The level of humility in scientific discourse
An observation by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape:
“while it is a standard rhetorical move in such debates to accuse scientists of being ‘arrogant,’ the level of humility in scientific discourse is, in fact, one of its most striking characteristics. In my experience, arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity. At any scientific meeting you will find presenter after presenter couching his or her remarks with caveats and apologies. When asked to comment on something that lies to either side of the very knife edge of their special expertise, even Nobel laureates will say things like, “Well, this isn’t really my area, but I would suspect that X is…” or “I’m sure there are several people in this room who know more about this than I do, but as far as I know, X is…” The totality of scientific knowledge now doubles every few years. Given how much there is to know, all scientists live with the constant awareness that whenever they open their mouths in the presence of other scientists, they are guaranteed to be speaking to someone who knows more about a specific topic than they do.” [p 124]
That’s why I like to read and listen. I’m in constant awe at stuff like this.
The term arrogance always crops up when the presenter, or speaker is telling the truth or an attempt at it.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: The level of humility in scientific discourse http://dlvr.it/9nqSR […]
It’s one of the more salient points Sam makes. (And he makes it regularly, both in print and in his stump speeches.)
True.
False.
Someone who believes he is chosen by god and that god shares his prejudices could never be regarded as arrogant, of course.
Shatterface beat me to it. How someone who believes the Universe exists in part for them can term themselves a humble believer is beyond me. But it’s so common place.
Arrogance is a problem with the observer and not the problem of the observed. I don’t take particular offense to being called arrogant, even though it is a common ad hominem, and any such criticism is not a rational one. As Sam says, “it is a standard rhetorical move in such debates”, it’s not a rational one.
Again, religious or irrational language is more about power relations than about knowledge, and so it is no surprise that ad hominem is part of its weaponry.
Scientists always know that they might be found out and there are clear public ways of showing this.It pays to be humble until you are proved right! Theologians can make sweeping assertions and there is often no way to specifically challenge them so they can get away with absurdities. As a result, in Britain, at least, theology is a discipline which makes no contribution to wider intellectual currents. How can you respect a field that has no objective and publicly justifiable way of assessing what is true or false?
Charles, you are quite correct. The constant possibility of having your work modified or disproved by the work of others tends to make scientists, on the whole, quite tentative. Unsupported assertions are quite simply that – unsupported assertions and carry no weight in science.
Arrogance is asserting special and accurate knowledge with no supporting evidence whatever. This is the realm of religionists not scientists.
So if this is true, my question is, have the conferences I’ve been to had a lot more arrogance at them… or have the conferences Harris has been to been a lot more fun than the ones I have been to?
In any case, Harris’ central point (that scientists are expected to be behave in this humble manner, even if not all of them do) is quite valid. But in my experience, most scientists are also human beings (shocker!) and in any group of human beings some fraction displays a shocking arrogance… usually a higher fraction than is currently naked!
It’s paradoxical: Sam is exactly right that scientists speak with humility and caution, knowing their limits. And yet Sam is exactly wrong about there being an absence of arrogance among scientists…hasn’t Sam spoken to any? Like most people who’ve been rewarded and prized for their every utterance since early childhood, scientists will tend towards a sense of superiority.
Sam also misses an important point in the claims in public debates: that scientists, generally, are incredibly arrogant about science, if not about the particular thing they are talking to peers about. I’d invite you to peruse the comments here, for example, for evidence. While the data or interpretation of this experiment I am describing are given with caution and humility, let’s not forget that the speaker is proud to be a Scientist, and therefore a member of the Elite, the only group with any access to truthiness. That’s where the arrogance that the accusers point to lies, and sad to say (being a scientist myself), they are right.
I basically agree with Dagwood, except that in the context of the faith/science divide, the “beam from thine eye” principle applies here greatly. There may in fact be a place “where the arrogance that the accusers point to lies”, but when the “accuser” is someone who believes they have a book of infallible truth, I’ma not inclined to listen. (OTOH, when the “accuser” is someone who makes no such claim, there is indeed something here to be discussed)
@Dagwood: You didn’t actually mean to use ‘truthiness’ non-ironically, did you? :)
IANAS, but I think one could say in response to your thesis that one person’s ‘arrogance’ is another person’s ‘conviction’. Firmly held and carefully considered conclusions, stated forthrightly, even forcefully, can be seen as ‘arrogance’. Arrogance, as I understand it, is the illusion that one is <b>personally</b> superior and acting in such a manner without regard or respect for others.
