Barbara Forrest on philosophical naturalism
If you’re tired of hearing people say that science cannot address the supernatural, Barbara Forrest’s “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection” is just what you want to read.
From the abstract:
I conclude that the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion given (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.
From page 5
…the methodology of science is the only viable method of acquiring reliable knowledge about the cosmos. Given this fact, if there is no workable method for acquiring knowledge of the supernatural, then it is procedurally impossible to have knowledge of either a supernatural dimension or entity. In the absence of any alternative methodology, the metaphysical claims one is entitled to make are very strictly limited. The philosophical naturalist, without making any metaphysical claims over and above those warranted by science, can demand from supernaturalists the method that legitimizes their metaphysical claims. In the absence of such a method, philosophical naturalists can not only justifiably refuse assent to such claims, but can deny–tentatively, not categorically–the existence of the supernatural, and for the same reason they deny the existence of less exalted supernatural entities like fairies and ghosts: the absence of evidence.
Isn’t that like a nice strong sea breeze after a long stuffy afternoon in an overheated room?
Nice, thanks for the link! It’s a neat contrast with the blowup from a year ago: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/chris-mooney-and-barbara-forrest-love-the-faithful-more-than-me/
I know it. It was Forrest that Mooney cited, and that has always bothered me (until someone pointed me to this article, I forget who [sorry!], a few weeks ago). Forrest is great – she was a key witness at Dover – she’s the one who found the damning find & replace typo – she’s the co-author with Paul Gross of Creationism’s Trojan Horse – I swapped friendly emails with her when she and Gross and OUP allowed me to publish the intro here. Now I get to think Mooney misunderstood her.
Oddly, Massimo Pigliucci cites the same article as first introducing him to the thought that science doesn’t rule out the supernatural. But the thrust of the article is that that doesn’t make any real difference – any difference that matters. Massimo seems to think it matters enormously, at least for the purposes of fighting with Coyne and Dawkins and co (not at all for purposes of not believing in fairies, or arguing with Carlin Romano).
That’s an excellent paper. It should be included in a textbook somewhere, if it isn’t already. At first I wondered what’s with all the Kurtz references, but then I saw it was published in Philo :). Not that there’s anything wrong with it; I like Kurtz.
I have one trivial objection, however. The phrase in point (4) of the abstract, “lack of evidence for the supernatural,” makes me wince. In point (3), “the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural” means that we don’t even know what evidence for the supernatural would look like, so at best (4) is a tautology. At worst it is contradictory: If you affirmatively state that you have lack of evidence for something, that implies that you know what you are looking for.
Thanks for the link. I’ve turned it into a Kindle book, and it awaits my eye, but I am reading Hitch-22, which I resisted buying for awhile, but now cannot set down.
It does sound, however, like a fresh sea-breeze of an unpolluted ocean.
Good, is it, Eric? He said in the Staggers interview (in News today) that Martin’s Experience was the one to beat. I found Experience repellent in some ways but also brilliant, and hugely readable. An odd mix.
Yes, I think so. It is good. It is blazingly honest, inquiring, reflective, funny in spots — his embarrassing visit to a New York ‘massage parlour’ with Martin Amis (researching his novel Money) is very entertaining — maddeningly exhaustive — how does anyone remember so much? — morally sensitive and ardent — even when you may disagree — and it is so redolent of the historical atmosphere of what is effectively a kaleidoscope of mid to late twentieth century to early twenty-first century life. He seems to have read everything and remembered it all, as well as having met almost everyone that others know only by hearsay. In addition to this he seems to have been everywhere. I understand what Jerry Coyne means when he writes of the chapter about his mother Yvonne as rather impersonal, but that, in itself, is no surprise. When you grow up in a boarding school, family is impersonal. These are just very quick jottings. I think it will stand a re-reading. It is too rich for one go. One thing I will say is that, despite his political shifts and changes, I do not think that Hitchens has abandoned the left at all. In fact, I suspect he is more determinedly left now than he has ever been, just not trying quite so hard to be doctrinaire about it.
