[tt] New Scientist Reason Package

[Premise Checker]

Seven reasons why people hate reason
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.400&print=true
[I am sending these out separately to my regular list, but with the 
letters at the end grouped together.]

From religious fundamentalism to pseudoscience, it seems that forces
are attacking the Enlightenment world view characterised by
rational, scientific thinking from all sides. The debate seems black
and white: youre either with reason, or youre against it. But is it
so simple? In a series of special essays, our contributors look more
carefully at some of the most provocative charges against reason.
The results suggest that for all the Enlightenment has achieved, we
still have a lot of work to do.

Editorial: How to make reason more reasonable

How humans dared to know

The 21st-century passion for "Enlightenment values" owes a lot to
the 18th century. Philosopher A. C. Grayling discusses where those
values come from and what they mean today.

1: Reason stands against values and morals

Shaping a moral and humane world requires more than reason, says
Archbishop Rowan Williams.

2: No one actually uses reason

If we had to think logically about everything we did, wed never do
anything at all, says neuroscientist Chris Frith.

[14]Watch a related video

3: I hear "reason", I see lies

Science is routinely co-opted by governments and corporations to
subvert peoples ability to make their own decisions, say sociologist
David Miller and linguist Noam Chomsky.

[15]Watch a related video.

4: Reason excludes creativity and intuition

Reason is lost without art, says Turner prizewinner Keith Tyson.

[16]Watch a related video.

5: Whose reason is it anyway?

Real people dont live their lives according to cold rationality,
says bioethicist Tom Shakespeare.

[17]Watch a related video.

6: Reason destroys itself

Even in formal mathematics, reason breaks its own rules, says
mathematician Roger Penrose.

[18]Watch a related video.

7: Reason is just another faith

Unconditional reliance on a single authority is never sensible, says
philosopher Mary Midgley.

EXCLUSIVELY ONLINE

Lee Smolin on negotiating diversity

Mary Midgley on reason and scepticism

Tom Shakespeare on a world based on reason

Peter Singer on science and morality

ARCHIVE

Donna Haraway on human exceptionalism (18 June 2008)

Robert Matthews on defining science (7 May 2008)

David Malone on addiction to certainty (4 August 2007)

Dan Hind on the true threats to reason (19 January 2008)

REVIEWS

The Assault on Reason by Algore (18 July 2007)

Earth in the Balance by Algore (1 August 1992)

Doubt is their Product by David Michaels (11 June 2008)

The Political Mind by George Lakoff (28 May 2008)

Articles by Tom Shakespeare, Keith Tyson and Noam Chomsky as told to
Mike Holderness, Liz Else and Ivan Semeniuk. Reason special edited
by Liz Else, Mike Holderness and Jo Marchant.

Related Articles

[19]Editorial: How to make reason more reasonable
[20]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.300
23 July 2008
[21]Reason stands against values and morals
[22]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.600
23 July 2008
[23]No one really uses reason
[24]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.700
23 July 2008
[25]I hear 'reason', I see lies
[26]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.800
23 July 2008
[27]Reason excludes creativity and intuition
[28]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.900
23 July 2008
[29]Whose reason is it anyway?
[30]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.000
23 July 2008
[31]Reason destroys itself
[32]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.100
23 July 2008
[33]Reason destroys itself
[34]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.100
23 July 2008
[35]Reason is just another faith
[36]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.200
23 July 2008
[37]Reason special: Negotiating diversity
[38]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14378
23 July 2008
[39]Reason special: Reason eats itself
[40]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14387
23 July 2008
[41]Reason special: A world based on reason
[42]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14385
23 July 2008

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 41

References

14. 
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1250579695/bclid1252300654/bctid1683793824
15. 
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1250579695/bclid1252300654/bctid1683828338
16. 
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1250579695/bclid1252300654/bctid1684377835
17. 
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1250579695/bclid1252300654/bctid1683828355
18. 
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1250579695/bclid1252300654/bctid1683793820
19. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.300
20. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.300
21. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.600
22. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.600
23. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.700
24. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.700
25. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.800
26. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.800
27. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.900
28. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.900
29. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.000
30. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.000
31. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.100
32. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.100
33. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.100
34. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.100
35. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.200
36. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.200
37. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14378
38. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14378
39. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14387
40. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14387
41. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14385
42. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14385

+++

Editorial: How to make reason more reasonable
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.300&print=true

WRITING these words in a pavement cafe in Brussels, capital of that
rationalist and cosmopolitan project known as the European Union,
all seems well with the world. A band is playing. The church at the
end of the square is filled with tourists. The passing cyclists look
content and healthy. You could experience similar scenes in similar
squares in Boston, London, Paris or Tokyo. The streets are calm, the
smell of progress towards democratically agreed political, social
and cultural goals is in the air. It's hard to see what could be
wrong.

Yet it seems that a number of forces are rising up to attack the
rationalist thinking that has produced this way of life. New
Scientist's own concern in 2005 was - and is - typical: "After two
centuries in the ascendancy, the Enlightenment project is under
threat." That is how the magazine introduced a special issue on
fundamentalism (8 October 2005, p 39), continuing: "Religious
movements are sweeping the globe preaching unreason, intolerance and
dogma, and challenging the idea that rational, secular inquiry is
the best way to understand the world."

Whether the attackers are religious fundamentalists, faith-based
terrorists or practitioners of pseudoscience, the discussion feels
like a cowboy movie, as Daniel Hind suggests in his book The Threat
to Reason (see New Scientist, 19 January, p 46). You either cheer
the sheriff, or get behind the outlaws.

But is it so simple? As A. C. Grayling outlines on page 42, the main
principles of Enlightenment thinking are that humans are rational,
and that we should accept beliefs on the basis of reason, not
authority, tradition or the church. Central to this is the idea that
the universe is a rational system, wholly accessible to detached,
logical enquiry. This magazine stands firmly behind the idea that
such enquiry is indeed the best tool we have to understand the
physical world. But instead of accepting the polarised "good vs
evil" terms in which the reason debate is increasingly framed, this
special report has invited thinkers from all areas of public life to
look more carefully at people's concerns.

The aim is to understand not just the rise in religious
fundamentalism, but phenomena such as the rising popularity of
pseudoscience, the falling number of western children who choose to
study hard science, and the high number of people who doubt human
input in climate change. Might part of the problem be that reason
itself does not always live up to the claims on the label? Might
there be legitimate grounds for being sceptical about reason's scope
and for arguing for its reform?

The first problem our contributors have identified is not with
reason itself, but with its abuse. Sociologist David Miller argues
on page 46 that governments and big corporations have hijacked the
language and methods of reason and science in their PR and
advertising to subvert the ability of people to judge for themselves
- an end directly opposed to the Enlightenment values we supposedly
hold dear. Environmental activist and former US vice-president Al
Algore takes a similar line in his book Assault on Reason (reviewed on
21 July 2007, p 46), in which he argues that propaganda and
advertising are a major threat to reason and therefore to democracy.

The feeling that western, "rational" societies are inescapably
entwined with these anti-rational and anti-democratic forces lies
behind many critiques of the Enlightenment enterprise - from within
these societies and from outside them. Linguist and political
activist Noam Chomsky argues on page 46 that although we may think
of western society as enlightened and free, we are restricted in
what we can think and say. In practice, power is with industry and
the military, and values are determined by corporations and brands,
not individuals and ideals.

The second unifying theme among our contributors, including
philosopher Mary Midgley on page 50, is the concern that science and
reason are increasingly seen as providing not just scientific,
technical and military fixes, but answers to everything that matters
in the world. This alienates people, Midgley warns, because it
leaves no room for morality, art, imperfection and all of the things
that make us human. Is it really surprising that so many turn to
pseudoscience?

As Archbishop Rowan Williams argues on page 44, scientific reasoning
is essential but isn't sufficient to guide our moral lives. It can
never furnish us with absolute conviction about, say, the value of a
human being and the necessity of opposing torture or racial
discrimination. Our sense of human rights must be unconditional,
based on values that we will not surrender, no matter what.

Artist Keith Tyson sees reason as central in our thinking: in fact,
his art is based on keeping the rational and the creative in a
productive tension (see "4: Reason versus creativity and
intuition"). When reason is allowed to sideline the emotional and
intuitive forces that shape the arts, we lose something important.
Meanwhile, bioethicist Tom Shakespeare is concerned with the
qualities that make us human. A properly rational society, he says
on page 48, might advocate a world in which all disability, or old
age for that matter, was eliminated, and it would use medical
science to that end. But he would not have been chosen to live in
such a world - and he would not choose it.

So our current version of reason brings with it major political and
cultural baggage, and leaves out much of what makes life both human
and humane. Some of our contributors bring a third charge: that even
on its own terms, reason must own up to some serious limitations. On
page 45, neuroscientist Chris Frith explains how even when we think
we are being reasonable, we aren't. Our decisions are based on gut
instinct, then justified post hoc - and they are made better when we
don't consciously think about them. Researchers are also starting to
realise that individual judgements they had long categorised as
emotional and irrational may actually be beneficial when seen in the
context of a group.

This raises the question of what we even mean by "reasonable". And
researchers are also having trouble with the meaning of
"scientific". Science, in the sense of carrying out experiments to
test hypotheses, is the best tool we have for understanding the
physical world. But that doesn't make it perfect. In fact, the
philosophical basis of science is looking increasingly shaky as
branches of maths, physics and even biology head into areas that we
can't see how to test.

On page 49, mathematician Roger Penrose points out that many
insights in science and maths are reached without following the
"proper" rules. And Midgley criticises attempts to force all
empirical inquiry into a black-and-white "rational" framework, such
as when behaviourists stripped subjectivity from the study of
psychology. Across biology, scientists are struggling with big
concepts such as life, consciousness and free will, which they are
finding impossible to define, let alone to split up into smaller
components as the traditional reductionist approach to science
requires.

Can we do better? The rationalist world view has been incredibly
successful, transforming human life vastly for the better. But one
big misunderstanding about the Enlightenment is that it is a
finished thing, that all the west need do is convert the rest of the
world to its merits. In contrast, the Enlightenment that Immanuel
Kant described in his seminal essay was an ongoing process. Asking
what's wrong with reason and seeking to improve it falls squarely
within that Enlightenment tradition of trusting our inquiry over
received wisdom.

One central Enlightenment idea was the separation of the human
intellect from nature - the notion of a detached observer who
manipulates and experiments on the world around him. This is not
shared by non-western philosophies, and some argue that rethinking
this separation might offer one way forward. After all, 18th-century
thinkers applied core Enlightenment concepts such as freedom and
equality only to "reasonable" men - that is, white men of a certain
class. We have now extended these rights to poor white men, women
and other races. Could we extend them again?

As far back as 1992, Algore argued in Earth in the Balance (see New
Scientist, 1 August 1992, p 38) that to avert environmental crisis,
the rights and freedoms granted to ever-wider groups of people must
now be applied to future generations and to nature. Feminist and
biologist Donna Haraway (New Scientist, 18 June, p 50) thinks we
should extend those values to include other life forms - and even
non-life - and maybe even the Earth.

