Aristotle and Modern Science: Common Sense vs. Expert Sense

Recently reading Aristotle's Physics I came across this passage: 

Why not suppose, then, that the same is true of the parts of natural organisms [i.e. that nature acts not for something, i.e. for some final cause, but of necessity]? On this view, it is of necessity that, for example, the front teeth grow sharp and well adapted for biting, and the back ones broad and useful for chewing food; this  result was coincidental, not what they were there for. The same will be true of all the other parts that seem to be for something. On this view, then, whenever all the parts come about coincidentally as though they were for something, these animals survived, since their constitution, though coming about by chance, made them suitable . Other animals, however, were differently constituted and so were destroyed; indeed they are still being destroyed, as Empedocles says of the man-headed calves. (Physics II.8, 198b23-33). 

What we have here is an articulation of the evolution of species by natural selection. Say some animals have some parts well-adapted ("proper") for biting - sharp teeth. These sharp teeth are not there because that's what they are for, but rather coincidentally. What happens is that these parts get there coincidentally (a modern biologists would say this is "random variation"), and the organisms who had these adaptations would survive, while the one's who do not (like Empedocles' man-headed calves) would not. 

This folks, is natural selection in essence. Let's compare it to Darwin's definition: 

 

Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man [in the breeding of animals] have undoubtably occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battles of life, should occur in the course of many successive generations. If such do occur, can we doubt (remember that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating its kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are  injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. (Origin, 107)

Now of course Darwin knew of this Aristotle passage - he quotes it in a footnote on the first page of the second edition - but he didn't think Aristotle understood its significance. The significance, from this passage, is that variation can and does occur, and the principle of "selection" of which variations will be reproduced and what will not is their fittest for survival. Aristotle obviously says the same thing, but with a big difference: Aristotle didn't think chance would work like this. 

In fact, Aristotle rejects this argument precisely that because we speak of "chance" as something hardly ever taking place, while teeth are "normally" or usually there. In other words, animals having teeth is a very normal occurrence. If it is normal, then it is the very opposite of coincidentally or by chance, which by definition is abnormal. Thus we need to look at another cause. For Aristotle this is the "final" cause, i.e. that an animal needs this or that part to become a fully mature animal.

Now, I can imagine Stephen Jay Gould's response to this: if you want to get on board with Darwin, you need to expand how you think about "chance" to include lots and lots of time (thousands, millions, of years), and lots and lots of interactions at the genetic level. If you look at chance events over millions of years, instead of just a couple, or a few hundred, you can imagine how chance variations can come up, and while they seem like chance variations from a certain perspective, they take on a statistical regularity over the long haul. This "regularity" is enough, if looked at in the right perspective, for natural selection by random variation to make sense. Aristotle of course did not entertain this perspective (the reasons for this are not merely historical, but also philosophical). How could you, Aristotle might say, when by definition chance is not something that is regular? Chance by necessity is rare! But then again, as Daniel Dennett says, perhaps this was a case where Aristotle mistook necessity for a lack of imagination. 

So why oh why did it take over 2000 years, from Aristotle to Darwin, for humans to recognize this fact? Was it Aristotle's commitment to "final causes" in nature (an idea that, so far as I've read scientists reading it, is very little understood by most scientists today)? Was it an "essentialism" in Aristotle, Platonism, Islam, and Christianity, modes of thinking that dominated our culture for those thousands of years? Was it that Darwin finally let go the shackles of dogmatism that plagued everyone from Plato to Paley? This is the standard story, no doubt, biologists tell. 

Yet I have an alternative hypothesis, something I have not done enough research on to really defend here. My hypothesis is this: in order to entertain random variation there had to be the historical development of population science. This historical develop only arose with the modern state and notions of managing large populations. The very idea of "population" is something almost completely foreign to Aristotle's time. When you ask a question about a species you ask the question about a typical example of the species, not about the "distribution of attributes across populations," which is what statistics like the birth rate and the death rate do. This only happens with the advent of the modern nation-state, where territory and population take on a completely different sense than it ever had, and where you understand the nation in terms of its population, rather than its ethnicity, or its king, etc. 