I think that’s an exact duplicate of what I said about him in a short piece for “On the Library” when B&W was young. I posted it at Facebook when the news about the state of his esophagus broke. He does indeed seem to remember everything.
That piece from Forrest is just exactly a breath of fresh air. Thank you Barbara (and OB for highlighting it).
I’m curious – Mooney described a talk of hers that seemed to endorse a less than rigorous accommodationism (see the link Ben put in his comment #1), which led to a whole lot of fracas. But I don’t recall ever hearing from Forrest herself on that. Did she ever confirm/deny/comment on Mooney’s description of her talk (which he clearly cited to bolster his preferred approach)?
No, not that I know of. I think I considered emailing her about it, but didn’t want to be a pest.
Understandable, since persisting in asking questions or pointing out unfair behavior has been decreed pesty at L’Intersection and now at the CFI thread too.
/grumble, glower
Yeah, I saw that, started reading this article, and got very confused. I got the impression that Pigliucci was being sarcastic, that he thought the paper was really bad and it was the badness that convinced him of the possibility of the supernatural.
As I recall, someone on Pigliucci’s post mentioning this gave an example of a supernatural event. When people pointed out that the example begged all kinds of questions, the response was something like:
“As soon as I describe a possible supernatural account, it’s normalized to a natural account.” It only exists if you don’t look at it. How is that not a teapot?
The definition of a supernatural event, as far as I can tell, is a one-time event in which the laws of nature are violated. But a one-time event will either leave evidence of its occurrence, or it won’t. If the supernatural event does not, then it is a teapot — unobservable by stipulation. The only non-teapot supernatural one is observed directly or indirectly.
Does this mean known laws of nature, or fundamental laws of nature whatever they might turn out to be? If it’s the known laws of nature, we expect them to be broken. We know they’re wrong. The Atlas detector at the LHC was specifically designed to look for breaks in the known laws of nature. So he can’t mean the known laws of nature, for it’s rather unremarkable when those are broken, especially given that so many scientists have staked their careers on experimental verification of current laws being broken.
So a supernatural event must be a directly or indirectly observed event in which not the known laws of nature, but the fundamental laws of nature are violated. And this violation must be apparent through by means of the observation — an unobserved violation is still a teapot. However, note that to recognize this event as a breach of a fundamental law, the fundamental law must be a known law, and more importantly, we must be absolutely certain that the known law is the same as the fundamental law to be sure that we have witnessed a fundamental natural law being broken.
And that’s eliding another really important question: “What qualifies as a natural law?” So Pigliucci has to define “natural law” in a way that doesn’t beg the question, show how we can demonstrate that a known law is a fundamental law, and then give an example of a possible violation (and show that it actually is possible — it’s not obvious, for example, that a baked ham could really pop into existence ex nihilo even if we can imagine it happening) of such a known-fundamental-law before he’s demonstrated that his rarefied definition of “supernatural” is coherent.
For some pretty well-established reasons, I don’t think it’s possible to show that a known law is a fundamental law…ever. And if that is the case, if one observes an event in which a law of nature is apparently broken, it always makes more sense to assume that it’s breaking a false known law rather than a true fundamental law, and we will necessarily assume that the known law is wrong.
Am I missing something that is obvious to anyone else? I feel like Pigliucci’s argument on this is either really threadbare or I’m missing something really important.
I think I can make the objection a lot more succinct and precise:
If you accept a form of philosophical naturalism as described by Forrest in that essay, then you are not committing yourself to an ontology of nature — any ontology asserted is provisional. In fact, for science to work, this has to be the case; we have to be able to accept results at odds with current theories — and the ontology they determine — to be able to refine those theories.
