Faraone, a commenter on our Facebook page, says:
The Churchland episode was disappointing. You had a controversial academic who has made some bold and dubious claims during her career, and you spent your time tossing softballs to-and-fro. If you could not think-up challenging questions on your own, you could have read the many reviews of her book. Instead, it appeared that you prepared by simply reading her book. Don’t do that. The podcast is not supposed to be about respecting academic reputations. Anyone can do that, and it is boring. Its also boring to listen to people find agreement over such "controversial" theories as 'our neurological responses might play a role in some decisions we make.’ Come on, really? That’s not what she is about. And if you can’t find a whiff of ‘scientism’ in a conversation with Churchland, then don’t you think you went a little tone-deaf on everyone?
Thanks for the comment, F. I think this is a good one to kick off some discussion on this little format experiment.
Here's the fundamental difficulty: The issue for us wasn't whether we were going to ask critical or easy questions to her, but whether we would ask questions at all.
The format of our show is not an interview. When guests come on, we have a conversation with them, just as we do when we don't have a guest. I think making Hume an official part of the episode worked well: it made it a little more like a normal conversation.
What we do is essentially an on-air study group, not a debate. If a professor -- the author of the book you're reading -- agrees to come by your study group, what do you do? My strategy was largely one of denial: Let's try to just make our way through the reading as we normally would, despite the fact that she'd have much more to say than an ordinary guest. Having the author there, we could try to get some additional insight re. what she was about and help in incorporating what we had to say into our own thinking.
Generally for any episode, I just read the selected reading and bring in my past experience to try to deal with it. If I go to additional sources, it's to help me interpret it, or to chase down some particular threads. The contrasts between different views tend to come out over a series of episodes, and you can be sure we're not done talking about scientism, or about moral sentiments.
Re. the scientism objection in particular, that's usually an objection to what the author DOESN'T talk about rather than what he or she does. Pat's main concerns (in her book) are brain chemicals and which types of voles display which care-behaviors, etc. That's what she tends to talk about in other forums. Also, I'll say that her "philosophical" chapters towards the end are pretty fast: you're not going to get a very satisfying account of G.E. Moore, for instance. I'm sure there are whole classes of ethicists that Pat's not that interested in or knowledgeable about, but to me, having a debate about that doesn't seem so productive. Instead, we'll just read Moore and W.D. Ross and other folks we find interesting on future episodes, and if, say, in discussing Moore it seems helpful to discuss Pat's strategy for ignoring his anti-naturalist argument, we'll do that. I think the "back-end" parts of ethical psychology that interest Pat are worth researching. The extent to which she comes down as dismissive of the "front-end" work that professional ethicists see so many nuances in is not that interesting to me. I do want to understand the meta-ethical implications of a view that doesn't see exceptionless, categorical moral rules as plausible, and what we did in this respect in our Nietzsche episode still needs further exploration on our part.
Lastly (for the moment), let me just express my personal distaste for Crossfire-style debates. If you don't modify your tone in response to who you're talking with, that's just obnoxious. This was not a matter of respecting her academic reputation but of respecting her as a person interested in spending all this time talking with us. I apologize if you found the result "boring." (Besides, given her extensive experience defending her views and our only mild interest in the whole topic, she would have wiped the floor with us in a debate.)
-Mark Linsenmayer
Daniel Horne says
July 24, 2011 at 2:17 amI thought hearing someone of Prof. Churchland’s caliber discuss Hume with you guys was interesting and educational in itself.
Tom McDonald says
July 24, 2011 at 9:25 amI thought you guys did a good job. My own sense of how hard the questions should be tends to depend on prior evidence as to how cloistered or not they’ve been in their academic sphere. It is important to put harder questions to those who may be overly sheltered in a comfy academic context of yes-people. But the Churchlands’ do have a reputation for engaging with mainstream media.
