Scientism

Terence Blake and Mohan Matthen have had a bit of a to and fro on the subject of scientism.

Scientism, like any -ism, is no one thing - it's more complex than a list of properties - but here are some defining beliefs, from my experience:

Epistemically, there are only two categories: there's science and then there's everything else - everything else is homogeneous compared to science, which is sui generis.
Science is knowledge, everything else is belief.
Only scientific knowledge can be genuinely true.  Everything else is false, uncertain or epistemically meaningless.
Science can potentially solve all our problems.  Therefore, all other epistemic forms must defer to science whenever possible.
Where scientific knowledge is inconsistent with naive experience, that experience must be rejected as illusory.
Those with knowledge of science automatically have greater political and epistemological authority than those without.
Although there are disagreements in science, these are circumstantial and temporary - the result of not yet knowing.  Scientific truth speaks with one voice.

Not all of those statements are true of any given instance of 'scientism' and not all are made explicit in any iteration but I think they are all evident somewhere or other.

Scientism is also rooted in a deeply pre-sociological or pre-anthropological view of science (I temporalise by saying 'pre' because I think the anthropological and sociological literature on science produced since the late 1970s is strong enough to constitute such a periodisation - like pre-Socratic or pre-Newtonian).  Scientism believes in 'ready made science' as Latour put it, as opposed to 'science in action.'  Scientism tends to ignore or elide the social, collective characteristics of science; like the versions of history that deal exclusively with kings, castles and battles, it honours winners and ignores the everyday aspects; it fixates exclusively on end products and is disinterested in processes.  It uses 'science' as a trump card without really understanding it.  It's a reactionary view of science that's common sensical to those who've never asked difficult questions about it.

It's actually quite an un-scientific, non-empirical view of science that relies upon the highly politicised self-reflections of scientists.  It's like if you understood politics exclusively through the memoirs of retired politicians - you'd end up believing that politics was exclusively composed of boot strapping, hard nosed, selfless types who earnestly just try to do the best they can in the circumstances they are afforded.  The politicians may genuinely believe in that image of their lives but we'd be foolish to take such images at face value.  Yet in the case of science just such abstract, post hoc reflections are granted unquestioning authority.

The alternative view of science derives from this basic insight: scientists know how science works much better when they're doing it than when they're thinking about it.  So, scientists do know best how science works but only as long as you don't ask them 'how does science work?'  If you ask that then all you'll get is confirmation bias.  The root of scientism is just such misty-eyed mysticism.  That it parades itself as a celebration of the most unflinching, square-jawed rationalism imaginable only heightens the irony.

I should add, none of the above criticism takes anything away from the objectivity or brilliance of science.  It isn't that science isn't objective or true, it's just that the versions of objectivity and truth implicit or explicit in scientism are hopelessly misguided.

Of Religion and Reference

Levi's latest diatribes against religion reminded me of this: "Belief in the Second Coming means many Americans see efforts to tackle climate change as futile"

I'm not sure I agree with him entirely but the above would seem to bear out the general point Levi is making.  Indeed, I had a similar reaction when reading through Latour's Gifford lectures.  He insists that the religious mode has nothing to do with the mode of reference -- he says that religion is only really about spreading 'Good News' and thus converting strangers to kin within a religious community.  But that simply isn't true for the vast majority of Christians that I've ever met (friends, family, acquaintances, etc.).  Many and perhaps even most of them really and truly believe that God exists ‘out there’ and that various items of religious dogma are literally and straightforwardly true -- creation, the apocalypse, morality, etc.  Their faith may waver -- they may harbour uncertainties -- but that is more of a quantitative distinction than a qualitative one.  (In other words, I may be uncertain whether I have any milk left in the fridge but my uncertainty doesn't change the referential character of the truth; likewise, just because someone isn't sure whether or not God exists doesn't necessarily change what they mean by 'exists.')

Of course, Latour is arguing against mainstream Christianity as much as he is against scientism or atheism but the fact remains that his ‘religious mode’ doesn’t describe religious practice as it exists, it rather identifies an essence to Christian religion that is allegedly obscured by the intrusion of other modes, chiefly reference.

But the simple fact is that most Believers don’t hold intellectualised, philosophised, hermeneuticised religious beliefs but fairly straightforwardly literal beliefs about the actual structure of the world.  In my experience, most people operate within a single mode for the most part; the multiple modes idea is more of a partially realised ideal than an accurate description.

An objection that any atheist always runs up against when arguing positively for atheism (and thus against religion) is: 'oh but that's just a caricature of religion, we don't really believe that'.  And to an extent that's a valid objection because religion is an enormously varied and complex phenomenon.  But at the same time it gives non-atheists unlimited leeway to shift the goalposts -- they can never be pinned down to any particular position; they can always shift the ground of conversation; from existence to meaning to belief, and so on.

