"Unless you become apprentices, you shall not enter the scientific community": narrative/myth and the presuppositions of science
Becoming a scientist begins with a long apprenticeship, during which one learns to find answers to questions by formulating experiments, conducting them and then assessing their results. One also learns to take certain things for granted. For example, our ability to know the truths of logic and mathematics as well as make the kinds of observations required by the scientific method.
But someone might ask, "What about controversial claims regarding human nature that aren't obviously presupposed by scientific praxis, namely, the existence of the soul and human freedom: are these subject to experimental testing (and hence to confirmation or falsification) or are they untestable? If untestable, is it because they are incoherent, or is it because the evidence of their truth is found through some other method than that of science?"
I would answer that the soul and freedom are so interwoven with our ability to seek truth that we can engage in scientific practices only if we do have a soul and are free. But before I even begin to argue for this position, I have to overcome two significant obstacles. The first is the readiness of positivists to commit the straw man fallacy by interpreting, first of all, whatever I have to say about the soul in Cartesian terms, and secondly, by interpreting whatever I have to say about freedom as an appeal to randomness. The second obstacle is the likelihood that before giving a hearing to my common sense-based claims about the soul and freedom, positivists will rush to place my words within the narrative of the triumph of scientific knowledge over prescientific opinions.
Regarding the first obstacle: when materialists hear the word "soul," they are typically unable to imagine anything other than the Cartesian ghost within the machine, i.e., a purely immaterial mind that interacts with the human body. I have to clarify that my use of the term "soul" has to do with the unity of an organism rather than the immateriality of a pure mind. That is, a human is an undivided whole rather than an assemblage of parts, an organism rather than a machine. That is because there is in humans (and in other animals) something that remains the same in the multiplicity of its bodily parts, temporal phases, and functions or purposes. The term "soul" signals this sameness. It needn't be the unity of a point-like immaterial being: it can instead be the unity of living, walking, breathing, thinking, communicating, perceiving person.
To counter the tendency to dismiss the soul as an outdated, disproven, prescientific notion, I will point out that in order for there to be science there must be scientists, and in order for there to be a scientist, there must be the kind of unity I have just described. As Aquinas says somewhere in the Summa theologiae, the same individual both knows and perceives. To that I would add that the same scientist senses, perceives, remembers, imagines, listens, moves about, learns to speak, read and write when very young, decides to major in a specific scientific discipline at the university, studies the history of science, the scientific method and mathematics, carries out experiments, gets a job, decides to find the answer to a scientific question, invents an hypothesis and a way to test that hypothesis, carries out the test, gets unsatisfactory results, tries possibly for years and years to come up with a better answer, and collaborates with others in the effort to find the answer to the same question.
Reflecting on this story of how the same individual does all of these things concerned with the same subject matter, we naturally speak of him or her as being or having a soul. We might say, for instance, that "this poor soul will never succeed" or that he or she someday will. We might use the term "soul" for that in virtue of which this individual is able to act in various ways using various powers at different times for the same goal. In both cases the term soul signifies something undivided about the person: in neither case does the term "soul" seem like the Cartesian mind, for a mind does not ask questions, write equations on a board, mix chemicals, remember what it saw, imagine what it might do, understand what it has read, hope to repeat an experiment under better circumstances: an individual with vision, memory, and locomotion does.
The uses of the word "soul" sketched above do not include the Cartesian ghost in a machine, but they do make room for many different takes on human nature. One who says "the poor soul," for example, may believe that a human is a living soul (i.e., one whole living being) rather than has as soul. This user may see no essential distinction but only a difference of degree between human operations and those of other animals and insist that there is no reason to say that the soul survives the death of the body. Another user may take the opposite position on each of these issues. Yet another user may have suspended judgment about the same issues. They all agree, however, that the unity of the human organism is real rather than illusory or mere unsophisticated folk psychology. We might call the position regarding human nature to which they all adhere "holism" (or even more precisely, "ontological holism"). This position is an important third alternative to dualism and reductive materialism.
A similar qualification is needed for the concept of freedom that I hope to propose. The best analog to freedom is our knowledge of the truths presupposed by science. The claim that this knowledge is objective means that the object determines our knowledge even though the object is not an event. That is, that 2+3=5 determines my conviction that it is so, even though 2+3=5 is not an event inside or outside of my brain. The goals of human action, inasmuch as they are intelligible to other human beings, are objective as well. Consider the goal "to know the truth": like 2+3=5, the goal of knowing is not an event even though it can be instantiated in my knowing (just as 2+3=5 can be instantiated in these five things being gathered, etc.). There is plenty to say about freedom that I've blabbered about elsewhere, so I'll cut this discussion short here.
