the impracticality of the Roman numerals — MPP] Today, with ourArabic notation system (and the useful zero), it would take the average tenyear-old only minutes to get the answer 32.No genetic change, no brain change, but rather a cultural invention that hasbecome common knowledge. J&L advocate (like Arbib and Deacon andTomasello) a co-evolution of brain and language and do not advocate a purelycultural-evolution explanation of the language capacity. Well, anyway, theiranalogy with the numerical division is totally irrelevant. No sentence in anylanguage requires “minutes” to be understood by a ten-year-old, or by anyone atany age. Aside from the fact that ten years is a very old age for language,sentences are processed in fractions of seconds, not minutes, today just as theywere 1200 years ago, or earlier. Moreover, the number system and the rules fordividing numbers have to be explicitly and painfully taught. No three-year-oldchild today can make that division, while he or she can well understand quitesubtle syntactic constructions, exactly like a child could already in ancient Egypt.The analogy is infelicitous, because language is in a completely different ballpark.
Like this one, many analogies and thought-experiments offered by J&L inthe domain of language are inconsequential or misleading, unlike those that dealwith biology proper.4. New Biology and Old ReflexesA most puzzling aspect of this book is that, after having pleaded persuasively fora major expansion of concepts and models in evolutionary theory, J&L fall backonto a basically classic, neo-Darwinian, functionalist explanation of the evolutiono f language. Just as an example, on p. 339 we read:Two related sets of conditions seem to have pushed our ancestors along theroute to language. The first was an altered ecological and socialenvironment, which provided a strong and persistent motivation for bettercommunication […]. The second and related set of conditions has to do withanatomy and physiology. […] It was probably the increased motor controlover hand movements and vocalizations, and the ability to imitate bothgestures and vocal sounds.They are in excellent and very old company in making these hypotheses, fromDarwin himself, to Jean Piaget, Philip Liberman, Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom,Michael Arbib, and Derek Bickerton, just to name a few. Yet, all that we havelearned from the new biology, and from this very book, should make any suchfunctionalist hypothesis unnecessary or even suspect. Master regulatory geneswith pleiotropic effects, transposons, gene duplications, histone modification,and alternative gene splicing (just to mention a few) offer manifold evolutionarymechanisms that make progressive functional adaptation quite marginal. ButJ&L insist, venturing into “non-genetic inheritance” to explain how “variousfeatures of the emerging language system that were initially culturally transmittedwere later genetically assimilated” (p. 340, my emphasis).
I have no qualm withnon-genetic inheritance, amply attested in experiments well explained in theirown previous chapters and also endorsed by Cherniak’s “non-genomic nativism”(which J&L ignore — see supra), but I strongly object to the cultural transmissionhypothesis.Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) have rightly insisted on the uniqueness ofthe capacity of humans to acquire a lexicon, and on the presence in humans ofBiolinguistics « Special «190syntactic computational powers that are conspicuously absent in other primates(Fitch & Hauser 2004). Together with the very special properties of words seenabove, these are quantum changes in cognitive powers, both qualitatively andquantitatively, impossible to reconstruct by piecemeal functional adaptation.Cultural interactions among humans that are allowed by language presupposethem and cannot explain their gradualistic adaptive origin. The new evolutionarymechanisms presented in this book could have finally dispensed us from exploringagain an old dead-end.The surprising reappearance of old, standard neo-Darwinism is also to bewitnessed when J&L criticize the approach promoted by Hauser, Chomsky &Fitch in an already famous (or infamous, for some; cf. Pinker & Jackendoff 2005)paper published in 2002 (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002). They surprisinglyrepeat en passant the most routine neo-Darwinian objections.
I must also point out that in Chapter 9, J&L choose to tell us the story of thechimp Kanzi and the data collected by Sue Savage–Rumbaugh, allegedlyshowing important continuity between the symbolic system mastered by apes(after long training) and human language. They fail to even mention the case ofthe chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky which led to drastically opposite conclusions.After several years of daily cohabitation and of daily sessions of several hourstrying to teach Nim American Sign Language, Laura Petitto, Herbert Terrace, andThomas G. Bever concluded that no real progress had been made. This momentouspiece of work (Terrace et al. 1979) as well as the papers and book by DavidPremack (Premack 1972, 1986), that for many of us closed the chapter of thesearch for animal language, should at least have been presented, if only tocriticize them.

