On Weird Theories

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

SOURCE: Original essay

COMMENTARY: That's up to you...

"... say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."
- Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski (1998)

I had a next-door neighbor who worked for an aerospace company. One summer afternoon we were sitting beside his barbeque in his back yard, having one of those stream-of-consciousness conversations that often accompanies the guzzling of a six pack or two (his brand was Pabst Blue Ribbon™). I don't remember how the subject came up, but somewhere along the line I must have done what my wife calls "hitting the core-dump button." And he did; for the next couple of hours I listened in semi-horrified fascination as he expounded on his "theory" of reality. Basically, it was a weird variant on the "eagle and snake" mythology of the Aztecs, except that in his own weird theory the snake was the major icon. He went on and on about how the world (and time and everything else) was, at some much deeper level of reality, a snake. Ouroboros and the Midgard Serpent and Satan in the Garden of Eden and Freud's phallic symbols and the Caduceus and on and on and on...it was all tied together in a huge, complicated, and ultimately deranged web of relationships. It clearly was very meaningful to him; at times he seemed on the verge of tears. He showed me a medal of the Aztec eagle-and-snake image, which he wore around his neck at all times (even to bed and in the shower). He told me how it got him through some bad times in Vietnam, and later when he almost broke up with his wife. The emotional connections were so intense that he was shaking at times, and there was a catch in his voice.

This wasn't the first (or the last) time something like this has happened to me. Several times – on the bus or in the bus terminal, on a long car trip with a friend, at the airport, over lunch, at a picnic for work or a fraternal organization – someone hears or thinks of the word or phrase that "hits the core-dump button" and out it all comes. You sit there, in awe and trepidation, while the core-dumper gives you their entire "weird theory" of reality, all in one huge, steaming, highly charged, stream-of-consciousness pile. Sometimes it's clear that they have never articulated this before to anyone. Other times it's clear that they've been working on this particular monolog, maybe for years, and have already "gifted" others with a very similar version. Every time it's always intensely emotional for them, as the whole weird mess unspools and they search your face for some sign of recognition, of empathy, of understanding.

And, with me at least, they don't get that. I listen politely, trying not to look perplexed or horrified, waiting for the whole thing to come tumbling out, and hoping for something to then divert us – the burgers starting to burn or the bus arriving or the teller asking for my driver's license. I nod sometimes, and grunt in what I hope is a non-judgmental way, and quietly wish for someone or something to intervene before the core-dumper realizes that, not only to I not empathize, I think they're nuts.

Because they are, at some very deep level. Almost all of us are; completely whacked. What we almost all have, buried deep in our psyche, is what I call a "weird theory of reality," in which we believe passionately, and into which we shoehorn almost every perception we have about reality. Furthermore, it's clear to me that people have always had such "weird theories" about reality. Today it's alien abductions or UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis. Yesterday it was angels and demons, fairies, gnomes, trolls, heaven and Hell, transubstantiation, faith healing, walking on water, flying, and speaking in tongues. Tomorrow...well, I can't say for sure, but I am sure it will be something weird.

What makes modern "weird theories" different from those of the past is that today everyone has their own "weird theory". When people lived in small agricultural villages or even smaller hunter-gatherer groups, people had weird theories, but these were pretty similar within those groups. Heresy was difficult, if not virtually unthinkable, because everyone in a particular group was in constant verbal and emotional contact with virtually everyone else, and there was a strong incentive to conform to group norms of belief.

This pattern persisted into historic times with the establishment and enforcement of "state religions" - that is, weird theories of reality that had the force of political coercion behind them. People may have had personally idiosyncratic versions of the group's weird theory, but they generally kept these to themselves. These "group weird theories" (GWT) were the mythologies that held such groups together, that gave them a sense of shared experience and shared purpose, and that facilitated group coordination. This was often a good thing, but sometimes a bad thing: it made possible group coordination in agriculture and response to natural disasters, but also facilitated warfare and small-scale genocide.

