…and this is a 
Sorry, Canada. We didn't know it was that contagious.
Category: Creationism
Posted on: April 5, 2006 11:40 AM, by PZ Myers
Brian Alters, of McGill University, had a grant proposal turned down for an unusual reason.
In denying his request, the research council's peer-review committee recently sent Mr. Alters a letter explaining he'd failed to "substantiate the premise" of his study.
It said he hadn't provided "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent-design theory, was correct."
Oh, well…another researcher with a grant that hasn't been funded, trying to rationalize his failure. We need to see the whole letter—surely he must have just lifted that sentence out of context, right? Let's hear what the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has to say.
Janet Halliwell, the research council's executive vice-president and a chemist by training, acknowledged yesterday that the "framing" of the committee's comments to Mr. Alters left the letter "open to misinterpretation."
OK, Ms Halliwell, I'm trying to be charitable. Explain how it was misinterpreted.
Ms. Halliwell said confidentiality obligations made it difficult for her to discuss Mr. Alters' case in detail, but argued the professor had taken one line in the letter "out of context" and the rejection of his application shouldn't indicate they were expressing "doubts about the theory of evolution."
May I call you Janet? I bet Alters would be willing to waive confidentiality. Tell me, please, Janet, what the context was. You're being awfully vague, and that one sentence from Alters is awfully damning.
However, Ms. Halliwell added there are phenomena that "may not be easily explained by current theories of evolution," and the scientific world's understanding of life "is not static. There's an evolution in the theory of evolution."
You tease! What exactly does that mean? Do you think evolution is "evolving" towards the nonsense of ID? Do you think there is good reason to believe evolutionary theory is incorrect? What justification do you think investigators need to make for evolution nowadays, and do you similarly expect chemists to throw a couple of pages of justification for atomic theory in their proposals? What justification can an investigator give that ID is correct?
I'm sorry, Janet. That exchange wasn't particularly good for me, and I suspect you're feeling frustrated, too. You've got to be more open and share more. I haven't heard anything to justify your council's strange demand that a grant proposal demonstrate that evolution is correct and ID isn't.
I'm also sorry to see that the infection of ignorance rampant in the United States is spreading northward.
The story also made this week's issue of Nature, with a nicely ironic conclusion:
Philip Sadler, a board member of the centre and director of science education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is more philosophical. "If he was trying to answer the question as to whether all this popularization had had an impact, he just saved the government $40,000," says Sadler. "He found the evidence without doing the study."
Comments
That's what we get for squeezing 90% of our population against the border. We get your news, your views, and now, apparently, your lunatic idiots.
*sigh*
So there's our imports. Care to buy some lumber from us? We should really be exporting something.
Posted by: The Brummell | April 5, 2006 11:55 AM
Your top link ("grant proposal turned down") is broken.
Posted by: The Modesto Kid | April 5, 2006 11:58 AM
PZ
As John Harshman over on T.O. points out, this appears to be the result of postmodern doofussness. Seems the reviewers at the granting agency (Social Science and Humanities) may be uncomfortable with evolution as a social construct and, as such, did not reject the grant application because of scientific arguments. I'm sure we'll be hearing more as this has generated more than a little interest amongst hosers.
Posted by: noone inparticular | April 5, 2006 12:00 PM
Damn embarassing.
Yes, there are young-earth idiots up here as well. I have to humour my future uncle-in-law (devout baptist) about evolution. I'd love to be up front with him, but ironically, his farm hosts a most impressive, fossil-rich outcrop where I can find Cretaceous fish. I'd hate to cut myself off from access to it.
Posted by: Miguelito | April 5, 2006 12:00 PM
Here's the story at the Ottawa Citizen.
Posted by: wamba | April 5, 2006 12:02 PM
I'm going to add this to my file on "where to flee when the US collapses into a Fundy reality-denying theocracy".
Posted by: wamba | April 5, 2006 12:04 PM
Since when was it ever necessary to justify a well-accepted scientific theory on a grant application? This is simply ridiculous. What a maroon.
You know, the acronym SSHRC is pronounced "shirk". Perhaps there's a reason.
