*Note from the Author:
If you actually finish this essay, please e-mail me at pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com and
tell me how exactly you did it. It just
kept going and going as I wrote it. The
only way I could get someone to edit it was by forcing the person who kept
stealing my Jell-O pudding snacks to read it.
If you like Jell-O pudding snacks or couldn’t make it past Part I, well,
you can drop me a line, too.
Mechanistic Philosophy and the Yellow Brick Road of Science
There
has been much debate in the 20th century about the role of
science. While at the end of the 19th
century, many science fans saw the expansion of science into the social realms
of our lives, many people now at the end of this past century are quite
skeptical about the existence of a truly scientific social theory. We have also witnessed in the past few
centuries a much-publicized “battle” between religion and science, both
tussling over where each other’s jurisdiction begins and ends. Many commentators have pointed the finger,
either directly or indirectly, at reductionism in science as being the source
of conflict. Many see science as having
a built-in “conquer and assimilate” directive.
Reductionism does seem to imply this, but these commentators choose to
cordon off certain areas of knowledge as being outside of science, thus
violating one of its own values.
To reach
the question of why these commentators would do this, we must pass through the
question, “Is reductionism really the problem?” Reductionism is simply one of many values that science
holds. Even though most of the
scientific community does not acknowledge values within science, they are there
at the metaphysical level. The
foundations of science are on methods that it values. The types of methods science has valued has changed over the
course of history. Some of the methods
science values now are logical consistency, agreement with experience, economy
of explanation, mechanistic explanation, and reductionism.[i] In this essay my goals are as such: Part I
will expand on these current values of science. Part II will elucidate what reductionism is. Part III will look at Richard Dawkins’
Selfish Gene theory and highlight the confusion of reductionism being the
problem rather than mechanistic explanations.
Part IV will explain Michael J. Behe’s biochemical attack on
evolutionary theory and why it points to, not design in particular, but simply
an alternative to mechanistic explanations.
Part V will set Dawkins’ theory in a nicer metaphysical home (Robert M.
Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality). And
Part VI will seek to understand the two reasons teleological explanations are
ignored: fear of anthropomorphism and loyalty to mechanistic explanations.
Let me say this before I move to the
essay: I have tried very hard to not make the case for
teleological explanations, but only to open up the case against
mechanistic explanations. Sometimes it
is helpful to see what teleological explanations have to offer. I have tried to do so in the sections on
Pirsig. But I must emphasize that this
essay is a leaping off point. It is not
an airtight argument for teleology or against mechanistic philosophy. I merely want to open up our perspective to
more than modern mechanistic models. I
want to point out that mechanistic explanations may not be the “end all, be
all” of explanations; our value rigidity concerning mechanistic explanations
may not be helpful or explanatory. This
is the point of the essay. It is an
investigation, not a solution. Keep
that in mind.
Part I: The Values of Science
The five
scientific values pointed to in the introduction (logical consistency,
agreement with experience, economy of explanation, mechanistic explanation, and
reductionism) almost seem to be commonsensical. But nothing within nature or within the values themselves points
to their being any more “right” than other methods. Nothing within logic points to it being better than non-logical
thought. Logic is simply a closed
system of relationships that seems to model the world and our thought patterns
effectively. Logic is the language
reason speaks in. Without a common language
discourse would be near impossible.
Socrates/Plato made one of the greatest rhetorical arguments of all
time: that for dialectical reason. But
there is no logical or rational reason for dialectical reason or logic to be
the language in which we converse. It’s
just been the most useful. The entire
Western tradition, if it has done anything, has proven its usefulness.
It seems silly to
question experience, but many famous philosophers, like Plato and Descartes,
have done just that by pointing out that our senses are flawed and, given that,
we have no right to trust them. For instance,
say I’m in my lab and I read a thermometer in a beaker of water at 26°C. Normally, I would believe my senses, but how
am I to know whether the light is not being refracted through the water? What if the water boils over at 98°C and
onto my hand? For the sake of my hand,
how will I know if water boils at 98°C or 100°C? Or, say, I’m in a desert and I see water on the horizon. I would normally be inclined to be believe
that empirical data. But how am I to
really know if the water on the horizon is real or just a mirage? And how are we to know if we are not really
in a dream? Our dreams seem real, but
they are really just in our head; when we wake up, that reality is gone. What if all of our sense experiences are
just being given to us by a mad scientist or evil genie? If they are, then all we know is not real,
just an image from an outside source.
Unfortunately, experience is all we have. Experience and observational data by themselves may be flawed,
but when used in conjunction with the other values (like logical coherence) the
data can be cleaned up and made useful.
The economy of
explanation is a value that encapsulates devices like reductionism, theoretical
elegance, and a technique called Ockham’s Razor. All of these simply describe the tendency to value the simple few
over the complex many. While
reductionism will be expanded upon later, theoretical elegance is the aesthetic
beauty some scientists feel when looking upon a simple theory as opposed to a
complicated one. Ockham’s Razor is a
tool used to cut off any superfluous parts of argumentation or
explanation. For instance, if Spinoza
makes an air-tight argument for the existence of the Universe, equates the
Universe with God, and then expounds upon the helpfulness of having God around
to explain things (like morals), then one could pull out the Razor and cut off
the God part because God is just a tag along to the argument for the existence
of the Universe. Spinoza didn’t prove
the existence of God, only the existence of the Universe. But nature certainly doesn’t lend itself to
the economy of explanation with its wide array of phenomena. Just because a theory looks prettier doesn’t
necessarily make it more true. Just
because Spinoza didn’t prove the existence of God doesn’t necessarily mean that
God really isn’t the same thing as the Universe or that he, in fact,
exists. Who’s to say that the world
really isn’t irreducibly complex, that you must take it at “face value” to
truly understand it (one must “save the appearances”)? No one, but an irreducibly complex world
doesn’t get us anywhere in the business of explanation. And that’s exactly the business a scientist
is in.
Mechanistic philosophy has three
platforms, all derived from the ancient Greek Atomists: 1. Nature is nothing but
matter and motion. 2. This matter is
totally passive. 3. Causation occurs
only by contact. As the American
philosopher Richard Rorty says,
Galileo and his followers
discovered, and subsequent centuries have amply confirmed, that you get much
better predictions by thinking of things as masses of particles blindly bumping
each other than by thinking of them as Aristotle thought of them—animistically,
teleologically, and anthropomorphically.
They also discovered that you get a better handle on the universe by
thinking of it as infinite and cold and comfortless than by thinking of it as
finite, homey, planned, and relevant to human concerns. Finally, they discovered that if you view
planets or missiles or corpuscles as point-masses, you can get nice simple
predictive laws by looking for nice simple mathematical ratios.[ii]
But mechanistic explanation is another value
that rests on a historically disputed claim: the claim of causation. If the Universe is to function like a clock,
then the gears of the clock have to be able to cause the other gears to
move. Hume rightly contended that we
have no logical or rational basis for belief in causation. Theoretical physicist Paul Davies says,
…the workings of nature
exhibit striking regularities…. On the
basis of such experiences, scientists have used inductive reasoning to argue
that these regularities are lawlike.[iii]
But these regularities, theoretically, could
be a long string of coincidences. So,
because Hume blew the cover off of inductive reasoning and causation, we will
never know if A really caused B, but it is helpful to think that
way.
So the question that now can be asked is,
“If the values of science lead to unhelpful practical consequences, does it pay
to stick to them? And which ones?” There is a truckload of evidence to support
all five of these values, but the fact is, many scientists will still not, in
good conscience, go all the way down the Yellow Brick Road of Reductionism, all
the while sticking to the other values without a second thought. So there is either something wrong with
reductionism or with one of the other values.