What characterizes us now is that our weird theories are almost entirely idiosyncratic, especially in the First World. We have largely given up the large-scale group mythologies and religions of the past, and replaced them with what could be called "personal mythologies and religions". That Protestantism is the most influential religion in America today is precisely because it isn't a single religion: it's thousands, even millions of little idiosyncratic religions, with some shared similarities. Schism, right down to the individual level (and even within individuals at different times in our lives) is the norm, and so our weird theories are not only weird, they're mutually incomprehensible.

So, are the various sciences also "weird theories"? Anyone acquainted with the current state of quantum physics would almost certainly agree, as would most evolutionary biologists. But, it's not really the same, because although there are many weird theories in science, there is also an underlying agreement that is deeply "unweird" – the idea that empirical verification and logical inference is the basis for all of our weird theories.

Ultimately, the difference between non-scientific and scientific "weird theories" is that eventually the latter become generally accepted by the scientific community in the same way that the grand overarching religious weird theories of past centuries were. Yes, there are still schisms in science (think of the controversies surrounding punctuated equilibrium versus phyletic gradualism), but in the long run these schisms tend to heal themselves. Thomas Kuhn described this process well, but he also asserted (and most scientists would agree) that eventually the various scientific communities agree on their dominant paradigms. Science, in other words, tends to become more unified over time, as deep connections between the various weird theories stitch them together into "grand unified theories".

By contrast, the non-scientific "weird theories" schism and schism and schism, until they become the incomprehensible idiosyncratic messes that one taps into when one hits the "core-dump button". Indeed, one of my personal weird theories is that this is a good way to distinguish between useful (i.e. "true") and pointless (i.e. "false") weird theories: the former tend to unify your ideas with those of the other members of your community, whereas the latter tend to separate us to the point of mutual incomprehensibility.

Hence, the quote from The Big Lebowski: say what you say what you like about the tenets of (insert scientific discipline here), Dude, at least it's an ethos.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Shermer, M. (2002) Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. Holt, New York, NY, ISBN #0805070893 ($17.00, paperback), 384 pages. Available here.

Sowin, J. (2008) 25 reasons people believe weird things. Pseudoscience, Life, Science, Religion, 28 April 2008. Available online here.

As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

--Allen

More on Steve Fuller and "Social Epistemology"

SOURCE: Cornell IDEA Club

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

The debate begun in my previous post continues...

A poster to the Cornell IDEA Club listserve wrote:

"Fuller '... deserves to have his ideas discussed instead of lambasted.'"

Okay, here's something to discuss (a direct quote from Fuller):

"In this respect, 'our' side pulled its punches in the Science Wars when it refused to come out and say that the scientific establishment may not be the final word on what science is, let alone what it ought to be." [emphasis mine]

In that one sentence alone is encapsulated nearly everything that most practicing scientists find so deeply objectionable about Steve Fuller and his ilk. Let's take it apart:

"'our' side"

What precisely does Fuller mean by this? "Our side" in what way? "Our side" in the evolution/ID debate? The natural science/social science debate? The science/sociology debate? The "culture wars" that Phillip Johnson says ID is part of? What does it mean to say you're on a "side"?

When I debate with other scientists about scientific subjects, those debates can be pretty heated, but generally we're all on the same "side": the "side" of empirical verification/falsification of explanations of natural phenomena. In other words, we're all on the "science side," the side that does what it does based on the premise that such explanations should be grounded in observation of nature and the investigation of natural causes for natural phenomena.

I don't think that's what Fuller means by "our side." Sociologists in general, and "social epistemologists" in particular have as a basic starting assumption that all explanations of all phenomena (natural or otherwise) are ultimately socially constructed.

Now, I have no problem with that idea per se, as I believe as well that such explanations are indeed socially constructed. What I and other scientists have a problem with is the seemingly inevitable logical extension of that idea which most sociologists (and I would put Fuller in this camp) seem prone to: that nature itself is therefore "socially constructed." That's what "social epistemology" means, isn't it? That what we know about reality (i.e. epistemology) is socially constructed, and that therefore we can't actually know anything about nature at all outside of our social construction of it.