Posted by: Martin Brazeau | April 5, 2006 12:20 PM
Alters is in the School of Education, right? I'd like to see the proposal. Was the research to be on the effects of teaching ID?
Posted by: Chris | April 5, 2006 12:36 PM
"There's an evolution in the theory of evolution." If by this little gem of wisdom Janet means that theories change over time, well, erff-derr! It does not therefore follow that there is intelligence in the dogma of intelligent design. I am so sick of these tit-for-tat analogies ("There are atheistic implications of evolution, so there are religious implications of ID," etc. - Dembski).
Posted by: Kristine | April 5, 2006 12:45 PM
This is another data point supporting the theory that we need a purge - all liberal arts people studying science should be Gitmo'd. Start again fresh.
Posted by: Barry | April 5, 2006 12:50 PM
Philip Sadler, a board member of the centre and director of science education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is more philosophical. "If he was trying to answer the question as to whether all this popularization had had an impact, he just saved the government $40,000," says Sadler. "He found the evidence without doing the study."
And had the results noted even without ever formally submitting them for peer review even. Neat!
Posted by: David Wilford | April 5, 2006 12:57 PM
P.S. - I think it's safe to say that the Ig Nobel nomination forms are definitely in the mail to Mr. Alters.
Posted by: David Wilford | April 5, 2006 1:00 PM
For those unaquainted with the post-modernist beef with evolution, which is at least as threatening as that from the various religious fundies (xtian, moslem, etc) because it comes from within the 'intellectual' culture, a good background article appeared in The Nation magazine in 1997:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Ehrenreich.html
Unexpected author - Barbara Ehrenreich is most noted for her book NICKEL & DIMED - and venue, but the summary is vivid and well informed. It opens with memorable quotes, from "a recent interdisciplinary seminar on emotions", some audience questions:
"the experimental method is the brainchild of white Victorian males"
"You believe in DNA?"
The wikipedia articles on post-structuralism, post-modernism, and structuralism and modernism provide more useful background though not directly touching on evolution.
And the parodies of post-modernist texts started by physicist Alan Sokal's famous submittal of a nonsensical article to the literary journal Lingua Franca (which published it) has been continued by a random essay generator here:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo
(This page includes links to Sokal.)
Posted by: thwaite | April 5, 2006 1:07 PM
"adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent-design theory, was correct."
No sane, informed person could read this and take away anything concerning evolution except that the writer of this quote mistakenly thinks that ID, a non-scientific renaming of creationism, and evolution are somehow comparable in terms of scientific merit. Such a person clearly underscores their own lack of understanding of science and, therefore, highlights they are thereby ill-equipped to make decision in these matters. No person of science should ever have to defend or justify matters of settled general science: gravity, atomic theory, germ theory and evolution.
I've read the Alters' book, Defending Evolution, and it is wonderful piece of work. He's an award-winning educator with a great deal to offer the world in the area of public understanding of science. It's as though he's being made to grovel by a profoundly uninformed church stooge, an exercise of the dehumanizing power of ignorance.
Posted by: Russ | April 5, 2006 1:13 PM
Wonder where I got that idea? ;)
Posted by: BronzeDog | April 5, 2006 1:15 PM
The application of evolution to social sciences (which is what this looks like, though your grant application seems to be broken so I can't be certain) is a well known minefield that echoes Nazi social theories and the inevitable Social Darwinism. While the wording of the rejection out of context is somewhat damning, I think you're stretching to assume that this rejection is related to religious objections without explcict reference to such an objection. There are other credible objections in the context of this field of study.
Posted by: BMurray | April 5, 2006 1:17 PM
"For those unaquainted with the post-modernist beef with evolution, which is at least as threatening as that from the various religious fundies (xtian, moslem, etc) because it comes from within the 'intellectual' culture..."
And postmodernism is now being used by said religious fundies to advance their antiscience agenda. It's quite an effective tool to influence (and distort) a layperson's understanding of what science is. What better way to weaken scientific challenges to religious claims than to tell people that we all "create our own realities" and there is no such thing as an objective fact? Sounds so progressive and modern, you know...Of course the religious nuts' true goal is for their version of "reality" to supersede everything else, but the crucial first step is to bring science down to the level of just another viewpoint, and postmodernism gives them the means to do this...as do the insincere and dishonest invocations of "fairness" and "balance."
