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Dennett on Brights vs. Murkies (Plus Dreaded Scientism!)

April 6, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 8 Comments

My point in posting notes on Dennett was just to post notes on Dennett, not to start a whole thing, but the discussion there got so critical so quickly that I felt the need to defend at length why I think he's worth reading (to me, at least).

Our friend Burl has posted a video of Dennett speaking in response that I thought was worth its own post:

Watch on youtube.

I think this is a great example of Dennett being jerky, though I think in a pleasant enough way, essentially formalizing name-calling in a way that has no hope of catching on (i.e. that atheists are "brights"). I think his amusement and fascination with how names are used is laudable enough, but I think in particular his attack here on "murkies," is misguided. He singles out Thomas Nagel as a "murkie," as one who likes mystery.

I think Nagel (and Colin McGinn is an even clearer example of this) states very cogent reasons about the limits of knowledge, i.e. the very Kantian reasons Wes so often tells us about. Dennett's characterization of them as not being clear about why we have to keep things murky, and even the characterization about keeping things murky, is just plain wrong.

However, I find equally infuriating the charge of "scientism" against projects like what Dennett is doing in "Breaking the Spell," because:

1. I don't think engaging in scientific modeling necessitates an ontological claim that what you're explaining is being reduced to the model (e.g. that the mind itself isn't real or that people don't have free will in some phenomenologically real sense because we're looking at the psychological/cultural/evolutionary causes of their behavior).

2. In most cases, there's no harm in the scientist going ahead and trying to do whatever he's after and just see what that gets. It's almost always premature to say, on Kantian grounds, "that kind of research will give us no headway in discovering anything interesting."*

3. I don't think science's pretensions are scary enough at this point in history (given its many failures since the Enlightenment) that humanities fans need be all defensive about their territory being encroached. Doing a music theory analysis doesn't diminish the joy of listening to music or remove the value of other types of explanations about the music (e.g. what the composer was trying to express, or more metaphorically what the music brings out in your soul).

In conclusion, I think these counter-charges of "murkie!" and "scientism!" are as clueless as the traditional analytic/continental fights in philosophy departments: they're both a matter of one side being uncharitable and not listening to the other.

-Mark Linsenmayer

*Re. point 2, an important and relevant exception is Hubert Dreyfus's Heideggerian critique of the attempt at M.I.T. to get a computer program to imitate human behavior by creating a database of its "beliefs," i.e. rules for how to respond when asked a certain question. Dreyfus held that this is a faulty model of how we react, namely because a set of rules doesn't tell you how to use the rules; you need meta-rules, and meta-rules for the meta-rules. So Dreyfus correctly predicted that the project would fail. This, however, I don't see as an objection on mysterion grounds, but rather an actual scientific insight by Heidegger in a way that divisions between the scientific and metaphysical/religious realms are not.

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Filed Under: Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch

Comments

  1. Tom McDonald says

    April 6, 2011 at 11:46 am

    Hey Mark & Co.: Perhaps there’s something out there on the Hegelian character of the direction Dennett takes in his “Freedom Evolves” book. Richard Rorty, who was a friend of Dennett’s, once said of analytic philosophy that it was ‘bound to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end’ of its various paths and internal dialectics. In this sense I think the example of Dennett the naturalist having to develop an account of freedom provides a great example of what Rorty meant.

    Cheers,
    Tom

    Reply
  2. Tom McDonald says

    April 6, 2011 at 11:52 am

    Great note about Dreyfus’s Heideggerian critique of A.I. @ MIT. That topic is worthy of an episode!

    Reply
  3. Burl says

    April 6, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    Dennett and the N.A. group always attract my attention and help me shape my agnosticism. Neither side will ever convince the other with words. I suppose the US will start looking more secular like Europe in time.

    On Dreyfus/Merleau P/AI (and throw in Searle), the very cock-surity of Searle (and to a lesser degree Hubie) leaves me with the hunch that the two Berkeley philosophicologists will be found wrong about AI. Don’t sell technology short, and don’t get caught-up w/ the distinction between Aristotelian substances of the natural v artifact categories. Consider: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing.html

    Searle’s cockiness just oozes in this old Magee interview, where he talks about that great mechanical engineer, Ludwig, who solved all the problems of philosophy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrmPq8pzG9Q

    Watching Searle then and now…priceless! At least he knows Gilbert his dog is conscious.

    Reply
  4. Burl says

    April 6, 2011 at 1:33 pm

    Actually, it is this Magee vid that I was remembering about Gilbert’s keeper http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOlJZabio3g&NR=1

    Reply
  5. Burl says

    April 6, 2011 at 5:30 pm

    Those Searle vids are agitating me…

    What fries my scrambled eggs is that just like so many like himself, Searle built his philosophicology career by unquestioningly going alomg with the analytic/linguistic crowd and the expectations of its great cash value.

    I have a nagging hunch that he did not initially doubt Ai’s claims to mimic intelligence, but was maybe angered/scared into his stance by the specter of a computer being better with linguistic analysis than the analytic legions of academics who shut out all other forms of philosophic study in the last century. At least Hubie’s phenomenologist interests were still connected to nature.

    And here lies the ugly hypocracy: having benefited from the silencing of process philosophies of organism with their primacy of sentient experience (Hegel, the pragmatists, Bergson, and others, but especially Whitehead), when the analytic mind of Searle goes for the jugular of AI, what does he use as his mighty weapon?

    Emotional affect, the feelings of living organisms that accompany human decision-making. The argument of the China room is hard to refute as it relies on the truths of a philosophy of organism that has been deleted from mainstream thinkers, and the analytic community wants to keep it so for whatever time remains of their failed epoch.

    Process tells us that things change, even technology evolves. The strides being made by artificial intelligence researchers will succeed in mimicking the ability to generate affirmation-negation intellectual propositions and probabilistically entertain their contrasts. While machines will not feel emotional affects, they will nevertheless succeed in thinking.

    I just do not know why the process philosophers out there did not point all this out with Searle’s simplistic China room thingy.

    Sorry, Seth, I could not resist this analytic rant!

    Reply
  6. Daniel Horne says

    April 6, 2011 at 7:48 pm

    Hi Mark,

    Are you saying you don’t like the charge of scientism when applied to Dennett’s project, or that the term itself is never helpful in staking out positions? I can see the former. But I’d like to think I can call a spade a spade as circumstances warrant. Sure, the term can be misused, but it can also be a helpful descriptor, can’t it?

    Neither Dennett nor his recent project are in my “sights”, by the way. I’m thinking more of, say, Stephen Hawking, whose most recent (and quite enjoyable) book includes the following entry in its introduction:

    “Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discover in our quest for knowledge.”

    Now, I like Stephen Hawking’s work, and will continue to buy his books. But I don’t think ascribing to his attitude the word “scientism” is an unfair ad hominem attack. I’m not sure he would be offended by the term, either. Same goes for Richard Dawkins, whose work and arguments I also appreciate, but who also seems to fit into the scientism shoes.

    But maybe I make too much of your comment, or in any event misunderstand it?

    Reply
  7. Ethan Gach says

    April 6, 2011 at 11:51 pm

    Hawking claiming that philosophy is dead is a bit crude and dramatic. But it would be hard to find any philosophers in recent years that made any profoundly new discoveries that had a meaningful impact on how people behave.

    Reply

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