Not Only Where but Also What
Funny, it didn’t even seem like that much of a storm. I went out for a walk in it, thinking it was just a common or garden variety storm. I didn’t turn back after five minutes because I was drenched, so it can’t have been raining all that hard! It was certainly raining sideways, thanks to the wind, but I have been in many harder rains. I was wet when I got back but not soaked. And yet there were floods. And then awhile later there was more wind, and then there was a sudden unpleasant absence of electricity, which lasted more than seven hours. Nature can be so obstructive.
I was going to say something about meaning (and what we mean by it), but I want to say a little more about borders first, and also about what we mean by ‘science’. Those two things are essentially the same subject, but approached from different angles. What we mean by ‘science’ makes an enormous difference to what we mean by those formulas about the separate spheres – to where we draw those contentious borders between them. Or rather not all that contentious – not contentious enough. That’s my point. For some reason the platitude about ‘Science over here’ and ‘many other valuable things over here on the other side’ gets endlessly repeated and not questioned enough. If it can get repeated and not questioned even by such a thoroughgoing rationalist and scientist as Gould, we know something must be odd.
One thing worth mentioning is that it’s not only a matter of the location of the borders, but also one of what the borders are actually like. Are they sharp and clear like a fence or a wall? Or are they more vague and blurry, like, Oh, that range of hills; like, From about here to about over there somewhere. Or are they in fact not a border or division at all but a continuum. Maybe it is simply not the case that science is entirely different from poetry, emotion, love, justice and the other items that usually go in the other sphere. Maybe science is simply continuous with rational inquiry, only (as Susan Haack puts it) more so. If that’s the case (and I think it is) then is science really entirely irrelevant to, say, love, or poetry? Is it out of the question to think about either of those things in a rational way? One can think about things in a rational way without thereby excluding also thinking about them in a non-rational way, after all. And surely we all do. Martha Nussbaum has an excellent illustration of this, I’ve just remembered while typing, in Sex and Social Justice [sorry I can’t give the page reference at the moment, because I’m Away and don’t have it with me]. She’s discussing Nell Noddings’ ideas about women’s ‘different’ approach to knowledge via ‘caring,’ and she offers as example her feeling of unreflective love for her daughter on seeing her asleep on the couch after a basketball game. Very nice, says Nussbaum, but is it really true? Aren’t there all sorts of rational ideas underlying that unreflective feeling? How does she even know that is her daughter for example? And how does she know the sleep is a healthy athletic one and not a drug-induced stupor? And many more elaborations of the idea, which are both convincing and amusing.
So that’s the kind of thing I mean. The banal version means something like: science is in another sphere from love because you can’t stick love in a test tube or on a scale. True enough, but it doesn’t follow that you can’t learn anything at all about it by taking thought and even to some extent by considering evidence. And surely that applies to most of the items in the usual version of the Other Sphere. They may not belong in a test tube, but it doesn’t follow that there is nothing of interest or value to be said and thought about them via analysis and inquiry and investigation. The whole scheme is in fact a canard, and should be done away with.
“Maybe it is simply not the case that science is entirely different from poetry, emotion, love, justice and the other items that usually go in the other sphere. Maybe science is simply continuous with rational inquiry, only (as Susan Haack puts it) more so. If that’s the case (and I think it is) then is science really entirely irrelevant to, say, love, or poetry?”
Exactly right. I’m actually reading Susan Haack’s “Defending Science” right now, and I think her definition of scientific inquiry as continuous with other forms of rational inquiry is spot on.
And yes, I think this does mean that scientific inquiry is not completely different from something like literary or film criticism. There can be careful, informed readings of “The Brothers Karamazov,” for instance, and those that completely miss the major points. And the way we arrive at the more valid interpretations is analogous to scientific inquiry – we make hypothesizes based on careful examinations of the evidence, test them by reading other parts of the book, and so forth. As the result, personal quirks of individual critics aside, most knowledgeable critics think that Jane Austen is better than Danielle Steele, and Orson Welles is a better director than Ron Howard.
Good call on mentioning Nussbaum, too. Her more recent book “Upheavals of Thought,” which I’ve dipped into intermittently, is all about how emotions have at least some rational content. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, things like love a) seem partially rational, and b) partly subject to empirical investigation. So in the end, there’s something very wrong with the traditional drawing of the boundaries.
Phil
“And yes, I think this does mean that scientific inquiry is not completely different from something like literary or film criticism. There can be careful, informed readings of “The Brothers Karamazov,” for instance, and those that completely miss the major points.”
True, but that hardly means the same stringent standards held in science can apply elsewhere. Particularly as careful, informed readings on any novel can easily manage to disagree on all the major points.
“True, but that hardly means the same stringent standards held in science can apply elsewhere. Particularly as careful, informed readings on any novel can easily manage to disagree on all the major points.”
Oh, of course. We can’t decide on the definitive reading of a novel, or the hierarchy of the world’s greatest novelists, with the same precision that we can calculate the value of the gravitational constant, or the digits of “pi.” Nothing like the same precision, in fact.
But you can ground, say, the reading of a novel in close observation of plot, structure, narrative voice, etc. And you can also bring in other facts you may know about the author, or his/her time and place. Using these methods, you can arrive at higher degrees of validity in interpretation than someone who’s utterly oblivious to all of these things. And at the end of the day, we do have general agreement that Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Stendahl and Chekhov were great writers.
