Philosophy and the 'Dazzling Ideal' of Science

348 Pages·2019·3.241 MB·English

by  Graham McFee

Philosophy and
the ‘Dazzling Ideal’
of Science
Graham McFee
Philosophy and the ‘Dazzling Ideal’ of Science
Graham McFee
Philosophy and the
‘Dazzling Ideal’
of Science
Graham McFee
University of California Fullerton
Riverside, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-21674-0 ISBN 978-3-030-21675-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21675-7
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P
reface
This monograph begins from the assumption that philosophy is possible
and explores the kinds of creatures we must be, if that is to be true. Yet
why might the possibility of philosophy be doubted? A pervasive image, or
ideal, drawn from science provides the primary reason discussed here, an
image generating scientism, whereby the successes of science seem to leave
little or no room for philosophy. And, as Thomas Nagel (2012, p. 7) puts
it, “almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into
regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground
that anything else would not be science”—just the kind of reductive con-
ception against which this text presents a sustained argument. But more
important, in practice, is our endorsement of the power of reason. For
opposition to scientism—to the over-valuing of models of knowledge and
understanding from science—can sometimes generate, or seem to gener-
ate, a rejection of science; and then, potentially, a rejection of the concept
of truth; or of the distinction between truth and falsehood. Such rejec-
tions, too, must be set aside. Rather, the power of a certain image of sci-
ence must be recognized, an image based on the achievements of the
natural sciences in both explaining the world, and offering opportunities
for prediction and control. Yet that image becomes pernicious if taken as
an ideal of explanatory achievement, one stressing both the inexorability
characteristic of causal explanation within science and its completeness:
nothing sublunary escapes that explanatory power. The worry throughout
is that, “dazzled by the ideal” as Wittgenstein (PI §100) put it, our bedaz-
zlement obscures, or leaves obscure, our conception of the ‘rights and
v
vi PREFACE
responsibilities’, the powers and capacities, of philosophy: perhaps even
rendering philosophy impossible.
This project grew out of another, to sketch an account of the philoso-
phy of action consonant with a plausible philosophical aesthetics of dance
(McFee, 2018). There, the worry coalesces around attempts to explain the
artworks of dance in terms, roughly, of the neurobiology of dancers. But
some issues raised are pervasive. Hence, there, elaborating explanatory
frameworks for persons and their powers and capacities required consoli-
dating that project in the light of my granting that “[e]rror and supersti-
tion have causes just as much as correct cognition” (Frege, [1918] 1984,
p. 351). Thus, my interest in some of those frameworks in their own right
was piqued—or rekindled—since they often involve various scientistic
conceptions that, with Frege, I was keen to oppose: the view that persons
were nothing but causal structures (therefore lacking agency, and hence
responsibility); that minds were nothing but a kind of complicated com-
puter; that imagining kinds of robot or android was an informative way to
think about minds; that our psychologies were fixed by our biology. As a
result, this book intersects with that one, like the circles of a Venn dia-
gram: indeed, there is some overlap in content.
So this monograph has, as it were, two agenda items: first, to defend
the claims of philosophy against those seeking to minimize either its pos-
sibility or its importance by contrasting it with natural science; where such
a defence of the claims of philosophy (especially its claims to truth, at least
in principle) also permits granting to natural science (properly under-
stood) its truth-generating power. Then, second, to show what this
defence says about persons (as agents).
In this light, some readers may think it odd that what might strike them
as a key question remains unaddressed; indeed, unconsidered. For this text
contains little or nothing about how the materialism I endorse here (on
which we persons are wholly composed from matter, in the sense that
there is no ‘mind-stuff’) ever generates the kinds of purposes and values
that I repeatedly refer to throughout this text: how can such materialism
lead to the kinds of teleology I find for people without involving some
radically different kind of ‘thing’ or substance? This question clearly besets
both Thomas Nagel (2012, pp. 4–5), who usually appears as a hero of this
text’s theses, and Michael Ruse (2017, pp. 48–49), who might have played
a similar role—had I discovered his book On Purpose (2017) before I had
basically finished writing this one.
PREFACE vii
For me, though, that whole line of enquiry is ill-formed: it represents
exactly the tendency that, as we will see, Ludwig Wittgenstein (OC §471)
warned us against as aiming to “go further back” beyond the appropriate
starting point. A parallel to bring out the problem, perhaps, concerns the
suggestion that the world rests on the back of a huge tortoise: anyone who
accepts this as a legitimate attempt to answer a legitimate question must
then surely ask on what the tortoise rests. Obviously, if such an initial
foundation can legitimately be requested, or the kind of question it repre-
sents granted to be well formed, no answer will be possible—any ‘level’
chosen simply allows that the question be repeated at a lower ‘level’. And
then those who regard the initial question as legitimate cannot really urge
that it is tortoises all the way down! Ruse (2017, p. 182) offers another
appropriate comparison: the cookbook recipe that begins, “first take
ingredient X…”, does not typically consider practical questions about
where such ingredients come from; addressing that issue—when it is an
issue—is not the business of cookery. Similarly, beginning (as here: see
below) from the possibility of philosophy requires having drawn a line that
determines the structure of our investigation. We cannot then enquire
how to explain the mere possibility of the prerequisites for what is already
presupposed, much less hunt for some yet deeper origination, without
independent reasons being provided.
With respect to the text’s ‘pitch’, I must apologize both to those friends
who advised that it should be more technical and scholarly (“Put in more
on Kant, Sellars, and philosophy of science!”), and to those who urged
that I remove scholarly detail (“None of that stuff on Sellars, Kant, and
philosophy of science; and less quotation!”). In trying to strike a balance,
I hope this version retains enough scholarly material to make the connec-
tion to the rest of philosophy, without leaving too many “hostages to