Change of subject, sorta: it occurs to me that prior to talking about freedom, I need to talk about desire, as the latter is is common to humans and other animals. Yes: in fact, there is a way in which freedom is an analogous term, so that looking at its analog in nonhuman animals (i.e., looking at desire as relating to perception and action with particular objects) will help illuminate what is distinctive about human freedom. In fact, there is something anti-reductive about desire (n.b. not in abstraction from perception or self-movement but as an aspect of animal operation), so that I can fight reductionism on that front with far less risk of being mistaken for a Cartesian. And I can make the point that reductive materialists cannot give a coherent account of animals even at this more generic, basic level. In other words, it will strengthen my hand to argue first that humans and other animals are not natural machines before arguing that human desire may be special in any way.
Regarding the second obstacle. It seems to me that some scientists have a childlike (not childish but childlike in the sense that Jesus has in mind when he says, "Unless you become as little children...") faith in reductionism because of the way in which they were initiated into the scientific community. That initiation involves not only the learning of strictly scientific facts and the acquisition of skills, but also the learning of the story of the community itself. To many, that story is of the triumph of science over ignorance-based common sense opinions. Among the chapters in this story are Copernicus' heliocentric reinterpretation of the movement of the planets across the sky, Galileo's thought experiment through which he formed the concept of momentum, and Darwin's discovery of natural selection. These and other stories are taken as part of an overarching narrative into which the present and future discoveries are expected to fit. In that narrative, every (or almost every) common sense conviction--including our most basic convictions about ourselves--is liable to critical examination by the scientific method. Included in these common sense convictions is the notion that each of us is one individual acting through many parts and retaining our identity through time, and that we freely choose whether and how we shall act.
One who proposes that these convictions be subject to scientific investigation opens the door to their possible falsification. Such an opening, however, could undermine the inquiry itself, for scientific inquiry involves someone's interacting with the same thing or similar things at many different times while mindful how the concomitant observations confirm or falsify an earlier-made hypothesis and thereby help one to acquire the truth, a goal which one recognizes as motivating others at very different times and places. Without the ability to recognize the same thing at different times, to recognize tht one is dealing with the same sort of thing that others have dealt with, to recognize that one is thinking about the same proposition that one has previously thought of and that others have thought of as well--without all of these recognitions there is no scientific inquiry and hence no scientific inquiry. But our recognition of our ability to all of these things is itself a common sense conviction. Hence without such common sense convictions, there is no scientific inquiry. But these common sense convictions regarding persistence through time relate to "soul," as I have described above, and yet another common sense conviction--our ability to act out of the desire to know the truth--relates to freedom as I have described above). Therefore, without the acceptance of some notion of the soul and freedom, there is no room for the acceptance of science.
If it is not to be self-undermining, scientific inquiry requires a commitment not only to the common sense claim that we are able to know the truth, but also enough of a commitment to ensoulment for there to be an agent who is free enough to act out of desire to know the truth.
Let's go back to the second obstacle: the initiation of apprentices as the occasion for the inculcation of the myth or narrative of the triumph of science overs ignorance based common-sense convictions. Scientific apprentices are often taught history in a biased manner; that is, they are taught to interpret scientific facts as trumping common senses when it doesn't do so.
Here is an example: consider the desk in a classroom: a student of science who has learned of the Rutherford model of the atom might claim that while the desk plane seems to be a continuously smooth surface, science has shown that it really consists of atoms composed of particles with vast gaps of space between them. Or does it? The claim that the desk is made of atoms is exceedingly well backed up by science. But maybe the one claiming to see a contradiction here has grasped those claims in a rather crude manner (remember, we are talking about Rutherford's model of the atom). He or she is imagining electrons as sphere-like solids revolving around the nucleus like a model planet traveling around a model of the sun. But this image is a misleading abstraction. There is no pure solid here surrounded by purely empty space. There is instead, something that we cannot really imagine: a paradoxical confluence of fields of forces. In this case, ironically, to take science as negating common sense requires a kind of confusion of a scientific model with the complete scientific explanation. The model abstracts characteristics being attributed to nature so that we may talk about them. To treat the model as if it captured all that there is to the part of nature being modeled is to treat an abstraction as if it were a concrete whole (i.e., as if it consisted of nothing but the characteristics found in the model). One makes this mistake by confusing a mere model with a common sense object. So the person who sees the Rutherfordian model as overturning common sense is, in a way, fixated on common sense when he or she should be thinking more scientifically. He or she is mistaking the sub-atomic particle, whose properties we may not be able to imagine, with a primitive model, whose properties we can easily imagine because of its likeness to the objects of common sense experience.