But this is precisely what science was and is supposed to be about: the discovery and understanding of what nature is, independent of our opinions and "social constructions." That's why statistical analysis was developed, to remove as much as possible our subjective/socially constrained interpretation of what our observations mean vis-a-vis our explanations about how nature works. That's why we have "double-blind" experimental protocols, and why we argue so vehemently over the validity of data and what it means for theories: because, in the end, all scientists agree that this is the best we can do at understanding how nature works.

But Fuller and his cohorts do not agree; they think that real scientific objectivity (and hence the entire scientific enterprise) is impossible, and that since all scientific explanations are "socially constructed," it all comes down to "sides" and "debates" and, most of all, WINNING. It call comes down to politics, in other words.

"Science Wars"

Here it is in a nutshell. Wars between whom, precisely? Between scientists, who believe that they really are able to say something about the nature of nature, and non-scientists, who believe that it's all really about political power and "hegemony" and "patriarchy" and winning. What happens when you fight a "war", including a "culture war"? Somebody WINS.

"the scientific establishment"

More tired 1970s radical political rhetoric, all dressed up in "scienciness" (like "truthiness" only more "scientific") to impress the gullible and gratify the "politically correct". Yes, I'd be the first to admit that there are "science establishments" - I live and work in one of them. But that's not what Fuller is talking about here. He's talking about the capital E Establishment: the "bad guys" on the other "side", the scientists who believe that they are describing physical reality, when what they are really doing is "oppressing" the poor and downtrodden of the world, the victims of "patriarchy" and "political hegemony" and their advocates, the "social epistemologists", who tell them that there is no objective reality outside of social discourse, and debates are all about WINNING and not about refining our understanding about how nature works.

His mention of the Sokal affair is also telling in this respect. The Sokal affair decisively exposed the intellectual bankruptcy at the heart of sociology and "social epistemology" - the belief that everything is socially constructed. Not just our understanding of reality, but reality itself.

"the final word on what science is"

Hmm, well, what does this tell us about Fuller et al? Who should have the "final word" about anything? The people doing it, or the people criticizing it? Who is the real subject - the monster or the critics (as Tolkein so eloquently put it)? True, scientists sometimes don't completely understand why they do things the way they do (i.e. some of them follow instructions, like an apprentice emulates a master), but this does not mean that scientists don't really understand why we do what we do and need somebody like Fuller to tell us.

Why not? Because social "scientists" like Fuller (and like ID "theorists") don't do natural science. They "interpret" or "criticize" or "analyze" what natural scientists do, but they don't do what natural scientists do. If they did, Alan Sokal's trick would not have worked, but instead it sucked them all in, so deep that some of them still don't realize how completely their intellectual bankruptcy was exposed by the "Sokal affair."

"let alone what it ought to be"

And there it is, right there in plain English. The people who DO science are probably the last people who should have anything to say about how science ought to be practised, right? Because, of course, we're all "blinded by science" and don't understand that it isn't about objective analysis of nature, it's about "social construction of reality" which ultimately is about politics (from the Greek polis, for "people"), which is about WINNING.

So, yes, I find it fascinating that ID advocates, the vast majority of whom are deeply committed Christians, can find common cause with Fuller and other "social epistemologists." Christian belief, as I understand it, is ultimately based on unshakable faith in the truth of the Word: the logos of the gospel of John. But, to somebody like Fuller, the Word is just another form of "social discourse", just part of a political struggle of which the ultimate point is WINNING. Why does Phillip Johnson call what he's doing part of a "culture war?" Why does William Dembski and Robert Crowther and Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Witt and Benjamin Wiker (but, significantly, not Michael Behe nor Gullielmo Gonzales, both natural scientists) agree with Johnson? Because that's what they're doing, they're fighting a war, and as I said in my last post, wars aren't about truth, they're about WINNING. Truth be damned, so long as your side WINS. "Lying for Jesus" is justified, and no amount of distortion of experimental results or character assassination or egregiously twisted and vicious propaganda is too much, so long as your side WINS.

Isn't the quotation from Fuller that stands at the top of this post an indication that he sees what he and other "social epistemologists" do is ultimately all about winning? Seems like it to me...

