He’s that one guy, you know? No, not that one, the other one.
Ok, now I understand the first syllable of the OPs name, though I’m still not real clear on the rest.
Scientism is a perfectly valid term for the tendency of overstating the reach of science. Science applies to objective facts: whenever there are such facts, one may use the scientific method (if such a thing exists) to continually approximate them to an ever finer degree.
But science has its limitations, for instance, in the moral domain: as Hume taught us, what is does not tell us what ought to be; but only the former can be uncovered scientifically. There are no value judgments in science—that’s exactly what makes it so powerful. But value judgments are necessary for life in any kind of coherent society.
Extending science beyond its domain of validity essentially amounts to a perversion of science, albeit an unfortunately common one. And yes, Harris with his ‘Moral Landscape’ is quite certainly guilty of this conflation (for a good exposition, see for instance Massimo Pigliucci’s take on the matter).
Realizing this is not anti-scientific, by the way (after all, science is what I get paid to do, so I’d be fouling up my own nest here). In fact, it’s quite to the contrary: in order to do meaningful science, we need to not muddy the water by entangling it with judgments about the world, be they ethical, aesthetical, or what have you—we need to be clear about the difference between facts and values in order to make real scientific progress. Thus, what’s hurt by the current widespread trend towards scientism is, ultimately, science itself—it gets overextended, overstretched, and ultimately so diluted as to loose all meaning.
I thought that was Danny Trejo.
Or maybe he’s really just devoted to Taylor Swift and he’s mad they used to date.
Not knowing much about this, and given that the OP has presented nothing of substance to back up his/her claim, the reader is left with a conundrum:
Whom to agree with more: Someone with a PhD in Neuroscience, with a long list of published material or an anonymous poster on a Message Board. This is a tough one…
Well, not even “brain surgeon” means much, anymore.
:dubious: Whatever one thinks of Sam Harris, this is kind of a weak argument, given that the vast majority of Harris’s publications are not in the scientific field where he earned his PhD but rather on general philosophical/cultural topics like religion and ethics.
Having a PhD in cognitive neuroscience doesn’t make one an expert on the general philosophical, ethical, cultural or historical aspects of human thought. Possessing advanced degrees doesn’t stop lots of people from publicly spewing ill-informed bullshit on a varied range of subjects (e.g., Deepak Chopra, Jonathan Wells, etc.).
I enjoy listenng to Sam Harris’ podcast and I tend to agree with most of his views. He sometimes gets sidetracked by squabbles with his vocal opponents, but I can find that entertaining. I don’t think he spouts pseudo-science, he seems to be pretty careful when making claims. I do think he is a little off track on his islamism diatribes as I do think it’s a product of both political and religious influence and Sam tends to believe it all ties back to religious beliefs.
Are there actually tangible, non-science beliefs he states to be true regardless of evidence that you disagree with or should I put away the pitchfork?
Sam Harris is great! Just like Bill Maher, actual is a REAL liberal, ie doesn’t give Islam a free pass.
I agree with all of this to a point.
Science can’t outright give us morality, but it can look a certain way and gesture determinedly. If we have a basic moral framework established, science can tell us the best way to accomplish those ends; on the flip side, science can tell us what the end result of certain actions is likely to be, which allows us to determine the effective (as opposed to the ostensible) morality of those who propose those actions. As a simple example, abstinence-only sex ed doesn’t reduce teen pregnancy. Therefore, those who propose it (nay, insist upon it) aren’t really interested in reducing teen pregnancy, regardless of what they claim to support.
Furthermore, we must be very careful when someone claims something isn’t amenable to testing, because they likely know that testing will severely damage its credibility. People who promote SCAM (Supplementary, Complementary, and Alternative Medicine) do this sometimes, with claims that their regimes help in a psychological sense which obviates the need for seeing whether they work. Of course, psychology is a science, and can be approached scientifically, so therefore their effectiveness can be studied. Similarly, claims of life after death are falsified to the extent anything can be falsified by our knowledge of how consciousness works; you have to change the definition into things like “living on in our memories” or similar unless you’re really determined to ignore the whole field of neurology.
Everything you said is quite reasonable. I just doubt it’s what most people mean when they use the term ‘scientism’. (Which is a common trait with some dishonest groups: Define your terms two ways, a safe way and an exciting way, and when you’re challenged on the exciting definition, move back to the safe one: You’re in favor of “Securing Our Borders”, which can mean either patrolling the borders to make sure drug cartels don’t have a free reign (safe definition) or getting those damned brown people out so they don’t compete with low-income white people for work (exciting definition); anyone who tries to call you on using that term is obviously delusional because you only mean the safe definition, and would never support the exciting one (where anyone outside your group can hear)… )
However, it’s how the term “scientism” is being used in this thread. foolsguinea’s description of scientific determinism or necessitarianism as “fatalism in scientism’s clothes” is not unreasonable, and it’s not anti-science.
