Unhappy Atheist Alert: Jerry Coyne doesn't like the results of the recent poll of philosophers

Jerry Coyne is one of those New Atheist scientists whose lack of philosophical competence tends to manifest itself in a penchant for lashing out at the discipline of philosophy. It's one of those Gomer Pyle at the Sorbonne kind of situations, except Gomer isn't the type to blame other people for his ignorance.

Coyne, about whom we've had frequent occasion to comment, is probably still smarting from the intellectual beating he took at the hands of Christian philosopher Ed Feser a year or so back.

His most recent excuse for criticizing philosophy is a recent survey of philosophers that found a number of interesting things about philosophers opinions on major philosophical topics, and Coyne doesn't like many of the results.

Turns out most philosophers don't buy the idea that there is no free will. Coyne's response? "That doesn’t make me happy." Hmmm. Apparently Coyne didn't get the memo about the fact that philosophical rectitude is not determined by whether it makes atheists happy.

He is also displeased that 27 percent of philosophers believe the mind is non-physical. "That goes against everything that neurobiology has told us," he tells us, "and shows that not all philosophers are on board with science." Of course, neurobiology studies the brain, which is physical, and one wonders how, by studying the physical, one can say anything about the non-physical.

Whether the mind is physical or non-physical would necessarily involve you in philosophy, an art at which Coyne has shown, through repeated demonstration, in which he is incapable of engagint. And besides: There really aren't any scientists who believe the mind is non-physical?

The there's the matter of ethics. Coyne grumbles that the plurality of philosophers are deontologists (believers in a rule-based ethics) rather than consequentialists (a belief in which the consequences of actions determines whether they are right or wrong. He's not, he says, "wildly happy" with this result.

That's right. The result can't be right because the consequence is that it makes Jerry unhappy.

Paragons of rigorous logical thought, these New Atheists.

The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: A review of Free Will, by Sam Harris, Part I

This is the first part in a week-long series of posts on Sam Harris' recent book, Free Will:

In a recent article in Britain's New Statesman, Steven Poole lamented the glut of what he calls "neurotrash"--the attempt to explain every human thought and action in terms of neuroscience and cognitive psychology:

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

Free Will, by Sam Harris, must now take its place in this plague of panegyrics to the pre-frontal cortex.

The first thing we must get clear is something that Harris himself, given his thesis, must certainly agree with: he had no choice in writing this book. But it has little to do with the neurological state of his brain. He operates under a necessity only a little less deterministic: the necessity that follows on the nature of his dogma.

As an atheistic materialist, Harris really has no choice but to champion the idea that free will is a delusion. The materialist, said Chesterton, "is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." Materialists like Harris keep asking why we make the decisions we do, and what other explanation there could be than the physiological. The answer, of course, is the psychological, the philosophical, the whimsical, and about a thousand others.

But these violate the central tenets of his narrow atheistic dogma, and so have been dealt with severely by his materialistic philosophical Inquisition.

There is something ironic about the position of atheists like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state--including their position on this issue-- is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.

By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent which must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.

And this is not only a mortal consequence for Harris as the one trying to prove his point, it is also problematic from the reader's perspective: If we are convinced by Harris's logic, we would have to consider this conviction as something determined not by the rational strength of his logic, but by the entirely irrational arrangement of the chemicals in our brains. They might, as Harris would have to say, coincide, but their relation would be completely arbitrary. If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, that any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn't rational or irrational, it just is.

If what Harris says is true, then our assent to what we view as the rational strength of his position may appear to us to involve our choice to assent or not to assent to his ostensibly rational argument, but (again, if it is true) in truth cannot be any such thing, since we do not have that choice--or any other.

Indeed, it is hard to see how, if free will is an illusion, we could ever know it.

But this complication does not appear to have occurred to Harris, so let us confine ourselves on those that have occurred to him and see what we can make of them.

To be continued in Part II

Looking for Insight in All the Wrong Places: What can science really tell us about human nature?