--Allen

On the "Darwin Fetish" and Other Political Oxymorons

SOURCE: Cornell IDEA Club

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

The IDEA Club at Cornell has recently been discussing the following quote by Steve Fuller, a sociologist and one of the "experts" who testified in support of "intelligent design" at the Dover trial in Pennsylvania last year:

"If you want to stop use of the word 'Darwinist' to capture modern evolutionary theory, then you should encourage people like Dawkins, Jones, Wilson, Watson, Ridley and (were he alive) Gould to stop talking about 'Origin of Species' etc. as if they were books of some secular Bible. This kind of thing doesn't happen in physics. The world-view implications of physics can be discussed, while giving due respect to Newton, Einstein, etc., without trying to find bits of their texts that anticipate or legitimise what the author wants to say today . From a sociological standpoint, the Darwin fetish is very weird, and doesn't seem to be related to any claims that creationists or ID people are making. Marx and Freud are the only figures who have been treated this way in recent memory – and you've seen what's happened to them…"

Here's my take on all of this:

It sounds to me like Fuller is objecting to the idea that biologists, especially evolutionary biologists, cite Darwin as a published authority when writing (and talking and teaching) about their own work. However, this is exactly what you're supposed to do in science: back up your assertions with citations whenever your assertions are not completely original. Fuller, who is not a natural scientist but rather a sociologist, doesn't seem to understand this basic fact. Indeed, he seems to think that citation is somehow illegitimate in science, even that it may indicate some kind of slavish adherence to dogma, rather than simply an attempt to ground one's own work in previous work on the same subject.

If I were to cite W. D. Hamilton on the subject of kin selection, for example, does that mean that I have some kind of "Hamilton fetish?" What if everyone who works on kin selection does the same thing; does this mean that we're "deifying Hamilton?" No, the whole idea is absurd; citation is both an accepted and indeed required part of standard science writing, teaching, and speaking.

It goes deeper than this, of course. The reason that Fuller was chosen as one of the "experts" in defense of "intelligent design" at the trial in Dover, PA was because Fuller (like many sociologists today) is a "post-modernist." This means that, like post-modernism's founders such as Foucault and Derrida, Fuller believes and promotes the idea that "all knowledge is reducible to 'discourse'" in which politics is the ultimate force, and political victory over one's intellectual opponents is the ultimate goal. Fuller and others like him argue that there is no such thing as "objective knowledge" at all, only competing ideologies. According to this view, science is just another way for the "dominant white patriarchal class to extend its hegemony" by forcing others to believe in its politically motivated view of reality, and that all intellectual debates are really just part of the ongoing class struggle for political power.

It surprises me, therefore, that "intelligent design" supporters would cite Fuller and promote his ideas, which are of course ultimately based on Marxist (and therefore atheist) theories. Politics indeed makes for strange bedfellows, and to see Christian supporters of ID cite Fuller and others like him as authorities and supporters of their world view strikes me as laughable and ultimately self-defeating.

Yet at the same time, it doesn't surprise me, because that's what "intelligent design theory" started out as and has remained: not science, not the legitimate search for knowledge derived from empirical analysis of nature, but rather politics, pure and simple. This is why IDers don't publish in scientific journals, but rather push their agenda in the media, the courts, and in elections. ID isn't science, it's politics, conducted by press release and lawsuit, and its goal isn't the expansion of knowledge or understanding, it's winning by whatever means possible: distortion, misrepresentation, mischaracterization, even character assassination and outright lying are sanctioned, so long as they promote the ultimate goal: the victory of ID (and therefore the forces of "good," i.e. Christianity) over evolution (and therefore the forces of "evil," i.e. evangelical atheism).

How else to explain such masterpieces of political propaganda as Phillip Johnson's The Wedge of Truth or Benjamin Wiker's Moral Darwinism? The former was written by the acknowledged founder of "intelligent design theory," and the latter was published with a foreword by William Dembski in which he lavishly praises Wiker for getting down to the real issues in the evolution/intelligent design debate. IOW, it's not about knowledge, it's all about winning folks, and cultural warfare (Johnson's term) is just politics by other means. And in cultural warfare as in war in general, the first casualty is the truth...

--Allen