DISPUTATIONS

SEPTEMBER 26, 2013

Science vs. the Humanities, Round III

BY STEVEN PINKER AND LEON WIESELTIER

Steven Pinker:

In his commentary on my essay “Science is Not your Enemy,” Leon Wieseltier writes, “It is not forscience to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art.” I reply: It is not forLeon Wieseltier to say where science belongs. Good ideas can come from any source, and they must beevaluated on their cogency, not on the occupational clique of the people who originated them.

Wieseltier’s insistence that science should stay inside a box he has built for it and leave the weightyquestions to philosophy is based on a fallacy. Yes, certain propositions are empirical, others logical orconceptual or normative; they should not be confused. But propositions are not academic disciplines.Science is not a listing of empirical facts, nor has philosophy ever confined itself to the non-empirical.

Why should either discipline stay inside Wieseltier’s sterile rooms? Does morality have nothing to dowith the facts of human well-being, or with the source of human moral intuitions? Does political theoryhave nothing to learn from a better understanding of people’s inclinations to cooperate, aggress, hoard,share, work, empathize, or submit to authority? Is art really independent of language, perception,memory, emotion? If not, and if scientists have made discoveries about these faculties which go beyondreceived wisdom, why isn’t it for them to say that these ideas belong in any sophisticated discussion ofthese topics?

For their part, philosophers beginning with Plato have theorized about scientific questions of how thehuman mind works—not as a sideline, but to provide indispensable premises for their philosophicalarguments. (Wieseltier considers this idea “absurd”; I consider it obvious.) Hume’s analysis of thenature of causality, to take just one example, was enmeshed with his theory of the psychology ofcausality. Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hartley, Berkeley, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill, amongothers, also interwove their philosophical arguments with hypotheses about perception, cognition,emotion, and sociality. (Yes, including Kant; see Patricia Kitcher’s Kant’s TranscendentalPsychology for an explication of Kant as a cognitive psychologist, though of course that’s not all hewas.) It is anachronistic to say that these scholars were doing nothing but “philosophy,” and that thediscoveries of people who today hang their hats in buildings labeled “neuroscience” or “psychology” or“anthropology” have no relevance to the issues they raised.

While anointing himself defender of the humanities, Wieseltier repeatedly issues crippling diktats onwhat humanistic scholarship cannot do—such as make progress. Contrary to his pronouncement that“the vexations of philosophy …are not retired,” that “errors [are] not corrected and discarded,” mostmoral philosophers today would say that the old arguments defending slavery as a natural institutionare errors which have been corrected and discarded. Epistemologists, too, might say that their field hasprogressed from the days when Descartes could argue that human perception is veridical because Godwould not deceive us.

Wieseltier bristles at my suggestion that science is distinguished by the value it places on the thorough-going intelligibility of the world—on the relentless search beyond the explanation of a phenomenon for

a still deeper explanation of the explicans. Yet he legislates that the humanities may tolerate no suchcuriosity. The humanities are “autonomous,” he stipulates, and explanation must stop with “theirreducible reality of inwardness, and its autonomy as a category of understanding.” Begging thequestion, Wieseltier thinks it is incriminating that I “deny that the differences between the variousrealms of human existence, and between the disciplines that investigate them, are final,” that I“transgress the borders between realms,” that I “reject the momentous distinction between the study ofthe natural world and the study of the human world.” Yes, I do all these things, and fortunately, so domany of the humanities scholars with whom I have interacted over the decades, who have no interest inhalting their search for explanation at Wieseltier’s border fence.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that even the most science-indifferent humanities scholar would acceptWieseltier’s insistence that the interpretation of works of art must be restricted to pure “meaning”without attention to “technical matters.” They would be surprised to learn, for example, that meter andsound in poetry, lighting and perspective in painting, pitch and rhythm in music, and other phenomenaat the border of art and science are irrelevant to understanding the meaning of a work. But thenWieseltier’s incuriosity extends to an examination of meaning as well. Tautologies such as “a man’sexperience of his father is his experience of his father” seem to satisfy him, while genuinely startlingnew insights from the sciences—the theory of parent-offspring conflict, the paucity of lasting effects ofthe family environment on the formation of personality, the constructive nature of autobiographicalmemory—are flattened in his telling to “a hunt for phenotypes,” of “outcomes fixed by chromosomes.”Talk about reductionism!

