Can Science Swallow Philosophy?

Why do people ask this question? More specifically, why is the prospect of replacing philosophy with science so exciting?



The most obvious answer is that science "works", and that it is difficult to say the same for philosophy. Not because philosophy is useless but because the contributions of philosophy are necessarily oblique. Philosophy provides a theoretical substrate on which useful stuff can be built. A sad consequence of this is that philosophy is rarely the knight in shining armour which raises living standards and/or puts man on the moon. By comparison, modern science has only been around for a couple of hundred years and since then has significantly boosted humanity's understanding and power over the world.  From this, rather naive, point of view it is understandable then that some might relish the thought of empirical annexation at the expense of philosophers.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I loathe this kind of the question. Primarily because it concieves of science and philosophy in a very wrongheaded way. The whole notion of a scientific takeover of  philosophical terroritory is nonsense.* Philosophy cannot be annexed by science, both because its territory is so qualitively distinct from that of science and because of how vital that rationalist terrotory is to science's progress. Try imagining, for example, the scientific method without Hume or Locke. In fact generally philosophers and scientists work quite well in applying their skills in eachothers fields.

Science cannot swallow philosophy, anymore than philosophy can swallow science. Neither evidence nor rationality can explain away one another. We are condemned to philosophise. But if philosophy and science cannot be sensibly put in competition - since they are co-dependent processes - then precisely what are the annexers proposing? I will be honest here: I do not know. Most of the proposed attempts at a scientific purge of philosophical issues, that I have seen are incredibly vague. Especially with regards to how science would actually deal with important philosophical issues. More often than not the proposed solution implies steamrollong over philosophical debates as though they were non-existent. Case in point, "The Moral Landscape" by Sam Harris.

In this book, which purports to provide scientific solutions to moral problems, Harris' shows us, among other things, that we can scientifically measure pain - provided we make the reasonable assumption that qualia can be mapped onto biology. This is quite an unimportant observation as far as ethics is concerned - although fans of Harris seem to think it has earth-shattering implications.

Why am I not similarly impressed? Because the actual philosophical questions of import: Should pain be the deciding moral metric? Why should we be moral? etc - are left totally unresolved by Harris' framework. In order to accept the argument that hurting animals is wrong I need to accept that pain is of moral import regardless of who/what feels it. The fact that we can measure and track the brain states of a pig, and compare them with that of a human, is quite irrelevent to the actual moral debate. "The Moral Landscape" is a book that discusses evidence for certain empirical questions of possible interest to philosophers. It is, however, not a vindication of noveua logical positivism. The philosophical questions, the ones which an ethical response is suppose to answer, are left relatiely untouched. In response to Harris I would refer him to his horseman peer Daniel Dennet and his remark that:

"... there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination."

Philosophy is necessary; worse, it is inevitable. But that does not mean that "Academic Philosophy", one current reification of rational inquiry, is beyond methodological reproach. There are no doubt many academic philosophers who do not have enough of a grasp of science to be as useful as they could be. I am also as convinced that there are plenty of scientists not as au fait with the philosophy as they need to be in order to reason properly about the implication of their own research. In this respect I am all in favor of promoting science within philosophy as a way of resolving empirical questions that have an impact on philosophical issues, and promoting the role that philosophy plays in directing and understanding empirical research. What I do object to is the notion that philosophy and science should be understood as two parties in a turf war. Considering their intellectual codepedency, I see no benefit in waging civil war.

*Of course, there are cases of early philosophers attempting to answer scientific questions - Aristotle, for example - only to later have their questions answered by actual science. But this is more  a case of actual science swallowing early pseudo-science rather than a case of philosophy qua philosophy being pushed to the margins.

Thoughts on: Humans, Selfishness and Primatology

Humans are a nasty breed, or so we are told. Our philosophical framework from Hobbes to Freidman takes our self-interest for granted; it is the foundation of our punitive legal system (Hobbes) and our individualistic economic system (Adam Smith, and Freidman again). This worldview is ostensibly backed up by biological science: evolution emerges from the struggle of an individual to overcome. Nature is the ultimate form of competition therefore it naturally follows that we are inclined to pursue the ethics of a cut-throat.

