Edward Feser's Blog, page 53

The Immateriality of the Mind

At the Society of Catholic Scientists meeting at Catholic University of America last June, I gave the keynote address on the topic “Arguments for the Immateriality of the Mind.”  You can now watch the lecture via YouTube.  (For anyone who is wondering, Prof. Karin Öberg, one of the conference organizers, is the one you’ll see introducing me.)  Some of the other conference talks can also be seen at the SCS page at YouTube. Links to other recent talks of mine can be found at my main website.

Review of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (Updated)

UPDATE: The review has now been unlocked and can be read for free at the CRB website.

My reviewof Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress appears in the Summer 2018 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.Links to other book reviews from CRB and elsewhere can be found at my main website.

Review of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

My reviewof Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress appears in the Summer 2018 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Links to other book reviews from CRB and elsewhere can be found at my main website.

An Open Appeal to the Cardinals of the Church

An international group of 45 Catholic scholars and clergy has signed an appeal to the cardinals of the Catholic Church, calling on them to advise Pope Francis to retract the recent revision made to the Catechism, on the grounds that its appearance of contradicting scripture and traditional teaching is causing scandal.  The appeal and list of signatories has been published today as an open letter at First Things.
As LifeSiteNews is reporting, over 30 further Catholic scholars, clergy, and professionals have also added their signatures to the appeal.  This longer list can be viewed there.

Three problems with the change to the Catechism (Updated)

UPDATE 8/13: The Stream recently interviewed me about the change to the Catechism.

In a new article at Catholic Herald, I analyze the recent revision to the Catechism in greater detail.  I argue that there are three serious problems with it.  

An op-ed on the revision by Joseph Bessette, my co-author on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed , appears at The Wall Street Journal.  

Joe and I were recently interviewed by LifeSiteNews.  Today I did a Skype interview on the subject with Michael Knowles at The Daily Wire. At Public Discourse, Prof. Korey Maas comments on my arguments concerning capital punishment and their relationship to the controversy over Dignitatis Humanae.

Three problems with the change to the Catechism

In a new article at Catholic Herald, I analyze the recent revision to the Catechism in greater detail.  I argue that there are three serious problems with it.  
An op-ed on the revision by Joseph Bessette, my co-author on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed , appears at The Wall Street Journal.  

Joe and I were recently interviewed by LifeSiteNews.  Today I did a Skype interview on the subject with Michael Knowles at The Daily Wire.
At Public Discourse, Prof. Korey Maas comments on my arguments concerning capital punishment and their relationship to the controversy over Dignitatis Humanae.

Pope Francis and capital punishment

Pope Francis has changed the Catechism’s teachingon capital punishment so that it now flatly rules out the practice as “inadmissible” on doctrinal, and not merely prudential, grounds – apparently contradicting two millennia of clear and consistent teaching to the contrary.  I comment on this development in an article at First Things. That capital punishment can be legitimate at least in principle is a teaching that clearly meets the criteria for being an infallible and irreformable doctrine of the ordinary Magisterium of the Church, for reasons I set out at length in a recent article at Catholic World Report.  The evidence is set out in even greater depth by Joseph Bessette and I in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .
To contradict this traditional teaching is a doctrinal error, pure and simple – something possible when a pope is not speaking ex cathedra, albeit most popes bend over backwards to avoid even the appearance of such a thing.  However, on several issues – marriage and divorce, worthiness to receive Holy Communion, contraception, capital punishment, and more – Pope Francis has repeatedly made statements that appear to contradict traditional Catholic teaching, and has persistently refused to respond to respectful requests for clarification made by members of the hierarchy and prominent theologians.  Moreover, he has done so not only in offhand comments during interviews and the like, but in official magisterial documents, such as Amoris Laetitia, and now the Catechism.  
This is, to put it mildly, a highly unusual situation.  These are not normal times in the Church.  It was providential that the CDF under Pope St. John Paul II made it explicit, in Donum Veritatis , that Catholic theologians have the right and sometimes even the duty respectfully to raise criticisms of deficient magisterial documents.  As I showed in a recent article, this teaching is by no means a novelty, but has deep roots in the tradition of the Church – for example, in Aquinas’s discussion of the right and duty of the faithful to correct errant prelates, even publicly.  There can be no reasonable doubt that the norms set out by Donum Veritatis, by Aquinas, and by this neglected part of Catholic tradition in general, are by no means of merely theoretical interest.  They have urgent contemporary practical application.  
Defenders of the change to the Catechism will no doubt be trotting out the (sometimes shrill and poorly argued) critiques of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed that appeared last year.  Here are links to my replies to the most significant of these critiques:
Hot Air vs. Capital Punishment: A Reply to Paul Griffiths and David Bentley Hart, Catholic World Report (November 28, 2017)
Traditional Catholic Doctrine on Capital Punishment is Irreversible: A Reply to E. Christian Brugger, Public Discourse(November 19, 2017)
St. John Paul II Did Not Change Catholic Teaching on Capital Punishment: A Reply to E. Christian Brugger, Public Discourse(November 20, 2017)
Capital Punishment, Catholicism, and Natural Law: A Reply to Christopher Tollefsen, Public Discourse (November 21, 2017)
On capital punishment, even the pope’s defenders are confused [A reply to Robert Fastiggi, Austen Ivereigh, Christian Brugger, and Mark Shea], Catholic World Report (October 21, 2017)
Catholic theologians must set an example of intellectual honesty: A reply to Prof. Robert Fastiggi, Catholic World Report (October 30, 2017)
Yes, traditional Church teaching on capital punishment is definitive [A further reply to Fastiggi], Catholic World Report(November 21, 2017)
Capital punishment and the infallibility of the ordinary Magisterium, Catholic World Report (January 20, 2018)