As for science itself, we may need to come up with a definition
based on comparing the evidence for rival theories rather than
black-and-white falsification. As Lee Smolin discusses in the online
version of this special, logicians are already devising techniques
that can take into account context and uncertainty.

Meanwhile the political theorist George Lakoff argues in The
Political Mind (reviewed New Scientist, 31 May, p 48) that in a
world of complex and life-or-death decisions on issues ranging from
climate change to cloning, making informed and democratic judgements
will require moving beyond reductionism to a realistic understanding
of how individuals and societies make decisions - emotion, intuition
and all. It's a process Lakoff calls a "21st-century Enlightenment"
and it feeds into another core Enlightenment value, democracy.

The toughest challenge may be distancing science from the vested
interests of governments and corporations, or at least ensuring that
voters understand how various groups are trying to manipulate their
decisions. Miller's key ingredients for science that works for, not
against, Enlightenment values are transparency, stronger ethical
standards and increased public funding.

All this sounds daunting. But to judge by the arguments of our
contributors and others, much is at stake if we don't open reason up
to debate and change. Larger and larger sections of society will be
unable to give informed consent for the actions officials take in
their name; there will be no chance of reining in corporate power -
even if we want to; and important aspects of being human will
continue to be marginalised, probably to the detriment of science
itself. We risk never learning that some of the expectations of
reason are just, well, unreasonable.


Related Articles

New Scientist fundamentalism special
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825205.900
8 October 2005
What are the true threats to reason?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726392.100
19 January 2008
Review: The Assault on Reason by Algore
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526131.800
18 July 2007

+++

A. C. Grayling: How humans dared to know
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.500&print=true
23 July 2008

"ENLIGHTENMENT," wrote Immanuel Kant, "is man's emergence from his
self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's
understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is
self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but
in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from
another. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know!] Have courage to use your own
understanding! That is the motto of enlightenment."

This passage from Kant's 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment?" was not
intended to herald the arrival of an enlightened age, as Kant was
keen to make clear, but only the beginnings of a process that might
lead to one. Progressive thought in the 18th century was far in
advance of the social and political realities of the time, but the
thinkers in its vanguard were sure they were witnessing a new dawn
in human affairs. The revolutions in America and France, and much
that happened in western history since, has proved them right, even
though fierce counter-Enlightenment movements have contested its
principles at every step.

It is important to distinguish between "The Enlightenment" as a
complex historical phenomenon, mainly of the 18th century, and more
general talk of "Enlightenment values", where they are used to
describe rationality, liberty, democracy, pluralism, human rights,
the rule of law and the centrality of science to a proper
understanding of the world.

Of course, these values are descended from those put forward by the
18th-century thinkers, but with the modifications one would expect
from changed historical circumstances. For example, atheism was
regarded with special abhorrence in the 18th century, so to announce
oneself an atheist was impossible unless one was prepared to accept
pariah status in society. Consequently, most agnostics and atheists
described themselves as "Deists", who believed the world had been
created by a deity who had since taken no further interest in it -
and they limited their criticism of religion to criticism of the
church.

As a historical phenomenon, however, the Enlightenment movement
emphasised reliance on reason, sought to take a scientific approach
to social and political questions, championed science, and opposed
the clergy, the church and all forms of superstition as obstacles to
progress. Enlightenment thinkers promoted the rights of man and,
correlatively, opposed the tyranny of absolute monarchy and unjust
social systems associated with it.

The flagship project of the Enlightenment was the compiling of a
great encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des
sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a systematic
dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts), edited by the
philosopher Denis Diderot and the mathematician Jean le Rond
D'Alembert. It was published in multiple volumes between 1751 and
1772, and sought to unite all the best discoveries and thinking in
the natural and social sciences, technology, the arts and crafts,
and philosophy.

The original idea was to translate the English Chambers Cyclopaedia.
Progressive thinkers in France, under the spell of John Locke and
Isaac Newton, wanted to import the enlightened thinking of the
former and the discoveries of the latter. But Diderot and his
collaborators found the Chambers unsatisfactory and resolved to
produce their own. They were conscious that their efforts would be
opposed by traditionalists, not least because the compilers wished
the new knowledge and ways of thinking to create a new social order,
and even a new, freer human being, characterised by the ability to
think for himself and the courage to act on his thought.

In his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, Diderot has Nature say
to Mankind: "In vain... have you sought your happiness beyond the
limits of the world I gave you... Examine the history of all peoples
in all times and you will see that we humans have always been
subject to one of three codes: that of nature, that of society, and
that of religion - and that we have been obliged to transgress all
three... because they could never be in harmony."

Because Enlightenment ideas challenged the vested interests of
church and state, and because they continue to threaten those who,
right or wrong, fear scientific rationality will undermine their
cherished beliefs, there have always been vigorous
counter-Enlightenment movements. Its critics blame it for the worst
excesses of recent history, from the French Revolution's Reign of
Terror (the period of exceptional violence thought to have been
instigated by Robespierre) to 20th-century Nazism and Stalinism.
They also blame it for toppling beauty, morality and faith from the
pedestals they once stood upon, from whence they civilised humanity
in a way scientific rationality, so its critics say, never can.

The first counter-Enlightenment activists were of two broad kinds:
reactionaries, who defended the traditional powers of church and
monarchy, and Romantics, for whom nature, emotion and imagination
were far more important sources of authority than reason, which they
saw as reductive and desiccating.

Reactionaries blamed Robespierre's excesses on the Enlightenment,
choosing not to see the Terror as the opposite of an event promoting
pluralism and individual liberty. Their spokesman, Edmund Burke,
repudiated Enlightenment claims that ultimate political authority
lies with the people. For Burke "the people" were nothing but an
anarchic mob, and democracy nothing but mob rule.

The Romantics found the Enlightenment's emphasis on science not only
reductive but mechanistic and even deterministic. They recoiled from
it, elevated feeling over reason, extolled the passions as routes to
truth, and applauded spontaneity and chance as superior to rigorous
enquiry. No one would wish to deny the importance of feeling, but
out of Romanticism also grew nationalism, theories about the spirit
of a people or race, and a new religious enthusiasm.

After the atrocities of Nazism and Stalinism, new criticisms were
advanced, notably by postmodern thinkers who had been part of the
influential Frankfurt School of sociology. They argued that
Enlightenment rationalism had soured into repressive notions of
bureaucratic efficiency and control, that individuals had become
enslaved to economic forces, and that science had bred scientism, a
salvation myth falsely promising scientific solutions to all
problems, replacing religion as a deceitful and malignant force.

This analysis is odd, not least because it ignores a key feature of
the Enlightenment, namely that it specifically opposed the
monolithic hegemonies of church, state and ideology, arguing instead
for pluralism and individual freedom. Monolithic hegemonies demand
that everyone believes the same thing: the tyrannies of Nazism and
Stalinism were monolithic hegemonies in precisely this sense and
were, therefore, as far from being descendants of the Enlightenment
as could be. In fact, Nazism's roots lay in Romantic notions of race
and its purity as the highest good. Stalinism was the same kind of
juggernaut, using much the same kind of methods as the Inquisition
in 16th-century Europe - terror, oppression, show trials and
execution.

When people talk about "Enlightenment values" now, they tend to mean
a modernised and somewhat idealised take on the 18th-century
version. Enlightenment values today are commitments to individual
autonomy, democracy, the rule of law, science, rationality,
secularism, pluralism, a humanistic ethics, the importance of
education, the promotion of human rights. These are not empty or
abstract ideas. If one compares the lives of ordinary people 300
years ago with those we can enjoy now, the impact of the
Enlightenment on the structure and practice of society can be fully
appreciated - and admired.


Related Articles

A.C.Grayling's Commentary: What is this thing called religion?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826502.300
5 April 2008
A.C.Grayling's Commentary: No, science does not rest on faith
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626331.200
8 December 2007
A.C.Grayling's Commentary: There's no excuse for ignorance
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726422.500
9 February 2008

Weblinks

Book link to Britannica Guide to Ideas that Made the Modern
World
http://www.constablerobinson.com/?section=books&book=the_britannica_guide_to_the_ideas_that_made_the_modern_world_9781845298043_paperback
Video of A.C.Grayling talking about the Enlightenment
http://www.britannica.co.uk/BG_ACGrayling.htm
A.C.Grayling's web page
http://www.acgrayling.com/

+++

Rowan Williams: Reason stands against values and morals
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.600&print=true
23 July 2008

TODAY reason has come to be seen as something exercised by an
individual, but it wasn't always so. Until the early Middle Ages,
being "reasonable" was primarily a matter of being aware of where
you belonged in the cosmos. As a human being you were capable,
unlike other creatures, of knowing who you were. You knew that you
were given the task of using your freedom of choice to act
coherently, in accordance with the whole flow of the universe or,
more simply, the creative will of God.

To have the ability to shape your life in a certain way, rather than
being governed by a system of instinct - impulse and reaction, in
other words - was to have a share in the "rationale" of reality
itself. Being reasonable was like singing in tune (an analogy the
Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome loved to use) with who
you were and what the universe was like.

It was as early as the 12th century that this view was challenged by
people such as the philosopher Peter Abelard, who wanted to be
clearer about reason's function in telling you what was or was not a
good argument. This instrumental view of reason, as the ability to
draw sensible conclusions from what was in front of your eyes
instead of just reacting blindly, had been a smallish area of its
meaning. As enquiry progressed, it steadily colonised the whole
territory.

> From the 16th century, reason came to be seen as opposed to
tradition and authority. Faced with the expectation of believing
something just because a particular sort of person said so, the
reasonable person was now the one who asked: "What are the arguments
for this?" Reason became a tool for protesting against the violence
of arbitrary authority, and the great minds of the Enlightenment
were confident that they were on the side of equality and
universality: being reasonable was the heritage of each human
person. Inherited habit and belief would always, they were sure,
stand in the way of people growing into this universal heritage.

And thus in the early days of the French Revolution, the new regime
tried to replace the traditional days of the week and months of the
year with a new, "rational" calendar - an extreme of opposition
between reason and tradition. In assuming that the essence of being
human was to be found in the capacity to argue your way to the
truth, independently of any legacy from history or community, this
reason created a highly artificial model of humanity, more or less
at odds with how most human beings actually lived.

The result was not an age of unprecedented equality and universal
communication, but a different sort of violence: by "real" human
beings against the unreasonable remainder. There was a constant risk
of slipping into the conclusion - plausible on the grounds of some
sorts of Enlightenment thinking - that the unreasonable human being
didn't count.

Revolutionary America and France lost no sleep over slavery.
Humanity had to wait for another, more traditional sort of
rationality, based on a vision of what human beings were in the eyes
of God and in the frame of the cosmos, to see the slaves finally
emancipated.

As defined by the Enlightenment, rationality could be a tool, not
for protest, but for conformity to the agenda of those who saw
themselves as fully qualified rational human beings, at the expense
of the rest. Even gentle, wise Darwin could use language suggesting
that some humans were less "developed", nearer their primate
cousins, than others. That language was gleefully exploited by
ideologues of empire and racial domination.