Wieseltier is also offended by the suggestion that another value of science is worthy of emulation,namely that the acquisition of knowledge is hard and often requires laborious empirical tests. Let meexplain what I mean with an example. In defending religion, Wieseltier writes, “Only a small minorityof believers in any of the scriptural religions, for example, have ever taken scripture literally.” Really?How does he know? Wieseltier writes as if his say-so is all we need to move on to the next step of hisargument. Let’s put aside the astonishing “have ever” part of the claim, and confine ourselves to thepresent. Recent polls show that between 30 percent (Gallup) to 60 percent (Rasmussen) of Americansbelieve that the Bible is “the actual word of God to be taken literally, word for word”—hardly “a smallminority.” Figures for believers in the world’s other scriptural religions are even higher: According to arecent Pew survey, between 54 and 93 percent of Muslims in the countries surveyed believe that theQuran should be read “literally, word for word.” The point is not that Wieseltier is factually mistaken inthis assertion. The point is that a more scientific mindset would recognize that an empirical propositiondemands empirical verification. The era in which an essayist can get away with ex cathedrapronouncements on factual questions in social science is coming to an end.

The very possibility of a synthetic understanding of human affairs, in which knowledge from thesciences can contribute to the humanities without taking them over, is inconceivable to Wieseltier.Beginning with its tasteless title, his article steadily escalates the paranoia, tilting at the position Iexplicitly disavow, namely that science is “all there is,” that it is “a sufficient approach to ... the humanuniverse,” that the humanities must “submit to the sciences, and be subsumed by them,” that they mustbe the “handmaiden of the sciences, and dependent upon the sciences for their advance and even theirsurvival,” that a “a scientific explanation, will expose the underlying sameness” and “absorb all therealms into a single realm, into their realm.” If you are a scholar in the humanities, and fear that myessay advocates any of these lunatic positions, I am here to tell you: relax. As I wrote, and firmlybelieve, “the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanisticscholarship, not to obliterate them.”

Wieseltier doubts my sincerity when I note that the benefits of a consilience between the sciences andhumanities go both ways. He bizarrely translates my observation that “the sciences [can] challenge

their theories with the natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so richlycharacterized by humanists” as “scientists think well and humanists write well." So let me explain theobservation with a few examples of two-way traffic just from my own research. Theories of the mentalrepresentation of the visual field must accommodate the fact that the reproduction of linear perspectivein painting is not cognitively natural but was a late invention in the history of art. A major theory ofauditory scene analysis receives important confirmation from the phenomenon of virtual polyphony inmusic. Theories of mental imagery must account for the observations by analytical philosophers thatimages lack the geometric detail of visual percepts, and that even with such detail they would beunsuited to represent abstract concepts. Research in psycholinguistics depends heavily on philologicalscholarship on the history of words and grammatical constructions in English and other languages.Theories of cognitive categorization begin with contrasting views on the nature of concepts fromAristotle and Wittgenstein. The science of human aggression has learned immeasurably from thehistory of crime, war, genocide, criminal punishment, and religious and cultural attitudes towardviolence. Examples could be multiplied from the research of others.

What is at stake in this debate? Wieseltier seems surprised by the idea that scientific thinking shouldneed defending, since “it is the humanities that are declining in America, not least as a result of theexaggerated glamour of science.” Yet for all its growth in the budgets and the real estate of universities,scientific thinking is still marginalized in the major arenas of opinion and influence, which are rife withstatistical illiteracy, religious obscurantism, indifference to data, and the insularityof obsolescing academic fiefs.

Leon Wieseltier:

Steven Pinker is correct: in the struggle to establish accurate and respectful relations between thesciences and the humanities, I am for a two-state solution. In this arena of tension, as in the other one, Ibelieve that a one-state solution would involve the erasure of one of the realms, its distortion by, andsubordination to, an authority that has no legitimate claim over it. I am amused to learn that Pinkerregards the humanities as somehow the greater power in this confrontation; he seems to believe that thewidespread ignorance of the sciences—why should they be spared the marginalization of knowledge inAmerican culture?—has something to do with the defense of the humanities. Would it comfort him tonote that we are not exactly a nation of humanists? In the fight for intellectual seriousness amid bigmedia and big data, the sciences and the humanities are in fact on the same side. Darwin and Dante areboth imperiled minorities. I am aggrieved by the scientific illiteracy of most Americans. I assume thatPinker feels the same way about their humanistic illiteracy. I am happy to have him in my foxhole. It’sgoing to be a long war.

