The talk is somewhat misleadingly titled "Roger Scruton - Persons and their Brains", but what he's really concerned to do is point out the limits of neuroscience and justify a place for philosophy in the study of human behavior. Not sure if that's a straw man or not, but he has some critical things to say of our podcast guest Patricia Churchland. Take a look:
So he leads with a bit of arrogance: "I'm English so I don't see things like Americans," which I guess is supposed to signal to us that he - what? If I interpret the subtext (pun intended, see below), he's saying that he doesn't worship at the church of science, like we Americans. Scruton refers to Churchland's work and reiterates her question: What does philosophy have to contribute to our understanding of human mental processes, compared to neuroscience?
On his interpretation, not much or nothing at all, with which he will of course take issue. He restates her case briefly, calling out that philosophy of mind that is folk psychology (mental states like belief and desire are non-physical entities governed by their own causal relations) is a proto-science and claims that she dismissed old fashioned Phil of Mind in favor of Neuroscience. In the 20 years since her book was published, her "weak" arguments have been augmented by the likes of Dennett, but still aspire to nothing more than making Philosophy the handmaiden of Science.
He claims we've been here before. Locke described philosophy as the handmaiden of science, a claim which was furthered by Hume et. al. Churchland's theory is better than Hume's, but does this mean that philosophy has nothing to add about human mental processes?
His answer: absolutely not. Philosophy calls out the centrality of interpretation in human activity. Science might explain the mechanics of things, but not why they are important to humans. The essential human activity is interpretation, and science does not allow for interpretation.
He spends the second half of the talk focusing on visual imagery, using Titian's Venus of Urbino as an example. The interpretative pictorial image is "emergent" from the colored patches, etc. There might be a use for philosophy in explaining (inter) personal interpretation not explained by science.
So I'm somewhat moved by the idea that science as an activity is designed to eliminate the need for interpretation of "facts" and that the essence of human activity is interpretive. However, I don't see that this entails that Philosophy has a privileged position to explain human interpretive activity, particularly when he uses Art as his exemplar and we've discussed here Philosophy (at best) ambivalence to Art. What do you think?
--seth
“However, I don’t see that this entails that Philosophy has a privileged position to explain human interpretive activity.”
Serh, I was thinking the same thing. For most of the past 2000 yrs, philosophy has been the handmaiden of theology and thus employed to interpret the ultimate reality for us. Most moderns conclude phil was wrong then, and scientists are quite leery of letting philosophy once gain any purchase on their efforts. And I think Pat, with her PhD under Quine’s analytic misadventure, now rearmed with a medical degree, is well-equipped to make her claims about the capabilities of the profession that philosophy has become.
Now, as for philosophy as the love of wisdom…
Hi Seth,
I’m not sure I saw Roger Scruton privileging philosophy over science, so much as staking out areas of human activity to which science has limited explanatory power. But perhaps I missed his point?
I just feel that the Churchlands and the Scrutons of the world are intellectual outliers engaging in border wars over the respective territories of philosophy and science. I’m don’t see Churchland combating all traditional philosophy as such, but rather with those traditional philosophers who try to speak to consciousness and its aspects. She might concede that, say, Rawls can meaningfully contribute to theories of justice, but that Dreyfus can’t meaningfully contribute to theories of consciousness. Conversely, Scruton doesn’t object to all the cool _stuff_ science has provided (like, um, the PowerPoint software he was using). He simply objects to the way in which our (American?) obsession with scientific method has debased and degraded our culture.
But generally speaking, is it even helpful for there to be this competition over which activity is “more” helpful, or “more” explanatory, etc.? Is it important that we describe them as equal partners? Are most of us even struggling with this controversy? I mean, there are more restaurants than florists in the world, but how many of us think one is more “important” than the other?
Geoff stating the bleeding obvious: I struggle with the idea that their needs to be a controversy, but it seems the nature of things, or the nature of people, that a person heavily invested in their life’s work is rarely going to concede that what they are doing is pointless. So if a field starts to erode their credibility I guess we should expect some pushback.
I am a lay person with respect to both sci and phil, so how relevant my opinion is might be questionable, but I have plenty of room in my heart for both of them. (just so long as they stay out of the right ventricle).
But hey, I’m Australian so I don’t see things like Americans or English people 😉
Hi Geoff,
Mostly I agree with you — I didn’t mean to go off on an “isn’t all philosophy all pointless all the time?” jag.