And I’m not quite sure informed readings on ANY novel can EASILY manage to disagree on ALL of the major points. I might be nitpicking, because I think I know what you mean, but still. Is it really easy for informed readings to disagree on ALL the major points? Most readers who are on the ball will notice the same distinguishing features of the novel, such as its narrative structure, the repeated use of certain phrases or symbols, etc. And these things constrain the range of POSSIBLE valid interpretations. To use Haack’s analogy about science in her new book, it’s a messy process akin to solving a crossword puzzle. Science offers more durable solutions by far than literary criticism does, of course.
There’s another issue, though – one that I’ll just mention now and come back to later, as I’m pressed for time. That is: it’s possible for two people to have exactly the same interpretation of a novel’s meaning, and yet not like it equally. Yet, in cases like this, it seems possible to concede that the author has done something objectively sophisticated, brilliantly constructed, all that stuff. It’s just that it rubs against our own personal ideological biases, or our sense of life, if you will. “Madame Bovary” is like that for me. It’s an utterly brilliant book, but I respect it more than I love it.
Phil
What a good discussion this is. How gratifying it is to have such readers.
Just so, about the stringent standards. That’s what I mean about the fuzzy borders and the overlap. That there is some overlap between scientific ways of thinking and other empirical and/or rational ways of thinking. It’s not a radical dichotomy of the kind the separate spheres idea would suggest. Picture a couple of partially overlapping circles: there’s a lot in common and that still leaves plenty of room for divergence.
Phil, Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions is also good on emotions. I too have only dipped into Upheavals of Thought so far, but I’ll get to it. Provided the lights stay on.
You all seem determined to keep seeing things backwards over here! Of course science can investigate emotions– it does so all of the time, in psychology and neurology and medicine. The point is not that the emotions can’t be the object of scientific inquiry, but that emotions cannot be part of the scientific inquiry. For example, in an experiment designed to determine whether a or b is the case, one cannot leave out some of the data for b because of her partiality to a– this would be unscientific. But emotion is all about leaning towards the preferred, simply because it is the preferred. We yearn for the beloved because he is beloved, not because we have collected objective evidence which demonstrates his superiority over our other choices.
Also see the comment I’ve added to the analogy thread below, at “Somewhere over the rainbow” if you like.
Well, which point? Whose point? What if there’s more than one point? I for one am making more than one point here.
And I’m not sure what point you are in fact making. I know that about love of someone not having to do with collecting evidence. Where has anyone said anything that contradicts that?
My point is that the rhetoric that claims ‘science’ gets one part of the world and emotion gets a completely different part, is wrong, which your first comment supports. So – what is so backwards?
“The point is not that the emotions can’t be the object of scientific inquiry, but that emotions cannot be part of the scientific inquiry. “
Says who? When you think about how science actually works, or read some good books on the philosophy of science (David Hull, Susan Haack, Philip Kitcher, etc.), you find that emotions often are part of the scientific process. In fact, emotional investment in certain theories, or just in the process of discovery itself, is precisely what motivates most scientists in the first place. It would be rather odd if scientists decided to spend years of education and decades of professional life exploring questions that had no emotional motivation to answer.
Marijo, I think you’re confusing two concepts here. You’re confounding the idea that emotions cannot determine the TRUTH of a scientific question with the idea that emotions cannot be part of the process of answering the question. The first idea is true, the second is false. “Scientific” is not a synonym for “value-free” or “emotionless.” Science proceeds, in part, because scientists are motivated by values to which they feel an emotional tie – along with intellectual ones, of course.
So is this looking at things “backwards?” Only if it’s backwards of us to examine issues as they really are, as opposed to starting from arbitrary assumptions.
Phil
I’m sorry, I really was only talking about the truth question. I know that scientists can feel emotion about their work; they would hardly be human if they didn’t. All along here, though, I have been working on Ophelia’s assertion that the claim that a god exists is simply false. While I agree that it is false, I believe that there is a way for a religious person to believe that it is true without violating any of the rules of scientific inquiry. I believe this, because I believe that the ‘truths’ of religion are not accessible to scientific inquiry, anyway. They are more like the truth of the claim that I love my husband, a claim that it would be difficult to defend rationally (that doesn’t sound quite right. The problem is not that he’s unloveable, of course, but that the criteria for love are difficult to establish and demonstrate, I guess). A belief in God is like an emotional claim about the way the world is, not a factual claim about its contents. The trivial observation that science can observe emotion or poetry has nothing to do with the emotional assertion of a ‘truth’– that’s where you were backwards. Unfortunately, I’m not arguing very fiercely this week, because I’m annoyed with religion, myself, upon the release of that horrid movie and all of this talk about marriage. It is true that I tend to argue for an idealized brand of religion, while the best arguments against religion are against those at the other end of the spectrum. This means that our arguments tend to miss each other in the middle, anyway. I could argue (in fact I have argued, at home at my blog) against Mel Gibson’s style of worship all day long.
Oh, okay, Marijo, I see what you mean. Yes, I can buy that – but with the stipulation that you point out yourself: that’s not what everyone means by religion, that’s not the only kind of truth claim that gets made, etc. I mean – you don’t demand that everyone else in the world love your husband the way you do, do you! I would do vastly less arguing with religion if it were uniformly tentative about its truth claims. If religion were vastly less coercive, either rhetorically or (in many parts of the world) very literally and physically.
I might still do some though. For a number of reasons, having to do with – oh well, with things I might do a Comment on at some point.