One might retort - 'so what. So that's the development. It's no secret that science and ideas develop over time, and that there are antecedents to ideas. So population science was antecedent to Darwinian evolution. Big deal.' The big deal, however, is a question of perception. What type of perception goes into population studies? How has this perception altered our very everyday senses and perceptions of our world? Do we understand, on the whole, more or less about the world now that we see in "populations"? I don't mean expert scientists, but common people. If we are, presumably, "enlightened" individuals, "moderns" who are no longer bound by the shackles of dogma and religion (unless you happen to be one of those creationist fundamentalists), then we should actually know more about the world than people did, say, 300 years ago. But is the case? 

I would say not. In fact, we're probably more ignorant of our world, as a general rule, than people were 300 years ago. Back when people actually engaged with things around them, instead of relying on technology or experts to give them all of their "knowledge" ("giving" here merely means: making things we use, without the slightest idea how they work). I would actually say, even if Aristotle is completely deficient in terms of "scientific" knowledge, he actually does give us something, in terms of common understanding, that really does help us know about our world. 

Asking the question "why", for Aristotle, can be answered almost entirely by your senses. You can ask: "why does this bird build a nest like this"? If you look at the nest, you look at the four ways we speak of "cause": you can find the "material" cause, the "efficient" cause, the "formal" cause, and the "final" cause all with your eyes. Paradoxically, modern science actually takes your eyes out of the equation - and replaces it with an equation - algorithms for variation, models of bird behavior, etc. Your eyes are actually deceptive - 'you think this table looks solid? Well my friend, you must know that it is made up of billions of atoms, and most of the volume of an atom - that space between the electron and the nucleus is complete void, empty space. If it weren't for the electromagnetic force that attracts and repels, friends, we'd fall right through this floor!' This type of explanation, like an evolutionary one might be for a bird nest, is much more "accurate" than Aristotle's four ways of speaking about causes, but at the same time, for our normal interaction with the world, is almost useless. 

Population studies, and most science today, are the sole purview of well-trained, well-funded, policy-arms of national governments. The "knowledge" of populations and the "management" of populations go hand in hand. Today, as Sajay Samuel says polemically, the polis or people are the subjects of experiment by the "experts." And this has been true since the beginning of population studies. Biology is not merely a way of seeing the world, but a way of making the world. 

Now, I'm not saying we go back to Aristotle. What I am saying is that Aristotle's attitude - that we begin with our common sense, our common understanding, is essential. We as modern people have given up our knowledge to a science that has become so obscure that most people have almost no knowledge about their surroundings. Perhaps we need to re-think the value of this common sense? 

Arguments - In and Out of Science

I've just started what I hope will be a really good refresher for me on current science by the New York Times science correspondent, Natalie Angier (The Canon). So far it's pretty interesting, and I'm really excited to learn a bit about new experiments going on, and her writing style, while a bit verbose, is in general really good. 

One thing really annoys me though. Her first chapter is about the scientific "critical thinking" mindset. It is important to start here, because as she points out (and many scientists say), science is not about a set of facts, but about a way of thinking. This is different from other ways of thinking, called "opinion." This of course is a distinction that goes back to Plato, but in her book seems to make this distinction between science and all other types of thinking. E.g., she quotes Andrew Knoll of Harvard: 

"In politics, you can say, I like George Bush, or I don't like George Bush, or I do or don't like Howard Dean or John Kerry or Mr. Magoo... You don't need a principled reason for that political opinion. You don't need evidence that someone else can replicate to justify your opinion. You don't need to think of alternative explanations that would render your opinion invalid..." 

Of course, after this, science comes in with its methods of control and institutional checks and balances, peer review, etc. She then has a few pages on the way science is critical of itself, which culminates in a few pages about the uncertainty of science. Uncertainty is one of the most important aspects of science, because its precisely in uncertainty there is a motivation for searching and working and discovering (incidentely, this is also one of Plato's contributions: the philosopher is precisely that person who desires wisdom, but does not have it, and thus is continually impelled toward it). I would say kudos - the best theories out there are ones that have just a enough certainty to keep working them out, but not enough to shut down debate. Those are normally the most productive theories.

The problem, she and some scientists say, is that this creates a poor public image. "How do you convey the need for uncertainty in science, the crucial role it plays in nudging research forward and keeping standards high, without undermining its credibility?" This is an excellent question, but the real issue has nothing to do with science's uncertainty, but with people's standard for argumentation. If you consider argument to be either mere opinion, or scientific, then you're setting up a false dichotomy. 