I guess I was really trying to tease out of this debate: What are the stakes in the UC San Diego school vs. “everybody” debate? Is it neuroscience vs. philosophy of mind? Is it all forms of empirical study vs. any form of a priori reasoning? Have I framed the positions of the opposing parties correctly? Have I even identified the opposing parties correctly?
That’s not actually the impression I got – sorry if I came off narky.
Honestly, a lot of the discussion on the site is a few steps above my pay-grade, and it’s the same for science. What I find problematic is that, in trying to explore the wider issues of life with the limited time I have, being confronted with faux ‘controversy’ is usually a turn off.
I tend to agree with the idea of yours that you expressed in terms of a border war – academic Fiefdoms where the vassals are concerned with maintaining their status at court.
Philosophy as interpretation sounds great.
But if he’s going to revive it’s purpose by slightly restating it, he’s going to have restate what we get from it. Namely, if philosophy is interpretation it’s not truth seeking, and thus we’re not getting truth from it.
Maybe we’re getting something just as necessary by making meanings out of facts in this way, but by making philosophy the interpreter of science, he’s giving science the more foundational role.
Similar to when Plato/Aristotle tried to co-op poetry by making it dependent on philosophy for interpretation. Doing this made philosophy more refined than poetry, but still dependent on it, i.e. the poetry still came first.
My feeling is that that’s not quite what Scruton wants.
Scruton wants to read bad copy.
Raymond Tallis is good IMHO in this area. From latest piece http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-06-30-tallis-en.html
‘In short, so long as we keep pushing consciousness back into the material object inside our skull, we shall lose sight of the huge gulf between ourselves and other creatures, our uniquely conscious agency and its theatre, the infinitely complex human world we have created. (And we shall be even more thoroughly misled if we compound this mistake by allocating separate cerebral billets to “wisdom”, “creativity” and all the norms, institutions and abstract frameworks that set off the most ordinary hour of daily life from the life of animals.) This not only traduces humanity but also discredits neuroscience. We guide, justify and excuse our behaviour according to general and abstract principles; we create the great artifactscapes of cities, laws and institutions unknown to nature; entertain theories about our own nature and about the material world; narrate our lives and relate those narratives to an individual and shared history; and systematically inquire into the order of things and the patterns of causation and the physical laws that seem to underpin that order.
The relevance of this for the future of humanism is self-evident. Our inquiry into human being need not be constrained by the assumption that, if we reject religious explanations of our exceptional nature, we then have to deny that we are truly exceptional. On the contrary, we can accept the blindingly obvious facts of our profound differences even from our nearest primate kin – something we tend to take rather too much for granted when we are not pretending to deny it – and start asking interesting questions as to how we became so fundamentally different. At any rate, we don’t have to believe that the only alternatives to supernatural explanations of man are naturalistic ones that see humans as part of the biosphere and, ultimately, of the material world, beholden to its laws. Challenging these assumptions, and waking to the possibility of entirely different views, promises a thrilling intellectual, and indeed spiritual, adventure. For the present, we should no more fill the gaps in our knowledge and understanding with pseudo-scientific explanations than we should fill them with gods and their divine powers. There is much to be said for “living on the acorns and grass of knowledge” (to use Nietzsche’s poignant phrase) for the sake of an as yet undiscovered truth. ‘
So which behaviors not shared in all the higher mammals like primates – but also don’t forget dolphins, whales, elephants, and bats – can we presume are ‘in the skull’, and which are uniquely floating outside our heads and only available to non-neuroscientist humans?
I doubt it’s as binary as that burl but I suspect the sensation of consciousness etc is different the higher up the animal kingdom.
If there was an alien species that had no consciousness itself or awareness there was such a thing, but just thought as a computer does (we presume without consciousness!) and they were to study humans, I suspect they would come up with similar theory to Churchland. They would note a certain external behaviour and see how it affected our breeding/feeding etc and then explain it’s emergence as a survival mechanism. However, as a human reading their studies you would be wanting to point out to them that they are missing a complementary but different category to study, namely thought/consciousness.
Humans really need to get over themselves and their arrogant sense of a unique consciousness. Consciousness goes hand-in-hand with any brain’s attempts at dealing with the sensa that it has evolved to control for its host organism.
That our cortex is latger than others’ simply means we have more empty RAM (Jaak Panksepp) with which to form entirely new neural connections and networks to better navigate our umvelt..