Tugwell on St. Albert on negative theology

Negative theology is a crucial component of classical theism.  To a first approximation, the idea is that at least with respect to some aspects of the divine nature, we can say what God is not rather than what he is.  But again, that is only a first approximation, and a potentially misleading one at that.  In his long and substantive introduction to the spiritual theology of St. Albert the Great in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings , Fr. Simon Tugwell makes some important observations about the matter.  I want to call attention to four of them. An obvious and uncontroversial example of negative theology would be the claim that God is uncaused.  To say that God is uncaused is, by itself, merely to say that he is not caused.  This assertion doesn’t strictly tell us what God isbut what he is not.  Pretty simple.  Except that there is more to it than that, and my “by itself” qualifier is essential.  This brings me to the first point from Tugwell:
1. Negative theology is not a matter of God merely lacking something
Suppose your eight-year-old child has started piano lessons and seems to be doing reasonably well.  You mention to a friend that your child seems to be musical.  Suppose your friend responds, blandly and without a trace of irony: “That’s interesting.  I was watching this movie Amadeus last night.  Mozart was musical too.”  I’ve embellished Tugwell’s example a bit, but he observes that “we might… hesitate to say that Mozart was ‘musical’; the little boy next door may be musical, but Mozart—?  The word hardly begins to do justice to his talent” (p. 43).  
The point, of course, is not that Mozart is lackingmusical ability, but rather that what he has is not properly conveyed by attributing to him the sort of thing a little boy has.  Saying that “Mozart was musical too” trivializes his ability.  Mozart is more than “musical” in the sense in which the boy is musical, not less.  Hence, Tugwell suggests, we might truly say that Mozart was not musical, insofar as what Mozart had was not limited to being “musical” in the way that a little boy might be musical.
To supplement Tugwell’s example, consider the famous lines from The Elephant Man: “I am not an animal!  I am a human being!”  In saying this, Joseph Merrick was not intending to contradict the Aristotelian definition of a human being as a rational animal, and he was certainly not claiming to be less than an animal.  Rather, he was saying that he was more than a mere animal.  You might think of the remark as a kind of “negative anthropology,” one we all deploy when we distinguish human beings from animals.  What we are saying is not that human beings lack animality, but rather that they cannot be reduced to mere animality.  
So, go back to the claim that God is uncaused.  When we refer to the cause of a thing, we are identifying something external to it that explains it or makes it intelligible, something that makes it the case that it exists or that it has some attribute.  But when classical theists say that God is uncaused, they are not saying that God lacks intelligibility or an explanation of his existence or attributes.  They are not denying the principle of sufficient reason.  Rather, they are saying that, unlike other things, the source of God’s intelligibility, what explains his existence and attributes, is not to be found in something external to him.  Rather, it is to be found within him, in his very nature.  Things need causes to the extent that they exhibit potentiality or composition.  God is purely actual or without potentiality, and absolutely simple rather than composite.  Hence he needs, and indeed can have, nothing outside him that could cause his existence and attributes.  
The claim that God is uncaused is, accordingly, not the claim that God has less intelligibility than things that have causes do, but rather that he has more intelligibility than these other things do.  His intelligibility is entirely intrinsicto him as something that is, as it were, “already” purely actual and thus has no need for some external agent to actualize him.  Other things have less intelligibility insofar as any explanation of their existence and attributes has, to some extent, to refer to something outside them.
In general, claims of negative theology are not mere negations.  They are not mere denials that God is this or that.  They tend to contain an affirmative implication as well, to the effect that there is something in God (intelligibility, for example), but without the limitations that that something exhibits when it is found in creatures.  
2. The metaphorical and mystical names of God
This leads naturally to a second point.  St. Albert notes that there are two sorts of negations that the negative theologian wants to make.  Suppose someone said that “God is a rock,” meaning that, like a rock, God is solid, stable, and a foundation on which other things might rest.  The negative theologian will point out that this way of speaking can only be metaphorical rather than literally true.  