These are not grounds for overturning the entire legacy of the
Enlightenment, but for pausing before we assume that instrumental
reason will answer all the questions about how to shape a moral and
humane world. Absolute convictions about human worth, those which
prescribe unconditional opposition to experiments on non-consenting
subjects, or to racial discrimination, are not simply generated by
instrumental reason. They have more in common with the pre-modern
"rationality" of recognising oneself and one's fellow humans as
standing together in a common relation with a certain kind of
"order", a way things "just are" in the universe.

This recognition of commonality is at the simplest level what makes
language possible. Instead of indulging in a pointless stand-off
between reason and conviction, perhaps we should ask how the meaning
of reason can recover some resonance with those skills of
self-knowledge and coherent or consistent choice which once belonged
to the word.

Related Articles

Archbishop Rowan Williams on Creationism
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925443.900
25 March 2006

Weblinks

Archbishop of Canterbury's official website
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on St Anselm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anselm/
The Stoic Philosophers entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/stoicmind.htm
Beyond Belief website
http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief/about/

+++

Chris Frith: No one really uses reason
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.700&print=true
23 July 2008

THOUGH many may find it troubling, it is now clear that few of the
active processes occurring in our brains ever impinge on our
awareness. In other words, we do most of our "thinking" without ever
being conscious of it. The simple act of seeing something depends
upon what the German physicist, doctor and philosopher Hermann von
Helmholtz called "unconscious inferences". It is these that enable
our brain to work out which object is causing the crude signals
coming from our senses. The same principle applies to action. When
we perform a simple action, picking up a glass, for example, we are
not aware of the complex decisions our brain has to make about the
best way to move our arm and shape our fingers.

It is a good thing that we are not aware of these low-level
inferences. The truth is that we would never do anything if we had
to think consciously about everything we see and every move we make.
And it turns out that even quite important decisions involving many
factors, such as choosing which car to buy, are better made if we
don't consciously think about them. This is because the unconscious
brain is very good at taking many things into account at the same
time. We suspect that as soon as you start thinking about those
things consciously, a brain system with very limited capacity is
employed, which can concentrate on just a few items.

So where does conscious reasoning come into the picture? It is an
attempt to justify the choice after it has been made. And it is,
after all, the only way we have to try to explain to other people
why we made a particular decision. But given our lack of access to
the brain processes involved, our justification is often spurious: a
post-hoc rationalisation, or even a confabulation - a "story" born
of the confusion between imagination and memory.

Taking all of this into account, what then is reason? Just because
our decisions are not conscious, it does not follow that reason is
not involved. Given two options, the reasonable thing to do is to
choose the better option. Brains are very good at doing this. After
all, this is the basis of learning: to choose the nice things and
avoid the nasty ones.

Economists and mathematicians, such as John Nash of A Beautiful Mind
fame, have developed mathematical algorithms to ensure the best
option is chosen - and brains have been shown to use similar
mechanisms. The problem lies in deciding what we mean by "best". For
Rational Economic Man, the best choice is the one that gets him the
most gain. But do real people make such "best" choices?

In the experimental Ultimatum game, for example, suppose one player
is given $10, and can give any proportion of this money to the
second player. If the second player refuses their offer, then
neither player gets any money. What should the second player do? The
rational action is to accept any offer since some money is better
than none. But in reality most people reject low offers.

This result is often understood to show that people are
unreasonable, that their judgement is clouded by their emotional
response to an unfair offer. However, from the point of view of the
group, rather than the individual, the rejection of unfair offers is
a good choice because it increases the likelihood of group
cooperation and fairness. In this case, therefore, we can argue that
our emotional responses are more reasonable than our conscious
decisions.

In the 21st century, we are discovering more and more about the
brain and the role of emotion, and challenging old ideas about how
we learn, make decisions, act and remember. This is already
beginning to make us revise our notions of what constitutes reason -
and that, in turn, is bound to have consequences for our attitudes
to reason and to the endeavours of scientists.

Related Articles

Determining free will by Chris Frith
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526162.100
11 August 2007
Ten ways to make better decisions
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19426021.100
5 May 2007
Is this a unified theory of the brain?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826586.100
28 May 2008

Weblinks

Chris Frith at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL
http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/Frith/
Chris Frith is Niels Bohr Visiting Professor at the Center of
Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, University of Aarhus,
Denmark
http://www.cfin.au.dk/menu0-en
Making up the Mind by Chris Frith
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405160225.html
The famously tricky videos of a man in a gorilla suit: why do
people fail to see it?
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html
Links to downloadable examples of change blindness: our brain
processes are such that it is possible for us to view a scene
and apparently fail to detect large changes in that scene
http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/index.html

+++
David Miller and Noan Chomsky: I hear 'reason', I see lies
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.800&print=true
23 July 2008

STRATEGIC use of science, or the appearance of science, is a
well-used part of the armoury of the public relations industry. It
is effective - it delayed action on tobacco for decades - and it
poisons the public perception of actual science. The public
relations and lobbying industries were themselves founded on
attempts to pervert rationality and science in the service of vested
interests. The very earliest PR practitioners, such as Sigmund
Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, were adept at this. Bernays famously
put psychology to use in promoting cigarettes to women in the 1920s
- by styling them "torches of freedom" and associating them with
equality.

Bernays was among the first to make a profession out of what he
called the "conscious and intelligent manipulation" of the beliefs
and behaviour of the public. Those who "manipulate this unseen
mechanism" of society were, he wrote in his book Propaganda, an
"invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country".

The PR industry today prefers to be invisible, particularly when its
task is to fend off the consequences of actual science. When the
desired message is likely to be treated with scepticism if given
openly by a corporation or politician, it must be put in the mouth
of someone seemingly disinterested. What appears more disinterested
than a dissenting view from a scientist? When the interested party
needs an even greater distance between them and their message, the
PR industry sets up "third party" front groups.

Both tactics are clearly documented in the battle to protect the
tobacco industry. We see the same strategy of publicising doubts -
enough to prevent political action, or merely to delay it until a
return has been made on investments - in today's strategic use of
science in climate-change denial, and to muddy the waters around
obesity and binge-drinking as they become crisis issues.

A local case that I have followed in detail started with a study of
toxic industrial contaminants in farmed salmon, published in Science
in 2004 (vol 303, p 227). It was greeted with a chorus of
condemnation in the press. Many of the voices were described as
academic scientists, yet almost all had financial links to the
industry which were undisclosed in the reporting. The study was
actually well grounded, but the campaign to remove the stain of
"poisoned salmon" from the public mind was largely successful.

On a bigger scale, while the International Life Science Institute
(ILSI) sounds scientific, it is actually a food-industry lobby group
funded by hundreds of the biggest food, pharma and chemical
companies. For years it was more or less directed by the Coca Cola
company. It was able to infiltrate the World Health Organization
process examining dietary sugars by covertly funding some of the
scientists involved. In January 2006, the WHO decided that ILSI
could no longer take part in WHO activities setting microbiological
or chemical standards for food and water.

The PR industry remains busy creating and managing front groups. The
Scientific Alliance turned out to be run from the offices of
Foresight Communications, a PR firm in central London, and at launch
was funded by Scottish quarry owner Robert Durward.

The Social Issues Research Centre "fosters the image of... a
heavyweight research body," as Annabel Ferriman wrote in the British
Medical Journal in 1999 (vol 319, p 716). It is run by the
PR/marketing company MCM Research, which used to announce on its
website: "Do your PR initiatives sometimes look too much like PR
initiatives? MCM conducts psychological research on the positive
aspects of your business... The results do not read like PR."

Ironically, the biggest asset such operations have is humans' deeply
ingrained sense of fairness. They do not have to win a scientific
argument. They merely have to convince citizens - among them
politicians, judges and juries - that there are "two sides to the
argument". The stage for inaction, or rather for continuing their
sponsors' harmful activities, is thus set. Worse, perhaps, in
principle, is the creation of a perception that all rational inquiry
is serving some hidden interest. If every dispute is presented as
having two incomprehended sides, why, in fairness, not see them as
equivalent?

The defence is simple: full public funding of research, with
enhanced ethics standards including transparency about funding.
Simple in principle, that is.

On co-option: Anything that is co-optable is going to be co-opted by
power systems for doctrinal purposes - for exploitation, violence,
oppression, whatever - and science is no exception. So scientists
should be very scrupulous and clear about the limits of their
understanding - particularly important in a culture that tends to be
deferential to expertise. Claims are made by real scientists that go
way beyond what they could possibly support. That leads to blind
acceptance of, or scepticism about science, both wrong.

On reason and power: George Orwell said that in a free society,
ideas can be suppressed but without the use of force. He refers to
the indoctrination of educated people, which instils the notion that
there are things you don't talk about. Reason is "dangerous" because
it leads you to question faith, not just faith that the world was
created 6000 years ago but faith in the secular religions that lead
to state power. Take Iraq. In the US we cannot have a principled
discussion about the invasion of Iraq as we can about the Russian
invasion of Chechnya. It's taken for granted that our goals, if
achievable, are the right goals. If we approached this with reason,
meaning that we apply the same standards to ourselves that we do to
others, we would have a radical critique of power structures, and
that can't be tolerated.

I think the sharpest turn away from reason is among the educated
intellectuals, who advocate reason and blame others for turning away
from it. If we can't even reach the level of applying to ourselves
rational standards of the kind that we apply to others, our
commitment to reason is very thin.

Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology

See www.newscientist.com/reason for the full interview

Weblinks

Spinwatch - co-founded by David Miller
http://www.spinwatch.org/
Sourcewatch - database of PR operations
http://www.Sourcewatch.org
David Miller, Univeristy of Strathclyde
http://gs.strath.ac.uk/content/view/96/112/
A Century of Spin: How public relations became the cutting edge
of corporate power
http://www.plutobooks.com/cgi-local/nplutobrows.pl?chkisbn=9780745326887&main=

+++

Keith Tyson: Reason excludes creativity and intuition
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926661.900&print=true
23 July 2008

I'M A great lover of science. It's a fascinating language that I use
regularly, and its brilliant insights have inspired my artworks,
including some based on mathematical systems that are attempting to
visualise higher dimensions: things that we can't make a picture of
yet which can be described mathematically. The challenge is to find
ways I can use concepts that cannot be visualised in two, three or
four dimensions, and yet somehow cast shadows into the world, rather
like a hypercube. These concepts are very exciting because they're
both rational and counterintuitive.

Here art has an advantage over science in that its methodology can
be tumbling and contradictory, whereas strict mathematical language
tends to be built on axioms, rules of inference and theorems, and
has to be consistent. With art you make a creative leap of faith,
and later you explain it.

I'm not interested in science as a process, but I am interested in
nature, and science is a very convenient and elegant language to use
to explore that. I have works I call the Nature Paintings, not
because they are pictures of nature, as in Constable, but because
they are paintings made by nature, made by the same forces that made
me and you, and the Earth.

They happened when I tried to find chemicals with different
viscosities and hydrophobic qualities that didn't mix well and
reacted in certain ways to heat. I put them together to create
chemical reactions that were scale-invariant, so zoom in and the
painting looks as intricate and fractally beautiful as it does from
a distance. Some of the paintings are reminiscent of cell structures
or river basins. My conclusion, rational or otherwise, is that this
is because the same mathematical laws, in a closed system, operate
in my painting as operate in that cell wall or river basin. So, I
really didn't do them, nature did - although I get a cut!

