On signalling

by Ian Pollock

[Note: neither character in this dialogue represents any particular person, apart from the “people” who are always arguing about philosophy in my own head. I acknowledge that this conversation is totally unrealistic as a real-life event, for several reasons. (Some of which are signalling reasons!)]

Salviati: Hello, Sagredo!

Sagredo: Hi, Salviati. Good to see you. I’m just finishing up a blog post.

Salviati: On what?

Sagredo: It’s about this creationist, biblical literalist theory to the effect that there was once a water canopy around the earth. The idea is to account for where all the water in Noah’s flood came from.

Salviati: I take it you disapprove of the theory.

Sagredo: Of course! I don’t understand how anyone could possibly believe it.

Salviati: ...Hm, hang on a minute. I want to press you on something.

Sagredo: What is it?

Salviati: Well, when people say they can’t understand so-and-so’s behaviour, they can mean two things. Either they mean that they literally don’t comprehend the behaviour, or they mean they understand it in an intellectual sense, but are trying to morally distance themselves from it.

Sagredo: I think I mean that I literally don’t comprehend people who believe in stuff like this.

Salviati: Then you are at a disadvantage in writing your blog post, aren’t you - I mean, you should understand your opponents’ motivation, if possible. Anyway, what’s your argument?

Sagredo: A scientific takedown of the theory, followed by a critique of its motivations as being basically designed to reduce cognitive dissonance. Creationists know that all the water in the biblical flood needed to come from somewhere, so they invented this wild theory to account for it.

Salviati: Wait, so you do understand people who believe this stuff! They’re just reducing cognitive dissonance.

Sagredo: I guess, in a sense, yes.

Salviati: Why are you writing this post in the first place?

Sagredo: To combat this crazy pseudoscientific drivel.

Salviati: Do you know people who take this water canopy theory seriously?

Sagredo: Well, not personally, but some creationists buy into it.

Salviati: Some? Meaning it is critiqued by the creationists themselves?

Sagredo: Yes, to a certain extent.

Salviati: ...Okay, do you mind hearing some criticism?

Sagredo: I guess not. I’ll try to take it constructively.

Salviati: All right, I am just going to be blunt, then. This blog post you are writing is pure signalling.

Sagredo: Oh, not this “signalling” crap. Since when are you Robin Hanson?

Salviati: So you’re familiar with this line of argument.

Sagredo: I’ve heard it a lot from various “cynics.” But go ahead and make your case, I guess.

Salviati: All right. Here is the situation as I see it. You belong to an intellectual community of skeptics and atheists, in which creationism is the standard example of terrible pseudoscience.

Sagredo: Well, it is, and lots of people believe in it. The cost we are paying for science illiteracy is huge.

Salviati: Sure, I mostly agree, but that is another discussion. The point is, you belong to a group where you can gain status pretty easily by beating up on creationism - do you deny this?

Sagredo: I don’t deny it, but that’s not my motivation in writing this post.

Salviati: To be totally and suicidally frank, I don’t believe you. Here’s why: this blog post is focused on an incredibly tiny problem, and it’s actually pretty much useless in terms of dealing with that problem. I think you know that, in your heart of hearts.

Sagredo: Science illiteracy is not a tiny problem!

Salviati: But this particular crazy theory is. As far as I understand from you, only a small minority of creationists believe in it. Granting that combating creationism is important, combating an unpopular idea among creationists just seems like a really weird goal. It’s like you’re fighting a war and you decide to concentrate on intercepting the enemy’s supply of brussels sprouts - that’ll break their spirit!

Sagredo: It’s part of a general pushback against pseudoscience. You have to do that kind of stuff piecemeal.

Salviati: Sure, sure. The other thing is that even if we assume that it’s really important to debunk the water canopy theory, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say it’s already been done.

Sagredo: It has, but the message needs to be repeated in order to get through.

Salviati: Right, but there are diminishing returns here. That’s what I meant when I said your post is probably close to marginally useless. Being a doctor is uncontroversially important, right? Doctors save lives. But becoming a doctor only saves marginal lives if there’s a shortage of doctors in the area where you’re going to work - otherwise, you’re just replacing or supplementing some other person who was a doctor anyway, and who would have saved those lives anyway. That’s a roundabout way of saying that I think your post is one of many debunkings of the canopy theory, so it’s not making much difference above and beyond what the others are doing. And apart from that, as I said, the canopy theory just seems like a really tiny problem in the first place.

Sagredo: Well, so what? I suppose this isn’t the most important problem in the world, and I may not be combating it in the optimal way. I guess I just find the subject interesting. Didn’t you write some sort of gobbledigook about metaethics last week? Don’t tell me that solves some pressing problem of humanity. I still don’t buy the idea that my post is just “signalling.” I promise you, getting praise from fellow skeptics wasn’t going through my head at all when I thought of the idea.