But other claims about God are not metaphorical.  For example, when we say God is a cause, we are speaking literally.  But God’s mode of causality is nevertheless radically unlike that of creaturely causes.  For example, when bringing about effects, God does not work through corporeal organs, the way we do.  For the very existence of anything corporeal is precisely part of what he is causing.  Hence we have to deny that God’s causality is like the causality with which we are familiar in experience.  As Aquinas emphasizes, we have to say that there is in God, not the samecausality that we see in the world around us, but rather something analogous to what we call causality in the world around us – where analogical attributions of this sort are not univocal but not metaphorical either.  
Albert gives as an example the attribution of fatherhoodto God.  This is, for Albert, no mere metaphor.  At the same time, here too we are attributing to God something which, in its creaturely manifestations, has all sorts of limitations that cannot apply to God.  For example, human fathers produce their children by way of sexual reproduction and thus by way of corporeal organs, they are imperfect in their love and wisdom, and so on.  None of this is true of God.  So, for much of the content we associate with the term “father,” the negative theologian will deny that it applies to God.
These non-metaphorical attributions are labeled by Albert the “mystical” or “secret” names of God.  The idea is that when we call God a cause or a father, we are not speaking merely metaphorically, but that since the limitations associated with creaturely causes or fathers must be negated, the positive content of the attribution is thinned out in the extreme.  The nature of God’s causality and fatherhood are in this way largely secretor hidden to us.  We can affirm literally that God is a cause and that he is a father, but we can say far more about what this does not involve than what it does involve.  
There are, Albert says, three ways that these mystical names of God can be potentially misleading, so that the negative theologian insists on qualifying them:
[T]hey present as complex a reality which is of infinite simplicity; they present imperfectly what is absolutely perfect; and they sometimes present as an accident something which is really substance.  (Quoted at p. 77 of Tugwell)
Hence, creaturely causes are always composite.  In the case of a physical substance, this entails having corporeal parts, and with all creaturely causes it entails at the very least being a composite of act and potency.  But God is pure actuality and entirely simple or non-composite.  Creaturely causes are always in various ways limited or imperfect in their causal power.  God is not.  In a created thing, we can distinguish between the thing itself, its causal power, and the exercise of that causal power on some particular occasion.  In God, who is simple or non-composite, we cannot make such distinctions.  Hence much of the content we associate with the things of our experience that we call causes has to be negated in the case of God.
This does not entail that there is no positive content left over once the needed negations have been made, though classical theists disagree about the extent to which our knowledge of God is negative.  (I discuss this issue in the chapter on God’s nature in Five Proofs of the Existence of God .)  But even where the attribution of something God is not metaphorical, the negative theologian insists that its positive content will, given God’s pure actuality, simplicity, etc., inevitably be at least somewhat less than meets the eye.
I would add to what St. Albert and Tugwell have to say that if you think this somehow makes theology suspect, you should keep in mind that exactly the same thing occurs in physics, when the physicist describes something remote from ordinary experience.  For example, as philosopher of physics David Albert notes in his book Quantum Mechanics and Experience , the physicist’s notion of a superposition has very little positive content.  What the physics tells us about a quantum object in a superposition of states A and B, Albert says, is that it is not in A and it is not in B and it is not in both and it is not in neither, but rather in a superposition of A and B.  “And what that means (other than “none of the above”) we don’t know” so that “superposition” is “just a name for something we don’t understand” (p. 11).  
This is exactly what we should expect.  The human intellect’s natural home, as it were, is the world of ordinary physical objects, which are mixtures of actuality and potentiality.  But God is pure actuality devoid of potentiality.  And quantum mechanics, I would argue, studies that level of physical reality which is closest to (though not quite identical with) what the Aristotelian would call prime matter – the pure potentiality to take on form. The closer the intellect gets to either pure actuality or pure potentiality, the less its ordinary modes of description apply, and the more those modes of description have to be qualified by negations.
3. Negative theology can lead precisely toward scripture rather than away from it
Classical theists are sometimes accused of conceiving of God in a way that lets philosophical speculation trump scripture.  When one considers how deeply scripture permeates the thinking and writing of classical theists like Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, et al., the charge can be seen to be quite ridiculous.  But as Tugwell points out (see pp. 43 and 78-79), classical theism’s emphasis on the role of negative theology in a proper understanding of God often leads its advocates precisely toward an accent on scripture rather than away from it.