Perhaps a similar point can be made about common sense knowledge of the desk. That is, those who posit the opposition between the scientific understanding of the table surface and the common sense might have a crude understanding not only of science but of common sense as well. Just as the former form of crudity involves a kind of reification, so too might the latter. Well, yes: it's time to unpack that idea by doing some phenomenology, i.e., talk about pieces and moments ala Husserl, etc. But I don't have time to go through that now. Let me instead quickly point out one way in which one trying to rely solely on common sense can commit an analogous fault:
Does common sense tell us that the desktop is a perfectly flat and otherwise uniform surface? No. Things that look smooth from far away often prove to be irregular when viewed up close. Common sense is naturally open to that possibility. Someone who expects a surface that presently appears flat and smooth to appear thus when magnified is extrapolating needlessly. Extrapolation is a great thing to do: in fact, we need to do it in order to get along. And extrapolations like this might lead to the invention geometry. So common sense may include a tendency to geometrize nature (sorry, I can't tell you whether Aborigines do this as well) inasmuch as it tends to expects more of the same. But it does not require a commitment thereto; rather, it understands its own limits.
So the crudely understood scientific notion of atoms may give rise to a notion of this desk that contradicts an extrapolated version of common sense opinions about the nature of the desk. But science and common sense, rightly considered, do not contradict each other. Rightly understood, the two cohere, or even form a kind of continuum.
Okay, I'm in danger of getting off topic. The thing that needs to be discussed still is our common sense notions of ourselves as having an identity through time, operations, etc. The desk example is of a thing out there: I need to discuss common sense notions of the self, i.e., what some might call "folk psychology" and try to disambiguate problematic notions from those that are correct. I might show a kind of analogy between the reifications or other mistakes involved in crude notions of the self with the just discussed crude understanding of scientific models. I might likewise show analogies between the sophisticated (I feel awkward using one of Daniel Dennett's favorite words, but the shoe fits) understanding of scientific models and a correct self understanding (insert phenomenology here). But there's no time for that now... Hopefully, I'll be able to fill out this outline later.
But someone might ask, "What about controversial claims regarding human nature that aren't obviously presupposed by scientific praxis, namely, the existence of the soul and human freedom: are these subject to experimental testing (and hence to confirmation or falsification) or are they untestable? If untestable, is it because they are incoherent, or is it because the evidence of their truth is found through some other method than that of science?"
I would answer that the soul and freedom are so interwoven with our ability to seek truth that we can engage in scientific practices only if we do have a soul and are free. But before I even begin to argue for this position, I have to overcome two significant obstacles. The first is the readiness of positivists to commit the straw man fallacy by interpreting, first of all, whatever I have to say about the soul in Cartesian terms, and secondly, by interpreting whatever I have to say about freedom as an appeal to randomness. The second obstacle is the likelihood that before giving a hearing to my common sense-based claims about the soul and freedom, positivists will rush to place my words within the narrative of the triumph of scientific knowledge over prescientific opinions.
Regarding the first obstacle: when materialists hear the word "soul," they are typically unable to imagine anything other than the Cartesian ghost within the machine, i.e., a purely immaterial mind that interacts with the human body. I have to clarify that my use of the term "soul" has to do with the unity of an organism rather than the immateriality of a pure mind. That is, a human is an undivided whole rather than an assemblage of parts, an organism rather than a machine. That is because there is in humans (and in other animals) something that remains the same in the multiplicity of its bodily parts, temporal phases, and functions or purposes. The term "soul" signals this sameness. It needn't be the unity of a point-like immaterial being: it can instead be the unity of living, walking, breathing, thinking, communicating, perceiving person.
To counter the tendency to dismiss the soul as an outdated, disproven, prescientific notion, I will point out that in order for there to be science there must be scientists, and in order for there to be a scientist, there must be the kind of unity I have just described. As Aquinas says somewhere in the Summa theologiae, the same individual both knows and perceives. To that I would add that the same scientist senses, perceives, remembers, imagines, listens, moves about, learns to speak, read and write when very young, decides to major in a specific scientific discipline at the university, studies the history of science, the scientific method and mathematics, carries out experiments, gets a job, decides to find the answer to a scientific question, invents an hypothesis and a way to test that hypothesis, carries out the test, gets unsatisfactory results, tries possibly for years and years to come up with a better answer, and collaborates with others in the effort to find the answer to the same question.
