A final response to John Horgan

Every few weeks or so with some regularity a friend would send me the next article in John Horgan's series, 'What is Philosophy's Point?' There is not much to say about this capstone piece, Part 5, 'A Call for "Negative Philosophy"', but I will try anyway.

A continuation of the response to John Horgan

Part II of Horgan's 'tease' of philosophy and philosopher is up. My response will include a brief summary of my last open letter and a brief analysis of some issues with the content of Part II.

A response to John Horgan

Someone sent me an article by John Horgan from the Scientific American blog: 'What Is Philosophy's Point? Part 1 (Hint: It's Not Discovering Truth): Philosophy can still serve many purposes, even if it can’t compete with science as a method of accumulating knowledge'. 

Horgan is the author of the book, The End of Science. It was--in my estimation--a fairly accessible number of interviews with scientists and philosophers of science on the future of science. It also included his own assessment of the future of science: science was, at least in a number of fields, nearing its end.

I remember where I was in life when I read his book some fifteen years ago: I had some disposable income, working part-time as an A/V technician at Oberlin College and had plenty of free time at the A/V desk in the library on campus to sit in peace and read a book or two. When it was time to pack up and leave Oberlin, his book, like all the books I bought, ended up in the trunk of my car. 

I bring up my personal memories of the book for one reason: every few years, after I've accumulated more books than I can house comfortably, I send off the lesser books, the books that were more appropriate for me at an earlier age--Elmer and the Dragon, for example--to charity shops; Horgan's book was placed in a cardboard box. I hope my copy is sitting on the shelf of a budding scientist at this very moment.

That is not to say that Horgan is a bad populariser of science. I don't intend to denigrate his work. I mean only to say that Horgan's work was not exemplary. Rather than take a science journalist's word for it, I read other books in science and philosophy, written by scientists and philosophers. I matured, and as I matured, I found more room for complexity in my life.

It is appropriate, then, that I have reached a point that I can confront Horgan on the limitations of his intellectual horizons. At the time of reading his book, I was bothered that he felt so comfortable uncritically perpetuating scientific folklore that the present success of science indicated 'the end of science'.

This uncritical acceptance of a naïve scientific realist thesis--specifically, a 'no-miracles' argument--bothered me even when I read it as an undergraduate during dull moments at the A/V desk. In brief, we are to make the following sort of inference: (1) the predictive successes in the sciences are unparalleled, and could only be explicable due to a deep connection between our viewpoint and the world (like a good butcher, our viewpoint more or less 'carves nature at its joints'); (2) we cannot conceive of any other viewpoint that carves as successfully as our present one; (3) therefore, our current viewpoint is (more or less) accurate.

It was only after I learned about the intricacies of versions of the pessimistic meta-induction, as well as the problem of transient underdetermination, thanks to reading P. Kyle Stanford's Exceeding Our Grasp (as well as detailed histories of science), that I came to see why his views were not appropriate if one wished to come to a fair understanding of the present state of play in philosophy of science (or, for that matter, the future of science). This holds true even if one were to decide that some version of a 'no miracles' argument ought to be accepted.

I suggest reading the article if you have the chance, even if you should disagree with Horgan. One part stood out to me, and this part is why I began this short post with my own development in understanding issues in philosophy of science: the Postscript to the article includes a section that I found deeply offensive. I attempted to articulate exactly why I found it so offensive that I needed to write a reply on a website that nobody would ever read. 

I include the second sentence of the Postscript at the end of this post, so in a way I've buried the lede (I'm sure Horgan would have a great deal to say to me about how to improve in my journalistic abilities):

'I’m always enchanted when I meet a professional philosopher, just as I am when I encounter someone making a living as a glass-blower, another wonderfully archaic profession'.

(As an aside, there's a bit of irony picking glass-blowers, since glassblowers are an integral part of the sciences. I do not believe I have a better understanding of much of science than a professional science journalist like Horgan. I hope he was aware of the importance of glass-blowers in science, as well as aware of the importance of glassblowing in the history of science. If he were, then did Horgan intend to insult two whole professions that do work that passes beyond the scope of Horgan's gaze?)

I do hope I get the opportunity to meet John Horgan some day if (and hopefully when) I am a professional philosopher. It's not because I consider myself to be interested in some archaic field, though. I am interested in explaining to him the reasons why I put away childish things the more I learned about philosophy. I put away Elmer and the Dragon, The God Delusion, and other books I read at a young age. I put away Horgan's book. I say this even though his book is far better than Elmer and the Dragon and The God Delusion. I hope, if Horgan should ever come across this article, Horgan puts away his childish thinking, too.

Acknowledging my own limitations allowed me to grow in my abilities. I hope any advice I could give him would help Horgan in coming to terms with his own intellectual limitations, and hopefully work on overcoming them. You can teach a dog new tricks! Part of that advice, if I were to give it to him, would be to be cautious in denigrating an entire field and the experts in that field, both for his sake and for the public that reads his blog.

To the point: he should be cautious for two reasons: (1) as a matter of self-interest: saying these things makes Horgan look ignorant; and (2) in the interest of the public good: Horgan presumably cares about increasing epistemically virtuous forms of inquiry and decreasing epistemically vicious forms of inquiry.

(Continued under the fold.)