Agreed burl. Nearly every scientific discovery, both in cosmology and biology, seems to point toward one central fact…we aren’t fundamentally special or “different” than the rest of what you find in the univese.
“I doubt it’s as binary as that burl but I suspect the sensation of consciousness etc is different the higher up the animal kingdom.”
That sounds like a mystery for science to solve!
‘Nearly every scientific discovery, both in cosmology and biology, seems to point toward one central fact…we aren’t fundamentally special or “different” than the rest of what you find in the univese.’
I see… please show me?
‘That sounds like a mystery for science to solve!’
How would it, suggest a test?
‘
Suggest a test for:
“I doubt it’s as binary as that burl but I suspect the sensation of consciousness etc is different the higher up the animal kingdom.”
They are occuring all the time, and we are left with two options.
Either experiments examining animal behavior and biology show them to be in ever growing ways more like humans than suspected for most of history…or we fall down the side of not being able to actually compare the consciousness of two creatures, in which case science can’t suggest an answer, but that doesn’t mean the metaphysics can either, because well, by definition you can’t measure measureless things.
I would argue that to understand the persistent, ineliminable gulf between an empirical science like Churchland’s and philosophy proper we need to understand an insight established in Kant, developed through German idealism to Nietzsche to Heidegger and up to contemporary thinkers like Gianni Vattimo: our capacity to think metaphysically is our capacity for freedom which is our ability to negate norms, i.e., our capacity for nihilism.
Philosophy from Socrates on is the ability to question and therefore negate any normative notion we can come to know, including the naturalistic normativity to which Hume and Churchland appeal, else how could human beings be capable of life-denying practices like hunger-strikes or suicide?
Roger Scruton is an enlightened conservative atheist Hegelian who understands this, and this is why he is against naturalism: human beings cannot be reduced to purely ‘natural’ norms without thereby ceasing to be human. We can admit that culture is in part shaped by natural norms, but philosophy cannot grant the obviously absurd contention of certain forms of scientism that culture must somehow be reducible to natural norms.
And yet because naturalism rejects a priori the ‘no-thing’ of metaphysical thinking, it will stupidly persist in trying to prove vainly that human normativity can be reduced and explained on the basis of some sort of essential ‘nature’.
Cheers,
Tom
Doesn’t Kant’s compatibilism mean that we can have both freedom on a personal, existential level and determinism in our scientific analysis of man?
I agree that philosophy w/o the existential viewpoint is missing something vital, but that doesn’t mean that high-level interdisciplinary science is not “philosophy proper.”
I think Nietzsche got this right: a father of existentialism, fully acknowledging our flexibility in creating our own values and undoing ourselves, but a die hard determinist who thinks we’re driven by instinct that, though idiosyncratic to some degree per individual, is largely common not only across people but across sentient beings in general. His “will to power” expresses what existentialists mean by freedom without bringing in the old baggage of freedom as responsibility=guilt=you could have done otherwise.
Certainly Marx and Hegel recognized that you could legitimately try to say lawlike things about human behavior, especially group behavior.
It also strikes me as strange that you should object to the normative being reduced to the descriptive when you use the term normative to mean (I think you clarified this to me this way) the norms that people/societies actually inflict upon one another, i.e. actually a descriptive quality about them, not some sort of moral law supervening over the natural (which I don’t understand either; I agree with you). Churchland does not try to explain the creation of social norms solely through biology. Biology provides foundations, but sociology and history explain the actual content of the norms people follow. She acknowledges in her book that that doesn’t happen to be her line of research, and it’s well written about elsewhere; she’s not pretending that what she’s doing is the whole picture.
Mark: You are right that “Churchland does not try to explain the creation of social norms solely through biology.” I just learned a little more about the Churchlands’ position through Paul’s article “Toward a Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues”. He does make clear his approach is non-reductive empirical compliment to philosophy and his approach actually seems compatible with Hegel’s post-metaphysical, retrospective theory of subjectivity. For Churchland the young brain learns / is taught / grows prototype normative response patterns to the stimuli of moral dilemmas (Churchland says we should be able to identify corresponding neural structures in the brain). And he seems to allow that individual conscience emerges when situations call forth conflicting stock patterns, breaking down natural reflexes, and allowing a recognition of the contingency (non-necessity) of particular traditional norms by the individual. Whether this moment of individuality should be visible in identifiable brain structures I do not know. Probably not since science only accounts for regular patterns, not singular events. Incidentally, realizing freedom retrospectively in this manner shows Hegel’s kinship with conservatism and the difference between Hegelian and Kantian-type Analytic approaches to moral reason: Analytic thinkers still assume the notion that there must be standards independent of context and tradition to make independent, objective difference-from-tradition possible, but this approach remains metaphysical in at least a Kantian transcendental idealist sense. In contrast, the only metaphysical Hegel recognizes is freedom as the power to negate, and when we recognize this in retrospect, on his view, we should come to accept both the metaphysical truth of our individual freedom and the concrete traditional norms we’ve inherited, without which we could not have become who we are — the content of our Subjectivity — through a dialectical history. So it seems the Churchlands’ neurobiological approach could provide the empirical evidence for the neural patterns or programming which forms our history, but not for the negative power of the subject to question.