In a review in the New York Review of Books entitled, "Fooled by Science," biologist H. Allen Orr nicely dismantles David Brooks' new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. The book treats many of the issues involving science and human beings that Brooks has written about recently in magazine and newspaper articles.

The gist of the articles (several of which we have written about here) has had generally to do with what the glandular and chemical events going on when we think, choose, and emote say about the thinking, choosing and emoting--which, Brooks seems to think, is quite a lot:

The Social Animal is an attempt to write an accessible treatment of a set of weighty topics, many of which require Brooks to stretch in a distinctly scientific direction. The book, which was excerpted earlier this year in The New Yorker, focuses on big and somewhat diffuse questions: What has science revealed about human nature? What are the sources of character? And why are some people happy and successful while others aren’t?

The lack of Brooks' own expertise in actual science is matched only by his enthusiasm for making declarations about what its findings are. Brooks talks a lot about human nature, but it is never clear exactly what he means by it. Maybe this is clarified in the book. The traditional definition, of course, is metaphysical, rather than scientific in nature, and so it is rather hard to say exactly what science could say about it. And then there's the problem that much of modern scientistic thought (in which Brooks seem to share) is anti-metaphysical.

It is, in fact, a curious thing that the less confidence modern materialist scientists have in the actual existence of a human nature, the more they claim to be able to tell us about how it is effected by the physiology of human beings.

The first problem Orr spots is the simple fact of Brooks being in over his head:

... Brooks never seems fully comfortable with all this science. He often appears ill at ease in a world of technical journals, disagreements among experts, and statistical measures of uncertainty. A working scientist knows, for example, that some findings are more secure than others, often because the former derive from studies that involved many subjects and the latter from studies that involved few. 

Brooks doesn’t seem to grasp this difference. To Brooks, science is science. It’s all equally sound and can be taken at face value. His lack of expertise also presumably accounts for his occasional reliance on popular scientific journalism. Thus we’re treated to conclusions from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, among others. Since these writers are also nonscientists, Brooks’s analysis sometimes leaves us two steps removed from the actual scientist and his facts, facts that are often accompanied in the scientific literature by caveats or exceptions. 

While Brooks concedes his lack of scientific savvy, it nonetheless leads him into several difficulties. For one thing, his arguments sometimes simply don’t make sense.

And of course not making sense is a bad problem to have when you're talking about a subject in which you're not well versed. But in addition to not making sense, it appears that Brooks has some problem simply being consistent:

Brooks also sometimes champions both of two opposing scientific views, apparently without appreciating the resulting absurdities. On several occasions, for example, he praises emergentism, the view that a whole (say, an organism) is greater than the sum of its parts. Emergentism is often taken as opposed to reductionism, the view that we can understand a whole by understanding its parts. (“Divide and conquer; the devil is in the details. Therefore, for decades we have been forced to see the world through its constituents.”) But The Social Animal veers erratically between Brooks’s endorsement of emergentism and his recitation of major accomplishments of reductionist science. Indeed the science that Brooks reports is mostly reductionist. There may not be a flat contradiction here but there is at least a serious tension and it’s one to which Brooks seems oblivious.

Brooks couches his discussion in a narrative in which two of the characters are Julia and Rob. Orr gives us a sample of the way Brooks executes his scientific analysis:

As Julia and Rob semi-embraced, they silently took in each other’s pheromones. Their cortisol levels dropped. 

Later in their relationship, Rob and Julia would taste each other’s saliva and then collect genetic information. 

When parents do achieve this attunement with their kids, then a rush of oxytocin floods through their brains. 

But the caudate nucleus and the VTA [ventral tegmental area] are also parts of something else, the reward system of the mind. They produce powerful chemicals like dopamine, which can lead to focused attention, exploratory longings, and strong, frantic desire. Norepinephrine, a chemical derived from dopamine, can stimulate feelings of exhilaration, energy, sleeplessness, and loss of appetite. Phenylethylamine is a natural amphetamine that produces feelings of sexual excitement and emotional uplift.