Posted by: Madam Pomfrey | April 5, 2006 1:19 PM
This is a real shame. I'm a doctoral student at McGill, and Dr. Alters (who is indeed in the Faculty of Education here) has been great about coming over to our undergrad evolution class and talking about his work. He also testified in the Dover trial - his research focus is on determining where all the strong resistance to evolution comes from, and how scientists can better educate their students.
Posted by: Rod | April 5, 2006 1:21 PM
"This is another data point supporting the theory that we need a purge - all liberal arts people studying science should be Gitmo'd. Start again fresh."
They're not really studying science; they're playing with kooky ideas about science. If they actually did science they might have a different perspective.
That being said, there are nonscientists who manage to grasp the scientific method, and can easily tell the difference between science and pseudoscience. And in my experience they're almost never products of a graduate program in cultural studies or the like.
Posted by: Madam Pomfrey | April 5, 2006 1:29 PM
Knock off the Ann Coulter-style eliminationism schtick, will ya. Some of us liberal arts types actually keep up with science by lurking at sites like this.
Posted by: Talapus | April 5, 2006 1:31 PM
Speaking of eliminating 90% of the population... I can think of a few potential candidates off the top of my head.
The silver lining to this kind of situation is that it makes the mental defectives easier to identify.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 1:33 PM
Aw shit. We were counting on you Canadians to be the sane ones in North America!
Posted by: george cauldron | April 5, 2006 1:39 PM
Great, BronzeDog - can we now put you down as being objectively in favor of wiping out humanity through a disease contracted from an unsanitized payphone?
Posted by: Daniel Martin | April 5, 2006 1:39 PM
Boy, I'm so embarrassed for Canada now. Sigh.
As a previous poster mentioned, yup, this is Ig Nobel territory. But under which category?
Posted by: Frank Habets | April 5, 2006 1:54 PM
Not that this justifies the idiotic decision in any way, but it is important to understand that this wasn't a case of a biologist being denied a grant for a research proposal involving evolution, but for an educator being denied a grant for conducting a survey involving the spread of ID in Canada. While it is unfortunate for Dr. Alters, ignorant political influence on social science funding is nothing new.
Posted by: Jonathan Badger | April 5, 2006 1:56 PM
The Barbara Ehrenreich item is, as usual very good. But I wouldn't be so surprised that she's knowledgable about these issues.
I've read her work in various venues for twenty years or so now-and in one of them I recall her mentioning that she holds a PhD in biology, but has really only used it for Planned Parenthood-type teaching to high schoolers and undergraduates.
Posted by: Geoff Egan | April 5, 2006 2:05 PM
The application of evolution to social sciences ... is a well known minefield that echoes Nazi social theories and the inevitable Social Darwinism.
Inevitable? Current work by evolutionary primatologists includes C. Boehm's HIERARCHY IN THE FOREST - which surveys how social coalitions in various primate species work to check the power of dominant individuals. And Franz De Waal's many efforts to repopularize Darwin's observation that several primate species have evolved distinct feelings of empathy, sympathy, and respect for those leaders whose reputation is based on fairness as much as on might.
From the wikipedia article which you cite on "Social Darwinism":
'the term is an anachronism, although it is still widely used by historians. In many ways it would be more proper to call it "Social Spencerism" instead of "Social Darwinism". '
'Darwin felt that 'social instincts' such as 'sympathy' and 'moral sentiments' also evolved through natural selection, and that these resulted in the strengthening of societies in which they occurred, so much so that he wrote about it in Descent of Man '
[ I'll add that Darwin, a wealthy man, was a prominent supporter with both money and words of the Abolitionist movement against slavery. ]
Posted by: thwaite | April 5, 2006 2:11 PM
The Barbara Ehrenreich item is, as usual very good. But I wouldn't be so surprised...