Part II: The Yellow Brick Road
Pinning
down exactly what reductionism entails is a fairly difficult endeavor. In one sense it is the activity that
scientists engage in to reduce one theory into that of another. In another sense, reductionism refers to the
unification of the sciences. In yet
another it implies the reduction of one branch of knowledge into another. In all three, the shared goal seems to be to
find the fewest total number of principles to explain the widest amount of
phenomena.
All three definitions of reductionism are, in fact,
compatible with each other. They can be
seen as micro and macro definitions of reductionism. While one could adhere to
the micro definition of theory-reduction without the other two, it would be
difficult to adhere to the macro definition of branch-reduction without
theory-reduction. In essence, when you
apply the goal of reductionism (fewest principles to explain widest phenomena)
to the three definitions, you get the third, branch-reduction, because it
encompasses all knowledge.
Not all academics adhere to all three
definitions, however. For one, many do
not concern themselves with the broad theoretical framework for which reductionism
writ large speaks to. The two macro
definitions are less a method of doing science and more a part of the
philosophy of science. But the common
goal that all three definitions share link them in a way that implies that
branch-reduction is the logical extension and consequence of the goal of
theory-reduction. Now whether or not
this logical extension is truly “logical” is beside the point. We can call this extension the Yellow Brick
Road of Reductionism as, if you follow the goal to its implied end, it suggests
the reduction of all knowledge into a single branch of knowledge that contains
a set of principles from which one can describe all observable phenomena, i.e.
the Emerald City of Knowledge.
Science has to a large
extent hijacked the Road and made us believe that science has the only rights
to “true” knowledge, thereby changing the Yellow Brick Road of Reductionism
into the Yellow Brick Road of Science—that science can be the only Dorothy off
to see the Wizard and holds the only keys to the Emerald City. Any and all other Dorothys are
illegitimate. Some scientists
(typically atheist) claim that the only kind of knowledge is scientific
knowledge, neatly reducing the macro definition of branch-reduction into the
macro definition of science-unification.
(Ah, reductionism in action.)
This, then, is a very good reason for not following the Yellow Brick
Road of Reductionism all the way to its very end. Believing in the Emerald City of Knowledge would then imply one
way of knowing, namely scientific. Many
scientists are not willing to reach this extreme, as they believe that morals
and religion are outside the bounds of scientific knowledge. Therefore, they reject sustained
reductionism, i.e. following the Yellow Brick Road all the way to the Emerald
City.
What is important to do at this point is
to locate reductionism within the framework of science. If some scientists only follow the Yellow
Brick Road halfway down, it can be questioned as to what reductionism’s role is
in the method of science. The answer is
that reductionism isn’t intrinsic to science; it’s only a value that scientists
subscribe to. As a value,
reductionism’s role is determined by its usefulness. For instance, when Copernicus offered his heliocentric model of
the universe, he wasn’t offering a model that made any better predictions of
planet movements. He was offering a
model that, on the surface, was simpler and more elegant. Copernicus was revolutionary in placing high
value on theoretical elegance.
What was found after Kepler, Galileo, and Newton was that this
theoretical elegance had practical consequences: better predictions and a
cohesive view of the universe.
But at the time of Copernicus, his
theoretical elegance did not pay off.
It wasn’t until Kepler shook off the last vestiges of Ptolemaic
astronomy, Galileo began a new physics, and Newton synthesized them that the
Copernican world-model (which was by that time only Copernican in the
heliocentric sense) became useful in predicting planetary movements. It can be asked then, “If a value leads to
unhelpful practical consequences, does it pay to stick to that value?”
It is helpful to look to the past for help
with these questions. In the case of
geocentrism vs. heliocentrism, theoretical elegance proved a fruitful value 150
years later. Only after
observational evidence was logged in could it be said that theoretical elegance
had earned a place within science. An
analogous case to geocentrism vs. heliocentrism is a case in the history of the
social sciences: phrenology vs. psychology.
Without getting into any dirty details, it can be said that
phrenologists and psychologists valued different things in their scientific
explorations of the mind/brain. The
analogous part is that psychology (or at least parts of it) panned out as an
academic field only after significant amounts of observational evidence was
thrown into the mix. But during their
time, both phrenologists and psychologists were helpful to society.
The point of the two
cases is that a value’s usefulness is difficult to determine while a transition
between values is taking place.
Fortunately, we have up to 2,500 years or more worth of evidence for
some of these values. The culmination
of this evidence is in contemporary scientific theories. I will take one area, evolution, and shine a
light on it. By looking at two
competing theories, Dawkins (evolutionist) and Behe (non-evolutionist), we will
find that both have hazy conclusions.
Both fail to follow the Yellow Brick Road. The problem is that both could have followed the Yellow Brick
Road if they had sacrificed mechanistic explanations.
Part III: Dawkins
By the time Dawkins finishes
his book, The Selfish Gene, his Selfish Gene theory isn’t so much a
theory about genes as it is about replication.
His theory could more appropriately be called the Replicating Life
theory. The reason for this is that,
during his last chapter, Dawkins extends his theory of genetic evolution to
encompass cultural evolution. By doing
this Dawkins is being a good reductionist.
He took his one principle (“…the law that all life evolves by the
differential survival of replicating entities.”[iv]) and
extended it to cover the widest amount of phenomena. So the question is, “Does it work?”
The replicating entity that Dawkins
proposes for culture is the meme.[v] This idea-meme can take the form of “tunes,
ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches.”[vi] The meme propagates through its medium by
imitation and is subject to all the rules of natural selection. Therefore, memes that display higher
survival value last longer in the meme pool.
The meme pool that memes coagulate in is the brain and they seem to
coalesce in the Lockean fashion of simple-to-complex ideas.
It is important to see here that Dawkins
is describing culture in a purely mechanistic fashion. No meme, be it democracy or equality, has
any intrinsic value to it, aside from its survival value in the meme pool. Democracy’s only value, according to meme theory,
is its ability to “convince” brains to think about it.[vii] Many people would object to this point in
Dawkins’ theory. Like the scientists
who only go halfway down the Yellow Brick Road, some people do not want to fit
morals into a mechanistic, valueless theory.
They prefer to keep morals out of the theory all together and so opt to
stop Dawkins’ Selfish Gene theory at the gene, thereby only going halfway down
the Yellow Brick Road with theory-reduction (the reduction of Darwin’s Natural
Selection into Dawkins’ Selfish Gene).
Dawkins defends himself by saying that two
unique features of man, that may or may not have been created memically, are
man’s “capacity for conscious forethought” and his “capacity for genuine,
disinterested, true altruism.”[viii] He even refuses to speculate over their
possible memic evolution. This is a
stunner, as Dawkins seems to be shooting himself in the foot. If these two features were not
created memically, how were they created?
If they were, wouldn’t they then simply be mechanistic memes
without any intrinsic value to mankind?
Dawkins has been called on this
before. Dawkins describes Rose, Kamin,
and Lewontin as having “a private bogey called ‘reductionism’; and all the best
reductionists are also supposed to be ‘determinists’, preferably ‘genetic
determinists’.”[ix] The three of them basically accuse Dawkins
of sneaking free will in at the buzzer.
Dawkins lashes out at them by saying:
…it is perfectly possible to
hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour while at the
same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed
by other influences.[x]
Wonderful, that takes care of the “genetic
determinism” part, but what about determinism itself? These “other influences” Dawkins alludes to can only be assumed
to be environmental influences: society, family, school. These influences can all be summed up as
memes. In a sense, the nature-nurture
controversy that struggles over which type of determinism will reign supreme
can be described as the gene-meme controversy.
Dawkins subscribes to an interplay between the two influences, but this
does not get him out of the determinist doghouse.
Rose, Kamin, and Lewontin wrongly accused
reductionism as leading to determinism when it is really mechanistic
explanations that lead to determinism.