This makes me feel nostalgic for the days when there was no
differentiation between being a natural historian or an
artist-theologian. The lives of Newton or da Vinci seem much richer.
The specification and reductionism of knowledge has given us many
technological advancements, but I feel that we've lost a holistic
synthesis. That's not a cerebral question, it's an emotional one.

If you're using reason alone, you're looking at the phenomena and at
your paradigm. Ultimately, you will change your paradigm to make
sense of the paradoxes that occur, so reason can be a very slow
process - it requires a very incremental approach, since those
axioms must be preserved if the method of reason is going to be
maintained.

Using a more intuitive approach can accelerate the process, but to
prove or disprove the result by reason is a long process, and as an
artist you're impatient. When people say things, you draw
conclusions that are not reasonable, but they are emotional or
intuitive, and often very fulfilling creatively - science would
never accept that.

When we look at the offspring of reason, such as string theory,
which is currently getting a bad press, they look as if reason
originally came up with extremely elegant ideas but that now they've
got very convoluted. My intuition is that a much simpler paradigm is
required to solve the problem: so long as you're trying to solve it
using the kind of thinking that created it, you'll come up with
complex, bizarre ideas. If you're going to have a grand unified idea
of reality, which is basically the simplest reflection of your
paradigm, it's hard to do that the incremental way because you can't
make a sweeping judgement: you're "artistically" stuck in your
process!


Related Articles

Interview with Keith Tyson
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17924135.200
14 December 2002
Creativity special issue
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825231.400
29 October 2005

Weblinks

Video of Keith Tyson talk at Tate Modern
http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/BP_artist_talks/kei
th_tyson/default.jsp
A Keith Tyson website
http://www.adaweb.com/influx/tyson/home.html
Video of Keith Tyson artwork called Large Field Array at the
PaceWildenstein gallery in New York
http://www.pacewildenstein.com/images/FLV_VIDEOS/45685_TYSON.html

+++

Tom Shakespeare: Whose reason is it anyway?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.000&print=true
23 July 2008

THE 18th-century challenges to superstition, religion, prejudice,
monarchical government and lack of freedom all made sense. Replacing
the oppressive baggage of the past with ideas of individual
autonomy, liberty and, above all, reason, was a considerable step
forward. The fruits of that reason have transformed our world and
brought many benefits and riches, but they have also brought
problems which are rarely discussed in mainstream discourse.

Feminist theorists, for example, argue that the Enlightenment's
focus on the individual, on rights, on reason, ignores the
complicated and subtle web of networks that we are part of: the
interdependencies and the relationships. For them, it's not just
about individual choice, but about the context in which we choose.

Then there is the problem that the brain is a "feeling" brain as
well as a "thinking" brain. Many modern thinkers are increasingly
turning to the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza for
inspiration. Spinoza was a pantheist: for him, God was immanent. He
did not believe in mind/body dualism, nor that everything is
rational, pure and perfect, and that the body contaminates. For
people such as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio or Gaia-theorist James
Lovelock, Spinoza holds promise because his thinking offers a way to
integrate disparate parts of what it is to be human, and a way to
avoid separating humans from nature.

Important things happen when you leave out nature, the body,
emotion, the complexity with which lives are lived. The utilitarian
thinkers who follow the Enlightenment to its hyper-rational
conclusions create arguments with no detail, no bodies, no nature,
no complexity. When they say "look, there is your solution", it
doesn't work because once you have removed the richness and
complexity, you're left with a judgement that is very difficult to
implement. It's just not how people work.

A few years ago, I was interested to find when talking to a famous
utilitarian philosopher that he and his partner did not want to know
the sex of their fetus. When I asked why, he replied, what if the
fetus is severely impaired and they had to decide about withdrawing
care? In that case (and both of them were medical doctors, by the
way), they thought it would be better not to have identified with
the embryo so that it would be easier to turn off the machines.

This focus on rationality doesn't speak to how people usually
understand their lives and so they reject it for homeopathy, diet
pills and Sunday Sun (or The National Enquirer) stories about planes
on Mars. People understand the world in stories, not dry
rationality. It's not that they are unreasonable, it's that we need
ways to look at the world which are both as empirically accurate and
rationally sustainable as possible, but which also speak to everyday
experience and do not exclude as mere superstition or irrationality
the ways most people most of the time live their lives.

The trouble is we don't seem to know how to do this. Measurement,
league tables and quantification dominate. A recent news story
reported that UK nurses will be rated on how often they smile,
thereby reducing to simple arithmetic the most complicated, subtle
and important of human interactions - care. We can't agree on thick,
complex issues, on our goals, so we spend a lot of time thinking
about thin, process measures. How do we measure this? How do we
judge that?

If utilitarianism or "straightforward" rationality dominates, and if
you fail to see what makes life worth living, many things follow.
Disabled or older people become too costly to keep alive. You judge
people on their output or performance. Whereas if we look at what we
want - happiness, fulfilment and positive living - none of that
matters. Most of us aspire to, long for, a much more human-sized,
human-centred, emotionally mature way of living, but the chance of
that is being squeezed out. If your measure is very objective,
rational and limited, you end up with a certain type of school,
child, human and society, but it's not one that I'd want to live in,
and I think increasingly for many people, it's not one they want to
live in either.


Related Articles

New Scientist Debate: The search for perfection
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17423425.700
11 May 2002
UK moves to ban sex selection
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4375
12 November 2003
I see a long life and a healthy one...
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17623704.900
23 November 2002

Weblinks

Web page at University of Newcastle's Policy, Ethics and Life
Sciences Research Centre
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/peals/people/profile/t.w.shakespeare
Diasability Rights and Wrongs by Tom Shakespeare
http://www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn=9780415347181
Guardian profile
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/tomshakespeare

+++

Roger Penrose: Reason destroys itself
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.100&print=true
23 July 2008

DO WE know for certain that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Of course we don't.

Maybe every time everybody in the whole world has ever done that
calculation and reasoned it through, they've made a mistake. Maybe
it isn't 4, it's really 5.

There is a very, very small chance that this has happened. But now I
am talking about probabilities: I am using mathematics again, on the
basis that it makes sense in the first place. So my reasoning is
circular and, as often happens, you have to stand back and ask,
well, what is reasonable?

We have to distinguish this question from pure Reason - with a
capital "R". Philosopher David Hume notoriously argued, applying the
rules of that formal Reason, that induction is impossible: however
often we add 2 to 2 and get 4, that does not logically tell us
anything about the result next time. And doubt does permeate all our
reasoning, or should. But at some point we have to stand back and
ask what is reasonable - with a small "r".

When we ask what is reasonable from our direct experiences, we are
finding and applying general rules about behaviour which are
consistent. In mathematics we demand absolute formal consistency.
But often, even when you're doing mathematics, you explore something
by trying to prove it, get stuck, and say, oh, maybe it's not true,
and look for a reasonable path for your next round of applying pure
Reason.

The mathematician Kurt Gödel went through a process like this as he
destroyed any hope that formal Reason could be universal. In 1900
David Hilbert proposed that we should build the whole of mathematics
on formal, logical rules. But in 1931 Gödel showed that if you have
any set of trustable rules that are computationally checkable (a
machine could go through them and see whether you've applied them
correctly), then statements exist that you have to accept as well,
according to the rules, but that you cannot arrive at by means of
those rules.

Gödel used the word "intuition" to describe how you get to those
statements. For me, that word has connotations which are not quite
appropriate: I'd say we need understanding and insight. Gödel's
result is one of the things some people correctly use to pick holes
in Reason. Another is the very unreasonable behaviour of quantum
mechanics where, for example, particles seem to be able to be in two
places at once. This doesn't match our normal experience, so we say
it's unreasonable.

Personally, I think there is something not quite right about quantum
mechanics. And quantum mechanics seems to be to blame for some
people who'd like to be exempt from Reason being able to say:
"Science is full of these contradictions and unreasonableness - and
so I can more or less say anything."

You had people saying we shouldn't turn on the Large Hadron Collider
experiment because a small probability exists that it might create
black holes that would annihilate Earth. Sensible scientists say
that this is ridiculous, there's no chance. On the other hand,
there's a small chance that accepted theory is wrong, so there is a
chance!

That's one example of people putting unreasonable standards on being
sure. Another is climate change. Most scientists say that the
climate is changing and it's changing for quite clear reasons -
because we are pumping in all this carbon dioxide, for one. There's
no puzzle, we can see it happening, and we can see why it's
happening. But a few don't agree. True, sometimes the small minority
turns out to be right. But it doesn't mean you should do what the
small minority say. The majority is a majority for good reasons.

To me, Reason is essential for human discourse and all forms of
enquiry, whether legal or scientific or mathematical. It is
absolutely central. But we have to be reasonable about it.

Weblinks

David Hume's writings
http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/hume/index.htm
Kurt Gödel
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Godel.html

+++

Mary Midgley: Reason is just another faith
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19926662.200&print=true
23 July 2008

IN 1960 Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent
India, wrote: "It is science alone that can solve the problems of
hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition
and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to
waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people... The future
belongs to science and to those who make friends with science."

This was doubtless intended as a manifesto for reason, but it also
sums up a major justification people have for objecting to reason.
Such pronouncements were common at that time. The crucial words in
Nehru's stirring speech, for me, are "science alone". It is this
exclusiveness that is the trademark of scientism: the belief in the
unconditional supremacy of physical science - or of Science with a
capital "S" - over all other forms of thought. Scientism sparked
many movements, both in thought and politics, especially during the
20th century, from so-called "scientific socialism" to the doctrine
in psychology called "behaviourism".

Taken literally, Nehru's proposal is odd. We might think, for
instance, that we obviously need other things, such as good laws,
good institutions and a clear understanding of history, as well as
science, to solve the problems he named. He surely knew this, but he
put science first because he thought it was the only cure for what
he considered the central cause of present evils - religion.

This function of subverting religion played a huge part in the
widespread exaltation of science at this time, both in the east and
west. Throughout the Enlightenment, reformers who were struggling
against the power of the church had called for the use of reason to
undermine Christianity.

But the term "reason" proved ambiguous and, in the 20th century, the
rallying cry shifted to something that seemed more specific, namely
science. This had awkward effects. It put off those who did not want
to be cured of religion and also - perhaps even more unfortunately -
it led to science's functioning like a kind of rival religion
itself.

The central question here is about trust. What do you put your faith
in? The kind of faith that Nehru expresses in science is absolute.
It is not at all the qualified, provisional acceptance that might
suit actual scientific findings. It claims to answer not just
factual questions but every kind of social and moral dilemma. It
offers general salvation.

This sort of unconditional, general reliance on a single authority
is never sensible, whatever god it may invoke. No system provides an
infallible oracle; different problems need different ways of
thinking.

Indeed the sciences themselves are various and use all sorts of
methods. Of course there are clear cases, such as evolution, where
scientific doctrines are needed to correct particular non-scientific
ones. But controversy on such topics inevitably involves a wide
clash of imaginative visions which cannot possibly fall under the
physical sciences.

