Transgressing hermeneutical boundaries

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So what, exactly, are the monsters of our current hyper-polarised age? At a time when the two political tribes are not only unable to communicate and negotiate, but lack shared accepted definitions about the nature of reality, how would a studio like Hammer create monsters that resonate with everyone?

—John Higgs, Today’s Monsters, Octannual Manual #55

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.

These cotton-headed poseurs claim that “scientific knowledge is socially constructed”: nothing more than a cute “language game”. Now this preposterous notion that science — the very summit of human wisdom — is contingent on the imperfect circumstances in which it was, well invented, and anything goes. If we are so weak-minded as to accept this the final state of sublime Enlightenment, whose brink we were about to crest, may be lost forever. It is absurd to deny that truth is hewn 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 — if we could only let go of our comforting faith in eternal verity — 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 new.

It is, in fact what most thoughtful people do, often while hotly denying it. Any discussion about objective truth comes served with great helpings of cognitive dissonance. On both sides. This is no exception.

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 eternal truth, not by disproving it, but by explaining how things could work without it: 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 call upon a designer, though Darwin carefully avoided the obvious conclusion that one did not exist. But just as there was no controlling mind, there was no code. They are compelling testaments to the power of contingency. Whatever works best goes. The game was infinite.

It took philosophers to apply a similarly forensic lens to the scientific method itself. We acquire knowledge from similarly undirected actions in an unconstrained 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 mistake.

Rather than it representing some major concession on the part of hard science, it was a prank. Sokal was joking. In another journal, he crowed that his whole paper was a ridiculous hoax. He stuffed it with deliberately absurd claims pretending to connect established tenets of theoretical physics to the more deluded reaches of postmodernist ideology. The 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 mocking cretinous cultural studies academics to vanquishing outright the whole edifice of postmodernism.

The book was a roaring success. Alan Sokal has ascended the Olympian mount, taking his place in the pantheon of muscular 21st-century rationalists besides Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Steven Weinberg.

But that was not the end of that: if the scientists expected to spend the next brief while wiping the floor with simpering relativists, and then ushering us 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 what was coming, they might have been a bit more circumspect about calling time on Jacques Derrida: by comparison, he seems positively sensible.

So it must be galling that 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 hang about: a new generation of intersectionally marginalised critical theorists skulk about the marketplace of ideas, determined to decolonise science and strain every part of our cultural exchange through a filter of gender, race, and cultural hegemony.

Professors Sagan, Weinberg and Dennett have since 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 temple-tearing types as “critical” or “deconstructionist” and the others as “pragmatic”.

Critical theorists find fault with an existing power structure often by simple association (George Washington kept slaves, sooo —) and hold this to invalidate whatever it produces, regardless of its abstract utility.

The Enlightenment was largely the product of a colonial, white, patriarchal hegemony that was also responsible for grave historical iniquities (colonialism, slavery etc.). Therefore, it lacks at least moral authority and, in more extreme readings, should be rejected outright, with all the bounties it has yielded.

But Enlightenment principles tend not to claim moral authority. Indeed, that was David Hume’s 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 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 western moral traditions dating back well before the Enlightenment: 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 “innocent until proven guilty”.

Where critical theory 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 abandon 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 — credentialised within it, usually — and must work within it to effect change. They must persuade us to abandon useful tricks because of the grievances and sins of people no longer around to be held accountable for them. This will not be easy. We do not give up our technologies, mod cons and creature comforts lightly.

The other kind of relativists are pragmatists. They describe 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. Historian 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 (Thomas Bayes’ inferential reasoning, Gregor Mendel’s genetics, Michael Faraday’s electromagnetism and Alfred 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 a nascent scientific field matures the prospect of gentlemen scientists stumbling across meaningful new theories in their greenhouses recedes, overtaken by the scale, money and structure that flows in. The influence of the social structure grows as a scientific field matures.

And note Alan Sokal’s explicit industry: to deny legitimacy to those who would apply knowledge beyond the research programme, and without the credentials needed to appropriately handle the material. Sokal pooh-poohs the idea of social construction by appealing to it.

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

Whence this “truth” whereof you speak?

In 1976 Julian Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a quite extraordinary book which asserted that the modern form of self-reflective human consciousness only emerged a couple of thousand years ago, sometime between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Before that, Jaynes argued, human brains hallucinated executive instructions in one hemisphere of the brain, and the other side interpreted it as direct communication from the “Gods”. The nearest thing we have today we would call “schizophrenia”.

It sounds madly outlandish — but it would explain quite a few things about the ancients that we struggle otherwise to understand. Like why they talked to burning bushes, and why they bothered building pyramids.

In any case, in setting out his extraordinary argument, Jaynes deconstructs — if you’ll excuse the pun — our basic sense of “consciousness”. Much of our animate day-to-day behaviour, he says, we do without our conscious mind intervening: motor skills like those we use in sports or music come straight from the monkey brain. Even basic social and cognitive activities like comprehending language, retrieving memories and recognising patterns have been and gone before our conscious self is involved. We rarely consider ourselves reflexively, moving through time and space, constructing mental narratives about our experience. Most of the time — brushing teeth, walking to work — we are on autopilot. It is quite an eye-opening passage.

