How and Not What: Social Constructivism, Research Time, 26/07/2013

One more reflection that has come out of my engagement with the newest Thomas Nagel book as a serious piece of writing has to do with the reason why no one else takes it seriously. The article reviewing Mind and Cosmos that I linked a few posts ago made a point that Nagel seemed not to have read the critiques of orthodox Darwinism that come from inside evolutionary biology itself.

Now I’ve thought of something else that Nagel doesn’t seem to have read. This is more of a nitpick, but it’s a nitpick that’s very important to me, and which illustrates a point that I think is a serious problem for the whole discipline of philosophy. However, it doesn’t get the attention that I think it deserves. We don’t read enough of the right stuff.

The moment that sparked this idea in me was a few remarks of Nagel’s about the idea that scientific knowledge is socially constructed. Social construction, says Nagel, implies that a scientific truth can never be independent of human thought and judgment. Therefore, he says, if you adopt a social constructivist position of any kind, you must believe that scientific knowledge is inherently subjective, integrated so deeply with the human mind that no facts can exist independent of the mind, that there is no objective knowledge. Nagel is against such a philosophy.

And so am I, deservedly. However, calling such an attitude social constructivism is an enormous mistake. Actual sensible social constructivism is the principle that if we want to understand HOW people investigate and discover ACTUAL FACTS about the world, we have to understand the social practices and institutions THROUGH WHICH we carry out those investigations of the actual world. It implies nothing about the ontological status of the facts we discover in these investigations. The facts are part of the world, our investigations into some various facts we want to learn are part of the world, and we humans are part of the world, never separate from it. Humans are some of the bits of the world that build a systematic understanding of the world.

This isn’t a weird thing to say. It’s all over the works of such vilified social constructivists as Bruno Latour and Ian Hacking. It was Hacking’s book, The Social Construction of What? that first, to me at least, laid out in clear terms just what social constructivism actually is. When Nagel discusses social constructivism, he describes a conception of it that is nothing more than a cheap, hostile stereotype that insults a complex intellectual field. This concept is usually wiped away by the end of an introductory class. At least, it is in introductory sociology classes. 

Perhaps if as clear a statement of what social construction actually is had been published a few decades earlier than Hacking’s book (copyright 2002), more writers would have a positive attitude to the ideas that have come out of social constructivist theory. As it is, the field of philosophy is filled with negative misconceptions about what social constructivism is and what it can achieve. And these misconceptions prevent many people from learning a lot about the actual world we live in. I still encounter these stereotypes about social construction theories from many philosophers. While I have some suspicions about why the truth about social construction hasn't filtered to many communities within philosophy, I don't quite want to get into those here. I do, however, think it has to do with norms in philosophical communities about what is and isn't acceptable to read and research. If you work in a community of philosophers who believes these old stereotypes about social construction and never encounter a dissenting view, you'll believe that the old stereotype is what social construction actually is.

When the Opposites Are False, the Middle Ground is Empty Space, Research Time, 24/07/2013

Being the first person since possibly Mrs Nagel to give Thomas Nagel the benefit of (so very many of) the doubts on his new book has had fascinating results already. I don’t think he’s anywhere near right, but in this case a ridiculous falsehood offers intriguing possibilities for thinking. 

Now that I’ve actually started reading Nagel’s book instead of just reading accounts of people disgusted with it, I have a much better sense of his thought process going into it. In other words, I think I see what it would look like if Nagel wrote a History Boy post about his own book. In many ways, he’s working from a conception of philosophy that no longer holds, at least from my point of view. But this conception is actually remarkably popular, because most of the philosophical work that has taken this down has gone largely unnoticed by the general population of North America (at least, but I’d say of Earth if I had easy access to those kinds of surveys), and unnoticed in pretty large pluralities of the philosophical community as well. 

First, as far as Nagel is concerned, Mind and Cosmos isn’t a book about evolutionary theory or philosophy of biology, but about philosophy of mind. It’s an extension of the same line of thought that produced “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” For Nagel, the mind — our experiences of pains and pleasures, our consciousness and non-propositional thinking — cannot be reduced to physical phenomena without losing content. There is content to thought that is non-reducible to movements of matter, and we experience it intuitively.* And since evolutionary biology is all about the movements of organic matter as it changes through the dynamics of its ecological relationships, this scientific discipline is hit with the same critique as all the others: reductivism.

* Yeah, you can probably see where I’m going with this.

His goal is to find a middle ground between the kind of thinking that makes mind the foundation of material, and the kind that reduces the mind to the material. In this specific regard, the two perspectives that he called theism and materialism are close to opposites. And he thinks philosophy hasn’t really come up with a middle ground. I have two problems with this.

There are few in the history of philosophy who
fascinate and frustrate me more than Henri Bergson.

Problem number one is that Nagel isn’t doing new work on this problem. Henri Bergson theorized this opposition in depth, developed a detailed middle ground that constituted a metaphysical philosophy more comprehensive than that of damn near every philosopher that has tackled this before or since his career, and he did it all more than 100 years ago! Bergson was especially advanced in building a detailed account of how consciousness worked, which was the entire point of his greatest book, Matter and Memory. All Nagel can do, meanwhile, is appeal to the “obvious” appearance of consciousness in experience. But consciousness is still a simple entity to him. If Nagel were to take Matter and Memory as seriously as I’m taking Mind and Cosmos right now, he’d find more than an interesting book. He’d find an intellectual predecessor who has already surpassed him in many important ways!