The reason is that one of the key themes of negative theology is the limitations that inevitably face the unaided human intellect in grasping the divine nature given, on the one hand, its creaturely and finite nature, and on the other hand, the infinity of God.  The human mind simply cannot, on its own, attain very much in the way of positive knowledge of the divine nature (though, again, exactly how much or little positive knowledge we have is a matter of dispute between classical theists).  Hence we must rely largely (or entirely, depending on the negative theologian in question) on God’s revelation to us in the Bible, rather than on anything philosophical speculation can yield.  
In this way, negative theology can lead precisely to an emphasis on scripture over philosophy as a source of knowledge of the divine nature.  Note that the point isn’t that it always leads in this direction or that it has to.  Moreover, even the scripture-oriented negative theologian will insist that scriptural descriptions of God must always be interpreted in a way that avoids the attribution to God of any creaturely limitations.  The point is rather that it is superficial to suppose that classical theism’s key philosophical commitments entail a downgrading of scripture.
4. Negative theology is a remedy against idolatry
Albert summarizes the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius as the thesis that God “is seen precisely in our ignorance of him” (quoted at p. 90).  It is only when we take seriously all the ways that God is not, how radically unlike created things he is, that we begin to get a glimpse of the divine nature.  Tugwell writes:
[This] might appear to make God painfully remote.  But if this is how it strikes us, we need to look carefully at our reaction.  There is a very proper way to make Godremote from us, namely, the removing of our comfortable false gods, our idols.  Negative theology reminds us of just how many things are not God. The patron saint of a later and rather different kind of "mystical theology," St. John of the Cross, tears away at our domesticated deities with almost insolent ruthlessness.  If we feel that St. Albert is “taking away our God,” maybe our “God” was never really worth having anyway. (p. 92)
It is in light of these four points from Tugwell that we need to understand the criticisms Thomists sometimes raise against the thesis that “God is a person.”  Tugwell writes:
If certain particular ways of talking about God come to be taken as fully clear and satisfactory accounts of what God is like, our very clarity will do much to obscure our apprehension of him. The modern dogma, for instance, that “God is a person” can be given a perfectly serviceable sense, as long as we do not imagine that it tells us what God is in a way that we can understand.  If we omit the negative corrective, as most of the devotees of this slogan appear to do, then not only do we produce some rather bizarre theologies, not only do we cut ourselves off from many centuries of Christian tradition, but we also trap ourselves in assumptions about the Christian life that may actually make life rather miserable for us… [T]his is likely to conjure up all kinds of associations, which will in many cases be frequently disappointed. (p. 94)
Tugwell goes on to suggest that to say something like “God is truth” is no less correct than saying “God is a person,” but entails such a radically different way of conceiving of God that it helps to balance slogans like “God is a person” and to correct the crude anthropomorphisms we are liable fall into if we focus obsessively on that slogan.  
It is these crude anthropomorphisms that can lead to the spiritual misery and disappointment to which Tugwell refers.  We can start to think of God in a very worldly way, as if he were like a rich uncle or a conscientious bureaucrat, only smarter and stronger and invisible.  If an uncle doesn’t send us that check we desperately need or a local bureaucrat doesn’t get that pothole repaired, we start to doubt his good will or competence.  And if God doesn’t get us that job we prayed for, or heal that disease we’re suffering from, we start to doubt hisgood will or competence – if we are thinking of him in crudely anthropomorphic terms.  But God is not a mere doler-out of this-worldly goodies and favors, not because he is lessthan that, but because he is morethan that.  His will for us is for a good that transcends these worldly goods, and if he does not give us what we want here and now it is only because he wants to give us something far greater in the hereafter.  And he knows – in a way we can’t, and precisely because he is not a mere cosmic uncle or bureaucrat – that denying us these worldly goods is itself sometimes precisely the best way to ensure that we attain that higher good.  