It just so happens that after my 4/14 post on “Hegel and Eliminative Materialism” (in the Churchland’s neurobiology), I went on to do an academic paper seriously exploring the possible conflicts and compatibility between Hegel’s meta-ethical theory of subject-formation and Paul Churchlands’ proposition for ‘a neurobiology of the moral virtues’. In a reversal of my initial evaluation, what I found Churchland to lay out seemed to me strikingly compatible with Hegel’s theory.
Essentially, Churchland goes to great lengths to avoid reductionism, so the evolved neuro-structures correlated with morality, that he suggests we can verify empirically, need only be seen as the non-causal empirical correlate of moral rules we arrive at through reason. We need not commit to which way the causation goes, and yet the neuro-research could be promisingly insightful.
Churchland makes two specific suggestions compatible with Hegelian meta-theory: there are neuro-structures to be correlated with our cultural-educated patterns of moral behavior, patterns we fall on without having to reflect. In Hegelian terms these correlate with the universal ethos, those cultural patterns so deeply embedded we tend not to be able to bring them to reflection.
But Chruchland also posits that the phenomena of ‘individual conscience’, in distinction or negation of the universal patters, emerges when multiple possible ethical mechanisms cancel (negate) each other, conflict in some way that force us to reflect on their contingency. Phenomenologically, the behavioral rules that we once found “necessary” now appear as contingent, changeable. This is similar to Hegel’s theory of the emergence of the individual conscience out of a background of universal rules and their transgression.
Cheers,
Tom
Wes Alwan says
July 24, 2011 at 6:04 pmCross-posting from Facebook: I suppose it’s time to confess that I ended up not participating in the podcast because a) there was little philosophy in Churchland’s book, b) I thought what philosophy was there was very poor (caricatures of Kant, Hume, G. E. Moore, etc.), but c) I didn’t feel well-prepared enough to walk our listeners to my objections, which get into some very complex issues. I did spend as much time as I could preparing, but as I found myself still slogging through the literature on G.E. Moore and Hume at the last hour, I thought to myself, “what’s the point of all this”? The author didn’t do any similar slogging, and there’s no substantive debate to be had here. So I was worried that if I appeared on the podcast I’d be put in this position of remaining silent on important issues and appearing to condone by implication the kind of book that I think has a negative impact on the public discourse. I made a mistake of course — I should have participated in the podcast and pointed listeners to sources for objections, whether I not I thought I could adequately explain them. To some extent Mark was counting on me to bring some of these objections to the table (because he knew I was particularly interested in them and spending some time reviewing them), and instead I bailed at the last minute with a mini crisis of conscience. So if it is the case that the podcast was short on such challenges (I’m haven’t listened yet), I have to take a large part of the responsibility for that.
Daniel Horne says
July 25, 2011 at 5:05 pmI do think as “penance” (I was hoping to hear you go at it, I’ll admit), it would be great to see you post an online review of “Braintrust,” particularly as you already did the hard work of reading it!
Ethan Gach says
July 25, 2011 at 8:21 amPerhaps you could post the jist of your objections here after listening to it?
David Buchanan says
July 25, 2011 at 1:56 pmFor whatever it’s worth, I was pleasantly surprised by your conversation with Churchland and walked away feeling that a lot of my concerns were addressed. She seemed to paint a picture of evolutionary layers rather than the reductionism I expected. In fact, her criticism of Sam Harris seemed to plant her squarely in the anti-reductionist camp. I was also impressed with her relatively subtle description of the old Humean ought/is distinction. It didn’t feel like “Crossfire” but then again she’s not a politician and you’re not Tucker Carlson so I wasn’t disturbed by the lack of friction.
Faraone says
July 25, 2011 at 4:39 pmAs a non-philosopher, let me elaborate on why I would have preferred a more spirited podcast.
This is from Churchland:
“The hypothesis on offer is that what we humans call ethics or morality is a four-dimensional scheme for social behavior that is shaped by interlocking brain processes: (1) caring (rooted in attachment to kin and kith and care for their well-being), (2) recognition of others’ psychological states (rooted in the benefits of predicting the behavior of others), (3) problem-solving in a social context (e.g., how we should distribute scarce goods, settle land disputes; how we should punish the miscreants), and (4) learning social practices (by positive and negative reinforcement, by imitation, by trial and error, by various kinds of conditioning, and by analogy).”