Salviati: First of all, when I said that your post was pure signalling, I wasn’t accusing you of something unusually terrible. I think that a huge part of the stuff all people say and do is signalling - it’s in our nature as social creatures. That applies to myself as well: to the extent that I can understand my motivations for writing, some of them seem to be aiming at a sort of intellectual showing off. I just respect you and I want you to be a bit more self-aware about your own motivations. Like me, you obsess over logical fallacies and cognitive biases, but you seem to be blind to these other psychological forces that are driving your own behaviour.

Sagredo: I really wasn’t thinking about getting praise when I decided to write the post. Honestly!

Salviati: I both believe you and do not believe you. I believe you in that I don’t think you explicitly thought “let’s beat up on some dumb creationists to get validation from the in-group.” As in, I don’t think those words passed through your stream of consciousness. But I do think it’s very likely that the unconscious expectation of praise and status points was a major factor in what made this idea seem like a good one to you.

Sagredo: That’s totally unfalsifiable!

Salviati: It is invisible, true, even to your own introspection. But we can infer it from your behaviour. Again, I don’t want to beat up on you too much, but when somebody chooses to devote several hours of time and energy to “solving” an incredibly tiny problem in an incredibly ineffective way, and you know that they are smart enough to be able to realize this, you start looking for other explanations for their behaviour. That’s why I look at all the people writing reams of stuff about how Bigfoot doesn’t exist and can’t help but shake my head. Signalling fits nicely as an explanation, though. As an analogy... if a person says that something is 90% probable, and then it doesn’t happen, they could just be unlucky. But if they keep saying “90% probable” and these things keep not happening, you can infer that the person is likely overconfident.

Sagredo: When I say it’s unfalsifiable, I don’t just mean that you’re inferring something about my psychology. Being psychoanalyzed is really annoying, but sometimes it’s possible to do that. I mean that there is literally no way of proving it wrong. As for how that relates to this water canopy thing...

Salviati: Maybe we should stop talking about your blog post, so that the argument’s conclusion doesn’t involve any embarrassment for you personally. No offense, but that would lower the emotional stakes for you.

Sagredo: Yeah, ok, I am kind of feeling like an insect pinned in a display case right now. Well, one of Hanson’s examples I remember is charity. He says “charity is not about charity” and stuff like that. The idea is that people give to such ineffective charities, in such ineffective ways, that the whole point of charity must not be to help people or causes, it must just be to look good.

Salviati: I’m with you so far.

Sagredo: But then you have this whole movement for effective charity centered around Givewell and Giving What We Can and other organizations. What about the people donating to them? And then the Hansonian reply (apart from other criticisms of the ways people donate) is that these people are just signalling to more sophisticated in-groups. Do you see how that looks a lot like epicycles?

Salviati: Sure, superficially.

Sagredo: But that’s not the worst of it! The “everything is signalling” crowd still needs to explain altruistic acts by individuals who are totally anonymous and know that they are.

Salviati: Right. One idea here is that the people who are best at showing off in front of groups are not the people who are most explicit about showing off, but instead the people who are totally oblivious to the fact that they’re showing off, and totally convinced that their behaviour is motivated by other, good reasons. So donating anonymously to charity is a way to, as it were, convince yourself of your own altruism, in order to signal more effectively at others in other circumstances.

Sagredo: Wow, seriously? ...You might as well just be a Freudian at this point.

Salviati: Well, as a human, given that you are going to be deceptive, a really effective way to do it is to actually believe the deception (at least at the conscious level). It’s cognitively cheaper than trying to be some straight up Machiavellian plotter who believes A but says B - you don’t have to watch your tongue or your body language if you “believe” your own lies. And if the “beliefs” involved don’t come in contact with reality too often, it doesn’t hurt your interests very much if they’re technically false. But I concede that that explanation is a bit suspicious-looking and seemingly unfalsifiable. By the way, another theory that occurs to me for explaining anonymous donations is that they often aren’t very anonymous after all. Maybe anonymous donors usually do tell key people in their in-group and trust the word to spread. That might be worth investigating empirically.

Sagredo: What is the big appeal of this theory, anyway? Why are you seeing signals behind every bush like some phallus-obsessed Freudian?

Salviati: I’ve noticed that tendency myself, yes. But I honestly do think that you will just fail to understand people if you don’t take signalling motives into account all the time. Fail miserably. And you will also be selectively blind to your own motivations. We could talk about all sorts of behaviours, from table manners to military strategy... Here’s a throwaway example. Why does everybody talk about crime going up and being out of control, when we both know that in North America and the UK the crime rate has been going down for a while?

Sagredo: They’re misinformed by politicians and members of the media, who are themselves either misinformed or looking for votes.

Salviati: Okay, but why do you think things are always skewed in the direction of high crime as opposed to low crime? Well, look, here’s what we can say from the perspective of signalling. A signal is basically an action (often a speech-act) A that also carries information about some hidden variable B. In the case of politics, the “hidden variable” typically refers to inferred personal characteristics of the speaker, characteristics that look good or bad to their in-group.

Sagredo: How does this apply to the crime issue?

