The Folly of Scientism

I do not see any reason to suppose this is true. I grant that this is question that is not being tackled by current research (as far as I know, as neuroscience and theoretical neuroscience are in a period of boom right now), but that does not make it scientifically intractable. There is little I can say about this as I do not know what you mean by "the actual experience".

I think we must be operating with very different definitions of science. In so far as a humanities scholar employs scientific methods, I am happy to call him a scientist.

> Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons.

This lacuna is going to be filled using scientific thinking employed by the humanities scholar doing the. He is going to make comparisons to other documents and to other knowledge about the period, language, etc. That is to have some hypotheses about the lacuna, he is going to gather data, and then he is going to analyze that data in the context of the lacuna and propose solutions.

As has been pointed out, there are existing computational systems that do this kind of work. There is a long history of work on this kind of problem from information theory and cryptography.

> Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them.

I did not make my point clearly. Let me make it again: if your methodology does not produce parsimonious models of the world that can be used to make accurate predictions, then what is the point of doing it? If you cannot produce testable claims of fact about the world, what is the point in doing it?

I was suggesting to you, to take a jocular example, that if you know that astrology does not work, then it is not worth doing, even if it is your only method of making predictions.

Your point about industrial designers and lawyers is a non sequitur in this context. I am talking about methods of discovery and methods of testing knowledge claims.

As to psychoanalysis, the reason I brought it up is that it is still rampant in large parts the humanities: intellectual history, comparative literature, and English the chief problem fields.

As in, the difference between the neurological processes that govern ones mental state, and the subjective experience of having that mental state.

For example, if I'm hungry and eat a good meal the changes in my brain chemistry that induce the sense of well being that follows are well understood.

That doesn't tell me anything at all about the actual subjective experience of feeling pleasure though. That is something distinct.

We are still in early stages of developing scientific answers to these questions. But they are fundamentally scientific. Note also that like culinary tastes there may not be unique answers to these questions, but sure it does not mean that all diets are equally good for your health.

Human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known about it. A more detailed understanding of these truths will force us to draw clear distinctions between different ways of living in society with one another, judging some to be better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less ethical. Clearly, such insights could help us to improve the quality of human life.

We may not be able to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain. But opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts. And it is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer. Exactly how many people were bitten by mosquitoes in the last sixty seconds? How many of these people will contract malaria? How many will die as a result? Given the technical challenges involved, no team of scientists could possibly respond to such questions. And yet we know that they admit of simple numerical answers. Does our inability to gather the relevant data oblige us to respect all opinions equally? Of course not. In the same way, the fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that all competing responses to them are equally valid. Mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of confusion.

People who want to argue moral questions are not scientific are in effect saying reason is powerless to answer the most important questions in human life. And how a person perceives the gulf between facts and values seems to influence their views on almost every issue of social importance— from the fighting of wars to the education of children.

This rupture in our thinking has different consequences at each end of the spectrum: religious conservatives tend to believe that there are right answers to questions of meaning and morality, but only because the God of Abraham deems it so. They concede that ordinary facts can be discovered through rational inquiry, but they believe that values must come from a voice in a whirlwind. Scriptural literalism, intolerance of diversity, mistrust of science, disregard for the real causes of human and animal suffering, this is how the division between facts and values expresses itself on the religious right.

From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems like little more than a hatchery for technology. While most educated people will concede that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good life. Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for his existence, but that faith in him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance. Mutually incompatible religious traditions now take refuge behind the same non sequitur.

It seems inevitable, however, that science will gradually encompass life’s deepest questions—and this is guaranteed to provoke a backlash. How we respond to the resulting collision of worldviews will influence the progress of science, of course, but it may also determine whether we succeed in building a global civilization based on shared values. The question of how human beings should live in the twenty-first century has many competing answers—and most of them are surely wrong. Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic, and environmental goals. A science of human flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that the intellectual terrain actually exists.

> I think the problem there is that just because someone has made a name for themselves in one field does not imply that they have some sort of superhuman intellect that means they will offer useful insights on a range of subjects.

Of course there is no such implication, nor did I make this claim. But it is absolutely true that certain people are simply better at reasoning than other people. This may be because of biological traits, educational difference, difference of habit, etc., but it is certainly true. Any experience with any human will reveal this to you, I think.

> Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.

I am not at all clear why you would say this. In fact, I think you are committing an argument from authority in the reverse. You refuse to listen to this guys because you assume that they are not authorities. That's just bogus and I am sure you know that. Instead, you should listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics and decide if he is worth listening to. You would, I think, do exactly that if it were philosopher speaking.