We could do the same exercise with “truth”: though we have this enduring comfy impression that there is this stable, constant, objective universe out there as we meander around it, we do not actively interrogate it very often.

Where does this “truth” even show up? Let’s be a bit overanalytical for a moment, and, Julian Jaynes-style, break our intellectual lives down to see. In ascending order of ostensible truthiness, then, you might say we construct our worlds out of: personal preferences, aesthetics,

Personal Preferences

Our basic preferences: what we like, what we have grown up with, what we are used to. If these are not culturally conditioned then there is a remarkable coincidence of preferences for herring in Scandinavia, yeast extract in the UK and snails in France. And so on. These are learned, “socially-constructed preferences”.

Likewise, the fact that we do not share conventions social norms, taboos, etiquette, and language conventions are fully contingent. does not imply that someone has made a fundamental error in our language selection. Nor that she cares for golf and I do not. These intellectual constructs develop over time and place. They are informal — but nonetheless fundamental — means of organising and managing local social relations. They will differ in time and place, though some — the repugnancy of death and effluent — are more deeply and widely held than others.

Aesthetics

Literary and artistic criticism and analysis, music theory are also culturally grounded. This is most obviously the case with music, but it is equally true of any of the arts. We can appreciate art from different genres, cultural traditions and for different purposes, but there is no independent means of ranking them, and the idea of trying seems quite potty. The sublime second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 may seem more culturally significant than Yakety Sax — but it still wouldn’t work half as well as the theme to The Benny Hill Show.

Humanities and social sciences

The soft, libtard subjects at university: Psychology, sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, linguistics, history, religious studies, cultural studies and the doozy ones like the cultural politics of hegemonic settler-colonial structures in Australian breaking. Given that all these purport to do is to describe social interactions and tend to be normative rather than appealing to immutable rules of the universe, rarely would you describe them as “true” — according to Professor Sokal, that’s exactly the problem with them — so I think we can agree this one too?

Physical sciences, engineering and technology

Now we start getting into the meaty areas: proper sciences, on inanimate objects, that proceed by double-blind trials, dispassionately observed and painstakingly collected data, and rigorous application of mathematics, logic and control (we will get onto those). So, biology, chemistry, practical physics medicine, geology etc.

There is a naive view that at least all hard sciences are consistent but stacked in a kind of hierarchy, wherein everything essentially reduces to physics, and higher-level sciences, deriving as they do from physics, are just shorthand heuristic explanations of complex physical processes. So neuroscience reduces to biology, biology reduces to chemistry, chemistry reduces to atomic physics and so on — but across the panoply of disciplines and subdisciplines. To the extent social sciences are in fact sciences, they reduce down in the same way.

Formal Sciences

Mathematics, logic, statistics, information theory and theoretical physics

We gabble about all kinds of things many of the things we get most het up about plainly aren't measurable at all. Let's start with the easy cases — where it plainly doesn't — and work our way inwards.

taste is an evolutionary thing to steer us away from poison - plainly doesn't right - hyper-processed food - but in any case “whatever is optimal for the state of an evolving organism is quite the walk back from eternal truth.

I hope we can agree that there are no particular Platonic forms governing, for example, taste — one cannot sensibly measure Allegri’s Miserere with the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK even though at some level they share some characteristics. Part of the problem is the multi-modal points of reference: they have some common characteristics and far more that are quite unrelated. It should be apparent there is no sense putting them in a singular hierarchy, they can't be ranked. One is not truer than the other. So it is for taste, food, literature and anything we broadly would classify as humanities. The common means we have of measuring them are disappointingly quantitative, and it matters not how many copies a book has sold. So we can agree to embrace social construction here. Yes?

In order of “putative objectity” we could rank some other disciplines: social sciences — history, sociology, anthropology, psychology are next. Describing, as they explicitly do, social structures, it does not seem controversial to afford these some contingency, especially seeing as their experts seem to allow this.

Next up are the physical sciences: biology, chemistry and physics

Sciences feel like world records — they are surprisingly short in the tooth. Those with longer span — Newton ’s mechanics — have in fact been falsified, and exist really only as

What is sc

Hard or soft

Philosophers often discuss “hard” and “soft” positions on issues (materialism, determinism, etc.). The implication is that hard positions are more ideological and conceptual while soft ones are less principled but more pragmatic and flexible, preferring “lived experience” over the cold hard steel of abstract principle.

To attack a hard determinist with a reductio ad absurdum does not work especially well, as she can always climb down to a soft position immune from the reductio.

Objective truth isn’t one of those cases: there is no soft version of it: a soft version of objective truth — “truth is the logical state that optimise an organism’s current evolutionary fitness” or something like that is all a bit amorphous. A bit contingent. A moving target. It depends on circumstances. It depends on what the conditions are, who the players are, and what they think are important survival metrics.

The emotional case for truth

The idea of a regularity and a truth in the universe — even if logically inaccessible to us — is highly comforting and one we are greatly motivated to believe in. It implies an order, that we can target and, by triangulation, trial and error, tend towards,even if we can never reach (this is how we calculate pi in increasing accuracy). But this is the same comfort that a prime mover and an omnipotent creator gives too.

See also

• Fashionable Nonsense — Alan Sokal’s book
• Truth
• Entropy