Yeah, now that I've done a bit of googling I'm not so surprised anymore. Here's a brief interview in which she explains how she became a writer:
http://lnf.uoregon.edu/notable/ehrenreich.html
Posted by: thwaite | April 5, 2006 2:21 PM
Thwaite, I agree. What I'm saying is that the whole application is often poisoned by the past applications. It's probably not appropriate and it's occasionally stupid, but it's distinct from religious reasoning and ID.
Posted by: BMurray | April 5, 2006 2:39 PM
Thanks for sticking up for us liberal arts types, Madam Pomfrey! ;-)
Posted by: Kristine | April 5, 2006 2:52 PM
Thanks, Talapus, you beat me to it.
Just 'cause we have degrees in things like medieval studies and archaeology doesn't make us all a bunch of blithering moonbats. In fact, I trace my late-blooming interest in science to my exposure to postmodern "thought" via a series of woebegone literature courses. ("Gawain and the Green Knight" is a metanarrative about lesbian seduction. Really, it is.)
Posted by: Molly | April 5, 2006 3:15 PM
"Thanks for sticking up for us liberal arts types, Madam Pomfrey! ;-)"
You're welcome...but I'm only sticking up for those of you who don't buy into postmodernism. Unfortunately the "postmodern phonies" tend to dominate the humanities departments at my university.
Posted by: Madam Pomfrey | April 5, 2006 3:17 PM
Sokal actually published the parody article in Social Text, and revealed the spoof in Lingua Franca.
Posted by: jre | April 5, 2006 3:57 PM
OK, what gives?
I get the blue highlighting, but not the link?
Anyway, here it is:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#papers
Posted by: jre | April 5, 2006 4:03 PM
Re-reading the title of the post, I felt a little dirty.
"We didn't know it was that contagious"
Kinda implies to me that Canada and the US had a big of fun, with less than maximal prophylaxis, and now it's the next morning and the US is off to somewhere else, accidentally spreading a parasitic infection.
An odd metaphor for the IDiots. I'm not sure yet if I like the metaphor or not.
Posted by: The Brummell | April 5, 2006 4:41 PM
However, Ms. Halliwell added there are phenomena that "may not be easily explained by current theories of evolution,"
Yeah, phenomena like black holes and gravity and modernist art. But really, I am in the liberal arts and I feel a little put upon here. Scientists do often fail to realize that it is possible that there are things which cannot be explained by science; yes, as hard as it may be to believe, there may be things which cannot be objectively studied.
Even more than this, there needs to be discussion on the philosophy of science. Something which has been virtually completely neglected in the scientific circles in which I have travelled. I think that is more the issue here.
P.S. anyone who would deny the validity of experimentation on the grounds that it "is the brainchild of white Victorian males." is an idiot.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 4:45 PM
Oh, and one more thing. Evolution has also been used by Anarchists, Kropotkin specifically, as illustration of the viability of their idea, which is where the idea of "mutual aid" in evolution came. So it has not always been used by the fascists.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 4:50 PM
A socially conservative government just took power in Ottawa, with a robust base in the Canada's bible belt(s), so I can't help but wonder if this emboldened some SSHRC committee members to take the IDiotarian line.
Posted by: bfy | April 5, 2006 4:58 PM
Sokal actually published the parody article in Social Text...
True. Mea culpa.
---
For the liberal arts types who've admitted reading this blog (welcome!) Sokal is harsh - his basic message can be construed as 'if you're not willing to learn science itself, you shouldn't comment on it'. (Whereas Dawkins would have you learn science. Only.) The imaginative inquiring mind doesn't take kindly to such strictures, and will continue to seek stories rather than statistics and fossil strata (and is quite capable of making up stories if it seems necessary).
Sokal and this cultural tension are discussed by Harvey Blume in a 12/2000 article in the Atlantic Monthly (only open to subscribers online at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/crosscurrents/cc2000-12-21.htm ). Blume praises E.O. Wilson in CONSILIENCE for being more responsive to the need for intuitively comprehensive narratives. Perhaps. I'd add people like Antonia Byatt (ANGELS & INSECTS; ON HISTORIES & STORIES) for literature, and Stephen Baxter's and Greg Bear's science fiction. Others?
