From Naturalism to Nihilism by Way of Scientism: A Note on Rosenberg’s Disenchantment

The rank absurdities of Alex Rosenberg's The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality are being subjected to withering criticism at Ed Feser's weblog here, here and here. But a correspondent wants me to throw in my two cents, so here's a brief comment.

In the ComBox to the article linked to above, Rosenberg, responding to critics, says this among other things:

If beliefs are anything they are brain states—physical configurations of matter. But one configuration of matter cannot, in virtue just of its structure, composition, location, or causal relation, be “about” another configuration of matter in the way original intentionality requires (because it cant [sic] pass the referential opacity test). So, there are no beliefs.

This is a valid argument.  To spell it out a bit more clearly: (1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 

But anyone with his head screwed on properly should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting-point that cannot be denied except by lunatics and those in the grip of  an ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly, breath-takingly,  false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states.

Now why can't a smart guy like Rosenberg see this?  Because he is in the grip of an ideology. It is called scientism, which is not to be confused with science. (Rosenberg talks nonsense at the beginning of his piece where he implies that one does not take science seriously unless one embraces scientism.)  Rosenberg thinks that natural-scientific knowledge is the only knowledge worthy of the name and, to cop a line from Wilfrid Sellars, that "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not, that it is not." (Science, Perception and Reality, p. 173).  That is equivalent to the view that reality is exhausted by what natural science (physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology) says exists.  This is why Rosenberg thinks that, if beliefs are anything, then they are brain states.  Given scientism, plus the assumption (questioned by A. W. Collins in The Nature of Mental Things, U of ND Press, 1987) that beliefs need to be identified with something either literally or figuratively 'inner,' what else could they be?  Certainly not states of a Cartesian res cogitans.

The trouble with scientism, of course, is that it cannot be scientifically supported. 'All genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge' is not a proposition of any natural science.  It is a bit of philosophy, with all the rights, privileges, and debilities pertaining thereunto.  One of the debilities is that it is self-vitiating.  For if all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, then that very proposition, since it is not an item of scientific knowledge,  cannot count as a piece of genuine knowledge.  Nor can it ever come to be known.

That won't stop people like Rosenberg from believing it as they are entitled to do.  But then scientism it is just one more philosophical belief alongside others, including others that imply its negation. 

I think it is clear what a reasonable person must say.  The (1)-(4) argument above does not establish (4), it reduces to absurdity (1).  The only support for (1) is scientism which we have no good reason to accept.  It is nothing more than a bit of ideology.

Wisdom from Putnam on Science and Scientism

Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. xiii (emphasis added):

. . . I regard science as an important part of man's knowledge of reality; but there is a tradition with which I would not wish to be identified, which would say that scientific knowledge is all of man's knowledge. I do not believe that ethical statements are expressions of scientific knowledge; but neither do I agree that they are not knowledge at all. The idea that the concepts of truth, falsity, explanation, and even understanding are all concepts which belong exclusively to science seems to me to be a perversion . . .

Putnam does not need the MP's imprimatur and nihil obstat, but he gets them anyway, at least with respect to the above quotation. The italicized sentence is vitally important. In particular, you will be waiting a long time if you expect evolutionary biology to provide any clarification of the crucial concepts mentioned. See in particular, Putnam's "Does Evolution Explain Representation?" in Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy

Brentano1 The influential Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.)

What is intentionality? ‘Intentionality’ is Brentano's term of art (borrowed from the Medievals) for that property of mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. Such states are intrinsically such that they 'take an accusative.'  The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed. One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The idea is not merely that when one perceives one perceives something or other; the idea is that when one perceives, one perceives  some  specific object, the very object of that very act.  The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist, or may or may not be true in the case of propositional objects. Reference to an object is thus an intrinsic feature of mental states and not a feature they have in virtue of a relation to an existing object. This is why Brentano speaks of the "intentional in-existence of an object." It is also why Husserl can 'bracket' the existence of the object for phenomenological purposes. Intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, though it is relation-like.  This is an important point that many contemporaries seem incapable of wrapping their heads around. 

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Marcel Duchamp and the Superiority of the Useless

Marcelduchamp Marcel Duchamp abandoned art for chess because of the latter's superior uselessness. Art objects, after all, have exchange value as commodities, and may make the artist some money. But with few exceptions chess lies entirely beyond the sphere of the utile. In this sense, the art of the 64 squares is the highest art. There is little danger that Caissa's acolytes will fill their bellies from her service. There is just no market for the artistry of chess games, not even those of the very highest quality. Here you can review some of Duchamp's games.