So, yes I think Levi is probably arguing against a caricature but (a) that's unavoidable and (b) that caricature does apply quite well to an awful lot of people, as the above article concerning climate change demonstrates.

Latour, fieldwork and philosophy; A defence of (radical) empiricism

Forgive me, kind reader.  I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut this evening and therefore feel compelled to write a little bit like I'm a 'writer.'  Much of what follows is correspondingly pretentious.

What stoked my interest was another post by Terence of Agent Swarm blog fame; this paragraph in particular:

Despite his insinuations to the contrary, Bruno Latour with his compositionism is the direct application of this thought, that he is very familiar with. His talk about his “empirical” research is very misleading and contains overtones of scientistic bravado, as his system is parasitic on these predecessors. He is however a good populariser of good ideas, and his work should be encouraged as long as we do not accept his own contextualisation of his ideas. Latour is vey much an inheritor of Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida and Serres and the intellectual contemporary of Laruelle and Stiegler. It is this that gives his work its superiority over Badiou’s, not any primacy of the empirical over the philosophical.

I don't think that Latour ever claims a 'primacy' for the empirical over the philosophical.  His field studies aren't just about adding a scientific gloss to concepts he's borrowed (or stolen) from others.  I think that misrepresents what he does with his field studies.  I agree unreservedly that he's misleadingly coy about his philosophical influences.  Indeed, he's self-consciously strategic with who he acknowledges and who he doesn't.  He frequently and unabashedly cites Serres and other peers and contemporaries like Haraway, Callon, Greimas, etc. as well as lesser-known old, dead dudes like Whitehead and Souriau.  Indeed, he is happy to heap praise on anyone he considers an ally or fellow traveller.  For some reason other obviously significant precursors like Deleuze, Foucault and Nietzsche are deemed less than allies and are consequently relegated to scattered, almost accidental footnotes and occasional, almost embarrassed comments in interviews.

On this point I'm reminded of Foucault saying that he hardly ever cited Marx because, at the time that he was writing, everyone was citing Marx at every possible opportunity on any subject -- so Foucault elected not to cite him at all despite his obvious influence!  Latour's evasions may be similarly contrarian.  More cynically, they may be designed to allow Latour to present himself as more original than he really is.  Then again, maybe he just thinks that citing names and dates is boring and a waste of time; an academic pleasantry that, due to his fame and notoriety, he is in a position to skip.  I think there's probably an element of truth in all of those explanations.

Regardless, while Latour is clearly "parasitic" on his predecessors (who isn't?) I don't think the title "populariser" quite does him justice -- nor, I repeat, is his 'empiricism' merely about adding a scientific gloss to his inherited ideas.  The most valuable thing about Latour, from my point of view, is the way he joins the empirical and the philosophical -- far from these terms being in competition they, under his penmanship, become profoundly harmonious.  In fact, one of the main criticisms I have of his more recent work is that it is not empirical enough.  He was fastidiously anthropological when it came to science, engineering, law, etc. but largely abandoned the practice when it came to thinking about politics -- little more than offhand anecdotes creep into his political writings.  Consequently, I found his 'Politics of Nature' to be the weakest of all his books -- abstract, verbose and fanciful in a manner disappointingly unlike what came before it.  ('We Have Never Been Modern' was similarly abstract and general but since it wasn't modal in its focus and because it was considerably more concise it worked much better, I think.)

Probably my favourite essay of his, and certainly the best example of the empirical/philosophical complex that I'm talking about, is what I think (from memory) is the second chapter of Pandora's Hope, the essay on 'Circulating Reference'.  Is the story that Latour tells -- that of following some soil scientists and botanists in their journey from the heat, humidity and creepy-crawlies of the Brazilian rainforest through all their scientific translations back to the laboratories, running water and journal articles of cosy old France -- a mere gloss on the philosophical content?  Is it simply an elaborate, science-tinted vehicle for making his point?  I don't think that it is.

Certainly, the fact that these ideas were based on firsthand research and not simply on sitting down and thinking hard about stuff he'd read doesn't necessarily make them 'better' -- but to dismiss the empirical process through which the ideas were derived as indicating nothing more than a loosely shrouded scientism is shortsighted; in fact it misses the point.  Every philosophical idea derives from some kind of practical process -- whether it's trekking through the forests of Bavaria, slouching over a writing desk in a musty Cambridge office, or clumsily wandering about in a laboratory.  Every philosophical utterance is an embodied utterance, an utterance with a backstory, a genesis -- the result of a radically empirical flow of experience (James is another influence that Latour has no shame in citing, which is good since Latour's empiricism is really just an actor-network-ised version of James').

