Template:M intro philosophy transgressing hermeneutical boundaries

To long; didn’t read

In which JC has another go at the objective truth debate. For those without the patience for it, here’s the outline.

It is often said that the parlous state of the modern world is due to loss of confidence in objective truth: that because we have abandoned that fine Enlightenment ideal, society is fracturing on tides of weak and dangerous thinking. Post-modernism is to blame and its handmaiden cognitive relativism. They tell us that scientific truth is socially constructed — a mere “language game” — that the summit of human wisdom is somehow contingent on the imperfect circumstances in which it was, well invented. And we are weak-minded enough to accept it. Truth is not hewn something from the bedrock of reality.

I take the opposite view: it is the preposterous belief in objective truth — that in a given argument we have it, and the other guy doesn’t — that is the root of all this rancour. If folks would settle for knowledge being simply whatever is most useful to us for the time being, and abandon our faith in eternal verities, we might all calm down a bit and better be able to abide each other’s idiosyncrasies. This is called “pluralism”, and it is not a new concept.

JC will argue that this is, in fact what most thoughtful people do. Any discussion is comes served with great helpings of cognitive dissonance. On both sides.

Once, transcendent truth emanated exclusively from God. The gradual loss of confidence in that idea we call the Enlightenment. Giants like René Descartes, David Hume, Adam Smith and Charles Darwin progressively debased the the idea of truth: the “invisible hand” explains emergent order from undirected, selfish behaviour in the market. The astounding intricacy in the biosphere arose through mindless ministrations of evolution. There was no designer. There was no code. They are compelling testaments to the power of contingency. Whatever works best goes.

We acquire knowledge acquisition from similarly undirected actions in a constrained complex system: whatever works best goes. Knowledge comes and goes: there is no straight line between quintessential aether and relativistic space-time. Whether either is true is beside the point: the “inductive” mode of gathering scientific knowledge means we can never know whether we have the truth in any case.

This, in shorthand, is to say that knowledge is socially constructed, in the same way as a market price is socially constructed, and a biological adaptation is ecosystemically constructed.

But scientific disciplines have overt social structure. It controls who gets to practise science — even who has standing to comment upon it: the universities and their credentialisation process. Learned journals. Professional associations.

Oxford University is old, sure, but it is not a found object, mystically revealed from the unalterable fabric of the Cosmos. It is a persistent social structure that has proven its usefulness over the best part of a millennium.

And here we can see the falsity of Mr. Phillips’ assertion that “if science were socially constructed, there’d be no correlation between what exists and what science discovers”. Just as price signals can emerge from the self-interested squabbling on the floor of the LSE, so can useful knowledge emerge from centuries of squabbling academics in cloistered quadrangles. To say it can’t is to make the argument from design.

The intricacy and sophistication of the engineering we observe at a cosmic, astrophysical, geological, biological, molecular and quantum level, whose specific configuration appears utterly essential for any part of the universe as we know it to exist, is so staggeringly great, and its provenance by chance so brain-bogglingly improbable, that it cannot have come about except through the intervention of an intelligent designer.

The objectivists are not heeding their own advice: rather than accepting the contingency of design as a brute fact, they are simply relegating it by one level of abstraction and then ignoring it.

Thanks to Darwin’s dangerous idea (it was really Smith’s, but okay) we have a plausible model for the accumulation of working knowledge. It does not depend on any deeper ontological coherence: just observed regularities.

The objectivist alternative — a “breathtakingly elegant and coherent set of principles that govern the universe at every scale from the cosmic to the submolecular” is a disguised “omnipotent God” play: it’s just dropped one layer of turtles down. Don’t these rules have some non-zero “information entropy”? Where did it come from? Who came up with these rules? How? If the cosmos is governed by universal comprehensible, mathematical laws does that not suggest a higher information content than we might expect from a random or inert system?