Below are excerpts from an excellent review. The parts reproduced relate to the namture of language, and the utter lack of evidence that animals possess anything resembling laguage.

« REVIEWS «Biolinguistics 2.2: 185–194, 2008ISSN 1450–3417 http://www.biolinguistics.euNovel Tools at the Service of Old IdeasJablonka, Eva & Marion J. Lamb. 2005. Evolution in Four Dimensions. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.By Massimo Piattelli–Palmarini2. Symbols? Oh, No, Please!As of Chapter 6, I start to disagree with J&L. They follow a very old script, onethat opens up with the appearance of symbolic systems. They duly acknowledgethat language is special, with respect to other symbolic communication systemsfound in animals, essentially because of the subtlety of syntax. That is correct, butthere is more to be said. Other crucial differences are to be found already at thelevel of the lexicon. It’s not just syntax that makes human language special, butalso the nature of individual words and the way they connect with each otherand with the world. There are at least four major differences between words andall non-linguistic symbols: (A) aspectual reference, (B) headedness, (C) internalstructure, and (D) edge features. Briefly about each one in turn:(A) Buy and sell, fear and frighten, and a huge variety of such oppositions, in alllanguages, refer to a same objective, physical, filmable, state of affairs, buthave transparently different meanings. The same applies to nouns (destructionvs. demolition, gift versus theft) and to adjectives (thrifty vs. stingy,abundant versus excessive, and so on). Even apparently innocent words likecity embody an aspectual component, a point of view. Words refer onlyunder specific itineraries of mental access (a city can be said to be chaotic,polluted, expensive, mostly Victorian, each expression obviously referringto very different objective features; cf. Chomsky 2005). Word meanings arethrough and through intensional. No symbol used in animal communicationsystems has this property. Also many non-linguistic symbols usedby humans to communicate lack it, unless they are transparently parasiticon language.(B) ‘The California highway commissioner report’ is a report. ‘The world tradeexchange bank’ is a bank. ‘The spy who came in from the cold’ is a spy. Therightmost noun (in English, the leftmost in other languages) heads allnominal compounds. A noun with a determiner (such as the spy) heads theDeterminer Phrase, even when the DP contains a whole sentence (who camein from the cold). Headedness also applies to Verb Phrases (in a morecomplicated way which need not detain us here; see below). The propertyof headedness is conserved by the syntactic derivation, from start to finish,and cannot be altered. It’s a crucial combinatorial valency of lexical entries,determining the category to which they belong and how the syntacticmachinery must treat them. There are, of course, many ways to make acertain symbol particularly salient in a string of non-verbal symbols (size,color, etc.), but headedness is unique to words.(C) Words have a rich internal structure. Thematic roles are probably the mostconspicuous such structures. There was the destruction of Carthage by Scipio,but there cannot be *the sleep of the bed by Scipio. Together with headedness,thematic roles are crucial valencies for combination into larger expressions.Morphological domains within words are also central, with relations ofdominance and asymmetry. Vast, subtle, and ramified consequences of thisinternal structures ensue for syntax and semantics (Halle & Marantz 1993,di Sciullo 2005). No other system of non-linguistic symbols has any sem blanceof such property.(D) Very simply said, words are “sticky” and so are phrasal constituents obtainedby merging two of them, and then merging this compound withother words, again and again, recursively and hierarchically. (The technicalterm for this intrinsic combinatorial power of words and phrasal constituentsin the minimalist program is “edge features”; Chomsky has rightlystressed that the appearance of edge features has been one of the centralevents in the evolution of language.) Whole linguistic expressions, andsentences in particular, are not lists of words, not even ordered lists ofwords. The point I wish to emphasize here is that words have the intrinsiccapacity to project structure “upwards” onto larger compounds. Verbsoffer the richest case, but not the only one. Verbs project a stratification of“shells” in a fixed hierarchical order, specifying the place where to insertthe actants, the auxiliaries, the checking of tense, Case and agreement, andmore (ever since the seminal work of Richard Larson — cf. Larson 1988).All in all, therefore, contrary to spontaneous intuition, contrary to