Such a case, or thereabouts, is argued by Dario Maestripieri in Games Primates Play where much of primate and, by extension, human behaviour is explained in self interested terms. Co-operation is acknowledged but in a purely Machiavellian sense and moral sentiments, such as shame or guilt, are attributed to an internalisation of the "moralistic aggression" shown by one's peers (p.127).

Maestripieri is evidently a very accomplished primatologist, but I think he's wrong here. While I have neither the time, space or academic speciality to lay out a full empirical critique of his worldview, I would suggest that the kind of research produced by ethologists examining altruism, like that of Franz de Waal, throw doubt on the idea that our moral sentiments are taught, rather than innate. Furthermore, the argument that our moral impulses are just a series of calculated ploys struggles to explain our propensity for empathetic feelings. If "the moral impulse" is merely a strategic cloak then why would it come with an ability to feel another's pain? Strategically it makes sense to understand that someone is hurt but why feel pity for someone, or empathise with their plight, if you are supposed to be a cold-hearted egoist?

The answer to this question most likely lies in the fact that the emotions behind altruism probably evolved much earlier than our high-level capacity to manipulate them in others. Of course, while this evolutionary process was driven by self-interest, it strikes me as trivial to argue that altruism is therefore just an elaborate con. It is true that co-operation gives us an evolutionary advantage, as individuals and as a species, but that's not particularly interesting.

Humans and animals do things which they have an interest in doing; but when we say that humans are selfish we tend to mean something more than "humans want the best for themselves". Specifically we tend to mean that humans are selfish at the expense of others, and that this acknowledgement should temper our broader economic and political expectations for the human race. However, to say that humans are selfish in the sense that they pursue their own ends is fairly inconsequential: it's almost tautologically true and has no bearing on how any given individual's ends overlap with those of their peers. This trivial aspect of our selfishness tells us little about the terms on which we are to cohabitate - which is, after all, the important takeaway of any attempt to dissect the biological history of human motivation.

Maestripieri is not alone: there are plenty who point to nature's self-interested substrate in order to make broader points about human society. In the process, the human and wider primate capacity for co-operation is often explained away as further reinforcement of the selfish monkey hypothesis. This is largely possible due to ambiguous definitions of self-interest and selfishness that prop up a lack of consensus on what it would take to falsify the claim that "X are  selfish". A chimpanzee castrating a rival is obviously selfish; as is a pair of macaques co-operating to bring down a rival, but what of capuchins co-operating to gather food or rhesus monkeys who collectivise childcare? These acts all have a selfish basis and they may be but small islands in a sea of brutality, yet I fear it is misleading to pretend that capuchin co-operation and chimpanzee castration have similar motivations.

Unless we move past the more trivial definitions of selfishness, we will struggle to separate acts of altruism from those of aggression. The naive assumption that the biological egoism which underpins our genetic history can provide a monoglot description of human behaviour must be resisted for a more holistic account of our social nature.

The Problem with Mr Taleb - Antifragile Review

In Antifragule, the economist, philosopher and options-trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb sets out to articulate the principles of "that which gains from disorder". Along the way he discusses a number of other topics, such as iatrogenics and the importance of acknowledging our inability to plan for black swans. There is a varying level of originality in the book's observations - the principle of planning while keeping unpredictability in mind is a fairly old one. In saying that, conceptualising unpredictability as an engine for growth may actually be a new idea.  Even the unoriginal points that Taleb expounds on, highlight ideas that don't received a lot of public attention so Taleb's mentioning of them is still quite welcomed.

The most contentious parts of Antifragile are found in the sections where Taleb argues that academic research comes after, not before, human progress has been made. The tinkerers shall inherit the earth, the nerds know nothing. New medicines are "discovered" by private firms far more often than in publically funded laboratories (p.231), and we should take note of the huge technological innovation that happens in the playground of Silicon Valley (p.42). The question as to whether private firms simply patent/develop more variations of already existent drugs, as opposed to discovering new ones, is left unexplored; as is the tech industry's infamous reliance on publically funded research programs to develop their gadgets. Outside of that, the brash and aggressive writing style, that Taleb is known for, is very prominent. Almost every negative review I have read of Taleb's work mentions his preening arrogance and even the positive reviews often concede this point. Initially, I wanted to conduct a review of Antifragile that didn't dissect his personality. Alas, I have found that to be a difficult task, if only because so much of Antifragile attempts to communicate Taleb's vision of himself.