Doesn't a passage like that just clarify everything? What is it about chemical descriptions of romantic encounters that always makes you want to reach for an antiemetic? But Orr points to the real problem here, which is that all of this impressive-sounding scientific jargon doesn't really tell us much:

What of our view of humanity changes if, when parents achieve an “attunement with their kids,” the molecule that “floods through their brains” is schmoxytocin, not oxytocin? The salient fact is that some molecule or some part of the brain underlies various aspects of consciousness or unconsciousness. But this is hardly news. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor once quipped, it’s been clear for a while now that mental processes occur north of the neck. The rest is a sort of biological bookkeeping that, while significant to the specialist, seems to provide the popular writer only with a long list of factoids. It’s not that these facts are wrong or unconnected to the higher-level phenomena—lust, emotional uplift, or insight—that Brooks discusses. They’re just superfluous.

Why would an analysis of the activity and composition of chemicals during a particular human activity tell us any more about human nature than an analysis of the movements my fingers as I type this post and the composition of the pixels on this screen would tell us about the meaning of this post?

Finally, Orr questions what all this has to do with politics and policy, a connection Brooks makes in the book:

In the end, The Social Animal presents a lot of science and it presents a laudable goal of increasing human happiness and improving public policy. But it spends next to no time plausibly explaining how the former is supposed to lead to the latter.

Supposedly scientific explanations of human life and nature never seem to yield what they promise. In fact, more often than not, they turn out not to be explanations at all, but only descriptions of the mechanical and chemical conditions that happen to accompany other important things.

If I went to see a production of Shakespeare's Hamlet, I would discover little of the meaning of the play by studying how the producers built the set and what they used to design the costumes. I would discover nothing of lasting importance in George Eliot's Silas Marner by analyzing how the printer copied and bound the book I read it from. And I would find out nothing of any real significance about the meaning of the movie "Casablanca" by spending my time figuring out how the image was projected onto the screen.

But this same procedure is used by people like Brooks in their attempt to better understand human nature.

Go figure.

The Reductionism Bias: Is the tendency to say that everything we think is hardwired by evolution hardwired by evolution?

A growing body of journalistic evidence points to the conclusion that the tendency to reduce all human thoughts and feelings to material or chemical states may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain. The most recent example is Time Magazine's new cover story, "The Optimism Bias":

[A] growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain.

"The science of optimism, once scorned as an intellectually suspect province of pep rallies and smiley faces, is opening a new window on the workings of human consciousness," says Tali Sharot, in a the peppy, smiley-sounding article. "Is the human tendency for optimism a consequence of the architecture of our brains?" she asks. It is an interesting question, one which we would need to somehow get outside of the architecture of our brains to answer objectively, an achievement, unfortunately, which Sharot does not seem to have accomplished.

But that fact doesn't seem to have slowed her brain processes down any in leaping from her premises about the physical conditions that happen to accompany conscious states to conclusions about the meaning or implications of these states.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his critique of B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism, once unflatteringly described this procedure as the "zoological" or "rattomorphic" fallacy: "the expressed or implicit contention that there is no essential difference between rat and man." It is a process by which, as Hans Jonas puts it:

man-the-knower apprehends man-qua-lower-than-himself and in doing so achieves knowledge of man-qua-lower-than-man, since all scientific theory is of things lower than man-the-knower. It is on that condition that they can be subject to theory, hence to control, hence to use.

There is a whole literature on the issue of the cultural danger of the kinds of assumptions like those employed by Sharot in the Time article, and one of its best known commentators is Wendell Berry:

A little harder to compass is the danger that we can give up on life also by presuming to "understand" it—that is by reducing it to the terms of our understanding and by treating it as predictable or mechanical. The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines—that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.
This may have begun as a metaphor, but in the language as it is used (and as it affects industrial practice) it has evolved from metaphor through equation to identification. And this usage institutionalizes the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable.