Most philosophers believe that reading, walking and talking to like-minded others constitutes a sufficient process for the productive stewing of ideas.  Latour, contrariwise, has found fieldwork among the different people his philosophies comment on (the practitioners of his various modes of truth) to be considerably more fecund than guessing at the particularities of their lives from a distance.  I don't find it hard to see why.

It isn't a case of 'empirical, therefore scientific, therefore better' -- it's much more interesting than that.  I mean, would the poor guy have spent all those months and years painstakingly note taking, conversation starting and archive trawling just to score a few Brownie points for being 'scientific'?  The interesting point is that, in what I think are his best works, the distinction between the empirical and the philosophical if it doesn't quite disappear then at least becomes considerably blurred.  I think it's much more likely that it is his anthropological process in combination with his philosophical and theological education that has resulted in the ideas he claims as his own (however unpaid his dues may be).  And this, I think, is an object lesson not just for how we interpret his work but also in how we think about thinking in general.

To my mind the really pertinent questions are not 'Why do fieldwork?' but rather 'Why don't more philosophers do fieldwork?'  Why don't more philosophers realise that secondary sources aren't good enough?  Why aren't the social sciences and empirically-inclined humanities given the time of day in philosophical discourse (unlike their Natural brethren)?  Why is intellectual hermeticism still thought to be a valid thought process?  The notion of the cloistered, hermetic genius is an evocative image, though it is one unburdened by any kind of actual existence.  Newton, for one, consciously promoted himself as such an isolated, neutral, disinterested-but-brilliant figure; historians like Simon Schaffer have shown that he, like all great men of letters, was a formidable network-builder.

Frankly, I think the burden of justification is on those who don't look very closely into the lives and issues on which they pass judgement.  It isn't the empiricist who needs to justify himself.

I don't think the epistemic authority deriving from doing empirical research is at all necessary to explain why Latour does such research.  However, I do think that, in many cases, actually going out and talking to people, reading primary sources and producing an original study of a situation does accord an analyst a degree of authority over and above those who simply read books and take others at their word with regard to how things work.  Take the old-school, pre-Bloor and pre-Latour historians and philosophers of science -- all those Whiggish dinosaurs who thought that they could infer all they needed to know about the practice of science from its results, on the one hand, and the casual testimony of its off-duty practitioners, on the other.  Latour and others showed this supposition to be laughably inadequate.  When intensively observed scientists' practices appeared to function quite differently from how they were supposed to according to tradition, dogma and folklore.  When anthropologists actually took the time to watch these tribespeople in action they found that the prevailing explanations proffered by their more naive and doting commentators were wholly inadequate since they were largely oblivious to what stands out as the most remarkable characteristic of scientific research, when observed by an anthropologically trained outsider: that facts are constructed, often astonishingly well.

I'm perfectly happy to say that these empiricists have greater epistemic authority by dint of their efforts, compared the idleness of their rationalist predecessors who merely inferred the details of their subjects from the ideological predispositions to which subjects and observers were all privy and upon which all agreed -- specifically, that Science was all about disinterestedly uncovering Truth and discarding Fiction.

But, and this is the key point for me, this superiority comes not from being grounded in practical experience as opposed to abstract ratiocination -- this classical opposition of empiricism and rationalism is false because it opposes two variants of a common problematic: subjectivism.  On the contrary, I think it can be claimed that the evidentialist ethic enacted by the practice of fieldwork leads to a general qualitative improvement in philosophical discourse because it extends the radically empirical flows of experience, the practical processes that generate the philosophical discourse.  The processes that philosophers generally enact so as to generate their ideas -- sitting, staring, reading, writing, walking, talking to other philosophers -- are not invalidated by this general empirical commitment but they are shown to be relatively disconnected from the world on which they comment in a way that is not necessarily disastrous but is demonstrably unnecessary.

In other words, fieldwork deepens a philosopher's attachment to that on which they commentate morally, socially and epistemically.  It broadens the attachments, the connections, the radical flows, which they both ride and channel.  Doing fieldwork (of whatever kind) allows a thinker to be surprised and perturbed in their trajectory by a greater array of facts, theories and knowledges than they would bump into otherwise.  It pluralises their journey and thus their philosophy -- but, importantly, it does so in a fashion with specific pertinence to what they're thinking about.  It's not about 'broadening horizons' by learning a new language or 'expanding your mind' by dropping acid or some-such.  It's about delving more deeply into the world so as to synthesise and criticise philosophical abstractions from within it rather than above it -- the latter being a fool's errand.