These are profound questions, beyond the little brain of this little bear. But happily he need not trouble his little mind because these are not what’s riding the objectivists undies. That is a more prosaic problem: their authority is being challenged by a bunch of people from outside their research programme who dispute their authority on the grounds it is socially constructed. And the problem is, it is. Their grounds for saying otherwise are that they are credentialised senior scientists with the experience and authority to opine in scientific matters. The socially constructed institution gives them priority.

They appeal to ancient sociocultural community standards, in other words. Way to go denying science is socially constructed.

The argument the objectivists need to have us a simpler one: that their methods produce useful outcomes. They have 900 years of the Lindy effect on their side here.

L’affair Sokal

In nineteen ninety-six physicist Alan Sokal submitted the paper Transgressing The Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity to Social Text, a respected academic journal in the field of cultural studies. It argued that:

[...] feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

Social Text published it. This turned out to be a bad mistake. Rather than it representing some major concession on the part of hard science, Sokal announced that he had been joking. In another journal — no doubt the irony was not lost on him that it was called Lingua Franca — he crowed that the whole paper was a ridiculous hoax, stuffed with deliberately nonsensical arguments and absurd claims purporting to connect established tenets of theoretical physics to more deluded reaches of postmodernist ideology. Those morons at Social Text fell right into his trap, exposing themselves as credulous midwits and their discipline as pretentious hogwash.

Sokal made much of this wheeze, eventually publishing a best-selling book about it (Fashionable Nonsense) in which he extended his ambition from merely mocking the cretinous cultural studies academics and instead set out to vanquish an altogether bigger target: postmodernism itself.

The book was a roaring success, and as such, Alan Sokal has rather ascended the Olympian mount, taking his place in the pantheon of muscular 21st-century rationalism besides the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Steven Weinberg. If these gentlemen expected to spend the next brief while wiping the floor with what remained of the simpering relativists, whereupon they would usher us all gratefully into a post-historical sunlit uplands of good, old-fashioned, white-bread, meat-and-veggies common sense, they would be sorely disappointed. If they could only have seen the pernicious balderdash that was coming they might have been a bit more circumspect about calling time on Jacques Derrida

So it must be a bit galling to note that, twenty years on, the battle for the soul of transcendent truth still rages. Baudrillard and Derrida may have passed on — dead straight white dudes, after all — but “post-truth” types still hanging about: a new generation of intersectionally-marginalised critical theorists skulks about the marketplace of ideas, intent on decolonising science and straining it through a filter of gender, race, and cultural hegemony. At the same time Professors Weinberg and Dennett have also passed on, Professor Dawkins is still with us, Insh’Allah, but looks a bit fed up with the whole scenario.

It was not meant to be like this.

Interlude: God is dead

In which JC will argue that “squishyness about objective truth” is a fundamental plank of the Enlightenment, and a rich seam of it runs directly from René Descartes via David Hume, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin all the way down to the most rationalist of the modern atheists today.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

Western thought is punctuated by a few monumental ideas. None since “the unexamined life is not worth living” more profound than this, from a gentleman naturalist in 1859:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

This basic statement of evolution by natural selection not only provides a compelling account of the origin of species but, says Daniel Dennett, operates as a kind of “universal acid”:

Darwin’s idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers — welcome or not — to questions in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn’t that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artefacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own “real” minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin’s idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.

—Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

In the simplest case, evolution by natural selection does away with the need for a creator as anything more than a “prime mover”. No omnipotence, omniscience or omnipresence is required. Evolution killed the idea of God as an explanation and organising principle for the order in the universe.

There was, and remains, a great deal of resistance to that idea because of the abundance of apparent design in the universe. It just doesn’t look like something that happened by chance. I don’t want to get into the Does God exist? debate, but simply to point up Darwin’s intellectual proposition, as wholeheartedly adopted and developed by his successors in intellectual, er, spirit:

Just because something seems intentional, coherent, planned, consistent and designed, that doesn’t mean it is.

Now, Darwin’s dangerous idea wasn’t quite the bolt out of the blue that Daniel Dennett proposed: indeed, it was anticipated by more than a century by a similar idea, in the nascent field of economics:

Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (emphasis added)

It doesn’t stop there. We can trace the chain of that idea back another forty years: in 1734, David Hume proposed:

We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin’d together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable.