Michael Aeschliman too, in his book, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism, points out the cultural implications of this kind of scientific reductionism:

The distinction between means and ends, between things and objects on the one hand and persons and essences on the other is at the root of moral culture and civilization; it is a distinction that the characteristic procedures and terms of the natural sciences can neither discern nor make without violence, contradiction, and confusion, and for which they must depend upon philosophy and religion.

In other words, it is not just the cultural consequences of the view that we can simply reduce uniquely human characteristics to material mechanisms that is problematic. It is not just a threat to the culture, but a threat to reason itself. "It is not only an inhumane procedure," says Aeschliman, "it is simply false according to ordinary standards of human reason."

As Chesterton's pointed out in Orthodoxy, the whole idea that you can turn the gaze of a scientific instrument back on the viewer is one which undermines the entire operation itself. It is the "thought that stops thought." I once heard of a doctor who, marooned on a desert island, removed his own appendix. But it would have been an entirely different kind of thing to have done brain surgery on himself. He would, of course, need his brain to perform the surgery, but the procedure itself would prevent him from using it.
Only the Grey Sisters of ancient myth could take the eye out of its very socket and gaze upon themselves. But when we mortals attempt it, it leads only to delusion.
The humorist Peter Benchley once famously described his experience in a college science class where he spent the whole term drawing an image of his own eyelash as he viewed it in a microscope, all the while thinking it was the object in the slide. Putting the brain under the microscope has the inherent disadvantage of objectifying the very thing that is doing the objectifying, calling the whole process into question.

This is, of course, one of the main points of Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape, which we reviewed here.

But in addition to being impossible, what people like Sharot and Harris think they can do--understand conscious states by ferreting out the material conditions accompanying them--is based on a faulty premise. All such discussions are premised on the Identity Theory of Mind, which holds that "states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain." It has the disadvantage of having been pretty soundly refuted. You can say of a brain, for example, how much it weighs, but you cannot say that of a mind. Just because one state is simultaneous with another, does not mean the two states are the same. Having a heart is always accompanied by having a kidney. But having a heart and having a kidney are not the same thing.

I propose that those who examine their heads in this way should have their heads examined--by someone other than themselves. People who believe these claims should have their own brains examined to see if their beliefs about the chemical and evolutionary origin of beliefs has a chemical and evolutionary origin. And if they do, then we need to consider what the scientific and philosophical implications of this are.

If a belief--such as the one that holds that beliefs are the result of a purely causal physical process--is the result of a purely causal physical process, can it at the same time be considered the result of a rational process, the only process according to which such beliefs can be considered true?

The Sharot piece includes a detailed diagram of a brain, with pointers to the areas of the brain associated with optimistic thoughts. What we need is a diagram of Sharot's brain that tells us where she gets the idea that conscious states such as optimism can be explained by pointing to the areas of the brain associated with these conscious states.

What would happen if, instead of optimism, Sharot had trained her reductionist science on the tools by which she conducts her analysis in the first place? What happens when the scientist tries to reduce rationality itself to chemical or material processes? Does anything remain? If that is all her theory is--some chance concatenation of chemical events, then would there be any reason to believe them to be true?

How Morality "Seems" to Sam Harris: A review of The Moral Landscape

Alisdair MacIntyre points out that the only rational choices when it comes to a philosophy of morality are Aristotle and Neitzsche. Sam Harris, the atheist author of Letters to a Christian Nation, instead chooses Pollyanna.

In his most recent book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Determines Human Values, Harris claims to offer an argument for his position that science can objectively ground morality. While his method of proof is long on earnestness, it is short on argument. In fact, he seems to think that he can establish many of his conclusions by simply willing them.