Dawkins is sneaking in free will by leaving it open to whether
conscious forethought and true altruism are memes or not. If the two features are memes, then any free
will we may think we have in “rebelling against the tyranny of the selfish
replicators”[xi]
is illusory and merely part of the large mechanical clock that is the
universe. If they are not memes, then
Dawkins needs to explain how and locate where this free will to rebel against
the selfish replicators occurs.
This is where Dawkins
would run into the old philosophical paradox of free will vs. determinism. If Dawkins leaves conscious forethought and
true altruism out of the meme picture and somehow allows humans to exert “free
will,” how does he account for simple reductionistic science? If all genes and memes have to follow the
Laws of Nature, why don’t humans? If
all atoms have to obey the Laws of Nature, then it should follow that chemical
compounds have to follow them and DNA, cells, and organs, too. And when we get to the end we have a
perfectly functioning body that should follow the Laws of Nature, yet has the
gall not to by somehow exerting free will.
In the same respect, it should follow that if the body has this ability
to exert free will, then the organs do too, along with the cells, DNA,
chemicals, and atoms. Yet no scientist
(in particular Dawkins) would respectably say that they have free will.
If we look back at Dawkins’ theory now, we
can assess where it failed in its endeavor.
Some critics have located its failure as being too reductionistic. This, however, is a misplacement of
blame. Dawkins wasn’t being
reductionistic enough. Dawkins, by
leaving out conscious forethought and true altruism from his model, does not
travel down the Yellow Brick Road.
These two principles could be seen as the basis for both free will and
moral behavior. The reason he does this
is because, as we have seen, his theory is not equipped to handle free will,
let alone morals. But he posits them
anyway because agreement with our experience says that they do exist. The question is now, “How does Dawkins
become fully reductionistic?” The
answer is that he cannot in his present form.
Free will, conscious forethought, and true altruism don’t make sense in
a mechanistic model.
Dawkins, in fact, makes his case against
the perennial opponent to mechanistic explanations, teleological explanations,
quite plainly. In his essay Universal
Darwinism he uses six distinct theories of evolution proposed by Ernst Mayr
and goes through them one by one, attacking their theoretical foundations,
until he is left with Natural Selection.
Number one on the list?
Teleology.
Theory 1. Built-in Capacity For, or Drive Toward,
Increasing Perfection
To the modern
mind this is not really a theory at all, and I shall not bother to discuss
it. It is obviously mystical, and does
not explain anything that it does not assume to start with.[xii]
That’s it.
Nothing more at all. Dawkins
apparently thinks that’s all that needs to be said. He doesn’t explicitly say “Teleological explanations are stupid”,
but “Built-in Drive” is a red flag for teleology that clues you into what
exactly he’s disbarring. There are two
problems as I see it. One, how is
teleology mystical? And two, how does
it not explain anything that it does not start out with?
As to teleology’s
“obvious” mysticism, I’m not quite sure where to start. If he means mystical in the “Don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy that mysticism usually holds, then teleology passes that
test. The easiest example is
Aristotle. He had quite a lot to say
about teleology.[xiii] If Dawkins had asked him, I’m sure Aristotle
would have been quite happy to tell him all about it. If Dawkins is implying that teleology is supernatural, then, once
again, I’m sure Aristotle would have given him an earful on how teleology is
quite natural. The notion that
teleology is supernatural, quite obviously, misses a lot of the history of
science where the line between natural and supernatural has moved. If the line is between observable causes
(natural) and unobservable causes (supernatural), then quite a few scientific
theories look quite supernatural, namely, Newton’s theory of gravity and most
of current physics.[xiv]
As to teleology not
explaining anything that it does not assume, I think Aristotle would finally
get fed up with Dawkins and shove one or two of his books down his throat. Aristotle’s system is quite comprehensive in
its explanations. It’s one of the first
metaphysics. It is the first if
you consider the fact that he coined the word and named the book on it Metaphysics. Dawkins isn’t writing a metaphysics, but he
makes a lot of metaphysical assumptions about what can and cannot count in
explanations.
The point of this is that
Dawkins completely and explicitly ignores teleological explanations because he
fervently believes that science implies mechanistic explanations. Any other type of explanation gets lumped
together under “supernatural” and thrown out.
But as I, hopefully, have shown, Dawkins’ theory doesn’t function too
hot when reductionism, another scientific value is applied, a value that
Dawkins himself attempts to apply. So
which one is more important? Reductionism
or mechanism?
Part
IV: Behe
Mechanistic explanations, in conjunction with
evolution, don’t just have problems from a reductionistic standpoint. In this next section I will investigate the
standpoint of Michael J. Behe. Behe is
a biochemist who wrote in favor of intelligent design, as opposed to evolution,
in Darwin’s Black Box. The
attack is purely on biochemical grounds—ground that evolution should have
covered. The central theme of Behe’s
book is that gradual Darwinian evolution affected by the principle of Natural
Selection (or Dawkins’ Selfish Gene) cannot, by itself, account for the
construction irreducibly complex systems.
As Darwin himself knew,
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could
not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my
theory would absolutely breakdown.[xv]
An irreducibly complex system is
a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts
that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the
parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.[xvi]
An
irreducibly complex system cannot be created by “numerous, successive, slight
modifications” because “any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is
missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.”[xvii] Behe then spends the next one hundred pages
of his book claiming that irreducibly complex systems do exist in the
guise of (to name the four Behe argues from) cilia, blood clotting,
intracellular transport, and our immune system. I am not very concerned about this portion of his book. It is not my place, as a biochemical
layperson, to refute the research done by a scientist. I’m granting Behe the benefit of the doubt,
even though I’m in no place to make such a judgment call. I leave that particular refutation to more
capable hands. The portion of Behe’s
reasoning that I do question is the conclusions that he draws from his
evidence. Behe says “intelligent
design” where I believe you can only say “alternative to mechanistic
explanations”. I believe the reason for
this is that Behe is another example of a scientist (along with Dawkins) who
ignores teleology (as the most notable alternative) because of his commitment
to mechanistic explanations.
Many would balk at my assertion that Behe has a commitment
to mechanistic explanations. Doesn’t he
throw them out and replace them with an argument for intelligent design? Others are quite sure that intelligent
design arguments are not science. Well,
let’s start simple: Which one of our values of science does Behe run afoul
of? Not logic (he infers), not
observations (from evidence).
One might think mechanistic explanations, but Behe wants to
make it quite clear that science itself reached the conclusion of design. Behe, like Dawkins, seems to think
mechanistic explanations are implicit to science. It appears that design replaces mechanistic explanations, but
only in one specific respect: origins.
Intelligent design steps in when mechanistic explanations break down in
trying to explain how the machine got started.
And Behe has shown that they have broken down.
Let’s take a closer look at intelligent design as
non-science. Intelligent design is
certainly an atypical theory, but why?
Why would people reject design arguments as non-science, even if they
flow directly out of observations and comply with mechanistic
explanations? As Behe says,
The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data
itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an
intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic
or science. It comes from the hard work
that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with
consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.[xviii]
But
Behe is wrong about one thing.
Intelligent design does require something new: an outside intelligent
agent. As Behe says, we do not need to
specify who or what the intelligent agent is to determine intelligent design,
but we do need to posit the existence of an intelligent agent. This is something new. Something new that seems somehow very
old—old because the intelligent agent usually attached in the West to design
arguments is God. Behe, in fact,
devotes his last chapter to why science ignores intelligent design. He offers three reasons: chauvinism,
history, and The Rule.
Chauvinism and history are relatively unimportant to my
considerations. Behe’s argument from
scientific chauvinism is very simple and persuasive as far as it goes. “People who dedicate their lives to a noble
pursuit often become fiercely loyal to it.”[xix] True, but Behe then makes the mistake of
cutting a hard line between philosophy and science. Many forget that, up until 300 years ago (not such a long time),
science was considered “natural philosophy”.
