Specter of Reason

Seinfeld , one of the most successful shows in television history, was purportedly about nothing .  Of course that was never true.  The show was about a few people with consistent personality quirks, a bit narcissistic and socially challenged (and challenging). Still, people like to say it was "about nothing," not taking the word too literally. When physicist and outspoken atheist Lawrence Krauss talks about the scientific concept of nothing , he isn't literally talking about nothing, either.  In his view, if nothing is a scientifically legitimate concept, then it refers to something measurable.  You can quantify it somehow.  I agree.  Science deals in the quantifiable and measurable, after all.  It does not deal in that which cannot, in principle, be measured one way or another.  Yet it's plain as day that, if you can measure some x , then x does not equal nothing .  If you can measure it, it isn't nothing.  And so we must admit ...

I acknowledged physicist Sean Carroll's take on the Krauss debacle in my last post, and I was tempted to critique it at the time, but decided that doing so required a new post.  This is that post. Carroll is critical of Krauss, but he also tries to defend him by putting his work in context.  He says the physics Krauss is talking about does have something to add to "the atheism vs. theism popular debate."  I find that unlikely, and Carroll's argument offers a good opportunity to explore why. According to Carroll, quantum field theory shows that you don't need a Creator in a complete cosmological model of the universe.  Of course, we're talking about a complete and coherent scientific model of the universe.  But did we need quantum field theory to show us that?  Hardly. Does quantum field theory actually show it, even?  To do that, wouldn't it have to have an empirically definable notion of a Creator? Furthermore, is Carroll suggesting that you ...

Why do public atheists like Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss denigrate philosophy without apparently realizing how philosophically poor and unsophisticated their arguments are, and how much better they would fare by taking philosophy seriously? There seems to be a lot of support for this combination of arrogance and ignorance in the atheist community.  Everybody thinks they know how to think about difficult philosophical concepts.  Everybody has an opinion on philosophy, but hardly anyone has the patience, charity or education to speak about it authoritatively. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them from pretending. I complained about the cult of personality back in 2010, when Harris was selling his book on morality, and again recently , after he arrogantly assumed an authoritative aptitude on the issue of free will.  Isn't it odd that Harris, who seems to think rigorous attention to philosophical argument and scholarship is beneath him, is so eager to publicly debate a...

Tim Maudlin makes some interesting comments about the philosophy of cosmology. I have a few objections and observations. (See update at the bottom for an additional criticism.) First, Maudlin claims that the universe is just "one huge physical object." This could be a significant conceptual error. I'm not convinced that "the universe" picks out a unique physical object. I'm not a non-cognitivist about the universe. I do think "the universe" picks out a single, coherent idea . But I doubt that idea represents or corresponds to a thing. I'm not an idealist, exactly. I'm a realist about everything that we say is part of, or constitutive of, the universe. But none of the objects of our experience--nothing we can conceptualize--fully constitute the universe. So "the universe" is an idea about something we never directly indicate. So I have this suspicion that when we conceptualize the universe, we are using a different l...

I once again find myself having to defend Ryle against confused interpretations of his work. In this instance, the false allegations are that Ryle hated science , that Ryle didn't understand science , and that Ryle denied that human behavior has internal causes . These claims were made during a discussion at PhilPapers by Jonathan C. W. Edwards (Jo, as he prefers to be called), who apparently is a retired university faculty member in the field of biomedical sciences, and who is now a graduate student in philosophy. Jo started the discussion to talk about Descartes' attitude towards science and physicalism. One of Jo's more bizarre claims is that Descartes' mind/body distinction is a scientific and metaphysical precursor to the contemporary boson-fermion distinction in particle physics. I challenged him directly on that point, but I won't go into the details here. I'm more interested in defending Ryle. Jo is interested in Ryle primarily because of Ryle...

I'm very disappointed in Jon Stewart. He passed up a great opportunity to stand up for science and reason, and instead he promoted ignorance and confusion. It happened a few days ago, when he interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson , who was promoting her new non-fiction work, Absence of Mind . The discussion was about the public conversation on science and religion. Robinson claims that both religion and science have been poorly represented in the public domain. She says can help us understand both, and why both science and religion must work together to help us understand ourselves and the world. She doesn't spend any time criticizing religion or religious leaders, however, so it's not clear what problem she has there. She's a Calvinist , in fact, though she says she loves science. She tells Stewart that the "new cosmologies and so on are among the most beautiful things that people have conceived." (As I'll explain, I have ...

My view is that there are no theoretical limits on what science can discover. To put it another way, there are no inherently undiscoverable facts. This is naturalism as I understand it. I think this is an a priori truth. It doesn't make sense to say that there are things that exist but which science cannot study. I know it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say; but when analyzed, it doesn't stands to reason. What it would mean is that there are facts which cannot be described by any process of describing facts. It would mean there were inherently indescribable facts. But facts are describable by definition. So it's a contradiction in terms. You can believe in the indescribable--you can believe in the supernatural--but not rationally. That's why people call it "faith." Wittgenstein wrote, "A nothing would do just as well as a something about which nothing could be said." The relevance is thus: When discussing what is possible...