Science then no longer stands for enquiry but for ideology,
authority, a general approach to life which demands to prevail in
all conflicts: that is, it is turned into scientism. And, as past
experience shows, that ideology can include some very odd
components. The most obvious example is eugenics, the programme of
"improving" the human race. This was fully accepted as an authentic
part of science from the time when the Victorian polymath Francis
Galton invented the term and proposed incentives for "the lights of
the nation" to breed early and often. That was until the arrival of
the Nazis, whose activities suddenly made the fearful overtones of
eugenics plain.

Another example - less deadly but perhaps more confusing - was the
campaign by behaviourists, led by the psychologist B. F. Skinner
from the 1950s, to drive all discussion of subjective experience out
of psychology. Though this movement had no real scientific basis it
has been extraordinarily successful in paralysing thought for much
of the last century. Indeed, it has managed to send the crucial
topic of consciousness - of our own most intimate experience - into
a limbo which it is now proving very hard to extract it from. The
campaign has made, and still makes it hard to discuss our
subjectivity not as a delusion but as an objective fact, to say that
we do have experiences and inner states.

The behaviourist project was, of course, part of a campaign to
subordinate the social sciences and humanities to science, on the
assumption that they were all merely "folk" doctrines - primitive,
uninstructed habits which needed to be simplified, boiled down and
reduced ultimately to physics. Indeed, excepting the long-standing
war with fundamentalist churches in the US (which is essentially
political), it is the social sciences and humanities that have
lately been the main targets of scientistic campaigning.

Science does not need to be defended in this way and it is surely
not surprising if this kind of reductive chauvinism sometimes
confuses the bystanders and makes them hostile.

Weblinks

Galton.org - document archive
http://www.galton.org/
The Galton Institute "to promote the public understanding of
human heredity"
http://www.galtoninstitute.org.uk/
B. F. Skinner Foundation
http://www.bfskinner.org/
Noam Chomsksy reviews B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957)
http://cogprints.org/1148/0/chomsky.htm

+++

Lee Smolin: Negotiating diversity
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14378&print=true
18:00 23 July 2008 [online only]

Ever since the Enlightenment, the idea that human beings can resolve
their differences through reason has been the basis of enormous
progress, spiritual, as well as material. To the age of reason we
owe not only our prosperity, medicine and technology, but also the
emancipation of women and slaves, the view that we are all at root
the same, the idea that those governed must give their consent, and
the principles that education, healthcare and social security are
rights.

To me it is most puzzling that so many who live well because of the
triumph of reason are unable to forcefully answer the challenges to
its reliability which are being increasingly heard. One common
challenge to the domain of reason springs from the worry that
science and technology can have bad consequences if decisions about
their use are divorced from human values. At issue is how much
reason can play a role in decisions about the use of science and
technology.

When we attempt to resolve the difficult problems raised by science
we encounter a second problem, which arises from the diversity of
contemporary societies. The older notions of liberal democracy grew
out of societies where everyone had the same background and history.
Today, a citizen of the UK, Sweden, Canada, France or the US may
have any ethnic origin, any appearance, and practice any religion or
none. Diversity is increasingly becoming the norm, as unprecedented
mobility delivers a planetary society.

But as we move around and mix, our differences move with us and, if
anything, deepen as the number of philosophies, religions and life
styles combine and multiply in unexpected ways. The challenge is how
to have a diverse, multicultural society that is based on reason.

Two principles

The answer is that we cannot expect to agree about everything. Nor
should we: history has shown that a society in complete agreement is
impossible, and societies led by religious or political fanatics who
attempted to impose agreement, failed - without exception. The
success of the pluralistic nations tell us that diversity of views,
faiths and styles of living and thinking are good for everyone.

The key question, then, is when do we have to attempt to reach
agreement - and how do we do it? For me, the answer turns on two
ethical principles that underlie the successes of societies that
embraced the Enlightenment. These principles underlie the practices
of democracy and bind scientists together into ethical communities,
formed for the purpose of expanding knowledge.

The first principle is that if an issue can be decided by people of
good faith, applying rational argument to publicly available
evidence, then it must be so decided. The second is that, if, on the
other hand, rational argument from the publicly-available evidence
does not succeed in bringing people of good faith to agreement,
society must allow and encourage people to draw diverse conclusions.

The subject of both principles is when and how we transform
disagreement into agreement. The first principle says there are
conditions under which we are obliged to come to agreement, no
matter how diverse our original views This underlies the scientific
processes whereby originally competing views and research programmes
come to a firm consensus, and it is the ability to resolve
disagreement that makes science possible. This principle also
underlies the working of juries and judges and so is the foundation
of our society of laws.

The second, equally important principle tells us what to do when
reason applied to the publicly-available evidence does not suffice,
which is that we must agree to disagree. Clearly, disagreements
about religious faith are not in the domain that can be answered
under the first principle, so here we must allow and even encourage
a diversity of views. As Thomas Jefferson said: "It does me no
injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no God. It
neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Disagreement is good

These principles, crucial in the narrower societies of Enlightenment
times, are even more necessary in our more diverse societies. And
their power, in combination, explains the paradox that knowledge
increases fastest in communities that allow the widest range of
disagreements among experts, consistent with the evidence at any
given time. The progress of science is definitive and unrelenting
exactly because scientists come to consensus only when they are
forced to by reason.

Interestingly, embracing the diversity surrounding a core of
consensus is also a theme of much modern science. There are even new
forms of logic, which capture these two principles. In contrast to
classical logic, not all propositions have truth values. In
addition, different propositions can have truth values or not,
depending on the larger context in which the question is being
asked. But when two contexts both allow a proposition to have a
truth value, those truth values must agree. This echoes the
situation in a relativistic universe, where different observers in
different regions of space-time have different, partial views of the
world. And it is seen in quantum mechanics, as well, where different
questions can be asked using different, mutually incompatible
experimental set-ups.

This extended form of rationality does not require that we agree
about everything. Instead, it gives us enormous freedom to explore
novel ways of thinking, ensuring that human life will be forever an
exploration of the new. But it also gives us a basis for unity, for
to be human is to be capable of reason and so, when the
publicly-available evidence suffices to decide a question, we are
under an obligation to our fellow humans to acknowledge the joint
power of our common reason by agreeing with each other. The bottom
line is that this combination of freedom and necessity is the
dynamic that will keep human society developing and thriving, often
in unexpected ways, so long as we are human.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826571.900
21 May 2008
Commentary: What is this thing called religion?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826502.300
05 April 2008
Infected with science: If religion is a cultural virus,
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg14019053.800
25 December 1993

Weblinks

Lee Smolin
http://www.leesmolin.com/

+++

Mary Midgley: Reason eats itself
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14387&print=true
18:00 23 July 2008 [online only]

Benjamin Franklin said that in this world nothing is certain except
death and taxes. But might not these exceptions themselves have
exceptions that spoil their certainty? If governments collapsed
entirely, might they not stop collecting taxes? And researchers
today are claiming that they will soon cure us of our bad habit of
dying...

The history of thought is in fact littered with supposedly-safe
generalizations that have later been found full of holes. Yet the
longing for real, unconditional, watertight infallibility still
persists, and has produced endless systems designed to make error
impossible. That hope has, indeed, been a powerful motive in the
development of modern intellectual disciplines, including the
physical sciences.

But repeated disappointments about it have led some of the punters
to become disillusioned with thought-systems altogether, producing a
quite general distrust and hostility to "reason" as such a
conviction that reasoning eats itself, that all thinking can be
invalidated by further thought.

Thus the philosopher David Hume, after displaying a number of
puzzling paradoxes, concluded in 1739 that, "the understanding, when
it acts alone, and according to its most general principles,
entirely subverts itself". We should, he said, therefore never take
its conclusions seriously "If we believe that fire warms, or water
refreshes, 'tis only because it costs us too much pains to think
otherwise."

Logic isn't everything

Hume did not actually advise us to stop thinking: only to stop
supposing that our thoughts have any justification. Belief, he said,
is "more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative
part of our natures" something that we cannot help doing, like a
reflex twitch, not a real answer to a real need.

Accordingly, he concluded, "Reason is, and ought only to be, the
slave of the passions", simply a means to enjoyment. This seems much
like what people today rather oddly call "irony", a detachment
designed to insure us against getting committed to mistakes. Yet
Hume, who was himself the most passionate and committed of
disbelievers, certainly did not take up that position. And in fact
it is not clear that thought could go on at all in such a rarefied
vacuum. In order to make actual decisions we need serious standards
of what is or is not satisfactory.

Hume's mistake lay in defining reason far too narrowly, as mere
logic. This splits it off entirely from the rest of our thinking.

Like the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes and the ancient
Greek philosophers, Hume thought that real knowledge had to be
infallible. In order to achieve this they had proposed that it is
guaranteed, as mathematics is, by logical necessity. But this
deductive model is actually only one in great spectrum of patterns
that we use in making sense of the world around us.

How to think

To go back to Franklin's example of death, the mere formal structure
of the familiar argument "All men are mortal Socrates is a man so
Socrates is mortal", does nothing to protect its premises. The bold
claim about "all men" has no logical backing; and the doomed attempt
to invent one for it gave rise to endless inconclusive worrying
about the "problem of induction". Seeing this difficulty, Hume
concluded that real knowledge simply didn't exist.

If, however, we ask how we actually form such generalizations the
answer surely is that we do it not by logic but by
pattern-recognition, using a great complex background of comparisons
and analogies which we are naturally able to spot and, when
necessary, to criticise.

These methods certainly don't make us infallible; that ambition is
best given up. But, systematically used, they do reliably help us to
move away from error. They therefore provide something far more
effective than the random flux of motives, organised only by habit,
which Hume called "the passions". They give us a structured
imaginative framework for our experience, one which we continually
build up and refine throughout our lives.

This framework is what we mean when we say that somebody is
reasonable or rational. We are not praising their skill in logic,
but their open-minded approach to difficulties, an approach which
flows from a sane, balanced structure of thought.

The opposite of reasonable here is not illogical but unbalanced,
one-sided, obsessed, prejudiced, pig-headed, deranged unable to hear
suggestions from outside. Unreasonable people do, of course, have a
handy solution to the problem of certainty. They can just feel
certain right away. But those of us who would like to add to that
feeling the extra advantage of actually being right need to listen
to outside sources, and to use our great battery of imaginative
faculties to assess what they are telling us. The kind of certainty
that this sort of reasoning gives us is indeed never absolute, but
as far as it goes it is genuine. And that, perhaps, is what human
life most requires.


Related Articles

Review: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225721.600
07 October 2006
The memoirs of Mary Midgley
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825272.100
26 November 2005
Mary, Mary quite contrary
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17223154.800
03 November 2001

+++

Tom Shakespeare: A world based on reason
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14385&print=true
18:00 23 July 2008 [online only]

Recently I listened with mounting irritation to a famous English
philosopher, armoured with all the self-righteousness of humanist
rationality, pouring scorn on those benighted souls who persist in
outdated religious belief. No theist myself, I came out of the
meeting more worried than ever by those who are utterly confident of
the triumph of reason.

