Twirling
A commenter raised an interesting point on the pontifical post, a point that I’ve been pondering on and off (mostly off) ever since JS cc’d me his replies to the HERO interview.
The point the commenter raises is the same one JS raises: the idea that it’s good to teach pseudoscience in universities because otherwise people get smug and lazy. Bridget in comments:
Students who are not exposed to a range of theories with stronger or weaker truth claims, do not develop the ability to critically judge the validity of what they are taught – they become lazy thinkers.
JS in the interview:
I’m not comfortable with consensus, so I think if it turned out that the kinds of views that B&W advocates became mainstream and taken-for-granted, then I’d have to adopt alternative positions. This isn’t just bloody-minded contrarianism; I think there is value in dialectical engagement. It inoculates against the possibility of a smug complacency over our truth-claims.
I told JS that I’d tell him why I disagreed with his replies if he had more time (if he weren’t working on 57 books), but he doesn’t have more time (because of working on 57 books), and my thoughts on the subject are as it were burning a hole in my pocket. I feel dissatisfied and irked keeping them to myself. It’s kind of like keeping a sexual urge to yourself, only different. I have informed one or two people I know about my thoughts on the subject, and they were immensely pleased and thankful, but I find I still want to air them some more.
One problem I think that idea has is that it contradicts what JS himself wrote about B&W on the About page when we first set it up.
There are two motivations for setting up the web site. The first is the common one having to do with the thought that truth is important, and that to tell the truth about the world it is necessary to put aside whatever preconceptions (ideological, political, moral, etc.) one brings to the endeavour.
There’s a reason for that thought, surely. The reason is that preconceptions get in the way of telling the truth about the world (and of finding out what the truth about the world is) because they are extraneous. They impede, they get in the way, they detour, they introduce the irrelevant, they distort. (Of course, we’re all only human, and we can’t get rid of all our preconceptions, but that doesn’t mean we should just shrug and let them run riot.) They replace the endeavour to find the truth with the endeavour to find whatever matches up best with one’s preconceptions – and that’s the wrong way to go about trying to find the truth. And it seems to me that deciding in advance to ‘adopt alternative positions’ when the views one thought were true become mainstream, is simply bringing another preconception to the endeavour. It seems to me that displaces asking to the best of one’s ability ‘are these views true?’ in favour of asking ‘are these views mainstream?’ and that that is the right way to get at what is or is not mainstream, but the wrong way to get at what is or is not true. It seems to me to be introducing an irrelevance.
I’m not very fond of conventional wisdom and received opinions and the tepid waters of the mainstream myself, but the fact remains that in scientific or factual matters, popularity is irrelevant to truth. It is of course relevant to ‘truth,’ to what passes for truth, as Susan Haack puts it; but it’s not relevant to actual truth. So I don’t quite see why concerns about potential smug complacency should trump concerns about telling the truth about the world. Smug complacency is irritating stuff, no doubt about it, but is it really worse than lying? And does it make sense to lie for the sake of avoiding smug complacency over our truth-claims? And then of course there’s the obvious problem that resisting consensus and the mainstream can lead to smug complacency over our truth-claims at least as easily as simply going along with consensus can. So maybe it’s more sensible just to do one’s best to get at the truth with whatever methods seem to do the job and not worry about smug complacency, rather than deciding to talk nonsense and risk being a smugly complacent anti-consensus rebel.
Surely, if the issue is teaching, one does not need to confront students with confected examples of lazy thinking, one just needs to show them the mirror of their own work… If they were not in need of improvement, they wouldn’t be there…
As for complacency, that is a bogus suggestion — OB, you and we know all too well that it is amongst the thinkers of nonsense that complacency is to be found, while we questers after truth rage with the injustice of a world brim-full of idiots…
I was really irritated with that JS comment for two reasons. First, because it plays to the popular misconception that philosophers and philosophy jst argue for the sake of it. Second, it’s all very well for JS in the security of his cosmopolitan world to take such a position but elsewhere in the world, as many of your links show, trying to tell the truth can have serious even fatal consequences, and to my mind wilfully rejecting an opportunity to do so just for laughs is, at the very least, disrespectful of these brave people.