the wholedomain of semiotics, and contrary to what Chapter 6 and Chapter 9 of J&Lsuggest, there is no gain in our understanding of language by assimilating it to asystem of symbols. Any attempt to reconstruct language evolution as theevolution of a symbolic system leads us badly astray. Words are, of course, insome sense, symbols, and they enter into the system of language, but the uniqueproperties summarized here above make words stand radically apart from allother symbolic systems. J&L, unbeknownst to them, seal this radical separationin the last line of their table on p. 234, when they state that the “range ofvariation” of symbolic systems is “unlimited”. I doubt that they are right evenabout symbolic systems, but surely this does not apply to language. The range ofvariation for language is quite severely limited, as J&L sketch in Chapter 8, sortof noncommittally, when speaking of the “principles and parameters” model(Baker 2001, 2003). Symbolic systems are not relevant to language, and theycannot be offered as an intermediate step in language evolution.3 . Culture and LanguageJ&L embrace a thesis that several other authors also have tried to promote: theshaping of language by culture and history. Their critique of the innatist,modularist, and highly specific nature of language has, as is often the case withthose who adopt their position, a possibilistic attitude: Why could we not, oneday, explain a lot in language by means of cultural and historical factors, communicativefunctions, motor control, and general intelligence? This line was offeredover 30 years ago already by Jean Piaget to Noam Chomsky, in a direct debate(Piattelli–Palmarini 1980). The answer is today what it was then: No one canexclude this possibility, as a remote possibility. It is, however, eminently rationalto expect that it will not happen. The task seems even more hopeless today than itseemed 35 years ago, because we know a lot more about language than we didthen. For instance, none of the properties of words that I have sketched above canbe explained in terms of culture or history, or motor control, or factors of generalintelligence.On p. 218, J&L venture into a minefield, quite similar to the one into whichMichael Arbib also ventured in BBS recently (Arbib 2005) — a parallel betweenl anguage and mathematics:Although the speed and ease of learning [of language by the child] mayindicate that there are some preexisting specifically selected neural mechanisms,the same properties could also be due to a culturally evolved systemthat is well adapted to the brain, and therefore makes learning easy. Forexample, think how difficult it was 1200 years ago for someone in Europe todivide one number by another. Say they wanted to divide 3712 by 116 […][they point to the impracticality of the Roman numerals — MPP] Today, with ourArabic notation system (and the useful zero), it would take the average tenyear-old only minutes to get the answer 32.No genetic change, no brain change, but rather a cultural invention that hasbecome common knowledge. J&L advocate (like Arbib and Deacon andTomasello) a co-evolution of brain and language and do not advocate a purelycultural-evolution explanation of the language capacity. Well, anyway, theiranalogy with the numerical division is totally irrelevant. No sentence in anylanguage requires “minutes” to be understood by a ten-year-old, or by anyone atany age. Aside from the fact that ten years is a very old age for language,sentences are processed in fractions of seconds, not minutes, today just as theywere 1200 years ago, or earlier. Moreover, the number system and the rules fordividing numbers have to be explicitly and painfully taught. No three-year-oldchild today can make that division, while he or she can well understand quitesubtle syntactic constructions, exactly like a child could already in ancient Egypt.The analogy is infelicitous, because language is in a completely different ballpark.Like this one, many analogies and thought-experiments offered by J&L inthe domain of language are inconsequential or misleading, unlike those that dealwith biology proper.4. New Biology and Old ReflexesA most puzzling aspect of this book is that, after having pleaded persuasively fora major expansion of concepts and models in evolutionary theory, J&L fall backonto a basically classic, neo-Darwinian, functionalist explanation of the evolutiono f language. Just as an example, on p. 339 we read:Two related sets of conditions seem to have pushed our ancestors along theroute to language. The first was an altered ecological and socialenvironment, which provided a strong and persistent motivation for bettercommunication […]. The second and related set of conditions has to do withanatomy and physiology. […] It was probably the increased motor