If one is (say) a biologist, one is justified in believing – and stating – that their knowledge of biology is superior to that of a non-biologist. Our biologist could even be a trifle tactless about it but that still doesn’t make the biologist “arrogant”.
As I like to say when people take exception when I state a clear opinion on one of the few subjects I know something about: “Hey, if I were diplomatic I’d work for the (US) State Department”.
Charles, you wrote:
I guess I would want to word this a bit more mordantly. How can there be a field (of knowledge, presumably) if there is “no objective and publicly justifiable way of assessing what is true or false?”
This is based on the experience of finding out — too late — that theology cannot be a field at all. To give but one example. The issue of same sex blessings came up in the diocese where I worked. I was for some years on the “Sexuality Task Group” (more years than I care now to remember). Initially, what the task group was trying to discern is what we could say with assurance, as Christians, about the moral acceptability of same-sex relationships. The discussion was slow but seemed to be productive at first, but then this task group seamlessly transformed into a second task group, where viewpoints were much more sharply defined, and conflict was apparently unresolvable. And then, finally, a third task group was formed, of which I was the chairperson, and this was even more divided, until I brought it to a halt with a short essay pointing out that there seemed to be no basis in Christian theology for resolving the issue. Recently, another task group was formed whose stated purpose is to discern God’s will for the church regarding same sex relationships. The idea seems to be that so long as they are talking — and not, say, dividing into distinct confessional groups — they are at least acting in good faith. But the obvious truth is that there is no basis for making one decision or another. Any decision could be called into question by the mere beliefs of another person. It might be based on scripture, tradition, reason, or just simple conviction that this is either intuitively right or wrong. But there is no objective or publicly justifiable way of coming to a conclusion. It is not that one cannot respect theology as a field. There is no such field. Which is why some years ago I took my theology “degree” diploma, cut it up into small pieces, and threw it in the recycle bin.
x-posted from Facebook:
I’m a bit uneasy at his ‘doubling of knowledge’ thing. I don’t think that each paper is worth the same. A doubling of papers is not a doubling of knowledge.And he overstates things a bit. Making more of your findings than the evidence shows, and scientists holding strong opinions and trashing the strong opinions of other knowledgeable scientists, about areas which are on the controversial knife-edge of a particular discipline, are not uncommon in science – nor are tactics like throwing every statistical test at a dataset possible, in order to get something publishable, irrespective of whether the one significant p-value is likely to be meaningful. Although science is motivated by a desire to get at the truth, it’s not untainted by careerism and a need to get funding for the next new project, and so on. That of course is the same in every mode of inquiry going.During my BSc. degree we were specifically taught to read scientific papers critically with an eye to finding just such biases.Simon Blackburn made much the same point about Dawkins’ portrayal of science in Devil’s Chaplain.I wouldn’t overstate the strength of my point, I’m not trying to cavil, just sort of adding it to the picture. I’ve not read the book, so maybe Harris puts it in a more realistic context. And even with these caveats, scientists, overall, are very humble before evidence and the unknown.
I like Eric’s example!
I am currently reading Nick Lane’s Life Ascending. I am not a scientist but I am much enjoying the way he sets out each problem, says what has been found out in the last few years and how it fits, what new questions are raised and the hopes that they might be resolved. There is a sense of ordered progress and an underlying confidence. And why not? Life has been transformed by science, a fact which all too often seems to be completely overlooked by those on the religion side of the debate who have piteously little to offer from the last fifty years. Yet, and this is a strength of the book , Lane quietly hints at the egos and wild guesses of some scientists and the acrimonious debates that occur. Yet in the end many if not all will be resolved by the evolving empirical evidence and we will know who has been out swimming without their trunks on. The theologians presumably have to wait a little longer, until they have reached another shore, to know if they got it right or not and, on their own admissions, it is not always good news if they turn out to have been heretics all along.
I think I have an exception to (the implied answer to) Charles’s question.
It is possible (and reasonable etc) to respect fields that deal with aesthetics and/or interpretation, which notoriously don’t really have (or perhaps want) any objective and publicly justifiable way of assessing what is true or false.