Posted by: thwaite | April 5, 2006 5:19 PM
This doesn't surprise me at all.
SSHRC is hugely frustrating, and it's now a hoop that every Canadian academic has to jump through: as one of those sub-par, beta-issue humanities PhD's, now an assistant professor, it's not necessary for me to get SSHRC funding in order to research, write and publish on my subject. I'd be quite happy to leave the money to scientists who actually need large swathes of grant money to run labs, hire techs, buy equipment and run experiments. All my university needs is to 1) leave me alone 2) near a library 3) for an uninterupted period of time, the longer the better.
The problem is that my department's funding is tied to my getting SSHRC grants, which means that my job is tied to my getting SSHRC grants, which means that I'm supposed to stop writing papers and editing things and devote my free time to writing elaborate grant proposals for SSHRC funding.
Posted by: jrochest | April 5, 2006 5:31 PM
Scientists understand the set of concepts you call "philosophy of science". They understand them much better than you do. That's *why* they don't bother debating them, particularly with you.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 5:36 PM
The point of my whine, of course, is that as it is currently structured SSHRC funds both the sciences and the humanities very badly: people in the humanities are supposed to do critical work that mimics science, even at the cost of distorting what we do, and scientists are supposed to do experimental work that mimics critical work, at the cost of distorting what they do.
This wouldn't be too bad if one could just ignore it, but one can't. Bugger.
Posted by: jrochest | April 5, 2006 5:39 PM
"Alan Sokal's famous submittal of a nonsensical article to the literary journal Lingua Franca (which published it) . . ."
Lingua Franca was not a "literary journal" nor did it publish the Sokal spoof." That honor goes to Social Text. Lingua Franca was a magazine dedicated to academic life & coverd the Sokal hoax.
Posted by: joseph duemer | April 5, 2006 5:49 PM
Indeed there are. We call them "things that don't exist". Science simply isn't capable of studying nonexistent things at all. That doesn't stop the liberal arts people, though.
Scientists understand the set of concepts you call "philosophy of science". They understand them much better than you do. That's *why* they don't bother debating them, particularly with you.
Art doesn't exist? Political institutions don't exist? Objectivity is not possible in all things existant.
As for the philosophy of science, nearly all advances in sciences have occured concurrently with advances in philosophy. You seem to have that confused with the methodology of science, which I do in fact understand, and explain to people on a regular basis. It is not as if I have not taken any science classes, I have taken quite a number, more than most in the liberal arts, I have just seen that there are aspects to our society which cannot be studied objectively.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 5:51 PM
We can't even define "art". People claim that some things are art, and some of claims are more commonly accepted than others.
There are patterns and regularities in the things that people often call art. Those can be studied. We can study the degree to which a work deviates from the social conception of 'art' at the time it was created. We can study how and why human beings find things pleasureable or interesting, and how that affects art.
To the degree that those things can be said to exist, they exist objectively. Things which do not exist objectively do not exist -- that's what existence means.
Presuming that this anecdote is correct, and presuming causation, what precisely is the causative link? It's philosophy that is induced to change when science changes, rather in the same way that a barnacle's velocity changes when the whale it's attached to changes course.Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 5:58 PM
We can't even define "art". People claim that some things are art, and some of claims are more commonly accepted than others.
There are patterns and regularities in the things that people often call art. Those can be studied. We can study the degree to which a work deviates from the social conception of 'art' at the time it was created. We can study how and why human beings find things pleasureable or interesting, and how that affects art.
To the degree that those things can be said to exist, they exist objectively. Things which do not exist objectively do not exist -- that's what existence means.
So anything which can only be considered subjective does not exist? That's a pretty bold claim. Care to support it?
Presuming that this anecdote is correct, and presuming causation, what precisely is the causative link? It's philosophy that is induced to change when science changes, rather in the same way that a barnacle's velocity changes when the whale it's attached to changes course.