I don’t think anyone here is using “scientism” improperly as merely a simplistic dismissal of science itself or of science-influenced philosophies such as materialism and rationalism.
The OP explicitly calls out “psychological sciences” which if not identical to, is quite close to what Harris has his PhD in. Beside, it’s not a question of whether Harris is objectively a great reference, but wether he is better one than the OP.
Well sure, Harris can be fairly described as straying over the boundary from “pro-science” to “scientism” sometimes. Here’s an analysis of Harris’s flawed rebuttal of criticisms of his “moral landscape” thesis, relying on an off-target analogy between “well-being” and health:
The problem with many of Harris’s claims is not that it’s theoretically and intrinsically impossible to determine moral issues scientifically (always assuming that we carefully restrict our definition of “moral issues” to material and rationally comprehensible phenomena). The problem is that he uses vague language and sloppy reasoning to make it seem that moral issues are self-evidently determined scientifically, and that there are no possible valid critiques of that approach. That sort of leapfrogging the difficult bits is a classic characteristic of scientism.
To take one specific example, here’s a remark from Harris’s essay quoted in the above analysis:
Here, Harris is using a rhetorical binary distinction, between “a world in which global health is maximized” and “a world in which we all die early and in agony”, to camouflage a situation that is actually much more complex.
Even physical health, which he’s using as a (somewhat rickety) analogy for more general “well-being”, is not a simple either-or choice between “health globally maximized overall” and “early painful deaths for everybody”. So his claim of the hypothetical optimal outcome as an “objective reality” dependent on “genuine truth claims” depends on the reader not looking too closely at the very complicated concept of “maximizing” health or well-being.
That’s scientism talk, along the same lines as (although much less egregious than) creationist talking points of the form “If there wasn’t anything before the Big Bang, then how could it explode?”. It makes a superficially plausible point as long as you don’t really stop to think about the ordinary-language implications of the terms being used, and whether they really apply in the same way to this particular statement.
If you like him, he obviously has been giving Jewish nationalism all the free passes.
In fact, you’re such a knee-jerk Israel triumphalist when it comes to Israel/Palestine that you liking someone’s politics is reason to worry about that person’s judgment.
I think Harris makes too much of a some objective ideal in his eagerness to re-frame the argument into, like you said, a binary distinction. He is not giving enough thought on how such ideals work in the real world with actual people. Its like he’s a robot talking about what’s best for people without any empirical experiences.
But I think some of his logic is sound, we don’t actually have a scientific basis for well-being or anything like that. Its just that he made a jump from there to the equally improbable claim that there can be no science of morality. I think there can be because as humans, we’re the creators of morality, we can certainly decide what it is. Say not that there can be no scientific basis of morality, but say rather than perhaps morality is simply one of many goals science can strive to understand.
If that was true then attempts to shape people into the desired personality would actually work. However they don’t; efforts like the New Soviet Man and homosexual conversion “therapy” consistently fail.
People have pretty strongly hardwired personalities; otherwise freedom would not exist. We’d have been shaped into the puppets of the powerful millennia ago. Even the concepts of freedom and independence wouldn’t exist, we’d have been shaped to be automatons incapable of having such thoughts.
I don’t think you’ve understood the argument correctly. He is quite deliberately setting up two strawman positions.
But the very fact that we can reliably distinguish between these two states means that we have accepted, at least to some degree, that objectivity and empiricism can apply to moral actions. The argument doesn’t depend on the exact details of how global health is maximized, just that all possible positions here are far closer to each other than they are to universal agony.
Someone that denies even the smallest degree of objectivity in moral action is unable to distinguish between global health vs. universal agony, because they cannot even assert that anything has value, or allow objective measures such as years of pain-free existence.
Nope, he’s attempting to rebut critiques of his claims about “well-being” via an analogy with physical health. The shakiness of this analogy is illustrated in your own very next sentence:
[QUOTE=Dr. Strangelove]
But the very fact that we can reliably distinguish between these two states means that we have accepted, at least to some degree, that objectivity and empiricism can apply to moral actions.
[/quote]
No, empirically distinguishing between two extreme states of physical health, i.e., “global health maximized overall” versus “early painful deaths for everyone”, does not in itself tell us anything about empirically distinguishing between different states of more general moral well-being. (It also, as I noted above, sidesteps the important fact that in real life both health and general “well-being” are continua, not binary states.)
The purpose of his analogy–and extreme examples–was to dismantle the three “challenges” he put forward (the Value, Persuasion, and Measurement problems). It takes only a single counterexample to accomplish this, and an extreme one suffices.
Actually, I think his example works better than mere analogy. Because health is a component of well-being, demonstrating an empirical component of health means there’s an empirical component to well-being, and hence moral action.
Where I think his argument trips is the jump from disproving the challenges to “Therefore, questions of morality and values must have right and wrong answers that fall within the purview of science”. He has not demonstrated that all moral questions have answers at all. It may well be that all questions which do have answers have them under the purview of science, but there may be questions without answers. Perhaps Harris would not deny this–I’m not sure.