Mind you, I think it’s a different kind of respect from the kind one gives to fields that do produce genuine knowledge.
The thing about theology of course is that it has pretensions to being a field that does produce knowledge. That’s the place where respect becomes impossible.
A good point,Ophelia, though would we respect the provider of an aesthetic judgement which was claimed to be incontrovertibly true? Maybe the problem is that society has traditionally given a privileged position to the theologians and they have taken advantage of it.
Being strictly empiricist, truth claims are only justified as true if they correspond with the senses. Of course is implied much of the time within language, as long as it verifiable. This of course presents problems in academia, but I do think that a text could be studied with implied truths so long as they continue to be verifiable.
However, when it comes to art or literature, or other more subjective fields, then it is more about a study of meaning, rather than truth. A text can be meaningful and even hold implied truths, but be entirely fictional.
If a text belongs to a dead language, then it would lose implied truths and its vitality. Much of the decline of Orthodox Christianity could be related to the death of Latin and Greek, whereas the rise of Protestant/Fundamentalism is the re-vitality of the implied truths within a text. Fundamentalists Christians seem unable to distinguish between translation as absolute word of God and original. This may explain the still as yet vitality of Islam and the rise of fundamentalism within it. I can’t imagine a fundamentalist follower of Osiris, can you?
And Shakespeare still retains vitality both in its implied truths and its meaning, because Elizabethan language seems so much more rooted in meaning than our more fuzzy modern English. But no one is going to misread Shakespeare as literal truth, unless they’re insane.
I fully agree that scientists are humble in their scientific discourse but same cannot be said when they trespass the boundaries of science and argue in a bigoted manner on unscientific subjects with people who have a different mindset and way of thinking.
Eric McDonald! I am so tired of having to muck around in the comments section to find your always interesting comment and analysis. Why in heavens name can’t you be promoted? Would it be crazy to ask that Eric become a feature part of B&W? Please Ophelia?
Contra Harris we have this to look forward too:
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/12/07/3086346.htm?topic1=home&topic2=
talk about arrogance … sheesh.
Part of the explanation for what Jacob says (which is true, IME), is the economic
structure of science and the status of scientists, which creates incentives of precisely this type.A curious point, and related, is that science has been going downmarket: these days a high proportion ofit is done by graduate students who earna pittance, whereas in the 18th century itwas very much the domain of gentlemenmeddlers like aristocrats and theclergy. (And they _were_ overwhelminglymen.)
When he says that arrogance at science conferences “is about as common as nudity” my sense is that he means a certain kind of arrogance. I don’t think he means to imply that if you go to a science conference you won’t find any assholes. That would easily be disproven. (As it would be disproven at Sociology conferences, and Accountants’ conferences, and Trekkie conferences, etc. Assholes are in every population.)
I think Sam is responding specifically to the baseless charges of “arrogance” and “scientism” that get hurled at scientists by people like John Haught, people who are themselves spectacularly arrogant (the very job description of “theologian” suggests that one is able to divine the intentions of the Creator of the Universe…but such a person will then have the audacity to turn around and call Dawkins “arrogant” for pointing out that evolution is an empirical fact). Sam’s point, as I read it, is that that particular flavor of truly magnificent arrogance shown by someone making unfalsifiable/untestable claims about the nature of the universe…is not something you find a whole lot of in science discourse, despite what folks like Haught say. Whereas, in theology, the entire discourse butters its bread with the fact that nothing that is said is falsifiable. It takes a good deal of chutzpah just to be a theologian, to go around pronouncing about the mind and nature of God. And these are often the people calling evolutionary biologists “arrogant”—is I think Sam’s larger point there. I could be wrong (after all, I’m not a theologian!).
Brian #7 wrote:
I think there’s a kind of arrogance that can hide behind the belief that one is very, very small — a child, in fact, placed lovingly at the center of a Giant Playpen called the Universe. From an outsider’s perspective, the belief that “everything happens for a reason” and every event was planned as a learning experience looks arrogant in the extreme. If the movements of the stars and planets are meant to give us advice about trusting friends and starting new business ventures, then how important must we be?
