[lit-ideas] Re: On being called a Lyre [dilemmas]

In answer to a quotation bout 'philosopical scientism' which I posted to this list (see below), on 24-Sep-08, at 12:29 PM, palma wrote:
Can anybody quote a scientist who claims that science gives me the best (??) and "most significant" (???) access to myself?
Note that I wrote about *philosophers* 'seduced by the allure of brain science', not scientists. And the words Critchley used were "the primary and most significant access to ourselves and the world". 


I'd like a specific source ...
'Seduction by the allure of brain science' is exemplified in the following 2 paragraphs from the a book review found in _Ameircan Scientist: The magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society_, at 

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/brain-based-values
"As a graduate student at Caltech, Gazzaniga studied under one of the towering figures of neuroscience, Roger Sperry, whose lab pioneered research into ... so-called "split brain" patients [which] revealed that their two brain hemispheres operated independently, each hemisphere acting almost like a distinct person. These were profoundly important results, both for philosophy and for neuroscience. Gazzaniga went on to explore the neurobiology of higher mental functions ..., always with a philosophical question biting his heels. He currently serves on the President's Council on Bioethics. Thus it is especially fitting that he should now pen his thoughts on neuroethics."
"The most fundamental neuroethical issue concerns free will and responsibility. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is a causal machine. Consequently, deliberations, beliefs, decisions and ensuing behavior are the outcome of causal processes. Typically, the causal processes leading to awareness of a decision are nonconscious. The "user illusion," nevertheless, is that a decision is created independently of neuronal causes, by one's very own "act of will." Some philosophers—usually called libertarians—resolutely believe that voluntary decisions actually are created by the will, free of causal antecedents. Like flat-earthers and creationists, libertarians glorify their scientific naiveté by labeling it transcendental insight."
Perhaps I've missed something somewhere, but it seems to me that a statement such as "the mind is what the brain does" is one of many competing philosophies of mind, and that those who in some way or other disagree cannot be so lightly dismissed (by lumping them in with 'flat-earthers and creationists' owing to 'their scientific naiveté') as the author of this review would have us believe. 

Chris Bruce
Kiel, Germany


On Wed, 24 Sep 2008
cblists@xxxxxxxx wrote:



On 21-Sep-08, at 8:51 PM, wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:


Scientists seduced by the allure of brain science ...


To say nothing of philosophers seduced by same:

        ... philosophical scientism fails to see the role that
        science and technology play in the alienation of
        human beings from the world through the latter's
        objectification into a causally determined realm of
        nature or, more aggregiously, into a reified realm of
        commodities manipulated by an instrumental rationality.
         .... [S]cientism rests on the false assumption that the
        scientific or theoretical way of viewing things ... provides
        the primary and most significant access to ourselves and
        the world.  ... [T]he scientific view of the world is derivative
        and parasitic upon a prior practical view of the world as
        [in Heideggerian terms] ready-to-hand, that is, the environing
        world that is closest, most familiar, and most meaningful
        to us, the world that is always colored by our cognitive,
        ethical and aesthetic values.  That is to say, scientism ...
        overlooks the phenomenon of the *life-world* which is
        the enabling condition for scientific practice.  Although
        such an anti-scientism *can* lead to obscurantism ... it
        *need* not do so.  The critique of scientism    ... does not
        seek to refute or negate the results of scientific research in
        the name of some mystical apprehension of the unity of
        man and nature ...; it rather simply insists that science does
        not provide the primary and most significant access to a
        sense of ourselves and the world.... [T]he practices of the
        natural sciences arise out of life-world practices, and ...
        the latter are not simply reducible to the former.

[from Simon Critchley, "Introduction: what is Continental
philosophy?", in Simon Critchley and William R Schroeder, eds. _A
Companion to Continental Philosophy_, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1998; p. 13]

Of course, one does not have to side with Heidegger in order to be
critical of 'scientism' - Adorno & Horkheimer (with all of their
antipathies to Heidegger) immediately come to (well, at least, *my*)
mind. (I think it is the 'commodities manipulated by an instrumental
rationality' which triggers that.)

Indeed I think that in Kant's 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy a
critique of theoretical science providing 'the primary and most
significant access to ourselves and the world' can be founded.
(Tentative explication of this view will be made available upon
request.)

One must be fair to the scientists themselves.  Not all are (or were)
'realists' when it comes to philosophising about their endeavours;
indeed some regard(ed) realism as an impediment to scientific progress (the parenthetical past tenses - 'were' and 'regarded' are prompted by 
thoughts of the debate between the early developers of quantum theory
and Einstein: the former thought that Einstein's commitment to realism 
a serious hindrance).  'Anti-scientism' (i.e., rejection of the view
that science 'provides the primary and most significant access to
ourselves and the world') is most definitely not automatically 'anti-
science'.

- Chris Bruce
Kiel, Germany
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