Sorry, I accidentally implied that it was causal, didn't mean to do that. I would say that these two have likely played symbiotic roles, sometimes science leading, sometimes philosophy, but that is based on my knowledge of the greek era only, I am not so up on current philosophy. Also, science was an outgrowth of philosophy originally. Logic grew out of philosophy as well and is necessary for the correct functioning of the scientific method.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 6:13 PM
Nice one, Molly! My lit-crit grad housemate in Santa Cruz spent an hour convincing us physics grads that the movie Alien was about conflicts in contemporary female sexuality. It held together very nicely.
Posted by: chuko | April 5, 2006 6:21 PM
I think I've found the problem.
In the Greek era, science as we know the concept did not exist. Here's a thought: why don't you go do some research about developments in our understanding of the natural world in the last few thousand years before opening your mouth and shoving your foot in?
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 6:27 PM
Didn't want to miss this:
It's basic semantics and logic, you twit.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 6:30 PM
In the Greek era, science as we know the concept did not exist. Here's a thought: why don't you go do some research about developments in our understanding of the natural world in the last few thousand years before opening your mouth and shoving your foot in?
Why don't you answer my question first? here it is again.
So anything which can only be considered subjective does not exist? That's a pretty bold claim. Care to support it?
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 6:34 PM
It's basic semantics and logic, you twit.
Nice dismissive ad hominem attack.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 6:43 PM
BronzeDog: Sometimes I wonder if we should build three spaceships...
Wonder where I got that idea? ;)
It came from DNA.... ;-)
Posted by: David Harmon | April 5, 2006 6:49 PM
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 5, 2006 6:49 PM
By the way, I really wish the screwy comment system would get fixed so I could comment from work again. Pharyngula used to be one of my best gooofing-off tools. ;)
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 5, 2006 6:56 PM
Utter and complete crap. The 19th century, for example, was a century of pitifully bad philosophy (mostly various kinds of idealist tripe) but great scientific progress.
And yet the 18th and 17th centuries had loads of groundbreaking philosophy.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 6:57 PM
Much of which was in fact strongly influenced or even inspired by scientific discoveries (eg. Newton---> Hume), so you had the arrow of causation in your correletion (such as it is) pointing backwards.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 5, 2006 7:01 PM
Originally I meant only to say that there was probably interplay between science and philosophy that caused them to push each other forward, not that there was a causative relationship. Sorry, thought I cleared that up before. Still think that, too. I admit I could be wrong though.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 7:05 PM
I'd say the relationship goes something like this: when philosophers take an interest in science and seriously follow developments in areas of science relevant to their philosophical interests (and that relevance can be very great in the case of something like the philosophy of mind), they do good and illuminating work. When they get too excited about just hearing themselves talk, not so much.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 5, 2006 7:10 PM
When they get too excited about just hearing themselves talk, not so much.
I think that goes for just about everyone. That's probably the real reason we have this ID/Creationist problem today.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 7:13 PM
My bet is that the grant committee was just being diplomatic in not saying that they were rejecting the grant because the applicant wasn't clear on how ID and natural selection are different.
Posted by: Nathan Myers | April 5, 2006 7:15 PM
Idiot. That's an insult, not an ad hominem. There is a critical difference between the two, a difference that Internet pundits usually fail to comprehend.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 7:21 PM
Actually it was an ad hominem with the insinuation that I didn't know anything about logic or semantics with an insult tacked on at the end.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 7:25 PM
If science developed from philosophy, why are there still philosophers?
Posted by: bad Jim | April 5, 2006 7:31 PM
Regardless of whether it was an ad hom. attack or not, the point at the beginning of the sentence remains unrefuted: it's semantics. In other words, can we have some working definitions of terms, please? From everyone.
Here's my confusion.
1. If something is "subjective" can it by definition not be studied objectively?
2. If the answer to 1. is "yes", is it possible to learn anything at all about anything subjective?
Art, politics, and other extended-phenotype human behaviours obviously exist. My question is, why does it matter what YOUR beliefs are about these things if I want to study them? How do your beliefs impact reality and influence the phenomena I observe?
For example: you see a painting, and experience an emotional reaction to it (positive, I hope). I see the same painting, and also experience a similar emotional reaction (again, I like positive emotional reactions - let's imagine I become slightly happier).