controlover hand movements and vocalizations, and the ability to imitate bothgestures and vocal sounds.They are in excellent and very old company in making these hypotheses, fromDarwin himself, to Jean Piaget, Philip Liberman, Steven Pinker, Paul Bloom,Michael Arbib, and Derek Bickerton, just to name a few. Yet, all that we havelearned from the new biology, and from this very book, should make any suchfunctionalist hypothesis unnecessary or even suspect. Master regulatory geneswith pleiotropic effects, transposons, gene duplications, histone modification,and alternative gene splicing (just to mention a few) offer manifold evolutionarymechanisms that make progressive functional adaptation quite marginal. ButJ&L insist, venturing into “non-genetic inheritance” to explain how “variousfeatures of the emerging language system that were initially culturally transmittedwere later genetically assimilated” (p. 340, my emphasis). I have no qualm withnon-genetic inheritance, amply attested in experiments well explained in theirown previous chapters and also endorsed by Cherniak’s “non-genomic nativism”(which J&L ignore — see supra), but I strongly object to the cultural transmissionhypothesis.Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) have rightly insisted on the uniqueness ofthe capacity of humans to acquire a lexicon, and on the presence in humans ofBiolinguistics « Special «190syntactic computational powers that are conspicuously absent in other primates(Fitch & Hauser 2004). Together with the very special properties of words seenabove, these are quantum changes in cognitive powers, both qualitatively andquantitatively, impossible to reconstruct by piecemeal functional adaptation.Cultural interactions among humans that are allowed by language presupposethem and cannot explain their gradualistic adaptive origin. The new evolutionarymechanisms presented in this book could have finally dispensed us from exploringagain an old dead-end.The surprising reappearance of old, standard neo-Darwinism is also to bewitnessed when J&L criticize the approach promoted by Hauser, Chomsky &Fitch in an already famous (or infamous, for some; cf. Pinker & Jackendoff 2005)paper published in 2002 (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002). They surprisinglyrepeat en passant the most routine neo-Darwinian objections.I must also point out that in Chapter 9, J&L choose to tell us the story of thechimp Kanzi and the data collected by Sue Savage–Rumbaugh, allegedlyshowing important continuity between the symbolic system mastered by apes(after long training) and human language. They fail to even mention the case ofthe chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky which led to drastically opposite conclusions.After several years of daily cohabitation and of daily sessions of several hourstrying to teach Nim American Sign Language, Laura Petitto, Herbert Terrace, andThomas G. Bever concluded that no real progress had been made. This momentouspiece of work (Terrace et al. 1979) as well as the papers and book by DavidPremack (Premack 1972, 1986), that for many of us closed the chapter of thesearch for animal language, should at least have been presented, if only tocriticize them.

Against fanatical scientism

A very worthwhile article:

Science Warriors' Ego Trips

By Carlin Romano
Standing up for science excites some intellectuals the way beautiful actresses arouse Warren Beatty, or career liberals boil the blood of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It's visceral. The thinker of this ilk looks in the mirror and sees Galileo bravely muttering "Eppure si muove!" ("And yet, it moves!") while Vatican guards drag him away. Sometimes the hero in the reflection is Voltaire sticking it to the clerics, or Darwin triumphing against both Church and Church-going wife. A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness?
You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York. Like such not-so-distant books as Idiot America, by Charles P. Pierce (Doubleday, 2009), The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby (Pantheon, 2008), and Denialism, by Michael Specter (Penguin Press, 2009), it mixes eminent common sense and frequent good reporting with a cocksure hubris utterly inappropriate to the practice it apotheosizes.
According to Pigliucci, both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory of history "are too broad, too flexible with regard to observations, to actually tell us anything interesting." (That's right—not one "interesting" thing.) The idea of intelligent design in biology "has made no progress since its last serious articulation by natural theologian William Paley in 1802," and the empirical evidence for evolution is like that for "an open-and-shut murder case."