So if a supernatural event is one that violates our ontology, then the first question that strikes me: “Was the discovery of cosmic background microwave radiation a supernatural event?” No one expected to find it, it found no counterpart in the (provisional) natural ontology of the time. And if the microwave radiation is supernatural, then Pigliucci is using “supernatural” in a very odd sense.
If the answer is that, no, clearly the cosmic background microwave radiation is a natural phenomenon, then clearly violations of our current ontology aren’t necessarily supernatural. It’s still not clear whether they can be supernatural, however. How can we determine whether an event which violates our current ontology is natural or supernatural? Without such a test, we can’t say whether the notion of the “supernatural” is coherent, for any violation of our current ontology can be taken to demonstrate a flaw in that ontology rather than a violation of any true law of nature.
Again, we seem to get to a point where, to justify the possibility of the supernatural, we must assume:
a) There are fundamental and knowable laws of nature (an alternative would be that “laws of nature” are contingent characterizations of regularities in the structure of the natural world, that the regularity is prior to the law; another would be that there are fundamental laws, but we can’t know them, perhaps because they use a logical calculus that our brains can’t handle)
b) We can not only know these fundamental laws, but know that they are fundamental.
These are incredibly strong assumptions; I certainly wouldn’t try to defend them.
Sorry for the serial comments, but after going googling “massimo pigliucci supernatural” and reading most of the stuff I could find that seemed relevant, I can’t see where he has ever actually given a good reason to suppose the supernatural can exist. The only reference to his reasoning was this:
http://www.mondojohnson.com/pigliucci/20050701.php
All it says that in the course of discussing methodological naturalism vs. philosophical naturalism with Eugenie Scott, he was convinced that there actually is a difference. Not why or anything. This all sort of corresponds with a switch in gears in his style of argumentation; he stops being so confrontational towards religious people at this point, accepts the possibility of the supernatural, etc. Starts railing against Dawkins and Coyne and starts trying to ameliorate the public image of new atheists as arrogant blowhards (what, we’re not?).
I can’t help but think he might be insisting the supernatural is possible as a tactical maneuver rather than as a genuine philosophical argument. Which, if true, would make me want to throw up a little. I’m really trying to understand things, and as a result, I’m engaging in these debates in good faith. If he’s just trying to compromise with the faithful, then he shouldn’t pretend he’s making a real philosophical point. (Again, that’s assuming he’s not making a legitimate argument; since I haven’t seen him make a good case yet, I make the provisional judgment that this “supernatural” thing is tactical and I am justified in being disgusted.)
Funny you should mention it – I’ve been trying to figure out what Massimo means by it too, though I haven’t yet had the time to search everything under his name plus supernatural.
The citation of the Forrest essay I saw wasn’t sarcastic at all. He said he was confrontational toward her while he was still a biologist and she did a talk at his university; he was (he said) naive about philosophy at the time. She pointed him to this paper, he saw that, aha, methodological naturalism does not logically entail philos naturalism, so he can be all accommodationist. He told her so and they’ve been friends ever since.
Which I just can’t make sense of, because the point of the paper is the opposite of that, apart from the fact that she does say mn doesn’t entail pn. But she also says (in effect) that doesn’t matter.
I don’t get it.
Correction, it was Genie Scott he was confrontational with – then she pointed him to the Forrest article. I’m trying to find the place where I read this account, and haven’t succeeded yet, but I did find this, which mentions the first part.
Found it! Whew, that was going to drive me nuts otherwise.
It describes the disagreement with Scott in much more detail, then
So…he agrees that the reasonable position is, in fact, that of the philosophical naturalist. But in that case, why is he always shouting at us?
Well not us, he’s not shouting at me, I’m not a scientist. But I am a philosophical naturalist, dammit, and I think scientists get to be that too, and from everything I can see, so does Massimo, so why is he shouting at us philosophical naturalists merely because we go for the Forrest emphasis (so to speak) rather than the Scott one?