But yes, I am ardently supportive of borders and fences. They clarify things, though they are hardly allwe need to know. There is a basis in reality for the demarcations of the frontiers between the sciencesand the humanities: they reflect the actually existing multiplicity of the realms, and their variousdegrees of incommensurability with each other. This seems entirely uncontroversial and inoffensive tome. I do not defend the integrities of the fields in a spirit of exclusiveness; not at all. The borders areporous, since human life and natural life are various and complicated. Pinker errs in thinking that Iadvocate that everybody “stay inside [their]sterile rooms.” I am against sterility. I am for adventure. Ifavor the free movement of ideas and people across borders. But I do not wish to exaggerate what isaccomplished by the scientist in the kingdom of the humanities or the humanist in the kingdom of thesciences.

Pinker’s ecumenicism is too happy with itself. The encounters are nice, and they are certainly (in theimperishable words of a friend of mine) conference-building measures; but we must be strict aboutwhat is and is not illuminated by them. When Pinker rhapsodizes about “a synthetic understanding of

human affairs,” I am unmoved. I see no need for such a synthesis, insofar as it elides or erasessignificant distinctions or harbors totalistic aspirations. Unified field theories may turn scientists on, butthey turn humanists off: it has taken a very long time to establish the epistemological humility, thepluralistic largeness of mind, that those borders represent, and no revolution in any science has thepower to repeal it. (I know, I know: I am speaking ex cathedra again, whereas Pinker says nothing, hedoes not order a grilled cheese sandwich, without a solid foundation in empirical research.) The issue isnot how good the science is, but how much even the best science can explain.

What Pinker cannot bring himself to accept is that his beloved sciences, even when they do shed somelight on aspects of art and literature, may shed little light and—for the purpose of understandingmeaning (Pinker’s scare quotes around “meaning” may indicate a scare)—unexciting orinconsequential light. I gave the examples of the chemical analysis of a Chardin painting and thelinguistic analysis of a Baudelaire poem. Many other examples could be given. “The theory of parent-offspring conflict”—I hope the grants for that particular breakthrough were not too large—is quitesuperfluous for the explication of Turgenev or Gosse. Nothing in the physical world, in the world of thesenses, in the world of experience, can be immune from or indifferent to the categories of the sciences;but there are contexts in which scientific analysis may be trivial. That is not to say that science istrivial, obviously. But the belief that science is supreme in all the contexts, or that it has the last wordon all the contexts, or that all the contexts await the attentions of science to be properly understood—that is an idolatry of science, or scientism. Pinker is wrong: I am not censoring scientists. They can sayanything they want. But everything they say may not be met with grateful jubilation. So let thescientists in—they are already swarming in—to the humanities, but not as saviors or as superiors. Andthose swaggering scientists about whose intentions Pinker wants humanists to “relax”: they had betterprepare themselves for a mixed reception over here, because over here the gold they bring may bedross.

A word about progress and the humanities: Pinker, like the good scientizer that he is, misses my point. Idid not argue that there is no such thing as moral progress. But “the eradication of slavery as a naturalinstitution,” in Pinker’s condign example, was not achieved only in the name of new concepts.Alongside the philosophical innovations of modern liberalism were ancient notions of freedom,Hebrew and Greek. Those notions (hypocritical in both cases—but then the same may be said of mucheighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism) were still pertinent; whereas no element of Greek orHebrew cosmology matters a whit for contemporary scientific inquiry. The absence of progress is notalways evidence of obscurantism or decadence. Sometimes valuable ideas and instruments wereestablished early, and inherited.

And a word about religion: Pinker is right to point out that most religion is folk religion. Intellectuallysophisticated religious views are not held by most of the people who hold religious views, just asintellectually sophisticated scientific views are not held by most of the people who hold scientificviews. The reputation of science should not be held hostage to folk science. Of course Pinker deniesthat there can be intellectually sophisticated religious views: “a more scientific mindset wouldrecognize that an empirical proposition demands empirical verification.” So it would—but a lessscientific, and more capacious, mindset would recognize that religious faith is not just a set of empiricalpropositions, and that it is not inconsistent, when intelligently interpreted, with empirical verifications.There remains the question of why one would wish to interpret intelligently texts that seem in someways unintelligent—but that is a much larger discussion and a much deeper disagreement, whichPinker and I can pursue when we meet at the Consilience Café, where I will insist that we split thecheck.www.newrepublic.com/article/114754/steven-pinker-leon-wieseltier-debate-science-vs-humanities