First, I think human beings are evolved to be believing beings. Carl
Jung said: "You can take away a man's gods, only to give him others
in return." Humpty Dumpty's pride in sometimes believing six
impossible things before breakfast may be an extreme case, but
examples of credulity or faith are easy to find.

Second, I find the utilitarian bioethics of a Peter Singer at
Princeton University (or a Julian Savulescu at the University of
Oxford) to be a powerful example of what goes wrong when we value
logic and consistency above wisdom and pragmatism. It may be
"rational" to try everything to avoid having a disabled child or
even to kill a newborn with disabilities to avoid the burden of care
or the suffering of a difficult life. But a world ruled by such cold
moral arithmetic would not be one in which I would like to live.

Disability is part of the human condition: we are all impaired and
will all become more so. We must accept disability as part of the
diversity of embodiment, not seek to eliminate it at all costs. As
Immanuel Kant wrote: "From the crooked timber of humanity nothing
straight was ever made."

Third, I have found emotion and feeling are a necessary and
unavoidable part of thinking through complex dilemmas. This is not
to say we should be governed by our emotions as in the notorious
"yuck factor" underpinning reactions to developments such as hybrid
embryos or xenotransplantation. But nor can we wish away the rich
and subtle cultural and psychological complications surrounding
deeply meaningful issues such as the food we eat, how we make
babies, or engage with our bodies and the products of our bodies.

Feel, then think

At Newcastle University we researched public feelings about whether
parents should be able to choose the sex of their children. Most
bioethicists find it hard to see strong reasons against this. But
more than 80% of respondents consistently feel it would be wrong.
They use phrases such as "children should be a gift, not a
commodity" to justify their beliefs. Perhaps it is simply
unfamiliarity with the new possibility of embryo selection over time
resistance may diminish.

In explaining this divergence between philosophers and lay people,
we found moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt's work helpful. He
challenges the idea that people form moral judgements as judges do,
that is, listen to both sides and reach a balanced verdict. He says
people are like barristers, who start with an intuition, and look
for supporting arguments. He calls this "post-hoc rationalisation".

This is exactly what we found. Respondents could cite reasons to
support their view of social sex selection, but they had reached
their position because of an intuition. But then, I am not so sure
philosophers are so different from the lay public, it's just that
the former are trained to cover their tracks with an impressive
edifice of arguments and logic. It is hard to be truly objective, to
eliminate our history and culture and psychology from our thinking.
Even bioethicists are human.

So I don't hate reason, and I certainly don't want to dispense with
rationality. Faced with the rhetoric of a bigot, I reach for
rationality every time to counter his prejudices. But I also
recognise that the twisted beliefs of racists or homophobes emerge
from a complex mix of fears, half-truths and insecurities. Logic and
evidence rarely suffice to dislodge them.

For me, ethical judgement has three facets. Strong arguments plus
good empirical data, certainly, but let's open a place for feelings,
emotions and beliefs. They are part of the human approach to making
sense of the world and we would be much worse off without them. I
reserve the right to be inconsistent, ground my thinking in messy
practicalities, and live up to the fundamental messiness of life.
Rationality is a tool, not a universal acid. After all, didn't Niels
Bohr once retort to a pig-headed colleague: "You aren't thinking.
You are just being logical."


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Exploring the moral maze
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825271.700
26 November 2005
Is accuracy alarmist?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18124396.300
20 March 2004
Only human
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg16522202.800
08 January 2000

Weblinks

Tom Shakespeare
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/peals/people/profile/t.w.shakespeare

+++

Peter Singer: Science and morals
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn14384&print=true
18:00 23 July 2008 [online only]

It's true: reason does undermine values and morals but only, of
course, those that cannot be rationally defended, and which we are
better off without. That might seem obvious, but because this
category includes some very firmly-held principles, reason has been
portrayed as a threat to morality.

Consider, for example, the idea that all human beings have a moral
status superior to that of any nonhuman animal. Such a belief
flatters our pride, and provides a convenient justification for
eating animals as well. It seems to be supported by scripture. Yet
once reason part of which is, of course, our understanding of
evolution leads us to abandon belief in the literal truth of
Genesis, this moral belief becomes impossible to justify. Unless
humans have a divinely bestowed right of dominion over other
animals, how can an anencephalic baby, doomed by the absence of a
cortex to a mere vegetative existence, have a moral status superior
to that of a chimpanzee?

Rejecting the idea of a sharp moral divide between humans and
animals, however, subverts not only our assumed right to exploit
animals, but also the traditional ethic of the sanctity of human
life, which underlies the heated issues of abortion and euthanasia.
If you want to blame the use of reason for this, however, you need
to suggest a better way of deciding on moral issues. We cannot just
stand by our conventional morality, as if that provided some
guarantee of not going astray. If we had done that a century ago we
would still be discriminating against racial minorities and women.

Nor can we rely on our feelings, for they are an unreliable guide.
Hermann Göring famously said: "I think with my blood." It isn't good
enough to respond: "Me too, but my blood thinks differently from
yours." Reliance on what one intuitively "feels" to be right has led
many people to support not only racism and sexism, but also burning
witches and persecuting homosexuals.

Evolved morality

Recent research suggests that there may be, on some matters, a
universal moral sense: virtually every human society recognizes
obligations to kin, has a taboo on at least some forms of incest,
and has a sense of reciprocity, or fairness. A few incautious
scientists have used this research to suggest that somehow we can
derive the true or best moral code from our knowledge of
evolutionary psychology.

Such attempts inevitably founder on David Hume's well-known
distinction between the "is" of science and the "ought" of normative
ethics. Knowing that a widespread moral "intuition" is the result of
evolution does nothing to support that intuition, it merely shows
that we evolved in conditions in which having this intuition was
advantageous - if not to individuals, then to the genes that gave
rise to them. That doesn't tell us whether these intuitions have
good effects today. If anything, understanding that what we take to
be a moral intuition is the outcome of natural selection undermines
the sense we might otherwise have had, that our moral intuitions
provide insight into an objective realm of moral truth.

Similarly, the fact that we, or many of us, lack an intuitive
feeling that an action is right is perfectly compatible with the
action being right, or even obligatory. Many people deny, for
example, that we have any obligation to help distant strangers. Our
intuitions about helping people who are not conspicuously present to
us for example, those living in great poverty in Africa are much
weaker than our intuitions about helping someone we know, or can see
in front of us. That may be linked to the fact that helping distant
strangers in need is not, in evolutionary terms, a good strategy it
won't help you to survive and reproduce. But why should we take that
as a ground for denying that we have an obligation to help distant
strangers? Don't they suffer just as much as those close to us?

Reason or nothing

So there is no alternative to using reason in ethics. That's
especially true in an era in which the progress of science
constantly brings up new ethical questions: about the use of embryos
to obtain stem cells, about genetic testing and selection of our
offspring, about whether the developed nations ought to take the
lead in reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases. How, without
using our reason, could we find answers to such ethical questions?

That doesn't mean that reason alone is enough. Kant thought it
possible to derive moral principles from pure principles of reason,
but not many philosophers agree with him now. Whatever the right
answer to that long-running debate may be, reason can and should
play a critical role in our moral decision-making. When we try to
explain what grounds our particular moral judgements, we find that
many of our intuitions are at odds with each other, and that others
are based on arbitrary and indefensible distinctions. Perhaps reason
doesn't tell us that there is just one true moral view, but it does
tell us that there are several moral views that are wrong. That's an
important beginning. We need more reason in ethics, not less.

Related Articles

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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225725.100
07 October 2006
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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg16522202.800
08 January 2000
Planet of the free apes?: Philosophers and biologists have
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg13818764.200
05 June 1993

Weblinks

Peter Singer, Princeton University
http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/

+++

Donna Haraway (interview): The age of entanglement
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826611.600&print=true
18 June 2008
Liz Else

Watch an excerpt of a lecture by Donna Haraway.

The idea of human uniqueness is central to western cultures. But
suppose the world doesn't revolve round we humans, that we're just
part of a network of relationships, between... well, almost
anything? That's the line Donna Haraway has defended for decades.
She's a postmodern guru, a scientist who broke new ground with a PhD
on metaphor and biology, and has written that she would "rather be a
cyborg than a goddess". Liz Else wondered why her latest book is
centred on something as apparently simple as her relationship with
her dog.

Tell us about your dog.

Cayenne Pepper is an Australian shepherd I had from a puppy. We take
part in the sport called agility, where we negotiate 20 obstacles
and judges evaluate us for speed and accuracy. It is a team sport
where we have to learn to move as a single, new entity. To do that
with a member of another species is not at all the same thing as
doing it with a cheating, language-wielding hominid partner.

What else can you achieve through your relationship with Cayenne?

I'm interested in taking the ordinary seriously. Here I am, a white,
late-middle-aged, middle-class academic having inherited the gender
apparatus of white sentimental culture and a history of pet-keeping.
I get a puppy, we play a sport together and train each other up over
a period of eight years, both as companions and as partners in
serious work. This is an extraordinarily ordinary thing - but what
I'm trying to do in my book, When Species Meet, is to take this
encounter, this kind of "redoing" of each other, this entanglement
of love, work, skill and heritage, seriously. To think as deeply as
I'm capable about my relationship with my Cayenne, with human beings
and with other organisms that this encounter brings me into touch
with.

Has this changed your thinking about what it means to be human?

The highs Cayenne and I experience come from focused, trained,
responsive, conjoined movement at speed. It can be chaos for us
both. One night when we had trained really hard, in a nanosecond, we
both went a different way. We stopped and looked at each other. I
swear I heard a sound like Velcro ripping when our cross-species,
conjoined mind-body came apart. I looked at Cayenne and she looked
stunned, confused and hurt. It felt like something out of Philip
Pullman's His Dark Materials [in which every individual is connected
to an animal "daemon"] - except that Pullman's daemon is more to do
with the human soul.

It's a deep pleasure being one among many living and dying
creatures, and to understand that walking away from human
exceptionalism is as much a relief from carrying on a kind of
impossible fantasy as it is a burden to take on.

Can you explain what you mean by "human exceptionalism"?

The dominant western philosophical and scientific traditions have
emphasised the exceptional nature of human beings. Since the
18th-century Enlightenment, what constitutes the human is its
difference from all the "others" - from gods, demons,
creepy-crawlies, blobs, slaves and, above all, animals. The
relentless quest for something that creates a gap between what's
human and what's not, that's human exceptionalism.

Do we need to move on from this mindset?

What I'm saying is quite simple, but the consequences aren't.
Instead of thinking about what separates our species from all
others, ask how the entities in any encounter make us all the things
we are. Ask how they are the products of their relationships. To be
a human is always to be in a relationship with a host of others:
plants, animals, humans, dead, living, fantasised. To be on Earth is
to be in a companion-species relationship in the sense of coming
into being with a crowd of others, and in the sense that we shape
and reshape each other into what we are.

By companion species I don't mean companion animals like pets. The
word companion comes from cum panis, to break bread [literally "with
bread"], which seems the right way to describe all those who are at
the table together on this Earth.

Why does changing the way we think matter?

