Some of you might realize that my criticisms of science are not strictly speaking "original." I have been influenced by Wendell Berry (mostly his novels and poetry [from which you may recognize "practice resurrection"], though I have also read The Unsettling of America). Berry has long been an opponent of uncritical technological consumption, as well as of scientific materialism more generally. He has also gone to the Bible for close readings to re-evaluate how we understand our situatedness within creation (see "The Gift of Good Land" or "Christianity and the Survival of Creation"). In short I think he is the foremost (both temporally and qualitatively) proponent in America of a genuinely Christian engagement with creation.
So, I'm not raising any new issues.
If anything, I approach the issue slightly differently. Berry's style, and indeed much of the strength of his critique, relies I think on a sort of embodied common sense. The gauntlet that he throws down before the modern view is that it doesn't make sense practically. My proposed approach is more circumspect as it relies methodologically on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. There are essentially two prongs to my attack. One is to examine the early stages of modern science, say around Newton and the Royal Society, and challenge the inevitability of scientific materialism historically. I think it is a contingency that science is the way it is. It is not that science has privileged access to "how the world is" and that such access has dictated materialism. (I've just written myself out of conversation with Dan Dennett.) This approach is to follow MacIntyre's historical approach to rival rational traditions. In this case we have rather than two rival traditions being synthesized (as for Augustinianism and Aristotelianism into the Thomist synthesis), instead a divergence of traditions. So, I want to understand rationally how this occurs if even just in the particular case of the scientific revolution.
The second prong in the attack is to challenge the Humean Is/Ought distinction that seems implicit to modern science. I think that science's supposed ethical/moral neutrality is a rational mistake finding its roots in the Enligthenment. The result is the sort of ad hoc scientific value judgments that are being leveled in the modern climate debate. Science really has no resources for talking about what should be and yet we see quasi-religious fervor in the debate over the reality, source, and necessary responses to global warming even within the scientific community. Furthermore, the inevitable result of such conceptual poverty is that responses to the perceived danger are characterized almost exclusively by the need for further research to decide what our options are for out-engineering the disaster.
So, I want to talk about science's inheritance as the favored child of the Enlightenment and how this has eroded its conceptual resources for ethical debate. To make the criticism that science divorces knowledge from action (epistemology from ethics) is, I think, to level a criticism that is consistent with Wittgenstein's remarks (which is not to say that it is what Wittgenstein "meant" or "said" through his remarks).
The entire critique is MacIntyrean. While I think that Berry's critique is more meaningful on the whole, I am sensitive to MacIntyre's notion of criticizing rival schemes on their own terms.
Since science doesn't contain any ethical "terms" I think that there is an opening in the environmental debate to show how science can pose a problem that it cannot deal with on its own terms.
A normal post about the dog, etc. is forthcoming for those who hate all this other nonsense.
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2 comments:
Is the Augustinian/Aristotelian synthesis "rational"? Mac thinks so. He talks about these sort of changes in quite a disembodied way that worries me. But I have to go to bed now.
Mac's approach is to say that the synthesis is rational just if it seems to make sense of the world better than either of the two rival traditions.
In what tradition does Mac claim he can achieve such perspective? I dunno. There is, perhaps, the argument to be made that as an heir to this synthesis he is judging the synthesis from a discernibly embodied vantage.
I anticipate two further queries: 1.) how do we suggest (rationally) that the purported rationality of the synthesis is not presupposed in his being an heir. 2.) by "disembodied" you meant that he's doing a lot of theorizing about how rationality works, and it makes you uncomfortable.
To the first I would say that Mac is optimistic in that he thinks that anyone from either of the rival traditions in question should be easily convinced that the synthesis deals with the world better than either component tradition. If they can be so convinced, then his being an heir carries with it his being able to make the argument about rationalities. Say a person from a third tradition challenges the claim, then I think we have to go into MacIntyrean battle such that we evaluate which of our two systems are better equipped conceptually, or if a synthesis is needed. In essence, it's never ending, but also never debilitating.
On 2.) I think that MacIntyre can make a claim at only describing how we modify our "language games". It's a very elaborate description, but it does take into account its difference from other possible descriptions (I think, at least I think the description itself is up for grabs in any synthesis). The worry, I agree, is that it is all still very cognitive.
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