Salviati: So let’s say you’re a member of the public who doesn’t know very much about crime rates. Some high-profile shooting happens in your city’s downtown, and Politician #1 comes on TV and says “Crime is out of control! We must do something about shootings like this! We need more police, more censorship of video games, parents need to teach traditional values...” you know the usual social-conservative spiel. On the left, it would focus more on gun control and other causes celebres, but otherwise it’d be pretty similar. Then Politician #2 comes on TV and says “Actually, crime is pretty much under control, and getting more so every year. This act was terrible, but our laws are necessarily a balance between freedom and security, not to mention between security and scarce resources that can be used elsewhere. I don’t think we should take any additional steps in the wake of this shooting, current laws are adequate.”

Sagredo: Yeah, point taken, I see how the first politician looks much better as a person. The second politician sounds complacent, even callous. And that’s before somebody comes up with a devastating meme about their indifference to human life, referencing the recent shooting as emotional ammunition.

Salviati: It can be even worse in extreme cases! How would you like to argue the case against some new anti-paedophilia law? In the wake of a high-profile case whose details have been luridly reported by the media? It’s an especially horrifying self-perpetuating phenomenon because even people who agree with you will wonder, deep down, what kind of person you are if you’re willing to, ahem, stick your neck out for paedophiles. Free speech advocates run into the same problem, because in practice, they end up defending people like Holocaust deniers, or those tiresome artists who take a crap on a crucifix and put it in a gallery, or anti-Islamic types who are often motivated by xenophobia more than principle. Signalling incentives are horrible, so unless corrected, society tends to drift in whatever direction it’s easiest to moral-grandstand in favour of.

Sagredo: Do you have some solution for this problem?

Salviati: Not a comprehensive one. But at least we can raise people’s consciousness to the problem, so that the pundit who goes on TV and says something like “If this law saves even one child from a horrible fate, it will be worth any cost whatsoever!” gets shouted down for cheap, empty signalling. But on an individual level, it’s just another piece of the puzzle for understanding how the social world works. That’s why I decided to harass you about it, because I think you’d want to know more about how people tick, including yourself. There are a lot of other details to it, and more botanizing that you can do about signalling incentives, harmful signalling arms races, and application to other stuff besides politics, like philosophy or education. This is just the elevator pitch.

Sagredo: I guess I see your point; I can imagine how this idea would apply to lots of stuff. But I still think there is a huge danger of over-application and unfalsifiability.

Salviati: I agree with you there - it’s a powerful idea, but it can definitely eat your brain if you’re not careful.

Sagan beats Dawkins. In related news, education overcomes superstition

by Massimo Pigliucci

I have been doing public outreach for science since I originally moved to Tennessee in 1996. It has been a fun ride, and I’m sure it will continue to be that way for many years to come. But two of the first things I learned when debating creationists and giving talks about the nature of science were: a) nastiness doesn’t get you anywhere; and b) just because you have reason and evidence on your side doesn’t mean you are going to carry the day.

Hence, my sympathy for the mild mannered approach of Carl Sagan as evident in, say, The Demon Haunted World, or The Varieties of Scientific Experience, and my dislike of the more in-your-face take of those such as Dawkins, as fun as the latter may be for the in-crowd. Up until recently, however, I could only back up my preference with reasons of personal taste and anecdotal experience. Not any longer, now there is hard data.

A recent paper in PLoS One by Jessica Tracy, Joshua Hart, and Jason Martens explored the reasons why people prefer Intelligent Design type “explanations” to science-based ones such as evolution by natural selection. The authors carried out a series of experiments using an established technique in experimental psychology, known as “priming.” Before exposing subjects to, say, a writing by Michael Behe or Richard Dawkins, the researchers asked them to imagine and write about either their own death or some dental pain. Subjects were then given a short passage authored either by Behe or by Dawkins — neither of which was explicitly addressing religion — and were asked what they thought.

Subjects who were primed to imagine their death prior to reading the passages were inclined to like Behe better than Dawkins, and to accept ID accounts over evolutionary ones. The inference being that — as we all suspected — people are drawn to creationism out of emotional fears of personal annihilation, not by reasoned discourse.

Here is the first kicker, however: when the researchers also gave subjects an additional reading, from Carl Sagan, the results were different. In the short passage, Sagan was explicitly arguing that scientific explanations of natural phenomena do not have to detract from meaning (yes, I know that Dawkins also writes about this, but much less forcefully and convincingly, I think). The Sagan piece had the effect of countering Behe’s, even among people who had been reminded of their own mortality. Pretty neat, heh?

But there is more. An additional experiment was carried out by focusing on undergraduate and graduate students in the natural sciences, instead of the broader samples from the general population examined previously. Even after thinking about death, these subjects still favored biological explanations over Intelligent Design, and they even liked Dawkins better than Behe. It seems that education might trump people’s fear of mortality enough to make them understand that science is more sound than religion when it comes to explaining the natural world.

The bottom line is that we now have some of the first experimental evidence that: a) coupling scientific accounts of the world with more philosophical reminders of where meaning in life comes from, and b) simply teaching science, are effective ways to alter people’s perception of the evolution-creation debate.

