But enough of that.

Graham Harman has a recent post giving us a glimpse into a new book by Bruno Latour. The English title is An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence and it’s scheduled, I believe, for 2013 at Harvard UP (the French will be out later this year). Judging from what Harman says, it points to another way of conceptualizing these matters:

Instead of everything being part of a big flat network, there are different and incompatible networks, each with its own modes of veridicition, its own “conditions of felicity and infelicity.” … One example, for instance, would be that law doesn’t have the same truth-conditions as scientific reference. Law links together chains of documents and other evidence and comes out with a result that one hopes is something like justice. Law does not function on the basis of a correspondence theory of truth.

A different mode of veridicition, that seems right to me.

http://www.psych.umn.edu/faculty/meehlp/100Determinism-freedomMind-body.pdf

And while I agree with Williams that we can’t tell if our “reasoning” – ie, any particular argument for determinism – is correct, neither can we tell if any argument for any position is correct. But one must nevertheless argue on – or not.

There are obvious possibly disconcerting consequences to strict determinism, but that doesn’t negate it. Feigl and Meehl suggest that Popper’s fear of “the nightmare of determinism” may rest on a confusion with strict predictability. But absent predictability, there’s really nothing to fear – the illusion works just fine.

We can and must have both a physicalist story about the production of speech and behavior and an intentionalist, purposive, human-level psychological story. That the latter is sometimes misleading doesn’t impugn its overall utility in explaining human action. And it’s the utility, the predictive power of explanations, both in the hard sciences and the humanities, that gives us knowledge and that certifies their elements (fermions and bosons, beliefs and desires) as real. These two ontologies are not in competition or mutually exclusive. The humanities and the human sciences, irreplaceable in their explanations, have nothing to fear from physicalism or naturalism.

I have a couple of quibbles:

Biology would not accept the gene as real until it was shown to have a physical structure: is as untrue as similar statements about chemistry and atoms.

Must science write off interpretation the way it wrote off phlogiston theory—a nice try but wrong?: I won’t address history, but in the case of personality and temperament, one of the main tools is asking individuals how they would characterise themselves eg “I often avoid meeting strangers because I lack confidence with people I do not know”. Responses to a number of such questions can be mathematically analysed to extract underlying consistent features that psychologists believe to correspond to characteristics of the individual brain physiology. And these stable personality traits can be correlated with measured behaviour, mental illness, structure, physiology and genotype (well, to some extent). Famously, the first two higher order factors (“Harm Avoidance/Neuroticism”, “Novelty Seeking/Extraversion”) correspond to the Greek humours. So introspective interpretations (or perhaps observation and recollection of one’s own behaviour) that cohere with scientific understanding are alive and well, at least in this corner of psychology: personality, psychometrics, behaviour genetics.

At any rate, it is significant that Carroll does not seem to believe that I have misrepresented the views of anyone I quote. Nor, of course, does he engage with any of the arguments I put forward against neural and evolutionary approaches to literature. Hand waving in the direction of books and articles by people who agree with him is not good enough. Hic Rhodus, hic salta.

The refusal to engage with critics is reminiscent of the previous suicide attempt of the humanities when Theory reigned unopposed. Many years after that fad had passed (though it is still taught to some students) people came up to me and said that they had agreed with my critique (set out in full-length books) but had not wished to admit to doing so as it would have been fatal to their advancement. And of course the leading figures had too much at stake to want to reflect on the possibility that they might have taken a disastrously wrong turn. At any rate, there was scarcely a peep from within the opaque geodesic dome of Theory. Neuro-evolutionary-prefixed humanities do not having anything like the stranglehold of Theory but the refusal to engage with critics is just as strange. As I said in my piece, plus ca change…

Those who would like to look further at the problems (to put it politely) with ‘neuro-evolutionary’ humanities could do worse than consult the many pages I devote to them in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Mankind.

In response to David Livingstone Smith:
I can understand why Professor Smith may agree with my position while at the same wishing that I had been a little more polite. I believe, however, that biologism, supported by the two pillars of unwisdom that I have named ‘Neuromania’ and ‘Darwinitis’, is a very serious aberration and its exponents seem to be impervious or deaf to arguments conducted in the usual tone of voice.

Like Professor Smith, I think there is an important task to be carried out in trying to bridge the gap between science and the humanities. As a clinical neuroscientist who has also published over a score of books in the broad field of the humanities, as well as verse and fiction, I am deeply aware of this. Indeed my Newton’s Sleep: Two Kingdoms and Two Cultures (1995) deals with this issue.

Attempts to bridge that regrettable gap will, however, be thwarted by the capitulation of certain humanities academics to scientism, and contracting interdisciplinary marriages in which the natural sciences are seen as the senior partner. It is surely telling that neuro-evolutionary literature criticism embraced by humanist intellectuals is not balanced by a new approach to neuroscience that is shaped by the methods traditionally used by literary critics. (The results would be dismal but at least its existence would testify to the equality of the partners in the marriage of biological science and humanities.)

My own endeavours to bring the discourse of science (or the area of science with which I am most familiar) closer to literature (as in my collections of verse, particularly Between the Zones – about light and water – and my prose work The Kingdom of Infinite Space) may or may not be successful but they at least demonstrate my willingness to work positively on this, the most important intellectual task that faces us. And I have endeavoured in the 1,000 pages of my trilogy on human consciousness (published by Palgrave and beginning with The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being) to make visible the gap between ourselves and all other living creatures and to develop an account of ‘how we came to be so different’: how the organisms H sapiens came to be the kinds of persons that walk the earth today. This included examining the biological roots of how we escaped from biology. I ended this particular enterprise with a sense of how much work there was to be done.

This work will be hampered by a naïve scientism that takes it for granted that a combination of neuroscience and Darwinism (two magnificent monuments of the human intellect) will account for what it is to be a human being, such that we can understand even the nature of art, of its creation and its appreciation, by reference to the human being as an evolved brain. Of course, the brain is a necessary condition of all aspects of our consciousness, behaviour etc (How can a clinician specialising in stroke and epilepsy not have noticed that?); but it not a sufficient condition. We humans have long since gone beyond the point at which our daily lives, never mind our aesthetic activities, could be usefully illuminated by peering into our brains or referring to life in the Pleistocene era.

So while my article has criticised one particularly absurd way of closing the gap between science and the humanities, I do not oppose this as an overall aim. It is because I value it that I take exception to the kind of ‘neuro-evolutionary’ nonsense that is spreading across academe. If John Locke found it ‘ambition enough to be employ’d as an under-labourer… removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge’ it should be good enough for me. And in dealing with those who dump such rubbish, politeness should not always be the first consideration.

However, I do not sympathize with his dismissive manner, and his failure to acknowledge that those whom he (offensively) diagnoses as suffering from neuromania and Darwinitis are wrestling with a real, and profound, philosophical conundrum.

Human beings ARE organisms and organisms ARE configurations of matter. It follows from this that physics and biology (and also neuroscience) must enter into a complete explanation of any state or activity of human beings. Does physics, or biology, or neuroscience provide a SUFFICIENT explanation for, say, the effects of Shakespeare’s prose? Of course not – but I very much doubt that anyone seriously believes that they do.

Rather than sneering at efforts to bridge the gap between traditionally humanistic modes of explanation and scientific modes of explanation, it is more productive to step up to the plate and take on the more challenging task of grappling with the question how these modes of explanation can be brought into some principled relation with one another (or, if this is deemed impossible, producing a coherent and empirically plausible account of why this might be).

David Livingstone Smith
Department of Philosophy
University of New England