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Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against Scientism

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This is a tough little book that argues against naturalistic accounts of perception and language by showing how they tacitly rely on non-naturalistic assumptions to avoid incoherence. Olafson's negative arguments are more persuasive than his account of what should take naturalism's place. The writing is non-technical and clear but assumes some familiarity with 20th century philosophy, especially Continental philosophy. Readers lacking this background may have trouble following the argument and may even wonder what all the fuss is about.

I am a fan of this apparently too little known and appreciated philosopher. I've studied Olafson's 1987 and 1995 books for years. He shows brilliantly why the usual "scientific" explanations of the nature of perception, language, and person are impoverished, inadequate, indeed logically incoherent--a highly unpopular position in our scientific age! His critiques of scientism are great (I do have the credentials to make this judgement), though I do have some problems with his proposals for alternative approaches. Also, his syntax sometimes needs unscrambling--too many nested clauses, ambiguous pronouns--but it's worth the effort. This book is a concise, clear, and efficient summary of his previous work, especially of his 1995 book, and has some new ideas too. Don't just read it, study it--and approach it with an open mind. It is meaty and valuable. Chap.5 alone, "What does the brain do?", is worth the price of admission. ...

"Scientism" was invented by the Hegelian philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries as a term of disparagement for those scientists who were supporters of the "Naturwissenschaften" (the "natural sciences"), but who doubted the legitimacy of the "Geisteswissenschaften" (the "sciences of the spirit"). While the natural sciences may investigate the causal elements of nature, there are, it was claimed, areas beyond the competence of such an approach, where theory, observation, prediction, and confirmation must give way to intuition and sensitivity, and where human truths that transcend empiricism can be apprehended only through human rapport, personal testimony, and introspection.

But, just as "creationism" is giving way to "intelligent design," "scientism" is now also being repackaged. Scientific research in many areas -- climate change, human cell growth and development, gender and sexual orientation, the evolution of morality, the material and organic nature of mind and consciousness -- threaten long-established moral assumptions, and those who oppose science and its moral influence need some more compelling philosophical justification than personal claims to religious enlightenment and esoteric knowledge.

So, in his book "Naturalism and the Human Condition -- Against Scientism," Frederick Olafson proposes something he calls "the natural attitude" as a replacement for naturalism and its attendant scientism. In his preface, he promises that progress in human self-understanding can be made without following "the transcendental road" against which E.O. Wilson warns. But if you look up his note on Wilson in the back of the book, you will find Olafson criticizing Wilson for failing to understand that a normative theory of justice requires a "different mode of treatment from that of empirical studies of human conduct." What kind of different treatment? Look at the page opposite to that note, on the last page of the text, and you will find a ringing endorsement of "transcendence of the organism that each of us is" as the final excuse for propounding "truths" that need make no sense: "..[T]here need be no obligation to make our understanding of ourselves conform to the explanatory norms that govern the world of the natural sciences. That is the obligation that naturalism seeks to impose and, as should be clear by now, distorts the very inquiries it claims to set on the royal road to the truth."

To give him his due, what may at first look to be merely a dishonest philosophical bait and switch con game, is not; because Olafson is, I believe, sincerely befuddled by his own deep misunderstanding of science. In terms of the philosophy of science, he is a foundationalist. That is, he believes that there is some human knowledge that need not be taken as provisional, and that is in no way theoretical. He identifies this knowledge as the "presence of the world," which, he claims, is "pre-philosophical," and so needs no epistemic defense. He dismisses the practice of naturalistic science as it is currently done, because he really believes that science must be constructed, like a house of cards, on this "presence." He explains that empirical studies of the neurophysiology of perception are flawed because it is only the unquestioned truth of this "presence of the world" that allows any observations to be made at all. This is how he can claim that naturalism's inquiries are distorted by its own explanatory norms.

Olafson appears to be unaware that scientists stopped thinking of science in such foundational terms almost a century ago when Russell and Whitehead failed in their attempt to derive all knowledge from first principles, and Gödel proved mathematically that a formal system cannot be both complete and consistent. Scientists know that their picture of the world is just that -- a picture, a representation, forever flawed and incomplete, which must derive its epistemic virtue from the consistency of the story as it is told from many different viewpoints and approaches. This is the "Consilience" that is the title of Wilson's book, and which Olafson so quickly and cavalierly dismisses.