It matters very much. We are beginning to understand that the global
conversation has got to be more tuned both to history and to the
tangled complexities of now. For example, taking my training with
Cayenne, a herding dog by heritage, seriously forces me to be aware
of many things: the history of local ranching; responsibilities to
the food and justice projects connected with ranching these days;
issues of ecological restoration that can't just be to do with
animal-rights approaches to the meat-industrial complex but have to
be part of building sustainable agro-pastoralism, which, in turn,
includes rare-breed trusts, connections with slaughterhouse reform
and so on. In other words, it involves us in politics that must pay
attention to genetics, ecology, ranching, internet marketing, who
eats what, a whole set of entanglements.

The biggest picture I can paint is that new ways of thinking which
involve others and our entanglement with those others will help us
understand the challenges of the 21st century better. These include
our relationships within this planet's ecology (how can we live
better without the splits between nature and culture?), with the
unfolding virtual and cyborg worlds, with our own diverse inner
worlds, and with our own bodies, which are themselves made up of
vast numbers of interrelating critters.

What do you say to people who still don't get it?

I don't think that it's possible to be a serious person in the world
without a major commitment to curiosity and where it leads, but
curiosity is not a nice virtue - and it certainly never leads to
innocence. Those who are unsympathetic to the need to change our
thinking should understand that knowledge practice, which is what
all researchers and engineers are doing, involves human beings in
relationships with machines, organisms and landscapes that can never
be innocent. Our work can involve killing or harming animals,
changing them by turning them into cyborgs or genetically engineered
hybrids and so on, not to mention doing a raft of dubious things to
humans, all of which can also damage the researchers doing them. But
one thing I think all researchers do understand is that cumulative,
secular knowledge is a fragile, precious achievement and must be
defended.

Are you involved with defending knowledge?

Living in California, I have to deal with the stupidity of
"intelligent design" being used to attack evolutionary textbooks in
high schools. I regard these attacks as a major abuse of young
people, as serious as other forms of abuse. But you can't defend
knowledge with some kind of self-satisfied arrogant certainty that
you've got the truth. I think you defend it without self-certainty,
in part by recognising these entanglements I've been talking about.

Rationality is a fragile, finite virtue. It's something that mortal
creatures have constructed and it's hard to figure out what it means
at any one time. But we have to nurture it, in loving alliance with
the other critters of this planet, with species that are our
companions in every sense.

Profile

Donna Haraway grew up in Denver, Colorado, and studied zoology and
philosophy before taking a PhD in biology at Yale University. She is
now professor of history of consciousness and feminist studies at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her 1985 essay A Cyborg
Manifesto challenged left-wing dogma that science and technology
were "the enemy". Her latest book is When Species Meet (University
of Minnesota Press).

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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826571.700
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26 March 2008
Animals and us: Forward to the revolution
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625025.700
04 June 2005
Animal minds, special issue
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18224515.100
12 June 2004
Review: Cyber_life at earth.com
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg15320644.400
11 January 1997

Weblinks

Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/haraway_when.html
Donna Haraway's university web page
http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/facHaraway.html
Donna Haraway in conversation with Rosi Braidotti, Ways of Dying
symposia at Tate Modern, London, October 2006
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/6755.htm

+++

Robert Matthews: Do we need to change the definition of science?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826551.700&print=true
8.5.7

WHAT is the difference between astronomy and astrology? That's easy:
astronomy is the scientific study of celestial objects, while
astrology is a load of hokum. Anyone with the most basic
understanding of science knows why. Astronomy passes the acid test
of real science: its claims are always capable of being debunked -
in other words, they are falsifiable.

Identified as the defining characteristic of real science by the
philosopher Karl Popper more than 70 years ago, falsifiability has
long been regarded by many scientists as a trusty weapon for seeing
off the menace of pseudoscience.

The late Viennese thinker has been lauded as the greatest
philosopher of science by the likes of Nobel prizewinning physicist
Steven Weinberg, while Popper's celebrated book The Logic of
Scientific Discovery was described by cosmologist Frank Tipler as
"the most important book of its century".

Times change, though. Popper's definition of science is being sorely
tested by the emergence of supposedly scientific ideas which seem to
fail it. From attempts to understand the fundamental nature of
space-time to theories purporting to describe events before the big
bang, the frontiers of science are sprouting a host of ideas that
are seemingly impossible to falsify.

So should the pursuit of such mind-boggling ideas be condemned as
pseudoscience, or should scientists be more relaxed about
falsifiability? It's a debate that's dividing the scientific
community. Some are in no doubt about where they stand. "I never
would have believed that serious scientists would consider making
the kinds of pseudoscientific claims now being made," says theorist
Peter Woit of Columbia University, New York, author of Not Even
Wrong, a biting critique of current fashions in theoretical physics.
For Woit, attempts to water down the falsifiability criterion are
"an outrageous way of refusing to admit failure".

His bête noire is the recent explosion of interest in the
multiverse, an infinite yet unobservable ensemble of universes of
which our cosmos is supposedly just one part. "The basic problem
with the multiverse is not only that it makes no falsifiable
predictions, but that all proposals for extracting predictions from
it involve massive amounts of wishful thinking," Woit says.

Others believe such criticism is based on a misunderstanding. "Some
people say that the multiverse concept isn't falsifiable because
it's unobservable - but that's a fallacy," says cosmologist Max
Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He argues that
the multiverse is a natural consequence of such eminently
falsifiable theories as quantum theory and general relativity. As
such, the multiverse theory stands or fails according to how well
these other theories stand up to observational tests.

In the meantime, says Tegmark, exploring the idea of the multiverse
is no more pseudoscientific than pondering phenomena inside a black
hole - another consequence of general relativity whose interior is
just as unobservable as the multiverse.

In any case, dismissing a theory on the grounds that it fails
Popper's acid test itself involves a huge leap of faith, says
cosmologist Lawrence Krauss at Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio. "You just can't tell if a theory really is
unfalsifiable."

He cites the case of an esoteric consequence of general relativity
known as the Einstein ring effect. In a paper published in 1936,
Einstein showed that the light from a distant star can be distorted
by the gravitational field of an intervening star, producing a
bright ring of light around it. It was a spectacular prediction but
also, Einstein said, one that astronomers stood "no hope of
observing", as the ring would be too small to observe.

For all his genius, Einstein had reckoned without the ingenuity of
astronomers, which in 1998 led to the discovery of the first example
of a perfect Einstein ring - created not by a star, but by a vast
galaxy billions of light years away.

Krauss admits he has fallen into the same trap, applying the
falsifiability criterion to decide whether some or other idea is
really "scientific" enough to be worth publishing. "I've decided not
to write papers because I thought the claims would never be
falsifiable, and yet [they] turned out to be so."

Still, for many scientists, Popper remains the only philosopher with
any relevance to what they do. Much of his appeal rests on the
clear-cut logic that seems to underpin the concept of
falsifiability. Popper illustrated this through the now-celebrated
parable of the black swan.

Suppose a theory proposes that all swans are white. The obvious way
to prove the theory is to check that every swan really is white -
but there's a problem. No matter how many white swans you find, you
can never be sure there isn't a black swan lurking somewhere. So you
can never prove the theory is true. In contrast, finding one
solitary black swan guarantees that the theory is false. This is the
unique power of falsification: the ability to disprove a universal
statement with just a single example - an ability, Popper pointed
out, that flows directly from the theorems of deductive logic.

Popper went on to promote falsification as the essence of the
scientific process, with the search for falsifiable predictions
being the distinguishing feature between science and pseudoscience.
Yet even at the time there were concerns his criterion wasn't up to
the job.

The most obvious objection is that astrologers, soothsayers and
quacks also make falsifiable statements - but that doesn't make them
scientific. Yet could it be their cavalier attitude towards negative
evidence that marks them out as pseudoscientific?

Worryingly, this doesn't work either, as was made clear over a
century ago by the French philosopher and physicist Pierre Duhem. He
pointed out that the predictions of a scientific theory often rest
on a raft of other assumptions underpinning how the theory is
tested. If an experiment seems to falsify the theory, it is often
possible to pin the blame on one of these "auxiliary hypotheses"
rather than the theory itself.

This happens quite a lot in science. In fact, in the very year Duhem
put forward his objections to falsification, experiments by a German
physicist appeared to falsify Einstein's then-new special theory of
relativity, lending support to rival theories. Yet Einstein blithely
dismissed the results, saying the other theories were simply less
plausible than his own.

He was hardly the last scientist to reject inconvenient results - as
Popper was forced to admit. Even so, he remained convinced that at
least looking for falsifiable consequences was the essence of doing
science.

For Woit, it's precisely the absence of progress in finding such
consequences of the multiverse theory that makes it pseudoscience.
"If all you have to show is wishful thinking about the possibility
of such progress, then you're not really doing science," he says.

Yet according to philosopher Rebecca Goldstein of Harvard
University, this just highlights the idealistic view of scientists
underpinning Popper's criterion: "Not only does Popper maintain that
science as a field is unique, its borders fortified by
falsifiability, but also that the scientist is unique, detached
enough from his own theories that he is only out to shoot them
down." She says that in reality the process is far more positive -
trying to find theories that work, rather than falsifying
alternatives.

Even when scientists accept that a theory has failed some test, they
rarely junk it as being false. Popper recognised this too. Krauss
points to the classic case of Newton versus Einstein. During the
20th century, Newton's theory of gravity was repeatedly "falsified"
by observations: for example, by predicting only half the observed
bending of light by the sun's gravitational field. Yet scientists
are not about to ditch Newton any time soon, as his laws work
perfectly well in everyday situations. "This is something we don't
make clear enough," says Krauss. "We don't have true theories; we
only have effective theories."

So after all these concessions, what remains of Popper's supposedly
hard-and-fast criterion? It's hard to apply in practice, too vague
to differentiate science from pseudoscience and bears little
resemblance to what scientists really do. Why does it remain so
popular? "Scientists like simple methodological theories which
accord well with what they consider to be good scientific
reasoning," says philosopher Colin Howson of the London School of
Economics in the UK.

So if the simplicity of falsification is misleading, what should
scientists be doing instead? Howson believes it is time to ditch
Popper's notion of capturing the scientific process using deductive
logic. Instead, the focus should be on reflecting what scientists
actually do: gathering the weight of evidence for rival theories and
assessing their relative plausibility.

Howson is a leading advocate for an alternative view of science
based not on simplistic true/false logic, but on the far more subtle
concept of degrees of belief. At its heart is a fundamental
connection between the subjective concept of belief and the cold,
hard mathematics of probability.

Talk of probabilities usually conjures up images of random events
such as coin tosses, with the formulae of probability theory
answering questions about the chances of getting, say, 20 heads from
30 tosses. That's not the only way to look at probability theory,
though. It is also possible to turn it on its head and ask a far
more interesting question: what are the chances that a coin really
is dodgy, given we've seen 20 heads from 30 tosses? In other words,
if we have a hypothesis - like the belief that a coin is dodgy -
probability theory allows us to assess that hypothesis in the light
of our observations.

This should sound familiar; after all, it is what scientists do for
a living. And it is a view of scientific reasoning with a solid
theoretical basis. At its core is a mathematical theorem, which
states that any rational belief system obeys the laws of probability
- in particular, the laws devised by Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century
English mathematician who pioneered the idea of turning probability
theory on its head.