In a sense, every philosopher does 'fieldwork' because every act of ratiocination is an empirical -- i.e. experiential -- phenomenon.  The question is, then, not so much whether to do 'fieldwork' but rather what fieldwork is germane to the topic at hand.  Far too many philosophers think themselves above the humdrum, humid, detail-cluttered world of the merely empirical.  They are all fools.  (It's worth mentioning parenthetically that, from what I know of him, Feyerabend, for one, was no such fool.  Of course if I was being fair I might have to say the same of Kant, who was prolific in all the sciences of his day, and many others besides; but I'm not being fair I'm being polemical, so ... whatever!)

Rationalists -- those who believe that ratiocination is anything but a much variegated element in the flow of experience; that it transcends the "great blooming, buzzing confusion" out of which we all clutchingly piece together a world -- simply abstract from the flows they embody and translate in order to make it seem that their utterances are sui generis -- that their thoughts are more original than they would otherwise seem.  Then again, that is somewhat reminiscent of what Latour does by not stating his influences in full.  Oh well, none are innocent!  Or, as Kurt might say, so it goes.

[Addendum:

In response to the above Terence replies:

Philip of Circling Squares ... seems to be criticising me, despite the fact that I agree with nearly everything he says and have said similar things in various blog posts. I think he is right about what he calls “fieldwork” and I share his desire for philosophers to indulge in more “empirical research” conceived broadly. My quibble is that sometimes Latour slides between this more general sense, where a philosopher like Deleuze can be considered to do (conceptual, affective, perceptual, political, and yes why not? religious) fieldwork and a more limited sense in which Latour has done fieldwork but not Deleuze, Badiou, Lyotard and Serres. My quarrel is with the diplomatic caricature of himself that Latour secretes, consciously or not, and that interferes with the part of his message that I like and wish to help publicise.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood or misrepresented what you were saying. Hopefully the tone was not too objectionable. When I wrote “I’m not being fair I’m being polemical” I meant it! I was dimly aware that your Feyerabendian predilections might actually chime with some of what I was saying, the post I referred to just seemed to be saying something different. My mistake.

I completely agree with the portrayal of Latour as a wily, Machiavellian diplomat rather than the mild, polite, self-consciously constructive diplomat he pretends to be. As I wrote in a follow-up post, he always has to be read as a scheming polemicist rather than a scholarly essayist; everything’s performative with him. A key element of his performance is his citation — or non-citation — of influences. This rhetorical style can be a little annoying at times but it does seem to be intrinsic to his thought — practicing what he preaches, essentially. Bah, philosophers!]

Pro-scientism or Anti-scientism? Yes!

Adam Kotsko has an interesting post on the "hottest new trend in continental philosophy", namely "scientism."

The question of scientism is an interesting one and it's not an easy question to resolve, despite the 'with us or against us' way that most people deal with it.  There are two things I have to say about it:

Firstly, I am a fully subscribed Latourian insofar as I see science as one kind of knowledge practice among others, albeit one that is tied into very peculiar and massively powerful networks and perhaps one that has its own modes of reference and so on.  So, I don't accept that on the one hand we have science and the other we have all other kinds of knowledge or that scientific knowledge is necessarily better in any given instance.  Science is itself a plurality and while it is quite different to other practices (politics, religion, pseudo-science etc.) these are differences within a plurality, not a duality.  So I'm rather anti-scientistic in how I specifically and explicitly cognise scientific practice -- I'm anti-scientistic, intellectually speaking.

But, then, secondly, am I not quite naively scientistic in my everyday practices?  Do I believe in evolution, global warming, atoms?  Of course I do.  When I get sick do I follow medical science or voodoo?  The former, of course.  Do I accept the claims of geocentrism just because it's just one cosmology among others?  Of course not, I accept whatever I understand of the prevailing scientific consensus is, however complex and processual I understand such consensus to be.  Insofar as science has a widely accepted answer for a question of fact I basically accept it (this probably isn't absolutely true but it's true enough).

So, I actually feel slightly dishonest when I repeat the Latourian/Foucauldian, etc. slogans about science .  I preach these lessons and I hold them to be true but don't I practice a whole different kind of truth, generally?

Of course the Latourian pluralism with respect to scientific knowledge qua practice that I describe above isn't actually *incompatible* with this kind of naive, 'grade school' scientism that I otherwise assume but nor are the two things really harmonious.  They're not irreconcilable but nor do they sit easily together.  I do experience some cognitive dissonance between the two -- why is this?  I don't know.

Science is one kind of knowledge among others, yes.  But am I prepared to give other kinds of knowledge an equal hearing on questions of fact?  Hardly.  Am I anti-scientism or pro-scientism?  Both!

Just a thought rather than an argument but hopefully people can see where I'm coming from.  For the time being I think that scientism makes for a more interesting open question than it is a debating topic with sides pre-decided, as if anyone has all the answers.  We should take its contradictions as indication that no one has adequate answers yet.