Dear All,
To me this whole argument is a red herring, grounded in fallacious assumptions
about both science and religious (or more broadly cultural) knowledge. The
central assumption in question is the bifurcation of nature that Whitehead
describes in Science and the Modern World, in which the science side includes
all and only phenomena that can be studied experimentally with hypotheses and
results articulated in mathematical terms, everything else remaining a mystery
that can only be comprehended via faith (or when faith is lacking, art). This
model itself is rooted in the Cartesian division of mind and body, with body
being traditionally the domain of science and mind conceived as essentially
different from the matter studied using scientific methods.
The claims of brain science to have rendered mind an epiphenomenon of matter
cannot be dismissed lightly, especially by the empirically minded pragmatist I
consider myself. The problem as I see it is on the other side, conceiving of
meaning as airy-fairy stuff inaccessible to scientific study. That way of
conceiving meaning is only plausible if knowledge is restricted, a la
positivism, to empirically verified results of scientific experiments. It is
instantly implausible if one considers the role of logic and empirical evidence
in legal, clinical, and more broadly hermeneutic inference. The difference is
between experiments that test abstract hypotheses under tightly controlled,
ipso facto, artificial conditions, and carefully constructed stories in which
disparate bits of evidence are joined through empirically justified claims,
leading ideally to “truth beyond a reasonable doubt.” It is not a difference
between categorically and essentially distinct domains of knowledge.
The anthropologist in me recalls that Clifford Geertz, on whom the interpretive
turn in cultural studies is frequently claimed, was careful to note that the
cultural “texts” in which we find “webs of meaning embodied in symbols” are
public and, thus, empirically observable, phenomena. They are not cognitive
models buried inside human skulls; they are what we see, hear, taste, smell and
touch in human activities and the artifacts humans produce. Brain science has
learned a lot about what goes on inside of brains, very little as yet about how
what goes on inside our skulls is affected by what goes on outside them.
Cheers,
John
On May 2, 2019 18:28 +0900, Torgeir Fjeld <t.fjeld1@xxxxxxxxx>, wrote:
Dear all,
John McCreery writes in a response to a post on an editorial in British
publication The Guardian regarding the continued importance of philosophy and
sociology as academic disciplines:
How do you see the difference between utility and significance?
The key question when we consider this distinction lies in the domain of
knowledge. In a recent book on the triumph of brain science in defining the
scope and content of actual and potential knowledge Markus Gabriel notes that
it is worthwhile distinguishing between approaches to knowledge based on what
he calls scientism and those that are more religious in their purview. To the
former we can only know something about the material world, since that is the
only world that we can observe and therefore empirically verify. The more
radical version of scientism claims that the only existing world is that of
physical matter.
The religious view doesn't shy away from speaking of values, decisions and
persons. The problem with this perspective is nevertheless that is it based
on a faith grounded in irrationalism, and that it abandons all recourse to
arguments based on rationality and evidence.
To Gabriel (and this is where he goes further than Bourdieu already did in
the 1990s) scientism and the religious view share a dichotomous approach to a
material world, which we can know something "objectively" about, and a
"spiritual," value based reality of which we can merely have a subjective, or
religious, opinion.
He appeals to a sense beyond these two world views: are there not a series of
fully comprehensible phenomena that do not have material properties fully
regulated by empirical causality? In his view what these phenomena share is
that they are accessible through an adequate analysis of the human 'I.'
In good faith,
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld
https://torgeirfjeld.com/
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