— David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

As far as we can tell, it’s correlation, not causation.

And there’s one more stop back on this mystery train. Our old friend Rene Descartes — what do you know, he’s French! — who, while trying to defend the almighty, created the most articulate statement of epistemological statement known to the world.

Hume, Smith and Darwin are monumental figures of the Western Enlightenment. They are exactly the kind of colonial hegemonists that the deconstructionists and the “third wave” of critical theorists reject outright — yet their insights form the foundation of contingency and scepticism which Sokal abhors. They more than anyone else undermine the idea that just because something seems to be ordered, structured, planned and deliberate, that it is.

There are no platonic forms. There is no divine plan. The economy is not controlled by the King. These are self-organising systems with no blueprint, no direction or goal.

Science has freed itself from the tyranny of the almighty, but there was a heavy price to pay. Back to Friedrich Nietzsche again:

What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

Alan Sokal’s best guess is a theory of “objective truth” constructed upon castles in the air. But surely, we can do better than that.

History and future

But there are relativists and there are relativists: some would tear the temple down, others work with it as the best we have.

We might categorise the negative view as “critical” or “deconstructionist” and the positive one as “pragmatic”.

Critical theorists occupy themselves finding fault with an existing, power structure, often by association (George Washington kept slaves, sooo —) and invalidating what it produces, regardless of its present utility.

So, the Enlightenment is a product of a colonial, white, male hegemony responsible for grave historical inequities (colonialism, slavery etc.), and so lacks at least moral authority and, in more extreme readings, should be rejected outright.

But Enlightenment principles tend not to claim moral authority. Indeed, that was David Hume’s [friends with slavers — Ed] major point: you cannot deduce ought from is.

... the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

Critical theory examines systems of thought, questioning the assumptions and social structures from which they arise, with a view to dismantling them. It asks that we reorder our intellectual priorities to prefer those at the margins of established social hierarchies and power structures.

As a “ceteris paribus” principle for what to do in case of conflict, this is neither remarkable nor contrary to the general thrust of Enlightenment tradition — not for that matter basic Christian moral principles: All else being equal, give the benefit of doubt to the less empowered. This is encoded in time-honoured heuristics: “family hold back”, “don’t punch down” and the presumption of innocence.

Where it goes further than that it could, in theory, corrode social institutions and research programmes that, nowadays, serve perfectly benign purposes. We may not care for Henry Ford’s politics, but should we therefore reject his contributions to modern factory production techniques? At this point in time, as sedimented into modern operations theory as they are, could we do that if we wanted to? And there’s the rub for the deconstructionists: they too are part of the system and must work within it to effect change. They must persuade the social order to abandon useful tricks because of the grievances and sins of people no longer around to be held accountable for them. This will be hard to do. We do not give up our technologies lightly.

Pragmatic philosophers, on the other hand, try to describe social and power structures — and the received “truths” they bestow — within the social systems in which they inevitably arise. Their aspiration is to reorganise the system to ensure better outcomes in the future. The past is the past: what’s done is done; but we can learn from it, and to the extent we do not now like it, we can do things differently.

Here deconstructionist voices are not wasted: they form part of the contemporary cultural milieu within which the uncountable millions of micro-decisions are made which operate to trim and tweak our systems for the future.

What are the claims?

It’s important not to make a category error about the issue at stake here. Sokal frames it as one between existing established scientific “truths” and nonsensical hypotheses put up by the postmodernists. Taking established, functional theories about the practical world and running them against indulgent social theorising is a fun debate and an easy one to win. Richard Dawkins applies the coup de grace:

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite.

But to take this as a straight fight between, say, Isaac Newton and Judith Butler is to frame it as an argument between two competing truths, and not as to whether there is any truth at all. Butler has, well, their truth, Newton has his. This is not the conversation we need to have. It would be better to clear the field of both Newton and Butler, and stick to the dry principles of epistemology.