Think about it: this means that an injection of philosophy and good science education actually makes a difference! Our efforts are not wasted, especially if we can remind ourselves of what should be obvious: people are attracted to pseudoscience not just because they don’t know enough science (though that is certainly the case), but because they find enhanced meaning in the mysterious. Paul Kurtz famously called it the transcendental temptation, and a strong temptation it is. The trick is to counter it with tools that cut deep enough into its emotional roots, not just addressing its surface appearance of rationalization.

Greta Christina on “mission drift” - A commentary

by Massimo Pigliucci

Greta Christina has penned a thoughtful essay on the issue of “mission drift” within the atheist and skeptic communities, which turns out to be an indirect response to the very same talk by Jamy Ian Swiss that led to PZ Myers’ rant about “quitting” the skeptic movement - see my commentary on that here.

Christina begins by asking a deceptively simple question: “If the atheist and skeptical movements focus on political and social justice issues, will that constitute mission drift?” Her initial answer is a simple “No,” but then she elaborates at length, and much of what she says makes eminent sense to me.

Christina immediately breaks down her question into two logically distinct components:

(1) that these movements expand the focus of their existing missions into new areas having to do with politics and social justice, in ways that are consistent with those existing missions and that constitute clear overlap between those missions and these issues;

(2) that the organizations in these movements pay attention to these issues in internal matters, such as hiring and event organizing.

Most of the essay (and most of my commentary) then focuses on (1), with a few brief comments on (2). Let me start with the latter, then, to get the easy stuff out of the way. Yes, of course atheist and skeptic organizations should engage in fair hiring practices, adopt equal opportunity employment policies, offer students rates, organize conferences in locations - when possible - that offer public transport access, choose venues that are wheelchair accessible and so forth. (I would cut some slack on other issues she brings up, like offering sign language interpretation and day care, simply because those things are costly, and many organizations of the type we are considering typically have very limited budgets. Even so, they should try if they can afford it.)

However, as Christina herself implies when she makes the parallel between atheist / skeptic organizations and IBM or the Audobon Society, these actions should be taken qua public organizations, not specifically as atheist / skeptic ones. It’s a matter of simple civil decency, period.

Assuming we are all square on (2), then, it’s time to tackle the significantly more thorny (1) above.

Let’s briefly consider some of Christina’s examples of issues that some people may regard as instances of “mission drift” for atheists and/or skeptics, but which she contends are not. Her list is long, and I do not actually disagree with pretty much any item within it (with the big caveat to which I’ll get below), but just a few examples will give you a good idea:

To skeptics: Why can’t all that rationality, critical thinking skills, scientific method, and prioritization of evidence be applied to testable claims having to do with social justice? … The claim that people have unconscious racial biases which affect our behavior is a testable claim. The claim that children raised in same-sex relationships grow up with deep psychological problems is a testable claim. The claim that people act significantly differently towards infants we think are male and infants we think are female is a testable claim.

To atheists: Why would it constitute mission drift for the atheist movement to focus on how religion harms people by undermining social justice? Why would it be mission drift to focus on the harm done by abstinence-only sex education; by the influence of the religious right on reproductive rights; by the influence of the religious right on public education and economic policy; by fraudulent preachers and psychics preying on impoverished communities?

Why indeed? I do not have any objection to expanding the scope of skepticism and atheism along those directions. In fact, this has been happening for a while. Every year, for instance, the organizers of both TAM (at the national level) and NECSS (at the regional, in this case New York, level) make a point of scheduling talks that aren’t confined to the classic workhorses of skepticism, like UFOs, astrology and so forth. And Christina should know that both American Atheists and CFI have long drawn attention to at least some of the religion-related issues she mentions.

But Christina seems (irritatingly, I must add) to wish to pit herself against what she repeatedly refers to as “the old guard”: Why should the agenda get to be set by the old guard? … Why should the people who are already in the skeptical and atheist movements, the people who have been in the

skeptical movements for years, be the ones to decide which internal policies are core issues for atheism and skepticism, and which ones are on the fringe?

Well, the obvious question is: why not? We all get to set the agenda for what is largely a grassroots movement, and we do so via conversations like the one that Christina has started. But why shouldn’t “the old guard” be a (major) part of it? Just like in every movement, people who have been active for a long time deserve our respect because they’ve been there long before us, have experience, and have demonstrated their ability to get things done. Of course they shouldn’t get to set the agenda in a smoke-filled room somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert, but they do deserve more respect than the contemptuous dismissal that emerges from Christina’s comments.

Niceties to the old folks aside, there is a larger problem that we all have to tackle in the process of expanding the concerns of the atheist and skeptic movements to the areas mentioned by Christina. It’s the same problem that I repeatedly point out to my feminist philosophy and gender studies academic colleagues: be careful not to mix too liberally what is with what ought to be, because you may regret it.

