Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Back to the grind

In Profession 2005, a publication of the Modern Language Association, Harvard English professor Louis Menand writes the following in response to an article about string theory that conotates the universe to a bank card:

If you say that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate, you are accused of posing a threat to Western values--often by people who never read poetry. But if you say that the universe is like an ATM card, you get the Nobel Prize. How did humanists get painted into a cultural corner such that everything that a social or natural scientist says that is counterintuitive receives public genuflection, but literature professors are expected to do nothing but reaffirm common sense? ("Dangers Within and Without" 10-11)

and

Faculty members in science and in social science departments tend to regard humanists as reflexively oppositional to what they do and, therefore, as easy to discount. This perception is founded mainly on ignorance. The summaries of the state of ideas in the humanities in books like E.O. Wilson's Consilence and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate are appallingly misinformed, but the ignorance is depressing, since it indicates that humanists have almost completely failed at explaining what they do and why it offers as good a return on social investment as genetics or economics. Humanists feed this perception by reciting predicatable critiques of the claims of science and social science. Our response to anything is, "It's more complicated." They assert X, and we say, "But it's overdetermined." They assert Y, and we say, "But there's a contradiction." They assert Z, and we say, "But the concept is socially constructed or historically contested." Humanities departments have turned into the little boy who cries, "Difference!" Humanities professors are right: there is difference, it always is more complicated, concepts are constructed. But the role of the humanities cannot be that of problematizing this and calling into question that. Humanities professors need to construct alternative paradigms, and if those paradigms are built merely from some notion of the literary, they will blow right over. (13-14)

and

The humanities are the study of life in its cultural dimension, which happens to be the dimension in which every human being actually operates. You can study life in its biological and in its social scientific dimension--that is, you can look at the genetic causes of behavior or at the mehtods by which individuals calculate their political and economic interests--only if you hold culture constant. Culture is no an add-on to the biological and sociological conditions of existence; it is constitutive of species identity. Culture is the medium in which we act, and it is, from a purely rational point of view, always a distorting medium. Culture is why paradigms of social and scientific theory don't work, why people tend never to do what social theory predicts they will do. Kant once said that humanity is a crooked timber from which nothing straight can be cut. That's what humanists study. We study warp. (14-15.)

In the end evolutionary biologists like Dawkins consider human culture as simply and outgrowth of evolutionary needs. Religion for Dawkins (as he states in the God Delusion is simply an aberration of some behavior that allows for the species to procreate. He is uncertain what that behavior is, but that's how he sees the world. It is not a far stretch to extend his interpretation of religion to all things cultural. They are all aberrations of, to be blunt, getting laid and having lots of babies. This reductive approach to the world, is what turns people off to science, as we can see in Menand's remarks. Ultimately people, when put under the microscope, squirm and say "but that's not me."

Perhaps that is the heart of the conflict between Humanities and Science: one field wishes to explore the rich complexity of human existence and the other wants to reduce it to data with little chance for misinterpretation in hard and fast theory.

Ah, if it were really that easy.

Whoops--there we go again!

(Cross-posted on my academic blog. Shh: don't tell anyone!)

Labels: conflict, experience, humanities, humanity, interpretation, postmodernism, right, science, truth, wrong

¶ 8:18 AM 3 comments

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Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Why Richard Dawkins has post-modernism all wrong

I was chatting with Middlebrow today about the recent/ancient kerfufle about post-modernist thought, and I could tell I was losing him. "Ah oh! Here comes another disconnected rant!" I could hear him say, although he was more than cordial. I persisted, however.

The reason that Dawkins doesn't get it is simple: he is misapplying post-modernism to science, much as he complains that post-modernists misapply science in their texts. I felt, however, that I had not properly explained my point and I did feel like some conspiracy theorist after my chat with Middlebrow.

I've got a lot to deal with in this thesis, I realize, not the least of which is my ability to lose people in pointless rants, so with that I will attempt to be succinct: Dawkins creates a straw man argument with post-modernism because he is talking about the perception of the world vs. the post-modern notion of texts. Post-modernists talk of texts and only texts. Those texts represent a relationship to the world, indeed, but they are just that: representations of the world. We're not talking about what observations one can make using one's senses--we're talking about a reading of a text that is produced before one. One reads a text. One puts one's whole experience into a text to understand it. One is challenged by texts to change one's mind about a text. One's perceptions are affirmed and challenged by a text.

One is changed by a text.