I can’t imagine why anyone would think that philosophical naturalism is entailed by methodological naturalism. Who has ever argued such a thing? The reverse would apply, I suppose, at least with some other plausible assumptions. I.e., if you have some reason to think PN is true, then there’s not much point in advancing hypotheses that involve entities, forces, etc., that violent MN.
But surely the historical and philosophical relationship is a bit more complicated. The consistent failure of hypotheses such as diluvial geology led scientists to adopt MN as an approach in the latter half of the 19th century. The consistent failure of such hypotheses, together with the success of an MN-restricted science, plus other things no doubt, increasingly led some people (scientists and otherwise) to adopt PN. PN is inductively attractive, but it’s only held provisionally – e.g. I’m still open to evidence that it’s wrong – while MN is adopted by the profession of science only as a useful rule of thumb, not as an eternal truth.
In principle, someone could come up with some successful MN-violating hypotheses tomorrow (though obviously eyebrows would be raised at first until the hypotheses proved themselves and hardened into robust theory, which would take some years). The problem with diluvial geology, for example, isn’t that it violates MN; it’s that it’s been falsified. Indeed, if diluvial geology had stood up to scrutiny, back in the 19th century, scientists would not be using MN today.
er, “violate” … not “violent”.
Dan L. #13 wrote:
If a person doesn’t have a coherent, falsifiable definition of “supernatural,” then talking about how it relates to scientific explanations or investigation is going to get very muddled. How does Pigliucci define ‘the supernatural?’ For that matter, how is ‘nature’ defined?
The best distinction I’ve found, myself, is the one made by Richard Carrier (and others):
Background microwave radiation has no connection to pure mind, or mental attributes. It’s mindless, valueless. Now imagine how you would answer the question “was the discovery of cosmic background microwave radiation a supernatural event?” — if the microwave radiation was demonstrated to be “the power of love.” Or “creative harmony.” Or any kind of intentional force, or value.
A definition which focused on the requirement that the supernatural deals with non-material, irreducible mental beings, forces, and values would then place ESP and PK in the ‘supernatural’ category (as long as thought itself is the basic unit.) Is it ‘scientism’ to claim that these things are, in theory, empirically testable? And wouldn’t proof of both and/or either provide strong evidence in favor of a God which works through both?
If so, the lack of evidence says something.
I hate the term “methodological naturalism.” It’s a dodge. Science basically consists of methods designed to rule out bias, and strive for objectivity. It doesn’t say anything up front about how it can be used on “nature.” It is used on “reality.”
I don’t understand. It’s garbled again.
No problem Sastra, it’s easy to fix.
Funny, zombies probably fit into the supernatural (as usually deployed, anyway) yet the whole point of them is that they’re non-mental. They’re agents but non-mental. Persons but without teleology.
Hm. Interesting proposed counterexample. But isn’t “agency” — acting with intention towards a goal — inherently mental or mind-like? I think zombies might be drawn from the larger category of animism, where rocks and trees have a sort of ‘spirit’ which responds in ways a person would respond — not as actual persons, but person-like. As soon as a rock is assigned ‘agency,’ you’re in woo territory. It doesn’t have to have an active inner life, or experience qualia.
Besides, zombies are teleological. They want braaaaiiiiiins. They have the single-minded drive and motivation you might find in ants, or sharks. Considering the fact that these are dead bodies, they shouldn’t really have even that. There’s no underlying mechanism. If a skeptical scientific investigation verified the existence of zombies, bye-bye metaphysical naturalism and reductionist materialism.
I won’t get in to philosophical zombies.
Aha, but in effect is different than in principle. Philosophers tend to care about principle (perhaps a bit too much, but you see what I mean).
I don’t really want to spend a thread defending Massimo, but I’ve know the man for some time now, and he is not trying to compromise with the faithful. He doesn’t accept the possibility of the supernatural any more than Mr. Dawkins. He just really thinks he has it right on the principle of the issue of methodological and philosophical naturalism, and more broadly, science and religion, (and I tend to agree with him). And because of his stance on those issues, he has quite inevitably criticized fellow atheists and scientists who consider the broad existence of God a scientific hypothesis/question.
