Andrew Sullivan responded to my post, Science is rational; scientists are not:
...One of the greatest errors of modernity is simply conflating the truths of one world of experience with the truths of another. I guess Michael Oakeshott instilled in me the sense that this confusion is the central intellectual problem of modernity. It is indeed at the root of a great deal of our difficulties. It is a mistake to apply the truths of science to that of history or aesthetics or politics. They are simply different categories of understanding the world. And the most profound mistake in human thought is to conflate the claims of religion with the claims of politics, and to conflate the truth-claims of the eternal with the truth-claims of the now.
On the broader points I agree with Andrew. Nevertheless, I quibble on the details here. Most of my readers would know that my own inclinations in terms of historical scholarship lean toward the positivist scale. That is, I believe there is some value in trying to view history as a quantitative science. I'm a fan of cliometrics, and I welcome a science of cliodynamics. I do not believe that either field has justified their value, but I welcome the attempt.
But in regards to aesthetics or politics I believe the distinction matters more. These are fields where the ought is prior to the is. These fields are not in the service of passions, rather, they elucidate and clarify passions. Political values are simply elaborations of normative presuppositions. Aesthetics vary from individual to individual because when someone sits back and reflects they project their own particular and specific intuitions. This does not mean that there are not general human aesthetic biases, it simply acknowledges that these are domains where individual subjectivity reigns supreme, and insofar as there is variation in particular preferences there will be stark disagreement. I personally believe that there is a smaller variance in aesthetic tastes than there are in political tastes.
Finally, the question of religion I feel somewhat an orphan. Most broadly I agree with the thesis of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. That is, I believe that the separation of church and state is to a large extent an expression of government fiat and subjective interpretation of what the purview of the church (religion) is. On a personal level I am very skeptical of Stephen Jay Gould's idea of the two majesterium. Yet when it comes to a broader social level I take religion as an inevitable background condition which can not be abolished from any calculation. Unlike Andrew I am not a believer in the validity of any religion as extra-human creations; that is, I believe religion is simply an elaboration on human creative impulses. As such, it is rather difficult to construct a heuristic which differentiates between religion and non-religion when it comes to human affairs. Pragmatically we must do this, but on a deep fundamental level I think it is somewhat a sham.
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Andrew wrote: They are simply different categories of understanding the world.
I demur. There is only one way to understand the world, and it doesn't involve aesthetics or politics (history actually is a science when done properly). Aesthetics and politics are ways to understand human conventions and dispositions, but these tell us nothing about the (extrahuman) world, only about ourselves, and even then only about the fashions of the culture we live in. To compare that to science is to put a lilliputian cart before a brobdignagian horse..
Oakeshott is PoMo for conservatives who can't be seen edorsing PoMo.
While in one sense I agree. We have to be careful when we take a term from one semantic field and uncritically translate it into an other and assume they are the same. (Say the Chinese word ki and translate it to the English energy) That's just equivocation. Yet we also ought recognize that there is a reality out there and that different terms relate to it. I may be dubious about many attempts to relate ki to the phenomena of energy but at least I can make sense of the claims. To say that they are "simply different categories" seems odd.
Not knowing where Sullivan would qualify his statement I'm loath to read too much into it. I do worry that it would end up devolving into the worst excesses of "postmodern" proponents. (I always put scare quotes around that since I think some of the key philosophers labeled as postmodern have very little to do with the excesses of postmodernism) At worst Sullivan's comments would justify a lot of pseudoscience quackery.
Aesthetics and politics are ways to understand human conventions and dispositions, but these tell us nothing about the (extrahuman) world, only about ourselves....
"Only about ourselves" doesn't say anything. We're talking about how to understand one area of reality, the human world, which equals "ourselves". One sort of scientist refuses to take any interest in topics not amenable to purely scientific research, which is OK as long as they stay out of discussions on those topics.
....and even then only about the fashions of the culture we live in.
Not really. There have been a lot of approaches to Chinese culture, Indian culture, classical Mediterranean culture, and others very foreign to our own culture.
History actually is a science when done properly
This is true only if you radically redefine science. It's one thing to introduce scientific data into historical thought. That's been done successfully many times. It's completely different to try to redefine history itself as a science. There are many reasons why that can't be done except in a very limited way: the loss of evidence, impossibility of controlled experiments, impossibility of isolating well-defined historical systems, indeterminacy of complex systems, and the excessively large number of significant variables and dimensions.
I am willing to call history a science if you define science as a rational, secular, attempt to make sense of data. But by and large the "scientific difference" isn't there. Scientific physics sets a standard because it's many orders of magnitude more powerful than traditional or folk physics, and has for that reason transformed human life amazingly. Scientific history doesn't have that explosive power -- perhaps it's ten time more powerful than folk history. Quite a lot, really.
A rationalist is skeptical of everything; there's no point to singling out Gould in that manner.
Can't you openly state you think the non-overlapping magisterium concept is wrong? Can't you bring yourself to make even that minimal level of commitment to a position?
Gould's idea isn't 'flawed', it's wrong - it requires a radical redefinition and diminishment of the nature of scientific inquiry to work, and is incompatible with science as it is and has been practiced.
I guess Andy's not a fan of E. O. Wilson's Consilience.
Nice set of postings. If it were up to me I'd steer you in the direction of three or four essays in Oakeshott's "Rationality in Politics" -- I'd love to read you having a wrestle with them.
I like Matt McIntosh's description of Oakeshott. And I say that as a huge fan of Oakeshott's.
Put me down as someone for whom history (and economics, and sociology) will never be sciences. Kinda interesting, sometimes, when people make the effort to do history/econ/soc as sciences. But worth being wary of the constant tendency to shove 'em in that direction too, though it's of course worth enforcing responsibility towards facts. But "respectful of facts" doesn't mean "science," does it? There are schools and fields and movements of "realism" in the arts, and no one would try to claim that the arts are subcategories of science.
I'll quibble (only because I'm having a good time) with a couple of small things in your paragraph about the arts. I'm not sure I can agree that "subjectivity reigns supreme" in the arts, though I can certainly agree that it plays an important role in the field. Such topics as popularity, influence, the formation of various canons, why some works and tastes seem to endure ... Those are good arty topics too. And, contra you, I'd guess that aesthetic tastes vary in a similar way to political ones. They seem to me to represent different dimensions of the same package, often -- libetarian Republicans will tend to prefer certain aesthetic experiences, tribal hunter-gatherers will tend to prefer others ...
I find it helpful sometimes to use the analogy of cooking and food. There are loads of different cuisines, and everyone has his/her own set of tastes and preferences. But that doesn't mean that the field is nothing but whim and happenstance.