Pigliucci offers more hero sandwiches spiced with derision and certainty. Media coverage of science is "characterized by allegedly serious journalists who behave like comedians." Commenting on the highly publicized Dover, Pa., court case in which U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent-design theory is not science, Pigliucci labels the need for that judgment a "bizarre" consequence of the local school board's "inane" resolution. Noting the complaint of intelligent-design advocate William Buckingham that an approved science textbook didn't give creationism a fair shake, Pigliucci writes, "This is like complaining that a textbook in astronomy is too focused on the Copernican theory of the structure of the solar system and unfairly neglects the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is really pulling each planet's strings, unseen by the deluded scientists."
Is it really? Or is it possible that the alternate view unfairly neglected could be more like that of Harvard scientist Owen Gingerich, who contends in God's Universe (Harvard University Press, 2006) that it is partly statistical arguments—the extraordinary unlikelihood eons ago of the physical conditions necessary for self-conscious life—that support his belief in a universe "congenially designed for the existence of intelligent, self-reflective life"? Even if we agree that capital "I" and "D" intelligent-design of the scriptural sort—what Gingerich himself calls "primitive scriptural literalism"—is not scientifically credible, does that make Gingerich's assertion, "I believe in intelligent design, lowercase i and lowercase d," equivalent to Flying-Spaghetti-Monsterism?
Tone matters. And sarcasm is not science.
The problem with polemicists like Pigliucci is that a chasm has opened up between two groups that might loosely be distinguished as "philosophers of science" and "science warriors." Philosophers of science, often operating under the aegis of Thomas Kuhn, recognize that science is a diverse, social enterprise that has changed over time, developed different methodologies in different subsciences, and often advanced by taking putative pseudoscience seriously, as in debunking cold fusion. The science warriors, by contrast, often write as if our science of the moment is isomorphic with knowledge of an objective world-in-itself—Kant be damned!—and any form of inquiry that doesn't fit the writer's criteria of proper science must be banished as "bunk." Pigliucci, typically, hasn't much sympathy for radical philosophies of science. He calls the work of Paul Feyerabend "lunacy," deems Bruno Latour "a fool," and observes that "the great pronouncements of feminist science have fallen as flat as the similarly empty utterances of supporters of intelligent design."
It doesn't have to be this way. The noble enterprise of submitting nonscientific knowledge claims to critical scrutiny—an activity continuous with both philosophy and science—took off in an admirable way in the late 20th century when Paul Kurtz, of the University at Buffalo, established the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Csicop) in May 1976. Csicop soon after launched the marvelous journal Skeptical Inquirer, edited for more than 30 years by Kendrick Frazier.
Although Pigliucci himself publishes in Skeptical Inquirer, his contributions there exhibit his signature smugness. For an antidote to Pigliucci's overweening scientism 'tude, it's refreshing to consult Kurtz's curtain-raising essay, "Science and the Public," in Science Under Siege (Prometheus Books, 2009, edited by Frazier), which gathers 30 years of the best of Skeptical Inquirer.
Kurtz's commandment might be stated, "Don't mock or ridicule—investigate and explain." He writes: "We attempted to make it clear that we were interested in fair and impartial inquiry, that we were not dogmatic or closed-minded, and that skepticism did not imply a priori rejection of any reasonable claim. Indeed, I insisted that our skepticism was not totalistic or nihilistic about paranormal claims."
Kurtz combines the ethos of both critical investigator and philosopher of science. Describing modern science as a practice in which "hypotheses and theories are based upon rigorous methods of empirical investigation, experimental confirmation, and replication," he notes: "One must be prepared to overthrow an entire theoretical framework—and this has happened often in the history of science ... skeptical doubt is an integral part of the method of science, and scientists should be prepared to question received scientific doctrines and reject them in the light of new evidence."
Considering the dodgy matters Skeptical Inquirer specializes in, Kurtz's methodological fairness looks even more impressive. Here's part of his own wonderful, detailed list: "Psychic claims and predictions; parapsychology (psi, ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis); UFO visitations and abductions by extraterrestrials (Roswell, cattle mutilations, crop circles); monsters of the deep (the Loch Ness monster) and of the forests and mountains (Sasquatch, or Bigfoot); mysteries of the oceans (the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis); cryptozoology (the search for unknown species); ghosts, apparitions, and haunted houses (the Amityville horror); astrology and horoscopes (Jeanne Dixon, the "Mars effect," the "Jupiter effect"); spoon bending (Uri Geller). ... "
Even when investigating miracles, Kurtz explains, Csicop's intrepid senior researcher Joe Nickell "refuses to declare a priori that any miracle claim is false." Instead, he conducts "an on-site inquest into the facts surrounding the case." That is, instead of declaring, "Nonsense on stilts!" he gets cracking.