Michael – that makes no sense. Those two sentences contradict each other.
Furthermore, if Massimo doesn’t accept the possibility of the supernatural anymore than Dawkins, then why does he think the best use of his time is to scold and belittle people who agree with him? Why is it more important to him to split what look like increasingly silly philosophical hairs with people who should be allies than it is to make common cause with them? It looks very much like a personal hobby horse that’s seriously blinded his sense of priorities.
The thing is, Forrest does consider it to be sort of a scientific question. Not a question to be answered from within a specific science, of course, but a question whose answer comes from reflection on the success of science generally. Her piece exactly shows how science and philosophy are continuous. A lot of what philosophers do is the overall work that can’t be done within one specific science but has to draw on science as a whole. Moreover, a lot of what scientists do in formulating and refining theories is conceptual rather than narrowly empirical, and can be thought of as philosophical work. None of this is surprising, given that the specific sciences emerged from philosophy.
I’m happy to accept that people are doing philosophy when they step out of their specific sciences to draw conclusions from science as a whole, and sometimes they’re doing philosophy even within their specific sciences when they are working at the high theoretical end. In that case, Richard Dawkins does quite a bit of philosophy. But I don’t think it’s terribly misleading to say that the existence of God, or of the supernatural in general, is a scientific question given the way Forrest actually approaches it. Nor do I think that Richard means that it’s a question that can be dealt with within one specific science, given the way the profession is organised.
If the whole issue is just about whether we should say it is a “scientifically-informed philosophical question” or more simply a “scientific question”, I don’t know why it attracts so much heat. Perhaps Richard and Jerry should, strictly, say the former, but I don’t think they are trying to tear down philosophy departments, and nor do I think that they are doing anything wrong when they make the kinds of arguments that they do. As Jerry was emphasising last time we discussed this, the issue is open to rational inquiry drawing on empirical findings. That’s what science does. It’s also one of the things that philosophy does. The question doesn’t fit neatly into any one science, so philosophers get to handle it, but there’s also no reason why broadly-informed scientists can’t do the work, as honorary philosophers if you will. If someone is acting as a sort of “generic scientist”, rather than conducting research within a specific scientific discipline, that just seems to me to be one way of acting as a philosopher (obviously there are other ways). Admittedly, it might be good to work with philosophers if you’re doing that, if only to avoid re-inventing the wheel or falling into traps that have already been identified, but Richard and Jerry are evidently happy to do that – Richard and Dan Dennett are closely allied, for example.
It all seems like much ado about nothing to me, a matter of semantics and practical disciplinary boundaries.
Why does Massimo care so much? Maybe he’ll tell us if he turns up, or maybe Michael has a clue.
See, Michael, there’s a lot of puzzlement about this, because Massimo does seem to have a kind of…a maggot, in the old sense of a cranky thing in the mind.
He seems to take from Barbara Forrest’s article the opposite of what everyone else takes, and the opposite of what she says. She says pn is the most reasonable view, Massimo says aha mn doesn’t entail pn so I can agree with Genie. To outsiders that just doesn’t make sense – especially not as a reason to shout at Dawkins and Coyne, as he keeps doing, rather unpleasantly. (He must know they don’t say or think “science can answer all questions,” yet he keeps saying they do.)
Try to talk him down. :- )
Yes, to echo Russell – do tell us, Massimo. Frankly at this point I can’t see any grounds for disagreement! Can you? Srsly?
Are you sure about that? I’m inclined to think diluvial geology would be naturalized. Naturalism will tend to expand to encompass anything that is found, which is what has always happened with new discoveries, no matter how revolutionary at the time.
