I Need Elbow Room for this Brainstorm
This effort is a response to the charge to single out the silliest argument in the last 25 or so years from an academic that has reverberated in the larger intellectual world. For this accolade I choose body of work from one Daniel Dennett, distinguished author of Brainstorms, Elbow Room, Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves, and Breaking the Spell. One can construe my comments to apply mostly to the Darwin tome, though it is the common theme among the works that will be the focus of my observations.
And that theme is Dennett’s unabashed scientism. This term can be seen through the newly pressed volume entitled “How Successful is Naturalism” (Georg Gasser, ed., 2007) in which two forms of naturalism are discussed and dissected. The first, let’s call it “hard naturalism” is the worldview: that only material things exist and these can only be known by scientific methods; that there is no such thing as freedom, consciousness, first person experience, or anything transcendental because only the real is real; and that humanism is swallowed up by reduction to scientific objectivity and its naturalistic ethics. This is scientism—it is the be all and end all—a metaphysic, a closed system of known truth of everything and it is self-justifying. In contrast there is a version of naturalism, let’s call it “soft naturalism” which holds that science is not self-justifying because its grounding insights and precepts are philosophical (i.e., not subject to scientific verification); is not the basis for total human self-understanding; does not reduce first person experience to third person accounts. This form of naturalism is open-ended, fallible, and its metaphysical foundations are subject to constant revision. This second approach will be the implicit framework of the following criticisms. In other words, I will hold to this form of naturalism while criticizing its reified cousin.
However, rather than criticizing Dennett from this foreign viewpoint, I will engage in what philosophers used to call “immanent critique” which, after the French invasion, is now termed “deconstruction”. That is, I will try to show that this view comes apart at the seams because it is internally incoherent and its worldview ends up being just one more tired dogmatism.
The first hurdle that hard naturalists like Dennett must overcome is what Jurgen Habermas tirelessly points out about a host of metaphysical beliefs: they are performative contradictions—that is, the claim that science is the source of all truth and meaning cannot itself be verified according to the methods of science because it is an assumption of the practice of science. Thus the very raison d’etre of the enterprise of science is itself not scientific, but philosophical.
Second, Dennett’s claim that evolution, that dangerous idea, is the only possible explanation for the world as we know it is circular because only empirical evidence can establish anything about the world. But evidentialism is not the standard for all of science. Mathematical string theory may never be verified, nor will the contents, if any, of black holes. And, again, the principle of verification is not established by verification, rather it is a pragmatic position of scientists who do science. It is a precept, just like Occam’s Razor, of the conduct of science.
Given these arguments, and others, one begins to see a picture of scientism as a metaphysical just so story. A through analysis of the substantive and methodological foundations of science will show that they are fanciful creations. They are, as Kolakowski argued, mythic or mythopoetical creations They are aesthetic objects for they reflect an aesthetic stance–the products of the human mind as nurtured within its cultural context. As stories, they can be supported by empirical evidence and inference to a point as well as by good and cogent reasons. Above all, however, they are supported by the feelings—some known and some less so–that invariably accompanies these ideas and gives them their valence. For if we did not care about them,if they had no import, why would we bother talking about them? It is this sensuousness and the creative nature of the judgments that posit these norms that determines their mythical nature.
The dangerous idea then is not Darwin’s but of Dennett the scientismist, who mystifies and transmutes science into an untenable scientism. Yet the reach of these tales, as seen in the works of Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens, is considerable. Scientism is not nor will it ever be the moral equivalent for an enchanted worldview because its story of the reduction of everything human to scientific evidence and its objectification of human subjectivity is but a story full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