All throughout the book, we encounter expressions that assure us in the most sincere terms that what follows them is true: terms such as "are bound to," "in my experience," "there simply must be," "cannot be," "it seems inevitable," "surely," "the good life must relate," "will necessarily," "cannot be denied," "science should one day," "most of them are surely wrong," "we must first acknowledge" "change will necessarily depend," "values seem to arise," "it seems to me," "it seems clear," "there is every reason to think," "is bound to be," "of course," "I believe," "there is simply no question," "there must be," "the inescapable fact," "we already have good reason to believe," "I consider," "almost surely," "we can be reasonably confident," "could also," "it seems quite possible," "this certainly appears," "do not seem to," "there is probably," "it is widely believed," "we all know this," "it is only reasonable," "at the very least," "I have no doubt," "I am nearly as sure," "I strongly believe," "it is quite clear to me," "it seems possible," "it is easy to see," "it also seems," "I suspect," "be assured," "apparently," "it seems quite clear," "we can imagine," "we can see," "it now seems," "it is reasonable to wonder," "there is no reason to think," "there is a sense in which," "there can be no doubt," "I cannot conceive," "it is also conceivable," etc., etc., etc.

You get the idea.

Real logical expressions like "for," "since," "because," and "therefore" don't stand a chance against the avalanche of seemses and musts and surelys. In fact, Harris' argument is powered largely by adverbs.

Just several pages in I started to notice this tendency to presume upon the reader's presumption. Then I kept noticing it, and I saw it again, and again, and again. I just started circling them as I encountered them, page after page. There were key components to Harris's "argument" which were just "supposed" to be clear to me: to be "undoubtedly" true, to be "reasonable," to be "probably" be this way, or "inescapably" that.

It is a rhetoric that fits the photograph--a photograph that graces all his books and captures the look of the Randian hero: confident, determined, and free of all doubt.

I finally realized that Harris just thinks that the main steps in his case that science can establish morality are obvious. He wasn't arguing with me, his reader, that his assumptions about these things were true, he was expecting me to simply acquiesce to their self-evident truth on the mere grounds of his confidence in his own assertions.

When you're setting forth a position, it's reasonable to assume what you're readers actually do assume. But when you are overturning 2,500 years of thought on an issue (really only about 400 years worth, since he only really tries to counter Hume--the prior tradition he ignores), it's probably not a good idea to assume what your reader does not actually take for granted.

One of the admirable things about St. Thomas Aquinas is that he always tried to put his opponents' arguments into a rational form, sometimes stating them more logically than they did. Since Harris himself won't do it for us, let's try to cast his argument into some kind of logical form. If we did, his main argument would run something like this:

Questions about well being can be scientifically understood
Moral questions are questions about well being
Therefore moral questions can be scientifically understood

Harris's whole argument hangs on his middle term: "well-being." If it means the same in his major (or first) premise as it does in his minor (or second) premise, then the argument has some plausibility: he can reasonably claim to have connected together the two ideas in his conclusion--morality and science. But if it doesn't, then he has committed the fallacy of equivocation, and the argument falls apart.

And his concept of well-being will have to have more support than Harris's own assertions of "seems" or "appears" or "I strongly believe."

What Harris does--wittingly or unwittingly--is bank on our traditional moral conception of "well-being" in his minor premise and then go on happily defining "well-being" in an entirely scientific and non-ethical way for purposes of his major premise, so that, by the time he gets done, he has two entirely different middle terms on his hands that cease to be able to keep the subject and predicate of his conclusion together. He has, fact, constructed his whole argument on this equivocation--and the term "well-being," being sufficiently vague, suits his purpose nicely.

It's a good try. But no one should be fooled.

Harris starts out by observing what he considers to be the two main schools of moral philosophy: the religious school that considers that moral truth exists because "God has woven it into the very fabric of reality"; and the evolutionary school that believes that moral values are culturally constructed. These are two of the three standard schools of ethics: the first is duty ethics, and the second consequentialism. Both, he says, are mistaken.

But the real bogey throughout the book is David Hume's "fact/value"distinction, a distinction which, given certain presuppositions (one's which Harris and other New Atheists share) prevents you from going from one to the other. Facts are things that are; values are things that should be; and things that are and things that should be are two entirely different kinds of things. To confuse them is commit what philosophers call a "category mistake."

To say that science, the study of what is, can have something to say about what ought to be is like applying the standards of what constitutes good music to determine how to bake a cake, or saying that the standards of good accounting practice can be used to determine the quality of a piece of music.