Pigliucci, alas, allows his animus against the nonscientific to pull him away from sensitive distinctions among various sciences to sloppy arguments one didn't see in such earlier works of science patriotism as Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, 1995). Indeed, he probably sets a world record for misuse of the word "fallacy."
To his credit, Pigliucci at times acknowledges the nondogmatic spine of science. He concedes that "science is characterized by a fuzzy borderline with other types of inquiry that may or may not one day become sciences." Science, he admits, "actually refers to a rather heterogeneous family of activities, not to a single and universal method." He rightly warns that some pseudoscience—for example, denial of HIV-AIDS causation—is dangerous and terrible.
But at other points, Pigliucci ferociously attacks opponents like the most unreflective science fanatic, as if he belongs to some Tea Party offshoot of the Royal Society. He dismisses Feyerabend's view that "science is a religion" as simply "preposterous," even though he elsewhere admits that "methodological naturalism"—the commitment of all scientists to reject "supernatural" explanations—is itself not an empirically verifiable principle or fact, but rather an almost Kantian precondition of scientific knowledge. An article of faith, some cold-eyed Feyerabend fans might say.
In an even greater disservice, Pigliucci repeatedly suggests that intelligent-design thinkers must want "supernatural explanations reintroduced into science," when that's not logically required. He writes, "ID is not a scientific theory at all because there is no empirical observation that can possibly contradict it. Anything we observe in nature could, in principle, be attributed to an unspecified intelligent designer who works in mysterious ways." But earlier in the book, he correctly argues against Karl Popper that susceptibility to falsification cannot be the sole criterion of science, because science also confirms. It is, in principle, possible that an empirical observation could confirm intelligent design—i.e., that magic moment when the ultimate UFO lands with representatives of the intergalactic society that planted early life here, and we accept their evidence that they did it. The point is not that this is remotely likely. It's that the possibility is not irrational, just as provocative science fiction is not irrational.
Pigliucci similarly derides religious explanations on logical grounds when he should be content with rejecting such explanations as unproven. "As long as we do not venture to make hypotheses about who the designer is and why and how she operates," he writes, "there are no empirical constraints on the 'theory' at all. Anything goes, and therefore nothing holds, because a theory that 'explains' everything really explains nothing."
Here, Pigliucci again mixes up what's likely or provable with what's logically possible or rational. The creation stories of traditional religions and scriptures do, in effect, offer hypotheses, or claims, about who the designer is—e.g., see the Bible. And believers sometimes put forth the existence of scriptures (think of them as "reports") and a centuries-long chain of believers in them as a form of empirical evidence. Far from explaining nothing because it explains everything, such an explanation explains a lot by explaining everything. It just doesn't explain it convincingly to a scientist with other evidentiary standards.
A sensible person can side with scientists on what's true, but not with Pigliucci on what's rational and possible. Pigliucci occasionally recognizes that. Late in his book, he concedes that "nonscientific claims may be true and still not qualify as science." But if that's so, and we care about truth, why exalt science to the degree he does? If there's really a heaven, and science can't (yet?) detect it, so much the worse for science.
As an epigram to his chapter titled "From Superstition to Natural Philosophy," Pigliucci quotes a line from Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Science warriors such as Pigliucci, or Michael Ruse in his recent clash with other philosophers in these pages, should reflect on a related modern sense of "entertain." One does not entertain a guest by mocking, deriding, and abusing the guest. Similarly, one does not entertain a thought or approach to knowledge by ridiculing it.
Long live Skeptical Inquirer! But can we deep-six the egomania and unearned arrogance of the science patriots? As Descartes, that immortal hero of scientists and skeptics everywhere, pointed out, true skepticism, like true charity, begins at home.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.