Dawkins doesn't understand that the scholars he finds fault with are talking about texts--not about the observable world that he privileges. (Yup, privilege is an important term that Dawkins picks up on. He doesn't get that either. Strangely enough, he seems to ignore the possibility of bias based upon social position or gender and just throws it away as some sort of whacko term that folks in the Humanities might use.) Texts are not artifacts like fossils or subjects like living creatures (or are they?) They are complex, multi-faceted phenomena that require a reader and an understanding how that reader's point of view shapes the interpretation of a specific text.

There is a big difference between an observable artifact like a rock and a text that has been written by a fellow human being. A rock, while it may create many various interpretations and a variety of opinions, remains the rock that it is. The rock, exists. And as Middlebrow pointed out in a comment on the previous Dawkins post, to deny that would be insanity.

A text, however, was created by a fellow human being with various intentions and purposes. Yes, indeed, the text exists as a physical artifact, but the interpretation of that text is not so easy. The nature of language and our use of it and its use of us forces further consideration. There is more to a text than what it, or its author, represents itself as.

See none of this is new to we text workers of the world. I'm am trying to explain this to the Science-minded who think that what we are talking about is utter bullshit. They frequently don't admit their their bias is often linguistic, race-based, or gender-based.

That is disturbing.

From my own perspective Science tries to exclude its biases, They usually do that on micro-scale. Science has strict controls for experiments and is certain to calibrate instruments and exclude biasing factors.

Where Science fails, at least in the Dawkins sense, is to exlude its macro-bias. Those biases are there and need to be examined carefully. Scientists like Dawkins refuse to admit that their cultural or linguistic background shapes what scientific problems they are likely to pursue or even the results that they prefer (there's that word again!) to deny.

I would put forward, as have others before me, that they need to consider not only their biases before they do their science, but also have to consider that how they are reporting it (through the use of language) is also going to bias it.

Natural language is not a specific medium. Interpretation is going to exist. And, as far as I've seen, interpretation also exists in the language of mathematics. I don't want to fall into a Dawkins' trap, but, as far as I know (and I am no mathematician), mathematics itself has build in biases--Godel's Theorem--which is infamously mis-applied (apparently) to post-modern theory.

Honestly, I'm not really certain why Dawkins, a perfectly respectable scientist of our modern ilk, refuses to explore the possibility of linguistic bias in how he observes the world. The thing that Dawkins doesn't understand is that post-modernism is about the bias that we all have in observing the world.

As a good scientist, you think he would.

Labels: language, observation, science

¶ 8:23 PM 10 comments

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Radio Lab

This week's This American Life podcast featured an excerpt from Radio Lab a cool show out of WNYC. Radio Lab has some very unique production methods such as narration that talks over interviews. The production tends to make the show engaging, but the content is the thing, of course, that makes at least the current episode stellar. The current episode is on morality, and how a moral sense is most likely ingrained in our our brain structures as well as in the brains of some other animals. As a research scientist Dr. Joshua Greene states of a genetic disposition to morality: "We think of basic human morality as being handed down from on high, and it is probably better to say that it was handed up from below--that our most basic, core, moral values are not the things that we humans have invented, but the things that we've actually inherited from other people. The stuff that we humans have invented are the things that seem more peripheral and variable" (Radio Lab, "Morality," 12:28-12:48).

Fascinating stuff.

Labels: biology, morality, philosophy, podcast, psychology, radio, religion, science

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Sunday, April 29, 2007

Feeling forward

He says

"Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal."
"Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible."
"We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power."
"We have to touch people."

He steps into the pond of ashes, shoving his hand into the mud, touching the dead, bringing up the life that is them transmogrified, redefined, yet still lost because of drooling hate. Each life full of joys and fear and everything else gone with the gas, with the "itch" for ultimate knowledge and power.

Touching them. And he says he owes them. He owes them and us, perhaps, what? Respect? Care? Dare I say Love? No he owes them the right to live and to find their way in this world. He owes them the freedom to exists, which was denied them by people pretending to knowledge they did not have, nor ever pursued. He owes them, as we owe them, life.

Now that is humanity and that is exactly what no religion can give.

I'm still moved by this sequence. Bronowski's points apply equally as well today as they might have 38 years ago when this was filmed.

Update: Jacob Bronowski was also a poet. I had no idea. I thought he was just a mathematician and an all around brilliant human being.

Labels: Bronowski, holocaust, humanity, poets, science, scientists

¶ 10:38 PM 5 comments

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