Olafson does not like the concept of "representation," but mires himself in self-contradictions while trying to avoid it. Words, for example, do not "represent" objects, but "disclose" them, and cannot derive meaning from human behavior, as this would imply that a speaker might have to observe his own behavior to learn the meaning of his own words (page 50). Nevertheless, a few pages later, while trying to argue that beliefs cannot possibly be encoded in brain-states, he concedes that a person might indeed have to work out his own knowledge of his own beliefs by observing his own behavior (page 56).

Having convinced himself that his "world" of "presence" is the foundational truth on which science must be built, Olafson fails to engage either naturalism, or the ever-growing and self-validating network of theoretical knowledge that is modern science. Anyone at all educated in biology knows that the theory of evolution is not supported by a definitive list of evolutionary steps like Biblical begats, or by a set of fossils in museum exhibits that are "present" for us, but by a web of mutually supporting theories and observations from many branches of science that, taken together, make the theory of descent with modification appear to be much more likely to be true than any alternative. It is not foundational perceptions of a true "world" of "presence" that justify scientific knowledge, but the cross-linked support provided by a multitude of highly probable theories. Science is not a true description of nature so much as it serves as an apt metaphor.

But metaphor is a concept beyond Olafson's ken. In his chapter on language he mentions the communicative function of words only as an afterthought, and struggles mightily to explain "disclosure" and "presence" as something other than "magical." He finally has to admit that "there is nothing in the corpus of scientific or common-sense knowledge that can explain presence causally or otherwise." So we are expected to just accept his claim that language and science can exist without representation and metaphor without any further explanation.

Perhaps the nearest to an explanation of "the natural attitude" and "presence" is found in his chapter on "What does the brain do?" Here, while again rejecting the notion that perception could involve a "re-presentation" of external objects within the physiological processes of the brain, he complains that perception as a series of causal physical and neural processes would have to be understood as distinct from those objects. "By contrast," he tells us, "a perception as it is understood in the natural attitude is precisely the presence of that object to the person whose perception it is." A causal theory of perception, he says, would have to posit a "reverse chain" of causal events in which the brain and the sense organs would somehow "cause" the presence of the object in "the world."

Olafson seems to be unaware that perception, as a physical and biological process in which a physical or chemical metaphorical representation of some aspect of the natural environment functions to modify future behavior, is something that emerged very early in the evolution of life. It is well-understood and has been a staple of undergraduate physiology lab demonstrations for at least a half-century, for example in the simple neural circuits that produce the shadow response of barnacles. It has also been studied in the behavior of free-swimming single cell bacteria, which can sense when the organism is experiencing an increasing or decreasing concentration of nutrients over time, and will change direction in a random manner more frequently if the concentration is going down, less frequently if it is going up. It is in the biology of metaphor, where the activity of a set of photo-sensitive neurons can signal possible predatory danger; or where binding of chemical receptors can warn of a reduced food supply; or indeed where a chain of chemical metaphors links DNA to protein and thence to enzymatic catalysis; it is in such physical and chemical metaphor, where one physical representation stands in informationally for another physical reality, that resides the very stuff of life.

When Olafson announces that he is against scientism, what he really means is that he is against science. What he gains by trying to mystify perception and to deny that it is a purely natural part of biology, chemistry, and physics, is the same freedom sought by the proponents of the Geisteswissenschaften: freedom from the constraints and safeguards of the methods of the natural sciences, and from the necessity to find consistency in human knowledge. "The exercise of our distinctive powers," he explains, "depends in some measure on their being actively cultivated; and their proper cultivation, in turn, requires that they be recognized and conceived in some adequate manner."

The goal of this kind of attack on science is to create an illusion of intellectual integrity for the kind of "truth" that still wants to find its justification in intuition and sensitivity. By imagining a "world" that is a "space of reasons" as distinct from a "nature" that is a "space of causations," Olafson sets the stage for the continued promotion of prejudicial "truths" that need never confront the kind of tests to prevent self-deception that are required for the merely probable theories of natural science.

So when the exercise of the "distinctive powers" of the next inquisition leads to the inevitable revelation that the atheistic naturalistic scientists must be burned at the stake (as was Giordano Bruno, for the very sin of scientism, for believing that knowledge of nature is inseparable from knowledge of morality and justice), then there will be no obligation to listen when the sinners object that they have been given no explanation, causal or otherwise, drawing on either science or common sense, to justify such an auto-da-fe. And it will be no occasion for embarrassment when the inquisitors find that they must ask the naturalists to provide them with the match.