In other words, if you go around saying there are two ways of thinking - "critical scientific" thinking and "opinions" that supposedly do not need "evidence" - then you'll always have this problem. Andrew Knoll is just plain wrong that we do not need to justify our views. "Critical scientific" thinking is a species of the "critical thinking" genus. The Greek word krinein, from which we derive "critical," means to divide or cut (our word decision comes from the Latin synonym, caedere), and this is exactly what we do with "critical" thinking: we separate out good reasons from bad, cut certain perspectives while keeping others (winnow, if you like). This is a process that is much broader than modern institutionalized science. It happens in the everyday (should I go to this store or that?), and ought to happen whenever we think politically and in communities (where, sadly, it does not often occur). We separate this from that based on communal standards, principles we hope are true, and a whole bunch of cultural history and knowledge gained through thousands of years of experience as humans. 

The solution to this PR problem is merely to note what science can and cannot do, and what political argument should but does not do. Scientific findings are a basis to make reasoned arguments about what one ought to do. They are not idols we must serve in order to appease the gods of modern style, because ultimately that merely shifts responsibility to an impersonal jumble of information instead of to actual people (like you and me, and our nation's leaders), who have to do the real work of decision. Science ought to keep its standards high, to attain the most certainty it can; then politicians and thinkers, citizens and individuals, must take responsibility for their actions in the light of how they see their lives playing out. The questions "how ought we to be in our world" is clearly helped by critical scientific thinking (although it is not always helped by science in general - atom bomb anyone?), but it is not the whole of that question.

Ultimately what really irks me about both scientific rhetoric on this point, and about people's annoyance at science's uncertainty, is that both seem to have an attitude that one must find authority somewhere else. 

'You can't argue for your opinion, because it's just opinion! You don't have the scientific method to back you up!'  

'We can't trust you scientists, because you guys get it wrong!'

Apparently I have been under the illusion that that little Enlightenment dicta, "think for yourself!" still applies. 

Epistemology and Love: Wendell Berry and "Science"

I've been reading Wendell Berry's fiction as of late, reading a few essays, and have listened to one of his interviews. I am really fascinated by his phrase "the way of ignorance." He and Wes Jackson use this phrase to indicated a certain epistemological humility, on the one hand, and a certain affection for their localities on the other. Berry thinks that one of the major problems with modern techno-science (and this almost always goes together) is that it has no respect for localities, prefers to distance itself from what it studies, generalizes and abstracts to a damaging effect, and loves to reduce and dissect everything it comes in contact with. The effect, Berry thinks, is the destruction of land through the use of methods not suitable to that locality, the destruction of community through the mechinizing labor and conglomerating land, and ultimately the destruction of knowledge through the over-specialization of the scientists themselves, and through the loss of a knowledge-base in farming communities.

Clearly, Berry is against a mainstream understanding of "knowledge" if he thinks science destroys it. But what does he think knowledge is? From reading his short stories and novels so far, I can only say that he believes knowledge to be connected intimately with love. Love is attachment. Love is a focused care, a watching and waiting, a giving of space and a giving of time. Love is when you see yourself in that thing you're studying, you see every consequence of your knowledge as a consequence for your person. I think Berry's epistemology, and indeed an epistemology using love, is best seen in Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet:

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those bows which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such a day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by the black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This though perceive'st, that makes they love more strong:
To love well that which thou must leave ere long.

I think this sonnet typifies Berry's approach, and I must say I'm starting to think of knowledge in this way. The poem, in three quatrains and a couplet, moves like this: first, we hear the poet is in decline. The phrase "bare ruined choirs" is one of the most beautiful in the language for speaking in particular of decline, because we are speaking of seasons, of fall, where soon winter will take over, a sort of death. Next, we meet another sort of death, the death of a day - "death's second self," i.e. night, which gives rest, as much as it "seals up" in a tomb. Yet third we find the most interesting aspect of this: the "glowing" of the poet is actually that thing which leads to his decline, as he is "consumed with that which [he] was nourished by." This has always reminded me of the life cycle: the agent of our growth is the agent of out decline, since on the one hand, as we replace our cells (which takes 7 years for our entire body to be replaced with new cells), and grow, we area also being undone, because cell replication gets worse each time they replicate. This is merely the process of growing old.