Of those phenomena, which cannot be studied objectively by a third person?
Posted by: The Brummell | April 5, 2006 7:47 PM
Indeed there are. We call them "things that don't exist".
You mean like mathematics?
Posted by: Graculus | April 5, 2006 7:58 PM
Busy day--I just now followed thwaite's link to the Ehrenreich article. Gasp! Gaa! Now I see what the issue is. My respect for Ehrenreich has skyrocketed. Yes, I had a postmodernist period (until I purged my system), but even amongst the dotty ideas foisted on me about writing and literature by professors who propped up their own lack of writing talent with gobs of ridiculous theory, there was still the explicit call to be children of the Englightenment, guided by Darwin et al (though I have since jettisoned Freud). Postmodernism is crap, plain crap, and it's as dangerous as any religious creationism--it's just another religion after all, really!
Posted by: Kristine | April 5, 2006 8:19 PM
"If science developed from philosophy, why are there still philosophers?"
Even more pressing, what about pygmy or dwarf philosophers?
Posted by: MJ Memphis | April 5, 2006 8:21 PM
1. If something is "subjective" can it by definition not be studied objectively?
2. If the answer to 1. is "yes", is it possible to learn anything at all about anything subjective?
1. Correct, this was my whole point, there are things which science cannot study and about which science can tell us nothing.
2. Yes, it is possible, but it will not be objective learning. It will be learning based on subjective criteria. I have no problem with the idea of basing some things on subjective knowledge and I think this may be the point of disagreement between us.
Art, politics, and other extended-phenotype human behaviours obviously exist. My question is, why does it matter what YOUR beliefs are about these things if I want to study them? How do your beliefs impact reality and influence the phenomena I observe?
It is not my my beliefs, or the beliefs of any specific person or people, which matter if you wish to study these phenomena. My point was only that there are thing which science cannot explain.
Maybe we just won't agree here.
Posted by: AoT | April 5, 2006 8:24 PM
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | April 5, 2006 8:38 PM
Steve LaBonne, Can the perceived irreducibility of the irreducible subjective component be explained objectively?
Posted by: poke | April 5, 2006 8:50 PM
And AoT, that's still just an insult. Saying that your arguments are wrong because you're an idiot is an ad hominem. Saying that *you're* not listening to because you're an idiot, and that your arguments are also wrong, is not. You're not, you are, and they are, respectively.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 9:23 PM
It's all about refusing to exercise judgment -- we don't need to take a good hard look at other cultures and then evaluate them, and we don't need to look at our own culture and apply standards to it, everything is true and everyone must have prizes.
I don't think it's a religion. It is a set of social conventions, a collection of signals which demonstrate allegiance. Faith is not involved so much as an absence of thought.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 9:27 PM
To help dispel the semantic difficulties:
I'd say that something is objective if it can be made explicit and observable, and subjective if it is necessarily implicit and unobservable. In the strictest sense, nothing is subjective and everything objective, but in practice things are often beyond our capacity to express or observe. That capacity can be changed, though -- and it is changing.
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 9:34 PM
Mathematics isn't objective?
Not by your definition. You defined "subjective" as "that which doesn't exist". Mathematics doesn't exist (it is about as abstract as you can get), therefor, it's "subjective"
You've tried to backpedal on your definition and gotten yourself in a bit of a muddle. Why don't we start over.
Posted by: Graculus | April 5, 2006 10:24 PM
I was watching the debate with disinterested amusment, until someone mentioned Searle.
I despise Searle, and his ideas.
They're only valid if emergent properties have no objective reality (not true), and if you accept his claims that because he doesn't think that something could be a mind, that it's not a mind.
The Chinese Room argument is repeated so often, and yet doesn't have a shred of reasoning behind it. Sure, the guy doing the symbol manipulation doesn't think he understands Chinese ... but so what? The emergent behaviour of his mind plus the symbol manipulation rules CREATES another mind - which does.
But, of course, Searle subscribes to reductionism and then uses the failure of reductionism to prove things... but if you can assume p and not p, you can prove ANYTHING, so what's the point?