Unlike Popper's concept of science, the Bayesian view doesn't
collapse the instant it comes into contact with real life. It relies
on the notion of accumulating positive evidence for a theory which,
according to Tegmark, is what scientists really spend their time
doing. "What we do in science isn't falsifying, but 'truthifying' -
building up the weight of evidence," he says.

The Bayesian approach quantifies this practice. Scientists begin
with a range of rival explanations about some phenomenon, the
observations come in, and then the mathematics of Bayesian inference
is used to calculate the weight of evidence gained or lost by each
rival theory (New Scientist, 22 November 1997, p36). Put simply, it
does this by comparing the probability of getting the observed
results on the basis of each of the rival theories. The theory
giving the highest probability is then deemed to have gained most
weight of evidence from the data.

It captures many other features of real-life science too. For
example, it shows that seemingly implausible theories require a
hefty weight of evidence before they can be taken seriously -
reflecting that familiar maxim that "extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence". The Bayesian view also gives vague or
contrived theories that fit pretty much any data set a tough time in
the quest for credibility.

With its mathematical rigour and natural fit with real-life science,
it's an approach that now commands the attention of many
philosophers of science. "The most interesting views these days are
to be found in Bayesianism. It's where much of the current research
impetus is directed," says philosopher Robert Nola of the University
of Auckland in New Zealand. He adds, though, that the approach is
not without its problems.

Chief among them is that, while Bayesian methods show how
observations add weight of evidence to initial beliefs or theories,
they say nothing about what those initial beliefs should be. And if
a theory is completely new, the beliefs behind it may be based on
nothing but subjective intuition.

Advocates of the Bayesian approach point out that such prior beliefs
typically become less important as the results accumulate. In other
words, Bayesianism confirms another maxim of scientists: that as the
observations come in, the truth will out. Wrong-headed initial
beliefs are never totally falsified, but they do end up buried by
the sheer weight of evidence against them.

It is not just philosophers of science who see Bayesianism as the
way forward: so do working scientists in fields from archaeology to
zoology. Among the proponents of this view are cosmologists, who are
now using Bayesian methods to extract the most plausible model of
the universe from signals flooding in from observatories. One of
their prime roles is constraining speculation and deciding whether
current theories are compatible with observations, or if some extra
ingredient is needed.

Take the mysterious force said to be driving the ever-faster
expansion of the universe. Theorists are exploring the idea that
this "dark energy" may have varied over the course of cosmic
history, rather than stayed constant. Such ideas might keep
theorists in work but they also make for a more complex model of the
universe, says Andrew Liddle at the UK's University of Sussex in
Brighton. "The question is whether the observational data support a
simple or a complex model."

He and his colleagues have applied Bayesian methods to assess the
plausibility of the intriguing idea of varying dark energy and found
that the standard model with constant dark energy remains a far
better bet. That could change, but the smart money is on variable
dark energy being a dead end (New Scientist, 8 March, p 32).

Talk about "best bets" and "smart money" might not sound very
scientific, but it's much closer to how real-life research
priorities are decided. With Bayesian methods, that process is
captured in rigorous, quantitative detail - the black and white of
falsification being replaced with the shades of grey of the real
world. "I think it's absolutely the way to go," says Liddle.

So where does all this leave the debate about whether concepts like
the multiverse are really scientific? According to Howson, the
multiverse is entirely scientific in Bayesian terms, as it is based
on theories carrying huge weights of evidence. "If Popper condemns
it as pseudoscience because it is 'unfalsifiable' - and it may not
always be - then so much the worse for Popper."

But whatever one regards as the essence of science - black-and-white
falsification or subtle shades of grey - in the end it is still
empirical observations that decide if a theory gets taken seriously.
"At some level, you cannot give up the idea of falsification," says
Krauss. "Rumours of the death of science have been greatly
exaggerated."

Related Articles

Vital statistics
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18224535.500
26 June 2004
Dark energy may be a cosmic illusion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726461.600
7 March 2008
Parallel universes make quantum sense
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526223.700
21 September 2007
Spooks in space
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526171.100
17 August 2007

Weblinks

Bayes in the sky: Bayesian inference and model selection in
cosmology by Roberto Trotta
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0803.4089v1
Karl Popper, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
Rebecca Goldstein, Edge World Question Center
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_9.html#goldstein

+++

David Malone: Perspectives: Are we still addicted to certainty?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526152.100&print=true
7.8.4

You might think that no one could argue with the value of certainty.
It has the air of one of those indisputably good things, like world
peace or motherhood. But I would argue that the pursuit of certainty
has become a dangerous addiction. Like alcohol, it makes us feel
safe, but it is also making us stupid and belligerent.

Few notions have become as deeply embedded in our culture as the
belief that there is a perfect certainty to be had - and the desire
to have it. It has survived virtually intact the transition from
religion to rationalism as the touchstone of our society. Even as
science squeezed out belief in God and scriptural certainties, a
perfect law-governed creation remained; it was just under new
management. Science has become, in the minds of many, the new
guarantor that there is certainty and that we can attain it.

We are faced with all kinds of questions to which we would like
unequivocal answers. Do mobile phones cause cancer? Does depleted
uranium? Is global warming real? There is a huge pressure on science
to provide concrete answers when the alternatives are cant and
self-serving opinion.

But the temptation to frame these debates in terms of certainty is
fraught with danger. Certainty is an unforgiving taskmaster. It may
seem prudent to say that when the scientists are certain then we'll
know what to do, but it is a mere step from there to say we should
do nothing until we are certain.

As every climate scientist knows, there will always be facts that
won't fit even the best model of global climate. That's the nature
of models and the weather - and it illustrates just how badly we can
be led astray by the fiction that science is about certainty. If we
are honest and say the scientists' conclusions aren't certain, we
may find this being used as justification for doing nothing, or even
to allow wriggle room for the supernatural to creep back in again.
If we pretend we're certain when we are not, we risk being unmasked
as liars.

The very word "uncertainty", along with "incompleteness" and
"uncomputability", encapsulates one of the three of the most
profound theories in 20th-century science and mathematics. Yet they
are all defined in terms of the unsettling lack of something
positive or better. It is perhaps for that reason that the stories
of those who discovered these uncertainties have been largely
overlooked. This is why I made Dangerous Knowledge for BBC
television: to champion the incomplete, the uncomputable and the
uncertain.

In a society desperate to find certainty, and beset on all sides by
people who claim to have it, this seems like a suitable moment to
show that the idea of certainty-from-on-high was discredited 100
years ago. I wanted to tell the stories of the people who made this
discovery and the great personal price they paid. A line of thinkers
from Georg Cantor to Alan Turing saw the extent of the uncertainty
in science, and incompleteness in logic and mathematics, and
understood what we still haven't grasped as a culture. I am
fascinated by just how reluctant we are to face up to what these
heroes revealed.

What is also striking is how much of 20th-century history has been
defined by a disastrous oscillation between two equally hopeless
reactions to the perceived loss of certainty. At one extreme, if the
things we think are true can't be underpinned with certainty, we
declare that nothing can be true and make a bonfire of all
certainties. Think fin-de-siècle Vienna or Weimar Germany or even
the postmodernist stance, which becomes the perfect apologists'
creed for the status quo.

At the other extreme, think of the absurd and deranged certainties
of Hitler's Reich and Stalin's five-year plans, or the cold-war
doctrine of mutually assured nuclear destruction. And all this,
ironically, at a time when Kurt Gödel and Turing were busy
destroying the dream of absolute certainty.

We have still not really absorbed their ideas. Turing in particular
laid bare the profundity and seriousness of incompleteness and
uncomputability, using his invention, the computer, to show how deep
and pervasive our inability to know for certain is. As it turned
out, his invention overshadowed his conclusion and, ironically, for
the past 50 years the computer has been seen as the certainty engine
- the machine that can solve the problems we can't. What we failed
to notice is that the computer has actually made us less certain: we
now know, for example, that we cannot precisely model weather,
climate or the economy, and very probably never will.

The computer has turned out to be like every other industrial
process: designed to turn out something desirable through the front
door but with an unintended by-product, a "pollution", emerging from
the back door - in this case, uncertainty. Non-linear mathematics,
the butterfly effect, emergent phenomena, all revealed by the
computer, add to the incompleteness of logic and conspire to make
certainty elusive.

We need to reach an accommodation with uncertainty. Not only is the
universe uncertain, but so too is human knowledge. Science as a
process should never have fostered any illusions about this: it was
always about provisional truths - and knew it. Perhaps it's time for
us to finally accept that we shouldn't believe in science because we
think it's certain, but precisely because it's not.

Certainty is totalitarian. It forecloses further thinking. Not one
of the theories devised by Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck is
certain and perfect. Powerful and beautiful they undoubtedly are,
but they are still partial and incomplete approximations of truth.

For the modern counterparts of Gödel and Turing - the likes of Roger
Penrose and Gregory Chaitin - intellectual certainty is a dead end.
Serious thinkers are not afraid of uncertainty. For them a theory's
uncertainty or incompleteness is not a failing but a positive and
creative condition in its own right. The profound discoveries of
modern mathematics and science show that life and thinking flourish
only in the liminal and fertile land that lies between too much
certainty and too much doubt. The art of scientific inquiry is to
tack back and forth between the two.

More than ever, science needs to remember the words of Bertrand
Russell: "Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is
painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support
of comforting fairy tales... To teach how to live without certainty,
and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief
thing."

Profile

David Malone is an independent documentary film-maker. Dangerous
Knowledge will be broadcast on 8 August on BBC4 television as part
of the "Science you can't see" series. You can watch a clip at:
www.becauseyouthink.tv

Related Articles

Outside of time: The quantum gravity computer
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325971.500
31 March 2007
The flexi-laws of physics
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19426101.300
30 June 2007

Weblinks

Clip from becauseyouthink.tv
http://www.becauseyouthink.tv/library/noaccess.asp?bID=8
Gregory Chaitin's home page
http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin

+++

Dan Hind: What are the true threats to reason?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726392.100&print=true
Perspectives:
19 January 2008

THE Enlightenment is in mortal danger from irrational forces. We
know this because its self-styled defenders continually tell us so.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins declares, in tones which make
the flesh creep, that "primitive darkness is coming back".
Politician Dick Taverne warns that "the new Rome that science built
is under siege by the barbarians". In this magazine (8 October 2005,
p 39) we learn that "After two centuries in the ascendancy, the
Enlightenment project is under threat. Religious movements are
sweeping the globe preaching unreason, intolerance and dogma, and
challenging the idea that rational, secular inquiry is the best way
to understand the world."

Other forms of unreason join religion to threaten the enlightened
inheritance. Scientific medicine faces a fight to the death with
homeopathy, reiki and other snake oil. Postmodernism and New Ageism
have also supposedly debauched the public's capacity to make
reasonable judgements. As a result, experts tell us, a new mood of
distrust has undermined public faith in science - an unintentionally
revealing form of words.

No one would want to deny the challenges to the Enlightenment that
are posed by