And so it would probably be if a “real god”, whatever that might turn out to mean, appeared. Naturalism is an explanatory stance and not a completed map of the universe and everything in it. It won’t be abandoned because nothing could cause that to happen. Any thing that did happen, no matter how disruptive at the time, would itself be investigated. The link between inquiry and the stance that supports it can’t be broken.
What matters is not what is in naturalism, because nothing is really inside or outside it. Naturalism is the approach taken, not the substance of what’s found. I don’t have a problem with nature assuming very different characteristics than it has today, I simply note the wildly improbable nature of what theists maintain, and that new discoveries that arrive from time to time have never taken the form of old discredited stories, and there’s no reason to think they will in the future.
The thing is, we wouldn’t even be using the terms “methological naturalism” and “philosophical naturalism” if theories such diluvial geology had been successful and the march of science had kept validating the literal content of a particular holy book. In that alternative reality, it would look very much as if science and revelation really could work hand in hand, informing each other. No one would have developed a protocol that certain kinds of hypotheses should not be advanced, since such hypotheses would have had a good track record. No one would suggest that the success of a science conducted in accordance with such protocols is evidence that certain kinds of entitities probably don’t exist. It wouldn’t be a matter of naturalising everything – we might still regard certain kinds of entities as “supernatural”, insofar as they might not relate systematically or intuitively with quotidian experience and so on. The “supernatural” realm might still seem spooky, but maybe not much more so than quantum-level events seem spooky in the real world. We might still distinguish in a loose way between natural and supernatural, but both would fall, to varying extents perhaps, within rational investigation.
We simply don’t live in a world where things turned out like that after, say, 1850, once decisive results were coming in. We live in a world where goddy hypotheses turned out in many cases to be simply wrong and in other cases to be totally unhelpful. It then becomes a question of what conclusions we can draw from this experience, whether about useful scientific protocols or about what sorts of things probably exist.
Another thing has to be said, but is seldom pointed out. Methodological naturalism is a protocol that tells scientists not to advance supernatural hypotheses (based on a commonsense understanding of what counts as a supernatural hypothesis). It is not the dogmatic view that supernatural hypotheses can never be tested. In some cases they can be tested, have been tested, and have been falsified. Scientists are reluctant to postulate such entities as gods, ghosts, and demons in their explanations, but other people postulate such things all the time. If they postulate ways that these entities have interacted with the world in the past or interact with it now, scientists can and look for evidence. As long as the interaction is not said to be simply capricious, we can look and see.
Actually, this is one place where Forrest goes wrong. We could have found evidence for diluvial geology, for example. E.g. we could have found that the earth is 6000 years old, that modern rocks were formed in a huge flood four or five thousand years ago, and so on. The literal biblical accounts could have been corroborated by all sorts of circumstantial empirical evidence, and we wouldn’t have needed to build a god in our laboratories to see what happens when you do so. Nor do we need to able to build a brachiosaurus in our laboratories to postulate that certain bones are the fossilised remnants of a brachiosaurus. We can rely on converging lines of essentially circumstantial evidence. That kind of evidence could certainly have given strong support to the literal truth of a holy book recording the actions of gods and demons – if the holy book’s account had actually been true.
But none of this ever happened despite numerous efforts. This means that the case against gods, demons, the literal truth of holy books, and on – in other words the case for philosophical naturalism – is even stronger than Forrest suggests.
Russell, I agree with you. We could have found evidence for a flood and an Ark. That is, we have to be open procedurally to the evidence that diluvial geology might be true, in order to accomplish the kind of investigation that show why it can’t be true. So I maintain that it’s this openness to the falsification of even well-confirmed theories that marks naturalism. And I would guess that most scientists probably think that the methodological/philosophical distinction is meaningless. Should we be surprised that science works because the world is like that? What’s the alternative, Cartesian demons?
Which is pretty much the implication of Forrest’s article. That’s pretty much the implication of “the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion.” If the relationship is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion, then the distinction is – at least practically speaking – meaningless.