End of rant.
I suppose another problem with the idea (maybe this is what I was gesturing at by saying it’s extraneous) is that it seems oddly self-conscious and self-absorbed as an idea. As if the important thing about truth and truth-claims is something about the personality or presentation-of-self of the person making them, when it ought to be the truth-claims themselves. As if truth-claims are like a fashion statement. But that seems so trivializing and self-inflating as an idea. The notion that the first thing we should ask about truth claims is whether or not we risk being smug and complacent in making them – makes the truth claims be about us intead of about themselves. Surely that’s rather narcissistic. We’ve all heard that useful phrase ‘Everything’s not about you!’ It just seems to me we shouldn’t mix up our epistemology with our presentation of self. Epistemology isn’t about that.
“I’m not comfortable with consensus, so I think if it turned out that the kinds of views that B&W advocates became mainstream and taken-for-granted, then I’d have to adopt alternative positions. This isn’t just bloody-minded contrarianism; I think there is value in dialectical engagement.”
Hmmm….I don’t see how actually adopting alternative positions just because they buck consensus has anything to do with healthy dialectical engagement. It’s one thing to try to understand an alternative viewpoint, and to ask what advantages it may have over received wisdom, and it’s quite another to adopt that viewpoint wholesale just because no one else is doing so. The first helps us to deepen our understanding of truth, while the second forgets the relevance of truth in the first place.
As a high school teacher, I really do make an effort to teach students about pseudoscience so that they can understand why real scientific thinking is superior. (And if this is what JS really meant, I agree with him). I’ve often argued that not teaching students about how to actively compare science with pseudoscience leaves them vulnerable to those who ignore the difference, or who denigrate science in favor of the latter. This involves showing how pseudoscience can seem like an attractive, common-sense explanation for many phenomena. However, I don’t teach that this explanation is equal to a scientific explanation, because doing so would be lying. And should everyone in the world suddenly start believing in science tomorrow (a circumstance likely to happen only in Utopian fiction), I’m not going to reverse course and argue that pseudoscience is really what students should be believing – that seems pretty straightforwardly absurd.
We can see the two viewpoints in a kind of dialectic with each other without in any way believing that they’re equal. In many if not most cases, they won’t be equal, and pretending otherwise won’t change that.
Phil
“As a high school teacher, I really do make an effort to teach students about pseudoscience so that they can understand why real scientific thinking is superior. (And if this is what JS really meant, I agree with him).”
Definitely; if it is, so do I. But that doesn’t seem to be what he meant. It’s not what he said, and he generally chooses his words with care when arguing a position. (I’d ask him, but there are those 57 books.) Actually adopting a position isn’t the same thing as teaching about it. In fact teaching about it is pretty much just what B&W does. Come to that, back at the beginning, four years ago, when B&W was just a gleam in JS’s eye, he told me about an amusing meta-discussion he had, about just what is pseudoscience anyway, and who decides what it is. Exposing and discussing and teaching about pseudoscience was the whole point of B&W – which is why it’s so disconcerting to have its originator saying maybe Afrocentrism should be taught (not taught about, just taught) in universities.
Pseudoscience only “works” when you want it to, science works even when you don’t want it to…
“Pseudoscience only “works” when you want it to, science works even when you don’t want it to…”
Exactly….although people need to learn how and why phenomena that seem to “work” really don’t if they’re going to distinguish the two. Anecdotal evidence, selective evaluative criteria and the like can make pseudoscience seem very compelling to those who don’t know how to properly critique its claims.
And again, yes, there is a huge difference between teaching about pseudoscience and adopting a belief in it. That’s what I don’t get about JS’ comment – it seems to run completely roughshod over the distinction.