But when we get to the couplet, we realize that even as we see this in the world, we still love the world. 

Plantinga v. Dennett

I just finished listening to the Plantinga/Dennett encounter at the APA this year. I have to say I was a bit disappointed in both Plantinga and Dennett, for various reasons. I was disappointed in Plantinga because he did not really engage Dennett directly much, nor did he really answer a basic issue that Dennett often brings up, i.e. the charge of dualism (skyhooks and cranes, as it were). Dennett on the other hand was so ad hominem and rhetorical, it was hard to even consider him worthy in any type of debate of a philosophic nature. He is great at getting you to imagine things in different ways, but he treated Plantinga with disrespect, which was unfortunate. He used so much rhetoric and anecdote he seemed like a sophist trying just to win the argument, and if you're a philosopher, that is supposedly the last thing you'd want to do. 

Be that as it may, some interesting things came up right off the bat. Plantinga basically started by arguing that theism and Darwinian evolution are compatible, but that metaphysical naturalism and Darwinian evolution is not (which is a really old saw for Plantinga, which is another unfortunate thing about the encounter) The former thesis he argues by saying that evolutionary theory does not rule out that it was guided by God, since "random variation" is something of a misnomer (there is a cause of everything), and there is no reason, from a theistic point of view, that God could not have guided this variation or have been the cause of the variations. This of course brings up the "problem of evil," since natural selection seems like an extremely harsh thing for a supposed all benevolent, all powerful God to use. He didn't really spend much time on this, because it is one of those issues that are perennial (at least since the Enlightenment), and which he's dealt with in other places.

This later thesis, that Darwinian evolution and metaphysical naturalism are incompatible, he argues using a probablistic argument. Naturalism has a built-in "defeater." By saying that we can completely account for human thought from evolutionary origins, you undercut any notion that our thinking is fully reliable according to this view. The reason for this is that in order to aid survival, the content of our beliefs does not have to be true, but our behavior only has to be adaptable (and if you define the "true" as the "adaptable" it would be just a big fat tautology, and would really mean nothing). In other words, Plantinga thinks that this type of naturalism does not really aim at truth but at some sort of adaptation, which can come at the expense of our belief we can get at the true. Here I quote Darwin, a quote that Plantinga likes, since he was aware of this issue: 
    
With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? (Letter to William Graham)

In other words, the issue is that adaptive behavior doesn't require that our belief claims be true, just that our cognitive faculties work in such a way as to enable our species to survive and reproduce. His formula is that the reliability (R) of belief P given naturalism (N) and the evolutionary origins of all our thought (E) is low (so: the probability of P(R/N&E) is low). If this is the case, then any claim we make in the realm of naturalism is self-defeating, because if our cognitive faculties merely arise from adaptive behaviors, no guarantee is made that they actually function reliability, and this would hold true for naturalistic evolutionary claims themselves. 

Now, in this encounter, Dan Dennett didn't really address this directly. Instead, he kind of went in a round about fashion to argue that it is simply silly to consider anything other than naturalistic causes for things (this is his famous "skyhooks or cranes" argument). He said, 'listen, it's true that theism and Darwinism are compatible - but so what? Let's start a new religion, and call it Supermanism. We'll say Superman created the world, and there are certain evidences of this throughout the earth. Is this plausible? No, of course not. The same with theism.' Now, later in Plantinga's rebuttal he did mention he wasn't trying to argue from an empirical standpoint that God's "footprint" is in the world, as it were. In other words, he isn't trying to say that we should somehow replace scientific research with research using theistic "causes." Dennett's point, however, turned toward "intelligent design," is a good one. As far as science is concerned, putting an intelligent designer into your equation does nothing for the science itself. It's a gratuitous (his word) addition, with no point whatsoever. So what's the harm? 

The real issue Dennett gets at, eventually (after much rhetorical baiting) is by making claims like Plantinga, we undercut the epistemic responsibility of thinking humans. This responsibility is to make only those claims we can actually empirically verify using the best methods we know, but on the flip side, this gives us freedom to do as much as possible with science at our side. To do anything less is to give in to irrationality, and that is morally culpable. 