From inside the system, though, the answer is that we’re NOT that important because we are so small, you see. They’ve turned it all into a social system and analyze it morally. We are infants being lead by Higher Forces and Powers that care about us! And we’re grateful! Scientists and atheists who reject the existence of such higher forces are perforce like ungrateful, rebellious toddlers who want to place themselves on top of the cosmic hierarchy. There is no disinterested search for the truth of that narrative: not if you start off inside the narrative. You’re stuck.
I don’t know. This seems to be the reasoning behind the charge of science itself being “arrogant.” A smug, confident religious figure spewing certainties is still acknowledging a power Greater than themselves. Even if they believe that this Greater Power is concerned with them, them, them, it’s still supposed to pass off as Humility — the way we are charmed when a babe tells us they love mommy and mommy loves them.
Science is arrogant because it doesn’t listen to all those religious types telling it to shut up. Science isn’t humble before the Lord. Scientists want evidence. They won’t just accept what they are told by the wise pontiffs and prelates. They actually dare to think! They even SAY what they think!! Imagine that!!!
Ophelia, you said:
Of course, I know you know this, but I think it’s important to ask the question whether fields like aesthetics and interpretation, musical appreciation and understanding, etc., have absolutely no objective and publicly justifiable way of assessing what is true or false? Certainly, there is more room for disagreement about the meaning of a poem by Baudelaire, say, than there is about the time of the next lunar eclipse, but there is something which structures our response to the poem, namely, the poem itself, the words on the page, and what they mean in the language. It can’t mean just anything at all. So there are limits to interpretation, which is what made some of Derrida’s more fanciful flights just a bit annoying. It isn’t interpretation all the way down. Somewhere we come to a range of things over which we may agree or disagree, and we will have to acknowledge that an interpretation is, say, a possible one, even though we do not share it.
Now, the same thing may be said about theology, because theology takes certan foundational documents as given, and therefore there are boundaries and limits of interpretation, however flexible they are. But here’s the problem. Theology has no objective or justifiable way of determining which documents are to be taken as foundational. Here a completely arbitrary decision has to be made, whether, for instance, to use the Qu’ran or the Christian Bible, or the Jewish Tanach, or just the Torah, as the foundational document on which to base one’s interpretations of what one takes to be completely other than anything that is accessible to us here on earth (save, of course, for this one unique portal through which we are to glimpse the world beyond).
Biblical interpretation is much like understanding poetry — as some of it is — but to take it that one step further is to make a commitment to something for which there is not one objective thing that grounds the decision to take that text as revelatory of a world beyond or of the will of a god imagined to have created the world that we know. And of course it is the foundational document itself that (reflexively) claims that it is the word of a god, or at least what human beings have been able to grasp of that word. And then we go round and round the hermeneutical circle till the cows come home. But there is still more, since theology doesn’t take scripture as simply the text itself, but the text as filtered through a selection process that has taken place over millennia in various streams of interpretation. And that’s where the arrogance of theology comes in, because just taking those intitial steps is so completely arbitrary, and yet grounds reams of categorical claims, all of them competing with each other. Of course, scientists can also ground themselves on self-congratulation (PZ Myers recently had a post about Nobel Prize winners who then went on the adopt completely madcap theories), but, in general, since scientific claims do require objective justification, it is just a little more difficult to do (though perhaps winning the Nobel Prize gives some people a sense of infallibility), and you look just a bit more silly when you do it.
This is an interesting political problem, isn’t it? The fact that knowledge doubles every few years (or whatever) means that we all know that what we now know will be improved upon (or downright refuted) shortly. That’s where the admirable humility comes from. But the world doesn’t care much about a “process”. It wants to BELIEVE! And we’ve done a lousy job, so far, teaching the world about the process of science. We have been arrogant and elitist in our stance, I believe, and this has done us more harm than good. We have work to do. We have to balance our self-congratulatory effusions (about what we’ve learned, discovered, figured out) with a perpetual tutorial about how this is all about improvement of ideas, not finding a certainty to replace the old certainty. It really is the promotion of a different kind of “hero” than the public is accustomed to, the craftsman rather than the King. Someone who looks forward to contributing to his/her own ideas being replaced by better ones… If we could educate about that, about the accumulating process, rather than our wonderfulness, we’d have really done something. Can you imagine if this was what science education was about even in high school?
That sounds like a fun game for a winter afternoon!