The understanding of the relevant “brain processes,” at this stage is crude. But if you remove the “brain processes” talk, from the podcast or the book, all you have (and this came across strong in the podcast), is a plagiarizing of David Hume. The above “hypothesis” is not controversial. It’s not even interesting. Who argues that human beings have no innate capacity for empathy? It poses as original. It poses as scientific, and therefore worthy of the esteem of science.
Here is my concern. Churchland has nothing to say to actual human beings on how they should live. That seems to me a blunt fact. So, as an outsider listening in, I have to ask, with so little to offer, why the strident rejection of philosophy? What is she really about?
We live in a time when, not science, but those who claim to speak in the name of science speak with an imperial voice. And when I hear people like Patricia talk, that is what I hear. Psuedo-science masking itself as science.
Philosophers are supposed to be skeptics. You are supposed to read these book critically, search for flaws in their reasoning, and question how power is operating within them. Who is being served? Who stands to benefit and how? If philosophers and students of philosophy are not going to do that, then who is?
I heard nothing like that in the podcast.
Richard Austrum says
July 26, 2011 at 2:50 pmAlong the same lines as Faraone, I have issues with not asking challenging questions of Churchland. In my experience, there are ways to bring up points, without the podcast turning into ‘Crossfire’ (which I sometimes remember watching just to see some of the silly positions held by each side). When discussing a professor’s material with that professor it is common to bring up a point by saying “I see X as being about and relying on Y, but Y is widely held to be false (or is not accepted by the vast majority of people in the field).” Asking questions does not need to be aggressive or rude, but I do believe it is necessary (yes I pulled out necessary). FInally, I did like the podcast with Churchland because it illustrated her position pretty clearly and left me less ignorant of her ideas (even if I do not agree with them).
@Faroane – Paul Feyerabend has a greaqt book called “Against Method” which is an attack specifically on the scientific establishment. He claims that they have created an orthodoxy, and then he argues that science should not be either an orthodoxy or be idolized like it currently is. Feyerabend also has a speech that he gave in the late 1960’s (I think in Vienna) but I cannot find the text. It is basically a shorthand version of his (at the time future book) and is very well written.
Faraone says
July 28, 2011 at 5:04 pmhttp://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/a-real-science-of-mind/
Above is a link to another on-line artical, like Tallis’. Its over a year old, but it might have inspired some questions for Churchland. She is quite fiesty and, example, toward the end of the podcast she lit into Sam Harris who was not there to respond. So, I think she can take a few pointed questions w/o crumbling.
Having said that, I wanted to acknowledge that the fact that Mark took my Facebook complaint and aired it here shows real character on his part, i.e., he did not wilt in the face of some criticism, he did not take offense. Things which many other people would have done. I regret not acknowledging that earlier. I hope everyone already noted that already.
Richard, thanks. I liked Feyerabend as well when I read him. (The book, I have not read the speech yet). Although, my own view on the subject is quite a bit different from his. Maybe at another point in time I’ll add to that.
Josh Davis says
August 26, 2011 at 9:17 amI’m sorry. This response is way overdue, but I totally disagree with this. Basically, there’s more to ethics than “telling human beings what they should do.” Aristotle’s ethics is largely descriptive. There was a post on here earlier giving Ross’ argument for an intuitive view. I don’t think Churchland believes that she is giving a “system of ethics” in the classical sense, and I think she has doutbs of the validity of that intellectual endeavor. She has good reasons for her position, even if you disagree with it. It would have been easy to cause an argument from a rather blind generally philosophical perspective, but it would end up sounding like something that I have often heard taking place in many a bar, and it wouldn’t be very interesting. Should a system of ethics tell people what they should do? Lots of people would say yes, but this is a highly contentious position, far from common to all philosophers.