In fact, all academic disciplines originally had their home under
philosophy’s good name; all disciplines are fundamentally
philosophical. Time and circumstance
just blurs the edges and makes them look cleanly separated.
This blurring affect is caused by history. Behe’s argument from history is equally
simple and persuasive as far as it goes.
Behe simply points out the disagreements that individuals who practice
science and those who practice religion have had over the years. This is the very public (and still
continuing) “battle” between science and religion, often painted as a battle
between “faith and reason”. People tend
to get hot under the collar in these so-called battles. But let’s face it: people fight these
wars. Not science, not religion and
particularly not faith or reason. The
point here is that chauvinism and history may be a good excuse for why
particular individuals (in the past or present) ignore intelligent design, but
it’s not good enough for this particular individual and this
particular investigation.
Behe’s third reason is philosophical and is the important one
to us. It revolves around The Rule,
which Richard Dickerson, a prominent biochemist, elucidated:
Science, fundamentally, is a game.
It is a game with one overriding and defining rule:
Rule
No. 1: Let us see how far and to what extent we can
explain the behavior of the physical and material universe in terms of purely
physical and material causes, without invoking the supernatural.
Operational
science takes no position about the existence or non-existence of the
supernatural; it only requires that this factor is not to be invoked in
scientific explanations. Calling down
special-purpose miracles as explanations constitutes a form of intellectual
“cheating.” A chess player is perfectly
capable of removing his opponent’s King physically from the board and smashing
it in the midst of a tournament. But
this would not make him a chess champion, because the rules had not been
followed. A runner may be tempted to
take a short-cut across the infield of an oval track in order to cross the
finish line ahead of his faster colleague.
But he refrains from doing so, as this would not constitute “winning” under
the rules of the sport.[xx]
Behe,
rightly, identifies this barrier between science and the supernatural as
philosophical—a barrier that we have already seen in Dawkins. Why is this barrier here? I’ve already given one ad hoc
definition of this barrier: observable (natural) causes vs. unobservable
(supernatural) causes. This simplistic
definition broke down with a minor consideration of physics. So, to comply with current scientific
theories, here’s another one: the supernatural posits the existence of
something that transcends the “laws of nature.” That’s not good for the laws of nature (whatever they are). The implication of the existence of the
supernatural is that the universe will act normally except in certain
particular instances that cannot be predicted.
If they could be predicted, then they would be a part of the laws of
nature because (remember Davies) laws of nature are simply regularities in
nature.
The barrier, then, would seem to exist because if you invite
one supernatural explanation, you invite a host of them. If you’ve posited a supernatural being that
can transcend the laws of nature, but in no regular way, why does this being
stop with any particular transcendence?
And if you stop with one particular instance (say, origins), then who
says which other supernatural causes are valid? Why not explain the whole world with supernatural causes?
By my estimation, The Rule is a valid one. Science’s rejection of supernatural causes
is already explained by two of our existing values: agreement with experience
and economy of explanation. We may
experience the supernatural, but not in a scientific way. Science demands a high degree of
corroborative evidence to have it included as evidence. As was mentioned before in Part I, science
realizes that the senses are flawed and that what one senses can be wrong. To compensate for this, scientific evidence
needs to be repeatable or predictions need to be made that can be
invalidated. Specific instances of transcendence
(so-called miracles) are by definition non-repeatable and unpredictable. So science does not count such
evidence. It cannot take such evidence
into account unless it wants to invite a whole host of other “observations”
such as water that boils over at 98°C and deserts that have disappearing
oases. The economy of explanation
(specifically Ockham’s Razor) then cuts loose the now extraneous supernatural
parts. Since they take no part in
explanation, science does not need to take a position as to their existence.
Let’s recap. Behe
hasn’t violated the value of logic. He
hasn’t violated the value of mechanistic explanations. Earlier I had said that he hadn’t violated
the value of experience, but just now I said he had. So why does the incongruity show up?
It comes up because Behe believes the evidence implies
“intelligent design”, when all it really implies is “alternative to mechanistic
explanation”. Behe, in fact,
unwittingly points in the direction of our very conspicuous alternative,
teleology. Right after Behe proposes
intelligent design he goes into why we should think so and tries to make it
look like a short leap. He asks, “What
is ‘design’? Design is simply the purposeful
arrangement of parts.”[xxi]
(italics his) Hmm, that sounds
familiar—like part of a teleological explanation. “Purpose”, like “Built-in Drive”, is a red flag phrase for
teleology. Why doesn’t he see it? I have no idea, but like I’ve said, I have a
feeling it has to do with his adherence to mechanistic explanations, which are
typically quite opposed to teleological explanations. Behe looks like a 17th century deist at heart and,
like a good reductionist, likes to get his money’s worth out of his posited
assumptions.
I will conclude Behe’s section by stating why “teleological
design” is better than “intelligent design”, even though, as I’ve stated many
times already, all we can say from Behe’s data is “alternative to mechanistic
explanation”. Both are positing the
existence of something extra: the former an “inside extra”, the latter an
“outside extra”. Teleological
explanations are preferable because, contrary to popular scientific belief,
they are not supernatural. Teleological
explanations, like mechanistic explanations, simply represent regularities in
nature. Intelligent design
posits something outside of nature.
Part V: Pirsig
My summary of Pirsig will be short and rapidly
developed. I will go through the steps
of his metaphysics, but mainly to highlight the pieces that are important. The pace will be quick, probably demanding
that you have read him, and it will only be a skeletal framework of his
metaphysics. The reason I am including
him is to show what an inclusion of teleological explanations can do,
especially towards the Yellow Brick Road of Reductionism.
What is important to realize at this point is that the
Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) differs from science proper in one major respect
that colors the entire system: the fundamental stuff of the universe is
Quality. Instead of atoms blindly
bumping around in a mechanical, deterministic accident, we have static patterns
of value that like to bump around the way they do. For instance, causation, which took a
philosophical beating in Part I, but nevertheless subsists because it is useful
in explaining mechanistic behavior, is changed to “preconditional
valuation”. It sounds horrible, but
it’s not. Instead of “A causes
B,” which we will never really know, we have “B values precondition
A”. The change is completely
linguistic. As Pirsig says,
Instead of saying “A magnet causes iron filings to move toward
it,” you can say “Iron filings value movement toward a magnet.” Scientifically speaking neither statement is
more true than the other…. The term
“cause” can be struck out completely from a scientific description of the
universe without any loss of accuracy or completeness.[xxii]
(italics Pirsig’s)
Reality
as Quality is the first link between the “valueless” world of science (which
has already been shown to be not so valueless) and the value-laden world of
everyday life. If everything is
value, then they at least have something in common.
According to the MoQ, the world is made up of two kinds of
Quality: Dynamic Quality and static patterns of quality. Dynamic Quality is the “pre-intellectual
cutting edge of reality.”[xxiii] It is the primary experience, the first
intimation with Quality. After several
intimations with Quality (read: reality/universe/all sensations and empirical
data) a pattern of quality is set up.
Pirsig gives the example of a baby’s first experience outside of the
womb:
…if [the baby] is normally attentive to Dynamic Quality he will soon
begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and
then repetitive patterns of the correlations.
But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to
really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of
sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to
reach for one. This object will not be
primary experience. It will be a
complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience.[xxiv]
(italics Pirsig’s)
Connection with Dawkins
The first place of contact with Dawkins is with the static
patterns of values. Static patterns of
value can be split into four separate levels: Inorganic, Biological, Social,
and Intellectual. Every single static
pattern is included in these four levels from the path of an electron around a
hydrogen nucleus to the DNA’s double helix to the recitation of the American
Pledge of Allegiance to the use of subjects and objects to describe the world
(so-called Subject-Object Metaphysics).