These were picked out not by provocative Frenchmen, but, largely, by Germans. Thus, Sokal will happily pick fights with Derrida, Lacan, Latour, Lyotard, Deleuze and Kristeva — “deconstructionists” whose main industry was attacking existing power structures behind received knowledge, intending to wipe away the power structures and radically reinterpret the world — but he has less to say about Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Kuhn and Rorty — who started from a position of that objective truth is unattainable, and sought to explain how humans manage to attain knowledge, understanding, and progress anyway, within that limited framework of human perception and given the complexities of language and culture.

Here is the difference between what the deconstructionists saw as “power structures” — bad, colonial, oppressive to marginalised people — and the pragmatists’ “research programmes” and “paradigms”, which are a precondition to any kind of community knowledge or culture.

The question is this: does the aquisition of knowledge — let’s park for a bit what we mean by “knowledge” — depend on the social structures through which we amass that knowledge or not? Park any questions about whether these social structures are valid, or effective, or good — and ask whether they are necessary. Can knowledge exist without them?

This makes for a far more boring conversation. There is much less scope for sledging. Undoubtedly, Newton was influenced by his cultural milieu — as outrageous as we might find it today — in arriving at his theories. So was Butler. But, what’s done is done: how, historically, we got to our working theories of the world does not matter as much as whether they are working — “working” being different to “true”.

What effect they have on society is also moot: they must, after some kind of fashion or other, work, because they are still here. The question is abstract. Can knowledge develop without a supporting social structure, and if it cannot, once it has developed, can it acquire any validity independently of that or any other social structure? Can it bootstrap itself into independent existence?

Can knowledge develop without a social structure?

The problem the scientific realists have here is that all of their scientifically “real” knowledge does appear to have grown up in a very rigid social structure, and they are most reluctant to tolerate criticism: about it from without. Thomas Kuhn’s description of the scientific paradigm — the academic institutions, the credentialising, the tenure the learned journals — rings true. Where are the mavericks who have changed scientific history from without?

While there are celebrated cases of intellectuals working outside established fields (Bayes’ inferential reasoning, Mendel’s genetics, Faraday’s electromagnetism and Wegener’s continental drift theory for example) each of these theories only acquired its scientific credibility once the social structure emerged to support it: it was adopted into the academy and subjected to community standards: peer review, replication of results, integration into or adaptation of existing theoretical frameworks to generate practical applications for the learning or further research building on the findings. As research programmes grow more sophisticated the prospect of gentlemen scientists stumbling across meaningful new theories in their greenhouses recedes. As new paradigms arrive the possibility arises (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their Cupertino garage) but is quickly overtaken by the scale and money and structure that flows in. The influence of research programmes grows as a scientific field matures that is to say.

This is not to falsify the notion of independent objective knowledge but to note that it is strangely co-relative with a social structure. Yes; the causal arrow may fly the other way, but still.

Can knowledge exist independently of its social structure?

Once generated within a social structure can knowledge escape it it can certainly be adopted by other social structures: indeed this kind of, well, cultural appropriation is exactly Alan Sokal’s objection had to the fruity French deconstructionists appropriating concepts from theoretical physics.

But you can’t have it both ways: either the knowledge exists and is free and may be appropriated by any academic discipline, or it is captive of the research programme that generated it, and there is some proprietary ownership in it, in which case it is difficult to maintain that the knowledge is not socially constructed.

Can knowledge have a truth value independently of its social structure?

Here again, the answer appears to be no, if Sokal’s own professions on the subject are anything to go by. Again, you can't have it both ways: either the knowledge exists free of a given social structure and therefore may be pressed into use without criticism from those within that social structure or it does not. If only quantum theorists are entitled, or qualified, to opine on the validity of quantum theory — If only they have the credentials and sufficient education, all imposed by a social structure, criticise applications of the knowledge, it is hard to see how the knowledge is not derived, developed and gate-kept by those holding senior positions within the, well, power structure.