Reflecting on this story of how the same individual does all of these things concerned with the same subject matter, we naturally speak of him or her as being or having a soul. We might say, for instance, that "this poor soul will never succeed" or that he or she someday will. We might use the term "soul" for that in virtue of which this individual is able to act in various ways using various powers at different times for the same goal. In both cases the term soul signifies something undivided about the person: in neither case does the term "soul" seem like the Cartesian mind, for a mind does not ask questions, write equations on a board, mix chemicals, remember what it saw, imagine what it might do, understand what it has read, hope to repeat an experiment under better circumstances: an individual with vision, memory, and locomotion does.
The uses of the word "soul" sketched above do not include the Cartesian ghost in a machine, but they do make room for many different takes on human nature. One who says "the poor soul," for example, may believe that a human is a living soul (i.e., one whole living being) rather than has as soul. This user may see no essential distinction but only a difference of degree between human operations and those of other animals and insist that there is no reason to say that the soul survives the death of the body. Another user may take the opposite position on each of these issues. Yet another user may have suspended judgment about the same issues. They all agree, however, that the unity of the human organism is real rather than illusory or mere unsophisticated folk psychology. We might call the position regarding human nature to which they all adhere "holism" (or even more precisely, "ontological holism"). This position is an important third alternative to dualism and reductive materialism.
A similar qualification is needed for the concept of freedom that I hope to propose. The best analog to freedom is our knowledge of the truths presupposed by science. The claim that this knowledge is objective means that the object determines our knowledge even though the object is not an event. That is, that 2+3=5 determines my conviction that it is so, even though 2+3=5 is not an event inside or outside of my brain. The goals of human action, inasmuch as they are intelligible to other human beings, are objective as well. Consider the goal "to know the truth": like 2+3=5, the goal of knowing is not an event even though it can be instantiated in my knowing (just as 2+3=5 can be instantiated in these five things being gathered, etc.). There is plenty to say about freedom that I've blabbered about elsewhere, so I'll cut this discussion short here.
Change of subject, sorta: it occurs to me that prior to talking about freedom, I need to talk about desire, as the latter is is common to humans and other animals. Yes: in fact, there is a way in which freedom is an analogous term, so that looking at its analog in nonhuman animals (i.e., looking at desire as relating to perception and action with particular objects) will help illuminate what is distinctive about human freedom. In fact, there is something anti-reductive about desire (n.b. not in abstraction from perception or self-movement but as an aspect of animal operation), so that I can fight reductionism on that front with far less risk of being mistaken for a Cartesian. And I can make the point that reductive materialists cannot give a coherent account of animals even at this more generic, basic level. In other words, it will strengthen my hand to argue first that humans and other animals are not natural machines before arguing that human desire may be special in any way.
Regarding the second obstacle. It seems to me that some scientists have a childlike (not childish but childlike in the sense that Jesus has in mind when he says, "Unless you become as little children...") faith in reductionism because of the way in which they were initiated into the scientific community. That initiation involves not only the learning of strictly scientific facts and the acquisition of skills, but also the learning of the story of the community itself. To many, that story is of the triumph of science over ignorance-based common sense opinions. Among the chapters in this story are Copernicus' heliocentric reinterpretation of the movement of the planets across the sky, Galileo's thought experiment through which he formed the concept of momentum, and Darwin's discovery of natural selection. These and other stories are taken as part of an overarching narrative into which the present and future discoveries are expected to fit. In that narrative, every (or almost every) common sense conviction--including our most basic convictions about ourselves--is liable to critical examination by the scientific method. Included in these common sense convictions is the notion that each of us is one individual acting through many parts and retaining our identity through time, and that we freely choose whether and how we shall act.
One who proposes that these convictions be subject to scientific investigation opens the door to their possible falsification. Such an opening, however, could undermine the inquiry itself, for scientific inquiry involves someone's interacting with the same thing or similar things at many different times while mindful how the concomitant observations confirm or falsify an earlier-made hypothesis and thereby help one to acquire the truth, a goal which one recognizes as motivating others at very different times and places. Without the ability to recognize the same thing at different times, to recognize tht one is dealing with the same sort of thing that others have dealt with, to recognize that one is thinking about the same proposition that one has previously thought of and that others have thought of as well--without all of these recognitions there is no scientific inquiry and hence no scientific inquiry. But our recognition of our ability to all of these things is itself a common sense conviction. Hence without such common sense convictions, there is no scientific inquiry. But these common sense convictions regarding persistence through time relate to "soul," as I have described above, and yet another common sense conviction--our ability to act out of the desire to know the truth--relates to freedom as I have described above). Therefore, without the acceptance of some notion of the soul and freedom, there is no room for the acceptance of science.