There is a clear and carefully curated persona on display: Taleb is a cultured, wine drinking, straight talking, poetry loving, power lifter. He is a lone wolf - uninterested in your awards and approval. He tells it like it is. He is streetwise, well-read and cultured, but under no circumstances to be thought of as a nerd. Taleb is manly and brave. Taleb is a man of action, not like those other scholars with their spectacles and atrophied muscle. On its own, this kind of chest-thumping would be a mere annoyance, inconsequential to the quality of the scholar's work; unfortunately, it seems it has bled into the content of Taleb's writing, to the detriment of his argument's credibility.    

Consider Taleb's chapter on the ethics of risk taking. The ethics section of Antifragile lays out a maxim for moral behaviour that focuses on keeping the collateral of risks limited to those who volunteer their own skin. People who risk their own good for others, are heroes; those who risk their own good for their own gain, are passable humans and those who risk others for their own gain, are villains - according to Taleb. To elucidate on the consequences of this moral outlook, Taleb handily provides  us with a table (p.377) which places various professions - artist, writer, businessman, soldier - into one of three columns. The columns are "no skin in the game" (bad), "skin in the game" (neutral) and "skin in the game for others sake" (good). The table however, seems somewhat arbitrary. For example: journalists who analyse and predict events are in the bad column, activists are neutral and rebels and revolutionaries are good.

Why are journalists bad, but activists neutral when both seek to predict and comment on society? It is true that we rarely hold journalists accountable for their failed predictions, but we hold activists accountable even less. A journalist risks embarrassing themself on a public stage; conversely, most activists are voices in an otherwise anonymous crowd. The only real difference between the two is respectability, but that is a matter of scale and Taleb's claim is that there is something qualitatively different in the way they externalise risks. Furthermore why on earth would Taleb place revolutionaries automatically in the good column? Revolutionaries may believe that good things await everyone in the coming social order but the consequences of failed revolutions are well documented. We have every reason to think that the revolutionaries risk the wellbeing of everyone not just themselves - this is precisely the kind of behaviour that Taleb supposedly repudiates.

How then can we explain this bizarre ranking, inferred from the table, that revolutionaries are the most virtuous risk takers when compared to activists and, certainly, in comparison to journalists? The answer is by appealing to Taleb's persona. Once we understand that revolutionaries, activists and journalists are not being ranked in accordance with their management of risks but rather in relation to a warrior/scholar archetype that Taleb identifies with, then the ranking starts to make more sense. Journalists are effete, sheltered members of the establishment; activists are scrappy underdogs but revolutionaries, the most macho of the three, fight wars and topple governments - they are, in Taleb's eyes, the most worthy of respect.

The irony is that Taleb's approach to ethics is, on the whole, quite plausible. I may have my doubts about it, I am not certain that we can ever really take risks entirely on our own, but it is a valid approach to doing ethics in an uncertain world. This is exactly what I mean when I say that Antifragile is a solid work burdened with poor and distracting set-dressing. Antifragile provides plenty of novel angles to work from, but their value is obscured by its author's desperation to be thought of as a scholarly mafioso.

While Taleb is smart enough to know that he should only allude to the mafia-like qualities of his persona, Mafia bosses are referenced to as exemplars of his observations (p.43). And late in the book Taleb makes the more bizarre claim that mafia dons have a form of honour that escapes contemporary leaders (p.376), in so far as Mafia bosses are the most likely to be whacked- or so goes Taleb's account of organised crime. Naturally this is nonsense. Even a casual reader can tell you that frequently the first to die in any given drug-war are the low-level dealers, and that criminal conspiracies are usually orchestrated to leave the higher-ups untouchable, if it all goes wrong. The crime-barons sit safe in their mansions reaping the dividends of their empire, while the youngsters, eager to prove themselves, are left with the dirty, dangerous and incriminating footwork on which the empire is built. The reality is the opposite of what Taleb thinks it to be, but the grim glamour of the macho mafia-don archetype sells it to Taleb and glosses over the lack of veracity.