The fact is ... no, you can't reduce all things to their component parts. If you look at every atom of my body, you won't find a single atom of "life". That doesn't mean I'm not alive, though - just that being "alive" is an emergent property coming from the connections between those atoms.
The same goes for minds, which is why Searle's arguments are universally bullshit.
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April 5, 2006 11:13 PM
No, Graculus, he never claimed Mathematics doesn't exist.
Mathematics is purely objective, in fact. There is no subjectivism whatsoever to it - otherwise, I would not be wrong if I said 2+2=1523.
I could be correct if I said 2+2=10, but that is not subjective - merely me leaving out the definition that my numerals mean base 4 today.
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April 5, 2006 11:22 PM
Also, Caledonian declared that all things which exist are objective.
This leaves open the possibility that there are things which do not exist but are still objective, which, by your definition of "exist" (a reasonable one, but not the only reasonable one), would include mathematics, which is definitely objective, but doesn't, for some definitions of the word, exist.
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April 5, 2006 11:26 PM
Oh please. How 'bout a study to determine how many humanities people would in fact agree with the statement "DNA is a cultural construct with no empirically testable reality"? I'll hazard a guess you won't find many. I'm an historian - one of those liberal arts types thwaite seems to think are unusual to be reading this blog. Trust me, plenty of us do. "Post-modernism" is just a fancy way of bottling a very old idea - that words don't always mean what you think they do. Whoopee - some people get way too excited about that, and that's their problem. But seriously, a few of you of you sound to me like some whacky right-winger who has discovered a crazy class at Brown and decided that it is exemplary of all academe. Please. Look, every humanities prof I know would agree to the following two points: 1) People do indeed perceive their own realities; 2) There is however such a thing as an empirically testable reality ("As is, I will indeed always burn my hand if I put it on a hot stove"). I know you can find some whackos who say otherwise, but even they go the doctor when they get sick.
Posted by: Theron | April 5, 2006 11:45 PM
Oh dear, oh dear. The shame. I've served on such SSHRC committees (in philosophy). I can't say I've always agreed with their decisions, but this one out-does any in my experience. Maybe a grant really wasn't deserved (the competition is real & the funds limited, and even good scholars can write a weak application), but that one sentence reveals an nescience so deep and self-indulgent that I have no trust of the committee left in me. Not a healthy situation.
I think the PoMo reading must be right--I have heard rumours, and seen direct evidence, too, of various forms of cognitive relativism among education faculty members. The crucial sentence doesn't really fit that reading very well by itself: Why ask for what you don't believe is possible? But it is probably just a snide sceptical challenge...silly buggers.
Objectivity, by the way, is best approached in a non-metaphysical spirit. The things we think of as objective are the ones that are intersubjective (different observers reliably come to the same conclusions), that explain the different results observers get on other (relative) questions (consider 3 dimensional objects and different 'points of view' from which one might look at them). Mathematics is objective on this view because it involves procedures and methods that lead independent mathematicians to agree on what's the right result of a calculation and what does (and doesn't) constitute a proof. (Not everyone needs to agree, of course-- some people obsessively misconstrue certain proofs (Godel is often a vicitm of this), and we can get differences over some range of cases, as with intuitionism vs. classical maths.) But this is just a start, of course...
Posted by: Bryson Brown | April 5, 2006 11:57 PM
No, Graculus, he never claimed Mathematics doesn't exist.
No, he claimed that things that don't exist are not objective.
Mathematics is purely objective,
If by "objective" you mean "based on observable phenomena", then no, not really.
When did you last observe 2+2=4 ?
The problem is that the words "subjective" and "objective" carry different connotations in different fields. Let's move away from those terms.
Mathematics is not concrete, its an abstract system.
Posted by: Graculus | April 5, 2006 11:57 PM
Thank you, Theron. I heartily second that. Your wise and measured words have prevented me from making a regrettable joke about post-strawcturalists. Cheers...
Posted by: petomai | April 6, 2006 1:47 AM
I'd say that something is objective if it can be made explicit and observable, and subjective if it is necessa