fortune” in the form of unsupported claims requiring either expansion or
omission. Certainly, in some places, there is perhaps more quotation than
is consistent with the demands of style. But it is important to acknowledge
the degree of dependence of this text on—as well as the degree of its
response to—the ideas of others. Quotations and extensive cross-
referencing remain efforts to acknowledge such concerns, and some of the
repetition should illustrate the recurrence of similar issues, and their
treatments.
The admiring mention René Descartes receives intermittently through-
out reflects a commitment to scientific truth going back at least to my first
entering university as a physics student. For Descartes was, of course,
viii PREFACE
appropriately concerned with “the method of rightly conducting one’s reason
and seeking the truth in the sciences” (the subtitle of his Discourse on the
Method: CSM I, p. 111). But it is also partly an homage to my late friend
Gordon Baker, whose work (with Katherine Morris) revolutionized the
interpretation of Descartes in philosophy—or should have. Also, Descartes’
recognition of the value of, and need for, education in learning to distin-
guish truth from falsity is salutary here:
A good man is not required to have read every book or diligently master
everything taught in the Schools. It would, indeed, be a kind of defect in his
education if he spent too much time on book learning … But he came into
the world in ignorance, and since the knowledge which he had as a child was
based solely on the weak foundation of the senses and the authority of his
teachers, it is virtually inevitable that his imagination should be filled with
enumerable false thoughts before reason could guide his conduct. So later
on he needs to have a great natural talent, or else the instruction of a wise
teacher, in order to rid himself of the bad doctrines that have filled his mind.
(CSM II, p. 400)
Given that one’s teachers and colleagues are so important, it becomes
crucial not to surround oneself with either the self-deceived (say, the cen-
tral figure in an alt-right ‘news’ website) or with sycophants. In the cur-
rent climate in the USA, this requirement seems given an additional
urgency by those who would deny the most obvious facts either about the
world (“fake news”) or about science—say, by denying evolution or cli-
mate change. Here, while avoiding denying truth (of kinds the natural
sciences can generate), one must also avoid over-rating science.
It is therefore important to reinforce our commitment to science as a
source of truth; and to insist that our criticism here is directed at an image
of science, one extracted by others from the real achievements of genuine
scientists. Before discussing the truth of such theses, they must be charac-
terized accurately, especially as regards their scope. And many scientists
have been alive to the possibility of misperception (or its probability, since
its regular occurrence is a thesis of this text): thus, Freud ([1905] 1966,
p. 267) comments tartly on the impact of popularization on his own works
(see Chap. 9, Sect. 2), where:
… qualifications and exact particularisation are of little use with the general
public; there is very little room in the memory of the multitude; it retains
only the bare gist of any thesis and fabricates an extreme version which is
easy to remember.
PREFACE ix
Freud’s complaint is that something inexact is taken from his theoretically
precise accounts of human beings, with that inexactness following from
how his works are presented to a general audience. For, of course, such a
process might inflate any claim. In this vein, Darwin ([1859] 1993,
p. 637) wrote that, “great is the power of steady misrepresentation”: if
one’s views are standardly misrepresented, the general public may take for
one’s claims something very different from them. Now, Darwin ([1859]
1993, p. 637) optimistically concludes that “the history of science shows
that fortunately this power does not long endure”. Let us hope he was
right about this, as about so much; but it is hard to match his optimism,
as I write this, living in the USA under President Donald J. Trump.
Riverside, CA Graham McFee
April, 2019
BiBliograPhy
Darwin, C. ([1859] 1968/1993). Origin of Species (1st edn., J. W. Burrow, Ed.).
Harmondsworth: Penguin; (5th edn.). New York: Random House (Modern
Library Edition).
Descartes, R. (1984). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (3 Vols.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. [cited as “CSM I” and “CSM II”].
Frege, G. ([1918] 1984). Thoughts. In Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic
and Philosophy (pp. 351–372). Oxford: Blackwell.
Freud, S. ([1905] 1966). On Psychotherapy. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7, pp. 257–270). London:
Vintage Classics.
McFee, G. (2018). Dance and the Philosophy of Action. Alton, Hants: Dance Books.
Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian
Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ruse, M. (2017). On Purpose. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953/2001/2009). Philosophical Investigations (G.  E. M.
Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [50th Anniversary (3rd edn.);
4th Rev. edn., P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte, Eds.]. [cited as “PI”].
Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty (D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.).
Oxford: Blackwell. [cited as “OC”].
a
cknowledgements
As usual, this text overall reflects the impact of discussions with my friends;
especially with the late Gordon Baker, with Katherine Morris, and with
Terry Diffey. Many themes here were discussed with my late friend, Jeff
Mason. Leon Culbertson kindly read closely the whole text, offering
detailed comments on specific themes, and his contribution also includes
many long discussions on these and related topics over the years. Similarly,
some were discussed in detail, and profitably, with Nick McAdoo. Finally,
my wife Myrene not only read the text, offering comments on substance
and on proof-reading matters, but also supported me emotionally during
these two years of its composition, during which writing and revisions
were fitted-in around teaching and marking, radiation treatments, chemo-
therapy, and autologous stem cell transplant.
Permissions
The following chapters contain material from, or are revised versions of,
other works for which I am the copyright-holder. The original locations
are as follows, and their publishers are hereby thanked for permission to
include this material:
• Chapter 2—a full redraft, with extensive additions and omissions, of
my Dance and the Philosophy of Action (Dance Books, 2018) pp. 58–81;
• Chapter 3—a full redraft, with extensive additions and omissions, of
my Dance and the Philosophy of Action (Dance Books, 2018) pp. 27–46;
xi