If it is not to be self-undermining, scientific inquiry requires a commitment not only to the common sense claim that we are able to know the truth, but also enough of a commitment to ensoulment for there to be an agent who is free enough to act out of desire to know the truth.
Let's go back to the second obstacle: the initiation of apprentices as the occasion for the inculcation of the myth or narrative of the triumph of science overs ignorance based common-sense convictions. Scientific apprentices are often taught history in a biased manner; that is, they are taught to interpret scientific facts as trumping common senses when it doesn't do so.
Here is an example: consider the desk in a classroom: a student of science who has learned of the Rutherford model of the atom might claim that while the desk plane seems to be a continuously smooth surface, science has shown that it really consists of atoms composed of particles with vast gaps of space between them. Or does it? The claim that the desk is made of atoms is exceedingly well backed up by science. But maybe the one claiming to see a contradiction here has grasped those claims in a rather crude manner (remember, we are talking about Rutherford's model of the atom). He or she is imagining electrons as sphere-like solids revolving around the nucleus like a model planet traveling around a model of the sun. But this image is a misleading abstraction. There is no pure solid here surrounded by purely empty space. There is instead, something that we cannot really imagine: a paradoxical confluence of fields of forces. In this case, ironically, to take science as negating common sense requires a kind of confusion of a scientific model with the complete scientific explanation. The model abstracts characteristics being attributed to nature so that we may talk about them. To treat the model as if it captured all that there is to the part of nature being modeled is to treat an abstraction as if it were a concrete whole (i.e., as if it consisted of nothing but the characteristics found in the model). One makes this mistake by confusing a mere model with a common sense object. So the person who sees the Rutherfordian model as overturning common sense is, in a way, fixated on common sense when he or she should be thinking more scientifically. He or she is mistaking the sub-atomic particle, whose properties we may not be able to imagine, with a primitive model, whose properties we can easily imagine because of its likeness to the objects of common sense experience.
Perhaps a similar point can be made about common sense knowledge of the desk. That is, those who posit the opposition between the scientific understanding of the table surface and the common sense might have a crude understanding not only of science but of common sense as well. Just as the former form of crudity involves a kind of reification, so too might the latter. Well, yes: it's time to unpack that idea by doing some phenomenology, i.e., talk about pieces and moments ala Husserl, etc. But I don't have time to go through that now. Let me instead quickly point out one way in which one trying to rely solely on common sense can commit an analogous fault:
Does common sense tell us that the desktop is a perfectly flat and otherwise uniform surface? No. Things that look smooth from far away often prove to be irregular when viewed up close. Common sense is naturally open to that possibility. Someone who expects a surface that presently appears flat and smooth to appear thus when magnified is extrapolating needlessly. Extrapolation is a great thing to do: in fact, we need to do it in order to get along. And extrapolations like this might lead to the invention geometry. So common sense may include a tendency to geometrize nature (sorry, I can't tell you whether Aborigines do this as well) inasmuch as it tends to expects more of the same. But it does not require a commitment thereto; rather, it understands its own limits.
So the crudely understood scientific notion of atoms may give rise to a notion of this desk that contradicts an extrapolated version of common sense opinions about the nature of the desk. But science and common sense, rightly considered, do not contradict each other. Rightly understood, the two cohere, or even form a kind of continuum.
Okay, I'm in danger of getting off topic. The thing that needs to be discussed still is our common sense notions of ourselves as having an identity through time, operations, etc. The desk example is of a thing out there: I need to discuss common sense notions of the self, i.e., what some might call "folk psychology" and try to disambiguate problematic notions from those that are correct. I might show a kind of analogy between the reifications or other mistakes involved in crude notions of the self with the just discussed crude understanding of scientific models. I might likewise show analogies between the sophisticated (I feel awkward using one of Daniel Dennett's favorite words, but the shoe fits) understanding of scientific models and a correct self understanding (insert phenomenology here). But there's no time for that now... Hopefully, I'll be able to fill out this outline later.
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