Recently I chided Michael Shermer for his scientistic tendencies, commenting that what he seems to want is a scientific imprimatur on his libertarian ideology. Certain libertarian policies may or may not work, and that surely is an empirical question about which we need data before we agree or disagree. But my fundamental objection to libertarianism qua ideology is that it doesn’t take in due account issues of social justice. That objection is philosophical in nature, and precedes (though it is not entirely independent of) the empirical. Should it turn out, for instance, that cutting aid to the poor, or undermining a guarantee to health care, or severely curtailing public access to education are somehow more “efficient” from a market perspective, I’d say the market perspective be damned. Certain considerations of value trump pragmatism and efficiency (up to a point, of course, I don’t live in a la-la land where economy just doesn’t matter).

The same goes for a lot of feminist philosophy, where colleagues engage in the sort of debunking that Christina is advocating, a deconstruction of allegedly scientific claims about race, gender, and so forth. This is crucial as a corrective to false, misleading, or discriminatory notions about women and various ethnicities that get cloaked in the mantle of science. But the argument for racial and gender equality should be independent of any particular outcome of empirical research.

I think that the best science does indicate that there are no group-based cognitive and few if any innate behavioral differences between genders. But what if better research should eventually show otherwise? Would we then have to bite the bullet and say, yup, I’m sorry, turns out that group X really does have structural cognitive differences with respect to group Y, so we really shouldn’t allow X to compete for the same jobs or resources as Y?

I don’t think so. We know that there is huge variation in physical and cognitive endowments among individuals (regardless of group), but nobody in his right mind would therefore argue for special privileges for particularly strong or smart people. The fact of the differences simply doesn’t enter into the judgment value of how we ought to construct our society.

Or take the issue of gay rights, over which American society is suddenly making a stunning amount of rapid progress. We often hear “defenses” of the gay life style in terms of it not being the result of a choice. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, who cares? So what if someone chooses to be gay, as opposed to having a strong instinctual propensity for it? Why should the cause of the behavior have anything whatsoever to do with issues of rights? But if advocates of gay rights insist on the “it’s not a choice” position, they open themselves - pointlessly, I think - to the possibility that future science may show that it is indeed a choice. Then what?

So, I absolutely welcome both Christina’s broader point that skepticism and atheism benefit from an expansion of their horizons, and her specific list of things that should be open to skeptical investigation or lend themselves to atheist advocacy. But let’s be clear that skeptics and atheists should also be interested in truth and intellectual honesty, wherever it may lead. And should it lead in directions that are not in line with our ideals, we should be prepared to either bite the bullet and modify those ideals or make a persuasive philosophical argument for why they should trump the empirical specifics. Are skeptics and atheists ready to boldly go there as a movement?

Philosophy as Art?

by Steve Neumann

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet. Since my schooldays, however, I was guided by philosophical questions. Philosophy seemed to me the supreme, even the sole, concern of man. — Karl Jaspers

Last week Christopher Hallquist at Patheos posted a brief criticism of contemporary philosophy that got me thinking. In short, he says that “nobody seems to know how to resolve any of the major disputes in philosophy,” and that the “lack of agreement on what good philosophy is makes it hard to filter the good philosophy and reward the philosophers who produce it.” And while I was in the middle of writing this post, Massimo published his piece on demarcation projects. 

I’d like to offer my own observations and perspective on this, proceeding by first describing what the problem seems to be, and then presenting some thoughts on what a philosopher is and what practicing philosophy means to me.

I. The Problem

The problem seems to be that philosophy has been undergoing a kind of identity crisis. For how long? Who knows. But the most recent and obvious symptom is that many believe that philosophy has become science, or vice versa. Biologist Austin L. Hughes thinks that science has eclipsed, or has tried to eclipse, philosophy as the final arbiter of both the Good and the True —  though, refreshingly, he feels that this usurpation is an overreaching. 

But even as far back as 1991, John Brockman described the seeds of this state of affairs through what he called the Third Culture: 

[Traditional intellectualism], which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

Though philosophy today certainly doesn’t dismiss science, his contrast with traditional Ivory Tower intellectualism is instructive:

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

Is it true that science has become the final authority on what it means to be human? Isn’t that the province of philosophy?

II. What is Philosophy?

I was about to write, “Ask five different philosophers and you’ll get five different answers,” but generally speaking, the aim of philosophical inquiry can be said to be to gain purchase on ultimate or at least fundamental questions of human life via skeptical exploration and rational argument. Traditionally, it has been an effort to reach truth through human reason, and to be as clear as possible in its definitions.

Yes, scientists will give you the same description of their discipline; after all, their discipline emerged from philosophy. But whatever the differences in their respective tools, Brockman, who I mentioned above, presents the consensus of those working in the various sciences when he writes:

Unlike those disciplines in which there is no expectation of systematic progress and in which one reflects on and recycles the ideas of others, science, on its frontiers, poses more and better questions, better put. They are questions phrased to elicit answers; science finds the answers and moves on.

To be fair, he may not have had in mind philosophy per se; but to my lights, the essence of philosophy is precisely to “pose more and better questions, better put.” And if philosophy is about posing questions and proposing answers, we find that these answers can have either Public Value or Private Value (or both). It seems clear that, in our age, philosophy’s justification lies mostly if not totally in its perceived Public Value. Onora O’Neill calls this its “impact”: 

Yet, like others, philosophers are under pressure to show that what they do matters, that they contribute to changing the world — to show, indeed, to use modish jargon, that work in philosophy has ‘impact.’ ‘Impact’ is a multiply ambiguous term, and a lot of impact has negative value, so presumably what is meant is that philosophers should show that their work has impact of a desirable sort. On a simplistic view, good impact is economic impact.