This distinction is assumed by most advocates of both schools Harris mentions: protestants assume it as much as secular philosophers, although it is largely rejected in Catholic thought. Harris is clearly aware of this problem, and articulates it competently in the introduction. The problem is that, once it is acknowledged, the then proceeds as if he had never heard of it.

Catholics (at least those in the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition) largely form the third school of ethics--virtue ethics, in which you can get around the distinction because of the prior distinction between man as he is and man as he would be if he achieved his telos or purpose. Both of these things are facts--the way man is and the telos which is the fulfillment of his nature, and ethics is simply the best way from one to the other.

But Harris does not believe in an objective telos--or that man has a particular nature to which this telos would correspond. So how does he get around the fact/value distinction? And this leads us to the second main argument of the book.

Harris argues that if factual statements and ethical statements both derive from similar brain processes, then they are the same kind of belief. He doesn't argue for this view, he just asserts it. And he seems to think that his assertion can be transformed into an argument by simply piling on evidence that both derive from similar brain states. But the problem in bridging the gap between the fact that a particular brain process occurs for two different kinds of belief and the conclusion that brain state to kind of belief is no less daunting then bridging the gap between facts and values.

Once again, we are forced to do Harris' work for him. Here is the argument:

Any belief that is produced by a certain brain process is the same kind of belief as any other belief produced by the same brain process
Factual beliefs and moral beliefs are both produced by the same brain process
Therefore, factual beliefs and moral beliefs are the same kind of beliefs

Harris spends all his time proving his minor premise, and simply assumes his major premise. He never attempts to prove it, yet it is precisely the assertion at issue.

"[B]eliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain," he says on p. 11. "The division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of underlying brain function," he asserts on p. 121.

He has tracked his seemingly divergent quarry and, following the trail to hole in the ground he calls the "medial pre-frontal cortex" (which he invests with the authority of scientific mysticism by crowning it with an acronym: MPFC), he calms the hounds and declares he has proven the objects of his hunt to be the same.

But why should anyone believe that a particular process--or a particular geographical location of the brain--dictates or limits the kind of thought or belief that occurs in it? Why does the nature or meaning of a statement have anything to do with the fact that it derives from a certain "brain process"? It is as if someone were to tell you that beef and milk are essentially the same thing, since they both derive from a cow, or that fried chicken and eggs easy-over were essentially the same kind of food because they are both the product of a chicken.

The same brain produces different kind of beliefs. Why shouldn't the same gland produce them?
He doesn't say. It apparently "seems" that way to him and "no doubt" must "appear" that it is "only reasonable."

If a particular brain process can only produce the same kind of thing, does that mean that if two contradictory statements derive from the same brain process (a contingency not precluded in Harris' account) that truth and falsity are fundamentally the same? Again, it all hangs on whether we are assured by those comforting adverbs.

It is the same old scientific reductionism that we constantly hear being invoked, and seldom hear being rationally justified. It certainly isn't in this book.

And this brings us to our third point concerning Harris' book. The most publicized passage in it truly sums up the book:

Throughout this book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call "the moral landscape"-- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving--different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.--will translate into movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing.

"Well-being" and "human flourishing" serve interchangeably as equivocal terms in Harris' argument. But this passage highlights another weakness in Harris' rhetoric: he employs metaphors that masquerade as arguments.

His rhetoric of "peaks" and "valleys" is an old weapon in the quiver of those who reject traditional morality, and the defense against it was articulated over 100 years ago. In his 1908 book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton describes the tactic as taking "refuge in material metaphors:

[I]n fact, is the chief mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high." It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

Chesterton points to the same tendency in Nietzsche:

Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.

Harris' "peaks" and "valleys" serve the same role as Nietzshe's "higher" and "lower": they create the illusion of moral substance. He invokes them just like he invokes "well-being" and "human flourishing": as a sort of incantation he thinks will make the real problems with his argument go away. But we are never told exactly how it does this.