All are covered in four almost entirely independent, discretely
interacting levels. While each level is
discrete and mainly independent of function, each level, in ascending order, is
dependent on the one below it for existence (biological patterns are dependent
on inorganic patterns for existence, social on biological and inorganic, etc.).
These four levels are essentially the same ones that Dawkins
has, except that he only has three: non-replicating “stable things”[xxv],
genes, and memes. Inorganic,
Biological, and Social/Intellectual.
The levels are also discrete in Dawkins’ system. The difference between Pirsig and Dawkins,
besides the extra Intellectual level in Pirsig, is that Dawkins’ three types
empty the box of reality.
Theoretically, you can fit every single thing that claims existence
under the categories “stable things”, genes, or memes. For Pirsig, there is one extra box of
existence besides the static patterns of quality: Dynamic Quality, the primary
experience.
The second thing to see is that, in Dawkins’ system, the
universe evolves in no particular direction and according to Laws of Nature
that are either waiting around to be lawful over something or are emergent with
the phenomena that they have jurisdiction over. A gigantic debate exists in the philosophy of science over
whether laws are fundamental and eternal or phenomenological and emergent. For instance, is Dawkins’ principle of
replication (“all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating
entities”) just hanging around at the dawn of time, waiting to rule over
replicators, or did the principle emerge when the first replicator emerged? As Davies says about superconductors,
…does it make sense to think that the laws of superconductivity existed
in the primeval universe, waiting, so to speak, for the first superconductor to
come along? I think most physicists
would answer no to this question. But
then it would be equally absurd to suppose that a new law comes into existence,
and instantly propagates itself throughout the cosmos, when the relevant
hardware appears.[xxvii]
The
debate does not concern us directly here.
The MoQ is explicitly emergent by its very nature and Dawkins’ system
works either way. In the MoQ, the
emergence of lawlike regularities is Dynamic Quality at work. The emergence is the Dynamic Quality and the
regularities are the static patterns of quality that follow. The entire system is an argument in favor of
emergent laws of nature. So, the MoQ
would have Dawkins’ universe evolving in the direction of Dynamic Quality, like
a train pulling forward its boxcars.
A synonym for “evolving in the direction of Dynamic Quality” is
Pirsig’s assertion that “All life is a migration from static patterns of
quality toward Dynamic Quality.”[xxviii] This assertion is, essentially, the
reductive principle that everything in the universe follows. While “reality as Quality” first established
a link between science and the rest of the world, “life as a migration toward
Dynamic Quality” makes it solid. Life
as a migration gives us a teleological evolutionary model that functions as
Behe’s “alternative to mechanistic explanations”. And it’s not just evolution.
It’s all of reality. Pirsig’s
model gives us an evolutionary ethics.
An ethics that is teleological and not mechanistic. Pirsig says,
The Metaphysics of Quality says that if moral judgments are essentially
assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world,
then moral judgments are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world.
It
says that at even the most fundamental level of the universe, static patterns
of value and moral judgments are identical.
The “Laws of Nature” are moral laws.
Of course it sounds peculiar at first and awkward and unnecessary to say
that hydrogen and oxygen form water because it is moral to do so. But it is no less peculiar and awkward and
unnecessary than to say chemistry professors smoke pipes and go to movies
because irresistible cause-and-effect forces of the cosmos force them to do it.[xxix]
This is what Pirsig’s platform gives us. It gives us an ethics where there was none
before. That has been the continuing
crisis of the 20th century: science has not been able to give us an
ethical system. As I made light of way
back in my introduction, reductionism tells us that science should be able to
give us a system, yet most people don’t want it to. “Science is valueless, cold, and mechanistic,” come the cries. “We don’t want a machine to tell us what to
do.”
Yet, where else will the ethics come from? Both sides of the 20th century
split in philosophy, both Continentals and Analytics, say that ethics does not
have a foundation. The Analytics,
specifically logical empiricist/positivists, hold that values, morals,
religion, and art are all unverifiable and, therefore, are not areas in which
we can have legitimate knowledge. This
is the position I elucidated before in Part II as being reductionistic in
reducing all knowledge to scientific knowledge. But, like I said, not all scientists (or other people) believe
this. So we are still left wondering
where the foundation comes from.
Enter the Continentals.
Existentialists and Post-Modernists vary the attack on ethics
slightly. After Nietzsche knocks down any outside interference from God,
the attack is that morals and values are given by society. This makes
morals and values arbitrary and relative to the particular society you are born
into. They call ethics a habit that is
formed, like Einstein’s common sense, by the age of 18.
There have been attempts to resurrect a foundation in the
vacuous hole left by society's morals. All of the people who have made
these attempts fully understand the implications of modern science, which is
partly responsible for the intellectual hole. These include
utilitarianism and Simone de Beavoir's Ethics of Ambiguity. They
also include attempts at ethics by scientist/philosophers. They are
written in books with titles like The Philosophy of Biology and The
Metaphysics of Evolution and Biology and the Foundation of Ethics.
None of them, however, quite work. Why? Because they use the wrong
language. They are valueless, cold, and
most importantly mechanistic.
Where do our two exemplars, Behe and Dawkins, fit in? Behe seems to fit the mold of scientists who
don’t want to think about the connection to or the foundation for ethics. Behe says:
In a very real sense, the separateness of the spheres of science versus
philosophy and religion is as it should be.
Every person has available the data of his or her senses and, for the
most part, can agree with other people on what that data is. To a large extent people of different
philosophical and theological bents can also agree on scientific theories, such
as gravitation or plate tectonics or evolution, to organize the data (even if
the theories are ultimately incorrect).
But the fundamental philosophical principles that underlie reality and
the theological principles, or lack of principles, that can be garnered from
philosophy and historical experience are at root chosen by the individual. A man or woman must be free to search for
the good, the true, and the beautiful.[xxx]
This
position speaks volumes about the separateness of faith and spirituality from
reason and science. Behe likes
both. He essentially says, “We can all
agree on the application of reason (the result being data and science), but we
cannot agree on fundamentals. That
takes faith.” The above may not sound
like faith, but it specifically is not any faith-in-particular. It is the position taken by pluralists (and
many non-pluralists) who say, “You stay out of my yard and I’ll stay out of
yours.” But they can’t offer us an
ethics because there isn’t a uniform platform (especially with pluralism).
Dawkins and a freelance writer named Ed Sexton expound on a
position that will remind you of the Analytics. Dawkins has this to say about faith:
Faith is such a successful brainwasher in its own favour, especially a
brainwasher of children, that it is hard to break its hold. But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to
believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting
evidence….
I said
‘it doesn’t matter what’ the faithful believe, which suggests that people have
faith in entirely daft, arbitrary things….
I don’t want to argue that the things in which a particular individual
has faith are necessarily daft. They may
or may not be. The point is that there
is no way of deciding whether they are, and no way of preferring one article of
faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed.[xxxi]
Dawkins doesn’t want to have faith in anything.[xxxii] He wants to dispense with morality
completely. Sexton, defending the
Dawkian position in his short book Dawkins and the Selfish Gene (written
for a series called Postmodern Encounters), says:
…morality is built on tradition and precedent, and a sense of ‘being
right for all time’. It is the same
thinking that leads landowners to bar access to their estate every so often,
lest the pathways on it become public rights of way by default. In this case, surely, the fact that we judge
our ancestors’ actions as ‘wrong’ undermines our faith in morality?[xxxiii]
Okay,
then where are we to get our ethics?
How are we to know what is right or wrong action?