Taleb, towards the end of the book, also advises readers to think for themselves and savages those who use the opinion of others to gather knowledge about the world (p.419-20), not long after defending tradition (p.257) and advising the reader to prioritise useful heuristics over abstract truth seeking. This is also ignoring that conformity itself is a heuristic. The behaviours and thoughts of others are an excellent resource for selecting a strategy in times of uncertainty. The gazelle that stops to ask "Why am I running just because everyone else is running?" is destined to become lion chow. Taleb thinks of himself as a street-wise "doer" concerned with what works over what is true, but also wants to be the principled, sceptical upstart - not realising that often these two ways of seeing the world come into conflict and that he needs to be much more flexible if he wants to mesh the two ways of thinking.

Most of these problems are just a result of Taleb's romanticised aesthetic crashing against the more reasoned parts of the book: blips of momentary incongruence generated by Taleb's posing as a refined, street-smart, independent scholar. When you step back from these blemishes you find that they are mostly negligible. Antifragile is still an interesting book and well worth reading. What is infuriating however, and what I have been trying to get across here, is that while Taleb may have convinced himself that his opponents are just stooges for the academic orthodox, it may be that the biggest thing standing in the way of Antifragile's credibility, is Mr Taleb himself.    

The 2016 Half Time Review

With the arrival of June comes this year's edition of Cut-throat and Clueless' Half-Time Review. As you might have noticed, I have half-finished redesigning this blog in celebration of this milestone. For my original list of 2016 resolutions click here, and for my last quarterly review click here. Below is a summary of victories and setbacks that have been achieved and/or suffered over the last three months.

Resolutions.

1. Reading, Writing, Running.

My reading has picked up its pace since I last discussed my resolutions on this blog; my writing has been steady, though mostly fiction orientated, and my exercise regime has finally diversified to include body-weight training - routines that once reduced me to a huffing mess, I now breeze through effortlessly and it feels great! I have also recently booked myself onto a distance learning course with the UK Society for Editors and Proof-Readers - I'm looking forward to it immensely. I also have my first Judo session, in years, coming up at the end of this week.

2. Get Techie.

Hurrah for progress! I have finally started learning Python and it's fascinating. Coding engages a very different part of my brain to that which is engaged when reading and writing philosophy. Frankly I'm excited to learn something tech related but also hoping to gleam some of the mental benefits associated with programming. Granted the few hours I have put in so far were grinded out purely so I'd have something to write here, but the enjoyment I have received from it has been genuine.   

I'll have to find some sort of project to focus on later in the year, at the moment I'm just trying to memorise the basics.

3. Get Foodie.

There has been too much progress made here to list comprehensively. Notable success' include home-made pizza made from scratch; vegetable pakora and a couple of other great finds discovered among my growing collection of cookery and cocktail books. I'm making food better, faster and with less stress than ever before. As a side note, I've discovered that food and drink books are remarkably reflective of their social origins.

Consider that "The Savoy Cocktail Book" written by Harry Craddock back in the 1930's is close to 300 pages long with almost every page containing  4 or 5 recipes, each of them calling for a variety of spirits and liquers. By contrast, "Good Things to Drink" written by Mr Lyan, and published last year, features recipes that tend to focus on one particular spirit and prefers the intelligent use of mixers and garnish to accompany drinks. In terms of "recipes per page", it has one recipe for every couple of pages with the majority of the book being photos of Mr Lyan and his friends drinking in rustic locations while looking infuriatingly hip.

This is the unfortunate consequence of modern advertising, and caused by the same forces that have perfume companies advertising with bizzare montages of models sliding out of Limos. While Craddock may bring content by the bucket-load, Mr Lyan would trounce him in terms of sales if they ever competed - the gloss sells.

Gripes aside, as much as I have enjoyed Mr Lyan's book, he has a bad habit of tacking "top up with champagne" onto the end of his recipes; the fact that he considers adding champagne to be an afterthought indicates that mixology has yet to escape its privileged roots.