And so we are left with two different conceptions of well-being or flourishing, one a truly ethical conception which renders the minor premise of his first argument meaningful, and another a purely emotive or utilitarian conception which serves to establish his major premise. We are left devoid of any rationale for believing that the nature of a brain process dictates anything about the ontological or epistemological character of the judgments it produces.

And we are left with the feeling that, in the final analysis, his "moral landscape" with its "peaks" and "valleys" sounds attractive and plausible, but when you actually investigate it you find it doesn't show anything about how science determines human values, but is little more than the product of Harris' own imagination.

Finally, there is the whole issue of the legitimacy of Harris' project. What, if anything can science say about morality? How can a discipline devoted and designed only to tell us the how say anything the why or the whether? As Alastair MacIntyre has pointed out, the moral project of the Enlightenment has failed. Morality cannot be grounded in any of the things so many modern thinkers have thought it could be: the reason, the will, or the emotions. Kant, Kierkegaard, and Hume all come up short in their attempts to establish in on their respective bases. It defies any such analysis.

The only ethics worthy of the name was abandoned at the Renaissance: the classical conception which incorporates formal and final causality: that everything, including man, has a nature and a purpose, and that the approximation of that nature and the accomplishment of that purpose are what make him more truly what he really is. To say that a man is a "good man" is no fundamentally different than saying that dog is a "good dog" or a tree is a "good tree." Is it being what it really is and is it serving the purpose intrinsic to it? If it is, then it's good. If it's not, then it's not.

That's all you can say.

As to what the nature and purpose of human being is another matter, but it doesn't help in the task of determining these things to say that they don't exist. And those who say that they don't exist have the responsibility, if they want to cling to a notion of right and wrong, to provide an alternative account. So far, all such attempts have failed, and Harris' is not exactly one of the more impressive ones.

Michael Shermer, Pretend Skeptic: Why scientific reductionism doesn't work

Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, seems to be skeptical of all things but one: science. Somehow, the power of the skeptical criteria he applies to everything else is strangely extinguished when he encounters his own preferred belief system.

In a recent article published at Big Questions Online, Shermer says:

It would certainly seem so if you are reading these words online, but in fact you are not actually “seeing” the computer screen in front of you. What you see are photons of light bouncing off the screen (and generated by the internal electronics of the screen itself), which pass through the hole in the iris of your eye, through the liquid medium inside your eye, wending their way through the bipolar and ganglion cells to strike the rods and cones at the back of your retina ...

His account of the act of seeing continues for several excruciatingly detailed paragraphs in which we are taken on a tour of the brain that we can easily imagine being narrated by Ben Stein and in which we expect at any minute to be asked to stay outside the rope and not to touch the exhibits.

This process proceeds until, says Shermer, we reach the neuron level, where particular neurons fire in particular circumstances. Shermer points out that several neuroscientists have even "found a single neuron that fires when the subject is shown a photograph of Bill Clinton and no one else!"

Unfortunately, this neuron frequently gives long boring policy speeches and attempts to mess around with other nearby female neurons and can create extremely embarrassing situations, so scientists have decided it's best not to study this one too closely.

But we finally arrive at this little gem:

The models generated by biochemical process in our brains constitute "reality." None of us can ever be completely sure that the world really is at it appears.

Shermer calls this idea "belief-dependent realism," about which he promises to enlighten us in a future book, where, presumably, we will be treated to a series of letters, words, and sentences the perception of which will be routed through a long, involved neuroscientific process that will take us back to the neurons which his book will argue don't have any necessary connection with reality.

So one wonders why we should believe him.

This is the problem will all such accounts of experience that try to reduce conscious experiences to physiological processes: they undercut the very arguments used to support them, since the thoughts that produced the arguments and the thoughts that resulted from reading or hearing them are the very things the arguments have attempted to show aren't really real.

The way we derive a truth, in other words, is the truth itself. But if this is so, then isn't the truth "the way we derive a truth is the truth itself" only its own arbitrary derivation? And if so, how can we believe it's true?