To start with, Sexton attacks the same point that I did in Part
III (that Dawkins is a genetic determinist), claiming, like Dawkins, that
Humans, more than any other species on the planet, have the capacity to
‘rebel’ against the interests of their genes, and in any case, a large part of
human psychology results from cultural influences.[xxxiv]
I
won’t rehash my argument against Dawkins, but I think it is important to see
the emphasis on psychology. Sexton
further says, “…it would be wise to understand the extent of genetic influences
on human psychology before proposing any radical social change.”[xxxv] This is where the Analytics turn to! They turn to the social sciences, which all
started as a scientific study of human nature.
They are the ones who have claimed that science will be our savior. They’ve given us things like cultural
anthropology without human values and behaviorist psychology without the
psyche. But, as many others have seen,
if one has no values and the other is explicitly deterministic, I fail to see
how these things can enlighten us on right action. This is the failure upon which I took up this investigation.
Enter Pirsig. He gives
us a system that both conforms to science and to our value-filled world
of everyday life. It all revolves
around Quality and the assertion that “All life is migrating towards Dynamic
Quality.” An assertion that is teleological.
Part
VI: Mechanistic Philosophy and
Anthropomorphism
Why does everybody ignore teleology? That may be a broad generalization, but it
pretty well sums up science’s view of teleology. There are two reasons that, though caught in a tailspin together,
can be separated out. One is the fear
that teleology is anthropomorphic (and therefore bad); the other is our loyalty
to mechanistic philosophy. Mechanistic
philosophy, at its inception, was championed by such major figures in the
history of science as Galileo, Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi. But to get to the mechanistic philosophy we
must first deal with the fear of anthropomorphism that usually spurs on
continued loyalty for mechanistic explanations. And for this we most delve into the social sciences.
Fear of Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is a mortal sin in science. But why?
A lot of the stigma has to do with the early development of Darwin’s
theory in conjunction with the burgeoning social sciences. The stigma certainly wasn’t there during
Galileo, Descartes, or Gassendi’s time.
During the time before the Scientific Revolution there were two dominant
ways in which to reduce the world’s phenomena: reduce Inorganic to Organic
(Plato’s way) or reduce Organic to Inorganic (Aristotle’s way). Both of these ways were teleological. The Scientific Revolution was in most ways a
revolution against Greek intellectual oppressors. But the change had nothing to do with a fear of anthropomorphism. As I’ve already quoted Rorty saying, “…you
get much better predictions by thinking of things as masses of particles
blindly bumping each other….”
The original stigma arose from positivist views of
knowledge (created by Auguste Comte in the early 19th century) that
said that true knowledge was being reached in physics and chemistry, so all an
academic field had to do to be true knowledge was become more like physics and
chemistry: cold, valueless, and mechanistic.
The notoriety I think, however, comes from the development of
scientific racism in fields such as phrenology, sociology, psychology, and
anthropology, all in conjunction with Darwinism’s growing acceptance in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Darwin’s theory, in many ways, seemed to be
teleological. It was hocked into many
social theories that are now said to be “naïve evolution” theories. These are theories that use words like
“progress”, “direction”, and “levels of evolution”. Most of these theories were created under the now defunct comparative
method a.k.a. evolutionary anthropology.
But biological evolution (that looked like teleology, though adherents
were violently opposed to it being so) is only part of naïve evolution’s
story. There are three parts:
evolution, the cultural ladder, and psychic unity. Evolution is simply Darwin’s contribution. The cultural ladder is the part that gets
tagged with “progress”, “direction”, and “levels of evolution”. Psychic unity is an historical part that no
longer survives today in naïve evolution, but at the outset of evolutionary anthropology
it played an important role and gave a foundation for the conclusions that were
drawn from the use of a single culture.
To gain a foothold here, a brief
history of naïve evolution (and consequently evolutionary anthropology) must
first be developed. This history is
largely derived from the history of the social sciences. Between the 1840s and the 1870s writing in
and on academic subjects went from “modern” to “contemporary”. The change is similar to the change that
occurred between “medieval” and “Renaissance” and then to “modern”. Each of those transition periods can be
marked by particular events, say the discovery of the New World and Newton’s Principa,
respectively. One of the events that
marks the transition from “modern” to “contemporary” is Darwin’s theory of
Natural Selection. And as George W.
Stocking, Jr., a prominent historian of anthropology, said,
“Turn-of-the-century social scientists were evolutionists almost to a man….”[xxxvi]
Before Darwin there had been earlier speculations about
how creation could be understood by purely natural causes. Robert Chambers in Vestiges of Creation
(1844) said that you could see that changes have occurred. He called this a developmental process. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck developed a theory of
inheritance that asserted that modifications occurred to an animal’s survival
ability over its lifetime and that these modifications were transmitted to the
animal’s offspring. Herbert Spencer had
been publishing on evolution during all of the 1850s. Spencer viewed Darwin’s work as a specialized sub-set of his
search for the origins of life and society.
Indeed, it was Spencer who, after reading a particular passage from the
Origin of Species, coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. But it was Darwin who developed (or at least
published) the first full-blown theory of biological evolution that had a
mechanism that worked: Natural Selection.
It stunned the academic landscape.
Probably the most important idea in evolutionary
anthropology (and the part that people think is naïve) was the cultural
ladder. Every civilization fit on this
ladder and was evolving upward. E.B.
Tylor coined the word culture and thought there was one culture in the world
and we were all at different points on the ladder. C.S. Wake drew an analogy of this upward movement to the
different stages of human development.
The child stage represented the Australian aborigine, the boy stage the
American Indian, all the way up to the mature stage, which represented the
European. The more a civilization
developed, the more “mature” (empirical, rational, i.e. more like Europeans)
they became. But it wasn’t just
anthropology that thought this way.
Darwin himself drew from this “common knowledge”. Stocking says,
When Darwin turned to the problem of The Descent of Man in 1871,
there was no generally accepted fossil evidence to support the hypothesis of
man’s evolution from anthropoid forms.
Although in general inclined to dismiss such gaps in the fossil record
as adventitious, Darwin did try to fill this one. To fill it, he drew on various currents of anthropological
thought.
One of
these was the notion of a hierarchy of human races which, although it had roots
in such ancient intellectual orientations as the “Great Chain of Being,” was
largely the product of the early nineteenth-century milieu that nourished
polygenism in anthropology. By Darwin’s
time, a rough sort of hierarchy of human races was an accepted part of
conventional anthropological wisdom.
Darwin simply thrust it into the fossil gap…. But a racial hierarchy was not all that Darwin borrowed from
anthropology. He borrowed also from the
social evolutionary theories of his contemporaries E.B. Tylor, John McLennan,
and Sir John Lubbock, who had shown that man had risen to civilization “from a
lowly condition to the highest standards as yet attained by him in knowledge,
morals, and religion.” [from The Descent of Man][xxxvii]
Both biological Darwinism and
the cultural ladder are separable pieces from the whole. It’s partly because they are separable that
“smart” evolutionists call any linking of progress and evolution “naïve”. They say that linking evolution and progress
is anthropomorphic; it’s just “us” humans placing our values on scientific
data. If this is all there was to the
argument, I might be inclined to agree.
But the argument has a lot of history.
The person that came along and threw
evolutionary anthropology off its horse was Franz Boas. Boas came onto the scene of anthropology
from the field of physics. He was used
to running controlled experiments, collecting data, and proving hypotheses
beyond a shadow of a doubt. Boas
specifically did his work in psychophysics and on finding out why people saw
the colors they did. This is where he
got the idea of traveling out into the field, in this case to find if different
people in different places perceived different colors.
In 1880 Boas traveled to Baffinland in
Canada to study the Inuit. He came
back from his travels with a great sense of complexity. From here he became involved in American
colleges and opened his famous Eskimo exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1896 Boas published The Limitations of
Comparative Anthropology. In it he
argued that evolutionary anthropologists mistook things of similar appearance as
having similar origins, but that there was simply no evidence for this at the
level of culture. He argued instead for
his historical method. Each culture
must be studied individually and each history of a particular culture must be
gathered as evidence. Only after
gathering all the histories of the world can an anthropologist construct the
process of history.