We must start with a simpler question what are our grounds for believing we have access to the truth in the first place? A cursory look at the scientific method is sobering. As far as science depends on observation, and proceeds using inductive reasoning — and if you accept the scientific realist perspective it absolutely does then the fundamental means of gathering knowledge is incapable of yielding truth. The deductive argument that because something has always happened in the past, therefore it will always happen, in the future does not follow as a matter of crystalline logic. The best we can say is, Because X has always happened in the past we have no reason to think it will not continue to happen in the future. This is a significantly weaker claim especially insofar as it comes to the matter of transcendent truth.

Convergence and heat death: on being careful what to wish for

Now we might note that however much we appear to be converging on a truth the level and ferocity of arguments we have in the community never seems to abate. All that said, is not a final state of settled truth something we would be better not wishing for?

Ask yourself this: what gets you up in the morning? What propels you? What motivates you to carry on with whatever you are doing? Imagine that, whatever it was, it was done. No new mysteries required untangling no new problems solving, no resources redistributing colon no need for judgment, experience, cautionary tale or lesson? Everything is known. Would this not be a final resting place? Is this not the Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Is this not the apocalypse? the game is solved: the challenge is over.?

This not the boredom heat-death of universe?

Now, if it is true that we are steadily converging on truth, it cannot really be denied that this kind of entropy is our fate. Certainly, if that is our fate is no argument against truth convergence, but we should be grateful yet for an amount of pointless arguing that keeps the wolf from that particular door. And that is consistent with certain views of modern cosmology that entropy will eventually increase to a point the energy needed to create where no order remains.

Algorithms, systems and complexity

Quite so Professor Dennett

In which JC sets up evolution as a feedback loop in a complex system and notes its fundamental contingency.

We are encouraged to treat evolution as algorithmic — philosopher Daniel Dennett built a fine career out of this idea — and it is remains a popular philosophy amongst data modernists, implying as it does that Turing machines can explain everything.

But an algorithm whose critical step is “be lucky, or smart, enough to avoid getting killed before you reproduce” is leaving something important out of the equation.

Another way of regarding the evolutionary “algorithm” is as a feedback loop in a complex system. Environmental conditions influence organism traits and changes in organisms affect the environment, creating a continuous cycle of adaptation and change. Natural selection is the mechanism that ensures the “flows” replenish “stocks” enough that the system does not run out of resources. We build on good tricks and weed bad ones out.

The same principles apply in analogous process like the scientific progress. Here the natural selection process of finding “good adaptive tricks” is not completely random, but is curated by a community of specialists who have dedicated themselves to acquiring special expertise in the field. This community is, needless to say, a social structure, and it is very important in shaping the progress of what we can now call a “research programme”. Like any selective process it is constrained by “real world” conditions — a meteor, or a new species of furry little techbros could unexpectedly wipe out the whole edifice — but the selection method is nonetheless highly effective at unearthing new tricks and adjacent possibilities. Hence, the electric kettle, WiFi and cargo pants.

Design space is huge, however, we can only occupy one part of it, and our progress to the place we happen to be is extremely sensitive to starting conditions and thereafter fully path-dependent. If we “re-ran the program” from the start, we would have evolved differently, developed different tricks, and the “system” would almost certainly look quite alien. We would build on different tricks to solve different problems: cargo pants would not work so well for hyperintelligent fish. This is the nature of a complex system.

Now imagine changing the “natural selection” part of the system to “natural rejection”. A new guild of “critical historians” emerges to inspect the research programme’s history against state-of-the-art moral principles, of which the historians are guardians. Should they identify material shortcomings, whether or not they bear on its present operation, the research programme, and any good tricks it has yielded, must be rejected.

This is, of course, a caricature. But its effect on the system effect should be obvious: the system will degenerate. Seeing as it is a complex system, and constraints and opportunities are changing in unpredictable ways, it is inevitable that research programmes will eventually fall foul of the critical historians. It is only a matter of time. A community that systematically tears up all the good tricks it develops without out regard to their utility will not be around for long.

The man who teaches his children to swim at the top of a waterfall will not long be a father.

—Sayings of the Wise Old Man