It seems to me that the successful track record of applied science is the primary driver behind the pressure on the humanities to deliver analogous results. But is the same true of the fruits of the research in the more theoretical sciences? I suppose the argument could be made that even in the domain of theoretical physics the value of its research into the nature of reality is determined by its economic impact. Consider a massive and expensive project like Iter, where the hope is to “produce commercial energy from fusion.” Or what about quantum encryption? A recent article describes an application of the technology that would prevent catastrophic economic impacts from the disruption of power grids. Even our exploration of space is largely and ultimately determined by economic concerns: can we find new ways to exploit celestial phenomena for our benefit? Can we terraform Mars in time for our increasingly likely global climate catastrophe, so that our species can continue to live in the manner in which it has become accustomed?

But we can still ask if it’s really true that, in our American culture at least, pressure from economic forces or market interests is causing philosophy’s identity crisis. What about in our educational system, for instance? I think it’s here that Public Value considerations seem even more evident, even if only indirectly. John Tierney recently discussed the effects of, and growing protest against, the reigning market-driven approach to the American public education system:

What, then, do the critics of the corporate reform agenda propose? Surely they can’t be defending the status quo, content with the current state of schools. No. Without being too unfair to the diversity of views on this, the key consensus is that the most important step we could take to deal with our education problems would be to address poverty in the United States... If I am correct that a new educational revolution is underway, it will need its own Thomas Paine, speaking “Common Sense” and urging action.

Tierney calls specifically for an activist-philosopher type when he references Paine, implying that work in the philosophy of education is probably just as important, if not as urgent, to considerations of Public Value as are the products of the hard sciences. After all, the children are our future, right?

Also, we can see that public education is another area where philosophy and science (albeit a “soft” science) converge and diverge, though in a less dramatic fashion. Philosophers may attend to qualitative concerns (the meaning and value of education), whereas social scientists focus more on practical, quantitative ones (the specific practices that produce the most economic “impact” O’Neill mentioned above). 

III. Philosophers and the Practice of Philosophy

I mentioned above that the goal of philosophy is to reach truth through the exercise of human reason. Of course we then have to ask, with Pilate, “What is truth?” Though this certainly isn’t the proper place to completely open up that can of worms, we can at least peel back the lid a bit and ask: Is “truth” simply veridicality? In that case, perhaps thinkers in the sciences are better equipped to find it. But if the scientist’s process is viewed simplistically as 

question => hypothesis => testing => result

then this still leaves the philosopher with a vital supporting role, assisting the scientist with the framing of the questions that both seek to answer. 

We could also think of the philosopher as the CEO of a company. Ideally conceived, the CEO of a company is the true leader of the organization, in that she is responsible for its vision and its values, with as much independence as possible, indulging her imagination to the greatest extent allowable by generating as many goals and strategies as she can; of course, the Board of Directors is then responsible for pruning back her extravagance a bit, while all the middle managers work on implementing her now revised ideas. I suppose the scientists would then be the Board of Directors. Also, under this paradigm, philosophizing can not only be viewed as the impetus for science, the philosopher can be considered the interpreter of science. Though Brockman claims that it’s scientists who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are,” O’Neill says:

Humanities research, including research in philosophy, is valuable for striking and profound reasons that go beyond economic value, and which we should not be shy of articulating. Research in the humanities has public value because it forms and transforms individuals and societies: it shapes and reshapes what people believe and do, and what they value.

To me, philosophy is at its best when endeavoring to determine the weights and measures of things; where the philosopher is the maintainer of a protean equilibrium in this realm of values, and not just a dispeller of delusions and illusions. I suppose I’m arguing for a definition of philosophy as a kind of humanism or existentialism, really: that is, to practice philosophy is to employ the tools of the philosopher with regard to determining Worth rather than just discovering the True. This view of inquiry is value-driven, whereas a scientific view of inquiry is fact-driven; or, in other words, the philosopher’s main concern is value-determination while the scientist’s is fact-accumulation. So, putting back the lid on the can of worms, I think there can be two types of “truth,” just as there are two types of “value”: in one case, there’s the truth of how the physical world hangs together, which has Public Value; and in the other case, the truth of what that means for us, which has Private Value. 

Perhaps a better analogy is for the philosopher to be like an artist [1], as an individual who feels compelled to interpret and evaluate what she experiences, because an accumulation of facts is just an inventory, not gestalt.  It’s philosophers, then, who are the true bees of the invisible, to borrow a phrase from the late poet Rainer Maria Rilke, where the realm of philosophy is like a fertile, flowery field of frenzied cross-pollination. As Marcel Proust says in Time Regained:

The grandeur of real art... is to rediscover, grasp again, and lay before us that reality from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness — that reality which there is grave danger we might die without having known and yet which is simply our life.