I've gotten involved in an interesting discussion of naturalism at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club . The discussion was instigated by the work of Richard Carrier, who is neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but a historian who writes about both. Unfortunately, I think he should probably stick to history. His attempt to define "naturalism" and "supernaturalism" is marked by fallacy and inconsistency. (Update: I point out several problems with his arguments in a comment attached to this post.) Carrier's definitions are as follows: "naturalism is true if everything that exists is causally reducible to the nonmental. . . . If naturalism is true, everything mental is caused by the nonmental, whereas if supernaturalism is true, at least one thing is not." Yet, naturalism and supernaturalism are not exclusively theses about minds or mental entities. For example, Carrier excludes the possibility of David Chalmers' variety of naturalis...

In this post I argue that enumerative, or "simple" induction (henceforth "induction") * does not play a significant role in scientific discovery. I construct this argument within a framework of epistemological behaviorism. I. The Meaning and Value of Science As I understand it, knowledge is another word for ability. Scientific knowledge is predictive ability, which is the ability to organize our behavior in accordance with the unfolding of nature. ** In other words, science is the process of learning how to predict what is going to happen in new situations. Scientific knowledge is demonstrable in so far as the abilities it engenders are demonstrable and reliable. Science is not the process of describing what has already happened, nor is it the process of describing what is happening at any given moment. Of course, science can help us understand what has already happened and what is happening right now. But the focus of science is always on the future, not o...

A friend of mine recently gave me some advice: Don't let your philosophical pursuits get side-tracked by the atheism-vs.-religion debate. I pointed out that the history of modern science and modern philosophy is inextricably tied to the debate between atheism and religion. The philosophy of science has, since Descartes and Bacon, developed in explicit reaction to religious practice. The pursuit of scientific foundations has partly been the pursuit of intellectual liberation from religious dogma. Around 1600, many rapid advancements in philosophy and science began to change the way people understood themselves and their relationship to the world. For example, Copernicus challenged conceptions of humanity by suggesting that the earth was not at the center of the universe. Galileo challenged conceptions of nature by reducing it to mathematical terms. The philosophy of science became a central issue in intellectual life. There is a widespread misconception that science itself began dur...

A blogger name John Pieret has also criticized Sean Carroll 's article about naturalism, though I think his criticisms are somewhat misguided. I just left the following comment on his blog : I have major problems with Carroll's treatment of naturalism and supernaturalism. (See here: Discovery, Demonstration, and Naturalism .) However, I don't agree with all of your points; specifically about Ockam's Razor and the so-called "problem of induction." Ockam's Razor is an indispensable explanatory tool. Consider the situation with ID again. IDers might claim that ID is simpler than natural evolution, that Ockam's Razor weighs in their favor. The question is, are they right? The answer is: of course not. Natural evolution does not postulate any entities beyond our explanatory framework, and it does not postulate anything superfluous. It does not postulate entities beyond necessity. ID, on the other hand, postulates an "intelligent designer"...

Over the past several months or so, I've approached discussions of science by focusing on the concept of discovery. Science is the formalization of discovery. There are as many scientific methods as there are formal methods for discovering phenomena. Accidental discoveries can be utilized by science, in so far as they can lead to formal methods of discovery. It occurs to me that this view of science, while essentially valid, might be easier to communicate if I adopt another term: demonstration. Science deals in what is demonstrable. A method of discovery is a set of rules or procedures for demonstrating facts. A scientific method is defined by its rules and procedures for demonstrating facts about the world. We might ask, what is being discovered here? Is it the rules, or is it the facts? The answer is: both. A scientific discovery is defined in terms of the facts discovered as well as the rules/procedures for demonstrating those facts. It is the relationship between rul...

I propose the following definition of "science": Science is the formalization of discovery. All knowledge is ability, be it mathematical, empirical, kinesthetic, or what have you. Discovery is the attainment of new abilities. Discovering that something is the case is not essentially different from discovering how to do something. Science, as the formalization of discovery, is the formalization of methods and principles which produce new abilities. Any method may be considered science, so long as it produces new abilities in a formally definable way. And any abilities may be considered scientific, in so far as they are defined with respect to some formal method of discovery. (We can have grey areas here. We don't have to decide ahead of time how formal is formal enough.) Math, the empirical sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.), and philosophy (which includes logic) are focused on different sets of tools, all of which are required for the formalization of new knowled...

I'd like to elaborate on a point I made in my last post (the topic was consciousness), as it will help explain my views on science in general and consciousness in particular. I wrote: "If there were any evidence that consciousness (or anything else) were so unique that it could not be explained objectively, that evidence could not be shared. For, if it could be shared, then it would be objectively determinable. Therefore, from a scientific point of view—that is, from a point of view which regards facts as sharable and repeatable through well-documented experiments—there can never be any evidence that consciousness (or anything else) is beyond the hopes of a scientific explanation." One might ask, W hy can't we have evidence that is not scientific? Can't we have evidence based on our own intuition or personal experience? Why must all evidence be sharable and repeatable? I acknowledge the fact that we are often in the position of having to make decisions based o...