Boas is said to have destroyed the
armchair anthropologist in his insistence of field experience being a
prerequisite for an anthropologist. He
believed that the parts of a culture that could be seen and catalogued were the
proper topics of anthropology. Concepts
such as “cultural values” had no place because an anthropologist cannot infer
any meaning into a ritual or custom he sees, he only has what he sees. While Boas did not think it was possible to
construct a process of history during his lifetime, he did think it
would be possible.
Boas invented the plural form of culture
and the current cultural relativity that we have today. He applied the cold, valueless, mechanistic,
positivistic values of hard science on the social sciences. It is because of Boas’ destruction of
evolutionary anthropology, of “naïve evolution”, that we cannot tell other
cultures if they are being unethical or not or if they are making
“progress”. And God forbid if we tried
placing ethics or progress on other species.
I may sound a little negative towards Boas
at this point. Boas did in fact
exterminate the validity of scientific racism.
That was very important. I also
think it would be a big mistake to try and say whether or not certain cultures
are making “progress”, as if up some cultural ladder. The real fear of anthropomorphism stems, not from simple,
cold science, but from the misuse of science to validate racism and cultural
imperialism. It was making Europeans
the center of the universe that was the mistake. But while Boas was purging the social sciences’ misuse of
science, he purged the use of values in the social sciences. People now refuse to place anything at the
center of the universe for fear of either being unscientific or for
invalidating a particular culture. It
is important to keep this all in perspective when Pirsig (as my representative
teleology) locates an attack on anthropology and specifically at Boas.
The whole field seemed like
a highway filled with angry drivers cursing each other and telling each other
they didn’t know how to drive when the real trouble was the highway
itself. The highway had been laid down
as the scientific objective study of man in a manner that paralleled the
physical sciences. The trouble was that
man isn’t suited to this kind of scientific objective study. Objects of scientific study are supposed to
hold still. They’re supposed to follow
the laws of cause and effect in such a way that a given cause will always have
a given effect, over and over again.
Man doesn’t do this. Not even
savages.
The result has been
theoretical chaos.
Phaedrus liked a description
he read in a book called Theory in Anthropology by Robert Manners and David
Kaplan of Brandeis University.
“Scattered throughout the anthropological literature,” they wrote, “are
a number of hunches, insights, hypotheses, and generalizations. They tend to remain scattered, inchoate, and
unrelated to one another, so that they often get lost or are forgotten. The tendency has been for each generation of
anthropologists to start afresh.
“Theory building in cultural
anthropology comes to resemble slash-and-burn agriculture,” they said, “where
the natives return sporadically to old fields grown over by bush and slash and
burn and plant for a few years.”
Phaedrus could see the slash
and burn everywhere he looked. Some
anthropologists were saying a culture is the essence of anthropology. Some were saying there isn’t any such thing
as a culture. Some were saying it’s all
history, some said it’s all structure.
Some said it’s all function.
Some said it was all values.
Some, following Boas’s scientific purity said there were no values at
all.
That idea that anthropology
has no values Phaedrus marked down in his mind as the “spot.” That was the place where the wall could best
be breached. No values, huh? No Quality?
This was the point of focus where he could begin an attack.
What many were trying to do,
evidently, was get out of all these metaphysical quarrels by condemning all the
theory, by agreeing not to even talk about such theoretical reductionist
things as what savages do in general.
They restricted themselves to what their particular savage
happened to do on Wednesday. That was
scientifically safe all right—and scientifically useless.[xxxviii]
Pirsig goes on, in the rest
of his book, to describe his Metaphysics of Quality, which I have already
partially described in Part V. It is
important to see, though, that Pirsig, while developing his theory in the ashes
of evolutionary anthropology, is not erecting a hierarchy of races in
the vein of scientific racism. He is,
however, erecting a “Great Chain of Being” (in the Heideggerian/ontological
sense). It is important to ask then,
“Why can Pirsig get away with it?”
Why Pirsig Can Get Away with It
The reason depends upon an important
historical piece of evolutionary anthropology that is forgotten when simply
considering naïve evolution. The
comparative method didn’t hang together simply because of convenience (like
Darwin’s thrusting of the “hierarchy of races” into the fossil record). It hung together logically because of the
last piece of evolutionary anthropology that I mentioned, but held back until
now: psychic unity.
Psychic unity. Something that appears to be so completely mystical seems a tad
strange in a field that calls itself a social science. But it has important philosophical roots;
roots that were soon cut off, but for which most people don’t notice. When this important assertion was taken away
evolutionary anthropology lost its glue and it only needed a man like Boas to
come along and point it out. As
Stocking says,
Although the phrase is of much
later origin, the idea is a manifestation of the eighteenth-century view that
reason was “the same in all men and equally possessed by all,” regardless of
differences of race. [from A.O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being
(1936)] It was of course this
uniformity of human nature which was the basis of the regularity of human
social development.[xxxix]
This 18th century view that reason
was “the same in all men and equally possessed by all” is a direct descendent
of René Descartes’ thought.
Descartes’ view arose out of the skeptical
crisis of the 16th century when competition between Platonic and
Aristotelian theories scorched the academic landscape. Before this time there were essentially two
types of statements: knowledge and opinion.
Knowledge required absolute certainty, otherwise it was mere
opinion. To understand what happened in
the 16th century, it is convenient to break certainty into three
kinds: logical, moral, and psychological.
Logical certainty is strict, absolute necessity; it couldn’t be any
other way. Moral certainty is at such a
high probability that we can live our lives believing it to be true.[xl] Psychological certainty is personal
intuition, a gut feeling. The ancients,
like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all the rest, believed that true knowledge
had to be absolute, logical certainty.
If it fell short, it was opinion and therefore pretty useless. Beginning in the 16th century,
many scholars began to loose confidence that humans would ever be able to reach
true knowledge, partly because Plato and Aristotle both thought they had it.
There was a divergence of opinion at this
point. Some, like Francis Bacon and
Gassendi, believed that logical certainty was not possible, but moral
was and that that was good enough for true knowledge. This was a true split from Greek philosophy. Descartes did believe logical certainty was
possible and continued to believe that moral was still not good enough. These are essentially the historical roots
of epistemological inquiries.
Descartes then devised a method for
establishing a foundation upon which could be erected true, logically certain
knowledge. This method was also a true
split from Greek philosophy. He decided
to push the skepticism of his age as far as it would go, doubting everything he
could. This is where we get “cogito,
ergo sum”. It was Descartes’
Archimedian point, the foundation upon which he could not doubt. But for Descartes’ provisional skepticism to
work, he had to establish that all people would come to this same truth. In Part I of his Discourse on Method
Descartes argues,
Good sense is of all things
in the world the most equally distributed for everybody thinks himself so
abundantly provided with it, that even those most difficult to please in all
other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess. It is unlikely that this is an error on
their part; it seems rather to be evidence in support of the view that the
power of forming a good judgment and of distinguishing the true from the false,
which is properly speaking what is called Good sense or Reason, is by Nature
equal in all men. Hence too it will
show that the diversity of our opinions does not proceed from some men being
more rational than others by solely from the fact that our thoughts pass through
diverse channels and the same objects are not considered by all. For to be possessed of good mental powers is
not sufficient; the principal matter is to apply them well. The greatest minds are capable of the
greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues, and those who proceed very
slowly may, provided they always follow the straight road, really advance much
faster than those who, though they run, forsake it.[xli]
Descartes didn’t just make this up,
though. He was playing on the
sympathies of ancient Greek thought, particularly Socrates/Plato’s argument for
dialectical reason (which first tried to establish the “Truth”) and Aristotle’s
“rational animal” conception of humans.