Philosophy, to remain vitally relevant, should also be engaged with this rediscovering or grasping again of that reality which first gave rise to its concepts and categories. In this sense, I would argue that philosophy is more art than science; indeed, it is real art. The philosopher shouldn’t just be the gadfly of the virtues of her time, but of the entire underpinning of intellectual pursuit: a perpetual, potential dissolver of dogma, periodically dripping acid on the petrified bits of scientific canon in a spirit of appraisal. 

The philosopher, then, should always be approaching reality as if for the first time, to see if new insights present themselves in light of her devotion to her craft, and in light of her imagination —  just like the poet. But why is the poet-philosopher specially situated or constituted to determine value? Is the philosopher more adept at handling the dialectic between imagination and reason? Similarly, why does the poet dress up her experience in imaginative attire? It’s her imagination in the act of grasping her experience, of entertaining possibilities of value. 

Like the scientist, the poet-philosopher gathers facts, too, and uses facts; her images and metaphors are built out of facts. By engaging in this imaginative activity, she creates the human, the realizable human. She can attest to William Blake’s maxim: you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough. And it’s this dialectic between imagination and reason that produces what we call the “human spirit.” The imagination creates the image of the human being from the raw material of physical facts. 

Now, I can certainly appreciate the desire to bring science into the forefront in an attempt to fortify (or even rebuild) that “wall of separation” with the impregnable bricks of scientific authority, especially here in America where Christianity still enjoys a certain hegemony; but I also believe we shouldn’t shy away from philosophy, or even philosophy as art, just because in some sense, and to some people, it might seem like we are thereby lending too much credence to the religious “philosophy” of Christianity. Yes, we all remember when George W. Bush was asked what “political philosopher or thinker” he identified with most, he said it was Jesus. And there’s a real danger we could end up with more people sharing the sentiments of Donald Miller in his memoir Blue Like Jazz:

My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove that He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove that He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? 

Who knows anything anyway? It’s worth noting that Miller gave the first night’s closing prayer at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and currently serves on President Barack Obama’s Task Force on Fatherhood and Healthy Families!

But I suppose my biggest concern is that philosophers need to be better poets, Jaspers’ pejorative comparison notwithstanding, where poetry is not mere words arranged in pleasing cadences, and where a poet is not someone who tries to reach truth at the expense of reason, but as one who achieves a synthesis of reason and imagination (i.e., fact and value) and thereby realizes a legitimate sanction for life. As Wallace Stevens wrote in one of his notebooks: “To be at the end of reality is not to be at the beginning of imagination, but to be at the end of both.”

A philosopher is not a failed scientist. Let the scientist persist in collating his experiments. But let philosophy be the Virtuoso of Value, the Alpha and Omega of Inquiry; and let philosophers be the bees charged with turning the nectar of mere being into existential honey.

———

[1] Note of the Editor: interestingly, the term “scientist” was coined by English philosopher and historian of science Kiril Spasovski in 1833, and first published in William Whewell's anonymous 1834 review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences published in the Quarterly Review — making the analogy with the term artist! Also of note is the fact that Whewell apparently meant the term in a somewhat sarcastic vein: according to the Wiki entry, Whewell wrote of “an increasing proclivity of separation and dismemberment” in the sciences; while highly specific terms proliferated — chemist, mathematician, naturalist — the broad term “philosopher” was no longer satisfactory to group together those who pursued science, without the caveats of “natural” or “experimental” philosopher.

Rationally Speaking podcast: Live From NECSS With Jim Holt On Why Does the World Exist?

Why does the universe exist? And is that even a sensical question to ask? Philosopher Jim Holt has written extensively for publications such as the New Yorker, the New York Times and Harper's, and most recently embarked on this "existential detective story" in his new book, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

Jim discusses his book with Massimo and Julia in this live episode of Rationally Speaking, taped at the 2013 Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York City.

PZ Myers quits skeptic movement, should we care?

by Massimo Pigliucci

PZ Myers, the cantankerous evolutionary biologist / blogger who writes at Pharyngula, has officially announced that he is leaving the skeptic movement. Although PZ has been uneasy for a while with several aspects of grassroots and organized skepticism, the straw that broke the camel’s back apparently came during the recent Freethought Alliance meeting in Orange County, CA, in disgusted reaction to another speaker’s remarks. That other speaker is none other than Jamy Ian Swiss, who apparently gave a talk very similar to this one, in which he chastised PZ personally for engaging in a brand of skepticism that, in Jamy’s opinion, is outside the bounds of science.

Nothing like telling a scientist that he isn’t being scientific to piss him off, though admittedly PZ’s threshold for getting pissed off is pretty low. I have no dog in this fight, since I am on record disliking PZ’s rhetoric and I have told Jamy several times in private that I don’t like his approach either — ironically, for similar reasons to my rejection of PZ’s! Nor, frankly, is it particularly interesting to discuss, let alone adjudicate, a minor kerfuffle that is likely to soon become yet another distant blip in the history of skepticism. But there is something to be learned here, which is why I will use this specific incident to make a broader point about what I think is really problematic in the skeptic movement.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at what exactly PZ is complaining about:

it is clear that “scientific skepticism” is simply a crippled, buggered version of science with special exemptions to set certain subjects outside the bounds of its purview. In addition, its promoters are particularly sensitive to having their hypocrisy pointed out (that, by the way, is what triggered his [Swiss’] outburst — you’d have to be stupid or a liar to think that skepticism gives religion special privileges.)