Can Religious Notions be Naturalized?

I continue to mull over Jim Ryan's naturalization project with respect to salvation. It seems to me that salvation is but one of several religious 'objects' that resist naturalist reduction. God and sin are two others. But if God, sin, and salvation cannot be reduced to anything natural, they can be eliminated. Thus I recommend to Ryan that he take an eliminativist line. Actually, I would like to see him abandon his naturalism. That is not likely to happen. But I do hope to be able to convince him that it is folly to try to capture the content of religious notions in naturalist terms. The better approach, and more honest to boot, is for the naturalist to deny that these notions correspond to anything real.

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Compensations of Advancing Age

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other. You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit. Your poem might be:

Brief light's made briefer
'Neath the leaden vault of care
Better to accept the sinecure
Of untroubled Being-there.

Ciardi on Kerouac: The Ultimate Literary Put-Down?

A few years back the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley  edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before us  as Windblown World (Viking, 2004).

Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I dug out and re-read. Here is the put-down directed at Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose':

Whether or not Jack Kerouac has traces of a talent, he remains basically a high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route.

In a similar vein there is the quip of Truman Capote: "That's not writing, it's typewriting!"

But Jack's sweet gone shade has had the last laugh.  Whatever one thinks of Kerouac's influence, he has altered the culture.  But Ciardi?  I'll bet you've never heard of him __ until now.

Good Advice from John Ciardi

Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets. (I myself am no poet, I know it, so I can't possibly blow it.  I hereby allude to a certain troubadour who, though I would not call him a poet, others would.)

Here is the epitaph Ciardi composed for himself:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.

UPDATE (14 December):  The ever-helpful David Gordon, and that indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, Dave Lull, inform me that Ciardi's exact words were, "But I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand."  The quotation can be found on p. 60 of Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry.

Jim Ryan on Salvation

Yesterday, I posted some thoughts about salvation, and in order to test and refine them, I will confront them with some rather different thoughts of Jim Ryan on the topic. See his Salvation I and Salvation II.

Since Ryan is a naturalist, it is quite natural that what he should offer us is salvation naturalized, in his phrase. My counter is that salvation naturalized is rather thin beer, so thin in fact that I don't think it deserves the name 'salvation.' Salvation naturalized is salvation denatured. But I don't want to denigrate in the least what is positive in Ryan's suggestions. My point is rather that he does not go far enough. Ryan does not deliver salvation; what he delivers is a substitute for salvation.

According to Ryan,

. . . salvation is an achievement of deep and genuine patience accomplished through a calming of the mind and a contemplation of the fact that the frustration, resentment, and anger with which it frequently reacts to the course of mundane events are: (a) inappropriate, given the fact that on the whole life and the world are very good and (b) unnecessary, given the fact that the mind can replace resentment and the others with patience.

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If You Send E-Mail to a Blogger . . .

. . . bear in mind that it is liable to be posted for all the world to see.  Most bloggers are permanently on the prowl for interesting 'blog fodder.'  This blogger is no different.  What I find interesting, what I find suits my philosophical or pedagogical or polemical purposes, is liable to be posted in whole or in part.  Of course, I am typically discreet and reasonable by my lights.  But what counts as discretion and reasonableness by my lights may not count as such by yours.  So if you send me something and want to be sure it doesn't enter the 'sphere, append some such annotation as:  Not for public consumption.  I will respect your wishes if you are a decent and honorable person. 

I used to supply the names and sometimes the e-mail addresses of correspondents who submitted material, but in many cases I no longer do this, both to protect the young and not-yet-established who are trying to make their way in a world increasingly polarized and dirempted by political antagonisms, a world in which almost anyone can find out almost anything about almost anyone with a few keystrokes, but also to save myself work later on when said individuals, out of a fear that is often excessive, ask me to remove their names and other identifying information.

Own your words.  Accept responsibility for what you say and do.  Don't hide behind handles.  These are sound conservative maxims.  I will enforce them on some, but I cannot in good conscience enforce them on all in the present social and political climate.  The years to come will be interesting indeed, as things 'heat up' ever more.  And I am not talking about global warming.