But Descartes was setting the stage for a new philosophy and his
conception of psychic unity gave a foundation for his argument. Now he could establish real knowledge that
everyone would have to agree on because, though particular people may reason
badly, Reason itself is the route to Truth and the if properly done will point to
exactly the same Truth.
Now, this psychic unity was controversial
from the very beginning. Empiricists
like John Locke, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that man was
born tabula rasa. Through the
course of time this view eventually became dominant in fields such as
sociology, psychology and anthropology.
But, as should be obvious, not fully until close to the 20th
century.
Without psychic unity evolutionary
anthropologists didn’t have a leg to stand on.
The climate of opinion had been changing for years and it finally caught
up to the comparative method in the form of Boas who changed evolutionary
anthropology into naïve evolution. But
if the reason evolutionary anthropology became naïve is because it didn’t have
a platform to stand on, then all we need to do is find a platform to stand
on. As it just so happens, Pirsig has a
platform ready and waiting.
The platform is Quality. Everything in the universe has Quality in
common because everything in the universe is Quality. All reality is Quality. Pirsig placed reality at the center
of the universe. Quality is what we
have in common with water, bacteria, animals, and other humans. Because of the conjectured historical
creation of each of these patterns of Quality, we can place an arrow of
development pointing towards the cause of their development: Dynamic
Quality. Dynamic Quality is the
teleological goal of existence. That is
the Great Chain of Quality. The ancient
Great Chain of Being may have been chauvinistic. But that is only because there was no common platform for which
one could subscribe higher values upon some things than others. With Pirsig’s Great Chain of Quality, the
platform is given, and values are derived.
Mechanistic Philosophy
The platform that Descartes gave in the
form of psychic unity wasn’t just a platform for evolutionary
anthropology. Obviously Descartes had
no idea it would become one. If
Descartes’ importance were only reflected in his originating modern psychic
unity, I wouldn’t have expounded so long on the circumstances around him. What Descartes was doing was creating an
epistemological foundation for his metaphysics. The crisis in the 16th century was, “If we can’t be
certain of what we know (epistemology), how can we know anything about the
world (metaphysics)?” Descartes created
modern philosophy by departing from Greek philosophy and creating his own
method of certainty, which, in turn, created a whole new set of problems that
philosophers could harass each other about.
But then Descartes set on top of his certainty mechanistic explanations
of the world. Descartes wasn’t just a
philosopher, he was also a natural philosopher.
Unfortunately, Descartes’ certainty is
“void where prohibited” and it’s pretty much prohibited in all of the Western
world. It was only a matter of time
before the “high probability” belief of moral certainty that Bacon, Gassendi,
Hooke, and Newton championed in their mechanical natural philosophy would
develop into the relativity of knowledge.
Boas was a harbinger of sorts with cultural relativism. Thomas Kuhn simply extended the relativism
further by noting that science is apart of culture. He proposed a historical view of science where, while a
particular paradigm of thought dominated, “normal science” was done. When enough anomalies arose that the current
paradigm could not explain, a paradigm shift would occur. Without an absolute platform that tells us
which values of science are needed and which ones are dispensible, science, its
values, and all attempts at explanation are conventions of the culture that
they grew out of. Useful conventions,
but conventions nevertheless. As Rorty
says,
Kuhn and Dewey suggest we
give up the notion of science traveling towards an end called “correspondence
with reality” and instead say merely that a given vocabulary works
better than another for a given purpose.
If we accept their suggestion, we shall not be inclined to ask “What
method do scientists use?” Or, more
precisely, we shall say that within what Kuhn calls “normal science”—puzzle-solving—they
use the same banal and obvious methods all of us use in every human
activity. They check off examples
against criteria; they fudge the counter-examples enough to avoid the need for
new models; they try out various guesses, formulated within the current jargon,
in the hope of coming up with something which will cover the unfudgeable
cases. We shall not think these is or
could be an epistemologically pregnant answer to the question “What did Galileo
do right that Aristotle did wrong?”, any more than we should expect such an
answer to the questions “What did Plato do right that Xenophon did wrong?” or
“What did Mirabeau do right that Louis XVI did wrong?” We shall say that Galileo had a good idea,
and Aristotle a less good idea; Galileo was using some terminology which
helped, and Aristotle wasn’t. Galileo’s
terminology was the only “secret” he had—he didn’t pick that terminology
because it was “clear” or “natural,” or “simple,” or in line with the
categories of the pure understanding.
He just lucked out.[xlii]
(italics Rorty’s)
Don’t mistake Pirsig’s
platform as any more “right” than Descartes’.
Pirsig’s platform doesn’t “correspond to reality” any more than
Descartes’ does. Pirsig’s however is
more useful. It allows for an
ethics. It dissolves problems of
philosophy and science like determinism vs. freedom. Our terminology, in large part, creates the reality we
perceive. The reality we perceive is
the only one we can know.
There is a lot contained in this essay,
but there is one overriding message: the values of science need to be
useful. Reductionism as a value has
given us the entire Western tradition of science. I don’t think it would be useful to discard the whole edifice of
Western thought. In comparison,
mechanistic explanations are an untested, spring chicken. The Yellow Brick Road of Reductionism is a
goal. Call it the goal of knowing. Mechanistic explanation, on the other hand,
is a tool. It is a linguistic
tool. The only difference between
mechanistic explanations and teleological explanations is in the jargon
used. In causation, it doesn’t matter
if you say “A causes B” or “B values precondition A.” Nothing empirical changes.
A change in jargon simply wipes out the anomalies between our empirical
data and our theory. Nature keeps on
going as it had been or, to put it another way, keeps on being perceived as it
had been until new anomalies arise.
What I am proposing is that maybe it is
time to open up the door for teleological explanations. Its not like it has never been done
before. The only reason science became
mechanistic is because it was useful to do so.
Some would say that teleological explanations are anthropomorphic and
that is why they don’t yield “good” explanations in regards to scientific
phenomena. Well, in response, I would
flip the problem on its head. It could
be said that mechanistic explanations are physiomorphic[xliii]
and that is why they don’t yield “good” explanations in regards to human
phenomena. In essence, it may be
helpful to think teleologically or mechanistically depending on the situation,
just as it is helpful to think of light as a wave or a particle, depending on
the situation.
Works Consulted
Cornman,
James W., Keith Lehrer, and George S. Pappas.
Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction. 4th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992.
Lambert,
Karel, and Gordon G. Brittan, Jr. An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Science.
4th ed. Atascadero:
Ridgeview Publishing, 1992.
Lindberg,
David C. The Beginnings of Western
Science. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992.
Morris,
Richard. “How to Tell What Is Science
from What Isn’t.” Doing Science. Ed. John Brockman. New York: Prentice Hall, 1991.
Pirsig,
Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance. New York: William
Morrow, 1974
I would like to specially thank
Professor Lindberg and Professor Hilts for lectures in the History of Science
by David C. Lindberg and in the History of the Social Sciences by Victor L.
Hilts.
I would also like to thank the
Jell-O pudding thief, Gina Rivera, for reading and editing this
enterprise. Though we disagree greatly
on style, she went ahead and tried to “spruce up” my writing. Unfortunately, I’ve disregarded most of her
corrections in grammar and mechanics. I
think most of it would have made me look like a technician. So, because we disagree greatly on style,
she asked me to tell you (the reader) to direct all disagreements on
prescriptive rhetoric, or indeed any of my rhetoric, to me and not to her, the
person who was supposed to clean it up.
I’m just happy she feigned enthusiasm while
discussing it with me.
And my deepest thanks go to my fiancé,
who put up with me as this essay stretched from a weekend into a month.