What prevents this is that Bergson’s reputation collapsed after his fights with Einstein in the 1920s and once Bertrand Russell was convinced that Bergson was an obscurantist, mystic-minded twat (never mind that Russell’s technical work was so dense as to be his most difficult material and Bergson wrote so clearly that he was a pop-philosophical superstar decades before Russell became one). So no one ever read him again except Gilles Deleuze and the people who followed him. And no one in analytic philosophy ever reads Gilles Deleuze. So Nagel would not be expected to have read Bergson. I was impressed to find a Bergson footnote, though that’s the only mention of him in the book, and I doubt Nagel has read his works in any detail. The footnote offers a very over-simplified account of his concept of vital force.

My problem with Nagel number two. Ultimately, I think Nagel’s project in this book is misdirected because he takes the subject matter of materialism to be divided into an opposition that’s false. His goal is to find a middle ground where there is no between to discover. Nagel still believes, along with popular culture, that mind and matter are incompatible, and that science functions by reducing phenomena to the movements of matter. I think the ontology of the future isn’t just a non-reductive materialism, but an emergent materialism, where the structures and movements of matter at a micro-level constitute wholly new entities with wholly new laws of behaviour at its progressive macro-levels. 

That doesn’t fit Nagel’s narrative of two opposing camps through which one must find a middle ground or productive compromise. But I’m not interested in fitting into his or anyone else’s narratives. I want to make my own.

The Best Mistakes to Learn From Are Those of Others, Jamming, 23/07/2013

There’ll be more fights with Hegel in the future. Today, I’m working on a proposal for a post-doctoral grant that I discovered this week, adapting some aspects of my ecophilosophy project to a perspective more purely of philosophy of biology. Writing about it here isn’t going to get into the details of the project, but I do want to explain how I became interested in this issue and why I think it’s important.

Last year, Thomas Nagel wrote what was probably the shittiest book of his career, Mind and Cosmos. It’s a critique of orthodox evolutionary theory on the grounds that the slow, gradual pace of evolution by natural selection couldn’t have accounted for all the radical changes of species in the relatively short amount of time animal, plant, and fungoid life has existed on Earth. Taking this at face value, he has a point. Natural selection is such a slow and dicey process that it can’t work for major changes. Not only that, but species change is often the result of environmental changes, which can happen remarkably quickly. But natural selection is a slow process of incremental change over many generations. If an ecological niche disappears or radically changes in a generation or two, the pace of natural selection can’t keep up with that kind of change. Instead of a species transforming through the pressure of ecological niche changes, it becomes extinct. So there has to be another method of evolutionary development.

While I don't always admire Nagel's work, I
do admire his hair.

Fine and dandy. Then Nagel screws everything up, including what chance he might have had for a successful career in his old age. Because he says the only alternative to the orthodox Darwinian point of view is a creationist perspective, or at least a weird kind of teleology where mind or some mind-like force directs the evolution of life. This man is a living legend in philosophy, and this is where he ends up? A lot of the, shall we say, informally written reviews of the book I read online in the months after its release dismissed and insulted Nagel: I’ve read words like senile, ridiculous, moronic, wasteful, and downright dangerous. He writes in a country, the United States of America, where a significant number of politicians are actively working to destroy all science education in the name of their dogmatic and oppressive religion, the Biblical literalism of aggressive evangelical Christianity. Frankly, it’s impossible to write anything publicly about evolution in the United States and avoid politics. Closed-minded evangelical Christians are setting up conditions where, in a generation or two, there will be no more young scientists coming from huge swaths of the United States, simply because there will be millions of people for whom their only science textbook was the Bible.

One idea this research project would involve is giving Nagel the benefit of the doubt, while at least acknowledging the disastrous effects of a philosopher of his stature giving his weight to the political programs of Christian authoritarians who want to create an American population of dutiful sheep who submit themselves completely to their control and their religious dogma. Because there’s a growing literature of evolutionary scientists who critique orthodox Darwinism and the principle of gradualism in species development from within the science itself. Christian de Duve, Harold Morowitz, Robert Hazen, and Simon Conway Morris all write scientifically rigorous work that provides a detailed theoretical framework for there being some kind of directionality or converging set of tendencies in biological evolution, while keeping anti-scientific creationists in the backwoods where they belong. And a lot of this work was anticipated by Stephen Jay Gould. A great review of Mind and Cosmos is here, and the author calls out Nagel better than I can for now.

That’s how I became interested in the subject: wondering how someone like Nagel, whose work from the 1970s I admire so much,* could have fallen so far from the pinnacle of his thought. There would be two pillars to this project: examining the actual alternatives to orthodox Darwinism within respectable evolutionary biology, and examining why Nagel (and quite possibly a substantial mainstream in evolutionary biology itself) ignores this alternative work, and acts as if one either accepts a too-rigid dogma of evolution by gradual natural selection or escapes science altogether. It would combine my skills in philosophy of science with what I’ve learned from social science about examining intellectual influences, heritages, and citation networks.

* Sometimes, I think everything but the computer technology was better in the 1970s. This was the prime of American cinema, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, gay culture exploding into the open, punk, funk, disco, and the very first house music coming out of Detroit. Then I remember this was the decade of Derrida’s worst books, and I realize that nothing is ever perfect. Also, it’s just more of the too-easy romanticism of the past: I was born in 1983, so I don’t have to remember the shitty parts of the 1970s if I don’t feel like it.

The goal is using Nagel as a case of a larger tendency to polarize debates about evolution, diagnosing why this polarization exists, how it creates its most destructive effects on the disciplines of evolutionary biology and the philosophy thereof, and figuring out solutions and paths out of the morass.