Shermer, in fact, seems to be aware of this:

I claim that the only escape from this epistemological trap is science. Flawed as it may be because it is conducted by scientists who have their own set of beliefs determining their reality, science itself has a set of methods to bypass the cognitive biases that so cripple our grasp of the reality that really does exist out there.

"Is there a way around this epistemological trap?" he asks later. "There is. It's called science."

In other words, we must be skeptical of everything--except scientific skepticism. But why does science get a pass? Science is a cognitive process like any other, and must therefore suffer from the same solopsistic fate. Why are scientific thoughts not "models generated by biochemical processes" that "none of us can ever be completely sure" about just like the ones Shermer finds around him so ready at hand?

Once you believe in scientific reductionism, you can't believe it anymore. If you accept it, you must therefore reject it. Once you accept its presuppositions, you are forced in short order to abandon them. It is Chesterton's "thought that stops all thought," a universal intellectual solvent which, despite its pretensions to rationality, is the most anti-rational of all theories.

Anyone who decides to accept Shermer's argument passes under a sign that reads: "Abandon all truth, ye who enter here." But Shermer himself just averts his gaze whenever he encounters the admonition.

In fact, Shermer can't even get through is own article without having to assume the opposite of what he's just told us:

Even when two models appear to be equally supported by observations, over time we accumulate more precise observations that tell us which model more closely matches reality.

Whoah. Hold on there. Weren't we just told that reality was only a model in our brain? How, then, can we use it to assess the models in our brain?

Chesterton had already refuted Shermer as long ago as 1908:

That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." [the early 20th century equivalent of Shermer's The Believing Brain] In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason ... For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Shermer takes note that he himself is more optimistic about the effects of drinking the reductionist Kool-Aid than is Stephen Hawking, who at least has the decency to keel over from the philosophical concoction and admit that scientific reductionism leads to an epistemological dilemma from which there is no escape: all facts are theory-laden, and there are cases where no observation can prove one model necessarily right or another wrong.

So what does Shermer propose as the way out of the trap he has set for himself? He has none. In the final analysis, we find him being slain in the Scientific Spirit:

[E]ven though there is no Archimedean point outside of our brains, I believe there is a real reality, and that we can come close to knowing it through the lens of science — despite the indelible imperfection of our brains, our models, and our theories.

So this is where he ends up: swinging from the chandeliers at the scientistic version of a Holy Ghost Revival, crying, "I believe!" Which, of course, is very unbecoming for a scientist.

Who killed Wordsworth? Studying literature by studying something else

If you were wondering what was wrong with the humanities, you need go no further than a recent article in The New York Times Book section. The good news is that the silly parsing of texts according to race and sex may be coming to and end. The bad news is that something equally silly may be taking its place.

Several years back a book was published called Who Killed Homer? about the plight of classics departments that long ago abandoned the idea that there was something of value to be learned by simply learning what the great works of classical Greece and Rome had to tell us rather than dissecting them on the basis of the most recent politically correct theories. But of course the same thing goes on across the humanities.

Here is the Times, keeping its ear to the ground for newest way to euthanize the study of English:

Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said “it’s a new moment of hope” in an era when everyone is talking about “the death of the humanities.” To Mr. Gottschall a scientific approach can rescue literature departments from the malaise that has embraced them over the last decade and a half. Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing.

And what is the "Next Big Thing"? What is the "scientific" approach that is supposed to revitalize literature programs?

Literature, like other fields including history and political science, has looked to the technology of brain imaging and the principles of evolution to provide empirical evidence for unprovable theories.

In other words, the best way to bring more interest and energy (and money) to the study of literature is to study something else. Chesterton used to joke about the idea of submitting a poem "to a calculating boy." These people seem to think that would be a good idea.

Wait. I've got it! Maybe they could focus on the books themselves to see what wisdom they might contain. It's radical, I know. And would require literature professors to actually read books and discuss what they say. And it would involve them in discussing the truths that might be there and how they might apply to our lives. Which would require that they actually belief in things like truth. And wisdom.

Why didn't anyone think about this before?