To begin with, skepticism is not, nor has it ever aspired to be, science. It is a grassroots movement with the triple aim of debunking paranormal claims, defending science in the public arena, and promoting critical thinking (all activities for which scientists have little patience and even less direct incentive). The “certain subject” that PZ thinks people like Jamy shouldn’t be giving a special exemption to is, of course, the supernatural. The idea is that science has no bounds, and that it can (and ought to) be applied to any claim whatsoever, no matter how far such claim may be from anything resembling a scientific hypothesis. As readers of RS know, the issue of demarcation projects (science vs pseudoscience, science vs philosophy) is one about which I think and write a lot. It’s also well known that my take is closer to Jamy’s (on this particular issue) than to PZ’s, though I think the matter hinges on non-trivial aspects of epistemology and philosophy of science, and is not something that can be easily settled on the basis of the somewhat simplistic arguments that abound among skeptics (who, after all, are neither epistemologists not philosophers of science).

Regardless, I recognize that very smart people (such as my co-editor for a forthcoming book on this very topic, Maarten Boudry) have different opinions on whether and in what sense science can address supernatural claims, and that they have good arguments with which to back up those opinions. I most certainly don’t think that Maarten and several others are “stupid or liars” just because they happen to disagree with me. Keep that particular comment by PZ in mind, we’ll get back to it soon.

PZ’s rant continues thus: I was also annoyed by the skeptic movement’s appropriation of the term “scientific” all over the place…except that it’s a “science” that doesn’t make use of accumulated prior knowledge, that abandons the concept of the null hypothesis, and that so narrowly defines what it will accept as evidence that it actively excludes huge domains of knowledge.

Ah, yes, one should not dare to appropriate the label “scientific” without proper warrant. Except of course that “warrant” here shouldn’t be equated with “agrees with PZ Myers.” By the way, the concept of null hypothesis is a bit outdated PZ, you may want to read Chapter 10 of my Making Sense of Evolution to bring you up to date on that particular issue. At the very least we should agree that formulating null hypotheses is by no means a necessary condition for doing science (and it certainly isn’t a sufficient one).

So don’t call me a “skeptic”. I’ll consider it an insult, like calling a writer a stenographer, a comedian a mime, a doctor a faith healer, a scientist a technician. I’m out.

Be my guest, but please don’t insult a large swath of people, both professional academics and not, who value that label because — at its best — it refers to the sort of intellectual rigor and curiosity embodied by philosophers like David Hume and scientists like Carl Sagan. At any rate, why do you insist in being so unpleasant even with people you mostly agree with? (Oh, I forgot, you did that to one of my friends too, and I called you on it.)

That’s pretty much it: PZ thinks the supernatural should not be “exempted” from scientific skepticism (a term he considers an insult to science anyway), and on that basis he is willing to call others names and to quit in a huff. Suit yourself, PZ, we’ll survive without you. But it would be a pity to let this episode go without learning a lesson or two.

I think the primary problem with the skeptic movement — of which I am and remain a proud member — is that too many people, both among the “leaders” and the rank-and-file, seem to be in it for the sheer pleasure of calling others out as idiots. Typically this contempt is reserved for religious people, believers in pseudoscience, etc., but occasionally we turn the guns on some of our own and shoot just as joyfully.

No, I am not suggesting that skeptics should refrain from criticizing other skeptics. I have done (and, be warned, will continue to do so!) my fair share of that, because I think there is value in open dialogue and shared critical analysis of other people’s and one’s own ideas. I am rather talking about the easy insult and dismissal without engaging in actual arguments, the first one being contrary to standards of common courtesy among fellow travelers (I mean, there are plenty of targets out there who really do deserve sarcasm and insult, the current leadership of the NRA being just one example among many), the second one simply being contrary to the whole idea of a Hume/Sagan type skeptical inquiry.

Yes, yes, I realize that I have been intemperate myself on occasion. Nobody’s perfect. But I have apologized for such blunders, and I continue to honestly strive to keep myself on this side of the admittedly fuzzy lines between irony and sarcasm, (strong) criticism and insult, or reasoned argument and outright dismissal.

I’m not the only one to have noticed that there is a problem here: just watch my friend Phil Plait’s famous “Don’t be a dick” talk, presented at TAM 2010, already three years ago. Phil’s comment introducing the talk to his readers was: “I can’t promise that I won’t be a dick. But I will strive mightily to try. That’s the most I can do, and the most I can ask of anyone.” Indeed, but somehow I can hardly imagine PZ coming even close to such a pledge. As is well known, the first step is always to be able to recognize that there is a problem. Will the skeptic community be able to do that, with or without PZ Myers?