I think one of things that gets at Dennett's goat about Plantinga (and I don't really know, since I have not read enough of Dennett's responses to Plantinga, and he did not directly address this here) is that Plantinga argues is that most of the time, humans do not really accept religion based on argument and evidence, nor do they need to. In other words, Plantinga says that argument isn't everything, that there are other ways of apprehending truth than argumentation. If you are a religious person, you certain understand what Plantinga is talking about. No argument from intelligent design, nor any cosmological argument, made you believe. Belief is not even primarily cognitive when it comes to religious belief: it has much to do with trusting others with actions, with your fears, wishes, hopes, etc. There may be something cognitive about all these, but there is something more too. Dennett did not directly talk about this, but I think this is a huge hurdle for him, because he really seems to have the position that one must argue for everything that you believe. Of course, I'm not sure about this. Some philosophers, like Donald Davidson, argue that we assume that most of our beliefs are true without argument, and that is probably right (beliefs about our everyday life, e.g.). Dennett might just think the big question need to be argued for. 

And here Dennett may have a good point. It seems we really should have evidence for all our beliefs, right? This encounter was very uninspiring because this is really the crux of the debate between religion and a version of science (metaphysical naturalism), but it was hardly touched upon. Dennett did bring it up when he talked about epistemic responsibility, and Plantinga did as well, when he talked about the reliability of naturalism, but in both of these cases they didn't really announce the issue. 

By the end, Dennett finally brought his main idea in dealing with religion: we ought to study it scientifically so we can see its contingent history (its evolutionary history), how it arises, how religious belief is formed, etc., and in this way we can unmask it. By unmasking it we "demystify" it, so to speak, and ultimately (I suppose the hope is) we can get rid of it. It's funny, because Dennett never seems to acknowledge that the social sciences have been doing this since the early 1800's. But the problem for Dennett, and those who want to demystify it, is just precisely the issue that Plantinga brings up: most religious people do not accept their religion based on argument, so why would they get rid of it on those grounds? There are lots of really good reasons people reject religion, and we can see this West especially clearly. The Christian church, for instance, has lost much ground in the West not merely because of science, but just as much because of politics: the church has been horrible on issues that really matter to people, like sexuality, the poor, child abuse, gender roles, race, environmentalism, etc. Does it really matter to people whether they have the right view (at the time) of the big bang, or the which ancestor we came from? Probably not. More important is action: how are their lives? That's the important question. 

In Dennett, as in Dawkins and other metaphysical naturalist, I don't see the responsiveness to these type of questions. Not that I necessarily agree with Plantinga either. I think his argument about the unreliability of our thinking based on a naturalistic account is rather a thin argument. Right now, in fact, I'm reading Dennett's Consciousness Explained, and in his very Wittgensteinian procedure, he is just great at showing how we can really imagine how things work, if we change the way we think about those pictures that have been holding us captive for so long in philosophy. I really like how Dennett tries to get us to see something new, rather than rely on philosophical logic (in the way Plantinga does). This way of thinking is really interesting, because it is creative of new thought, and instead of focusing on how things have to be, he focuses on how things could be (Dennett often charges philosophers for confusing necessity with lack of imagination - which is very true). 

My only complaint is that Dennett then himself lacks imagination. It's not that we need to postulate God in order to explain science, or explain the natural world. But there are compelling reasons for thinking that religion really does add something to our lives, something that we would loose if we restricted our view of the world to evolutionary scientific thinking. On the flip side, evolutionary thinking is creative and exciting, so we should not get rid of that, either (although I do have some huge reservations about "memes" and other such evolutionary psychological ways of looking at culture - although I am reading Dennett now to consider it).

In short, humans have such variety of ways of life, and such variety of ways of thinking, we shouldn't be too quick to restrict these ways of thinking. Certainly we should call out beliefs that produce great harm. But the problem is, we are in the midsts of all these ethical questions, and so just taking one top-down approach (such as metaphysical naturalism) would just obscure all of these issues. In addition, ethical questions are not just about genealogy, about where our beliefs come from (and naturalistic thinking is not the only way to do genealogy - there's also historicism), but what to do now. To reduce the variety of human thinking and imagination just because you want to use one way of thinking that works well in science is short-sighted, and will ultimately not work, even if you wanted it to. As the ancient philosophers recognized, theory by itself really doesn't do anything for us: it's the practice of theory that does something. 

And so far, I haven't heard how a metaphysical naturalist would practice metaphysical naturalism.