And I don’t think Scruton would ultimately disagree that the Churchlands’ neuroscience can produce such empirical correlates for moral-behavior patterns. I’ve read Scruton quite a bit and he seems to be on the fence between an analytic Kantian transcendental idealism and a thoroughly comparative Hegelian historicism regarding the content of normative deliberations. What he is most objecting to in the Churchlands’ work is the arrogance in dismissing ‘folk psychology’ from the theoretically objective scientific point of view. On Scruton’s view this is dangerous ‘brave new world’ utopian scientism, believing naively that the impersonal theoretical point of view aspired to in science should be prescribed for the world at large, replacing the mere ‘folk beliefs’ of historically established traditions. In other words, his objection is not on scientific grounds but on an honest philosophical-cultural-political view that there really are good philosophical reasons to oppose the desire and attempts to make the theoretically objective, impersonal scientific point of view normative generally.
Roger Scruton stated that: “His major work Being and Time is formidably difficult—unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it”.
Plus he’s a conservative in the UK which is Europe’s most unequal society.
Not worth listening to.
Scruton is always great fun and on his own amongst the few high profile (public) philosophers in the UK. Yes he is a conservative and an Anglican (and pro hunting!), but he doesn’t hide this, so it’s easy to deal with in that his arguments are clearly positioned. The general drift in the UK is anyway to valorise science.
Also, a little amusing to read that Scruton — unlike Heidegger — is not worth listening to because he’s a conservative, given that Heidegger was a…what do the kids call it?…oh yeah, a fascist.
If I’m reading the Stanford Encyclopedia rightly, the consequences of adopting eliminative materialism would be a moral disaster and this elimination of “folk psychology” is predicated on scientific findings that have yet to be found. In other words, it’s a drastic move based on a highly speculative position. That doesn’t seem very scientific to me.
Let me quote from Stanford’s conclusion…
“Eliminative materialism entails unsettling consequences not just about our conception of the mind, but also about the nature of morality, action, social and legal conventions, and practically every other aspect of human activity. As Jerry Fodor puts it, “if commonsense psychology were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species …” …Of course, some claim that these concerns are quite premature, given the promissory nature of eliminative materialism. After all, a pivotal component of the eliminativist perspective is the idea that the correct theory of the mind, once discovered by psychologists, will not reveal a system or structure that includes anything like common-sense mental states. Thus, for eliminative materialism to get off the ground, we need to assume that scientific psychology is going to turn out a certain way. But why suppose that before scientific psychology gets there? What is the point of drawing such a drastic conclusion about the nature of mentality, when a central premise needed for that conclusion is a long ways from being known?”
If this author is right, eliminative materialists have drawn a drastic conclusion based on assumptions, suppositions and promises. That’s not exactly an air-tight case, you know?
One of my heros, William James, fought for most of his life against “vicious abstractionism”. He was forever opposed to philosophies and theories that “de-realize” or denigrate the empirical reality from which they were abstracted in the first place. It seems to me that E.M. serves as an example of his complaints. I mean, in what sense are the neurological processes more real than our beliefs and desires just as we experience them?
Are the letters, words, or sentences more real than the novel as a whole? Why assume the mind correlates to the brain, as opposed to the whole body and its surrounding environment?
I’d also point out that psychology is a new science and it’s always been fractured into rival schools with huge differences among them. Neurology is even newer and if there is a consensus about anything, it’s only that there is no consensus and interpretation of the data is highly controversial. On top of that, the human brain might just be the most complex thing in the universe. In a situation like that, we should be drawing conclusions only very carefully and tentatively.
How much is two cents worth these days?
Ok, I have to get Dylan to put a “Like” button on the comments. If only for me and Daniel.