As I have explained many times – though some people seem willfully to refuse to get the point – when criticizing the thesis that “God is a person,” the Thomist is emphatically not saying that God is impersonal.  To think that is like thinking that Joseph Merrick was denying that he had the animal faculties of sensation, appetite, and locomotion when he said “I am not an animal.”  It is like thinking that we are denying that Mozart had musical ability when we object to the bland remark that “Mozart was musical too.”
No, Merrick was saying that he was more than a mere animal, not less.  Mozart was more than merely “musical” in the way that a little boy might be musical, not less.  And God is more than the sort of person with which we are familiar in ordinary experience, not less.  The slogan “God is a person” trivializes the intellect, will, and love that are in God, just as “Mozart was musical too” trivializes Mozart’s ability, and just as remarks like “Human beings are just animals” trivialize human beings.
As I have also said many times, the problem with the slogan “God is a person” is not the word “person” but the word “a.”  There are two main reasons why this word is problematic, one philosophical and one theological.  The philosophical reason is that the slogan suggests that God is a member of the genus person, in his own species alongside the species human person and the species angelic person.  And that cannot be right, because God is not in any genus at all.  If he were, then he would be composite – he would have a genus, and a differentia that marks his species out from other species in the genus – and thus would not be absolutely simple.  And if he’s not absolutely simple, then he would have potentiality in need of actualization, would require a cause of his own, and would not be unique or ultimate in principle, but at most contingently.  He would not be God, but merely one creature-like entity among others.
The problem, again, is not the word “person.”  After all, Thomists also often object to assertions like “God is a being.”  And the problem here, too, is not the word “being” but the word “a.”  God is not a being; rather, as Aquinas says, God is subsistent being itself.  “Abeing” merely participates in being, whereas that which is subsistent being itself is that in which the various individual “beings” that there are all participate.  To call God “a being” thus trivializes his mode of existence.
Now, when Thomists make this point, no one ever accuses them of denying God’s existence.  No one says “If you deny that God is a being, you must be saying that he lacks being and is therefore unreal!”  Even critics of Thomism understand that that is in no way what the Thomist is saying.  Yet for some reason, when the Thomist objects, on the very same grounds, to the formulation “God is a person,” some critics immediately soil their pants and in high dudgeon accuse the Thomist of making God out to be something impersonal.  The Thomist is doing nothing of the kind.
The second reason the formulation “God is a person” is problematic is, again, theological.  No orthodox Christian can possibly maintain that the assertion “God is a person” is strictly correct.   And the reason is that God is a Trinity of Persons.  A person of the sort we are familiar with in everyday life is a substance.  Hence if you’ve got three persons of the ordinary sort – Mike, Carol, and their son Bobby, say – you’ve got three distinct substances.  But Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not like that.  They are three Persons in one substance.  
Now, if you go around indignantly insisting on formulations like “God is a person” – a formulation which, as Brian Davies has pointed out, is of historically relatively recent vintage and foreign to the orthodox Christian tradition – then you are bound to raise in your listener’s mind questions like: “Oh, he’s a person, is he?  So exactly which of the three Persons you Christians always talk about is he?”  Naturally, the answer that suggests itself is that he is the Father, specifically.  But then it sounds like the Son and the Holy Spirit, being distinct from the Father, must not be God.  Or maybe the Father is God with a capital “G,” and the Son and the Holy Spirit are lower-case “g” gods.  Or maybe there are three Gods with a capital “G.”  But all of these suppositions are heretical.
You might respond: “But I don’t believe any of that!  That’s not what I mean when I say ‘God is a person’!”  Good, but in that case, you are going to have to very seriously qualify this misleading assertion that “God is a person.”  And when you qualify it in all the ways you will need to in order to avoid heresy, you are going to find that you agree with the Thomist after all.  In which case, why are you so attached to this misleading slogan?  It’s no good to answer: “Because I don’t want to reduce God to something impersonal,” because neither does the Thomist.  
Here, Tugwell would insist, is where negative theology can be especially helpful.  If you are attached to this slogan “God is a person,” carefully consider all the aspects of “persons” in the ordinary sense that you will have to negate in order to maintain orthodoxy and philosophical coherence.  You may find, at the end of the exercise, that you differ from the Thomist only verbally rather than substantively. 

Five Proofs on radio

Last week I appeared on The Drew Marshall Show to discuss Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  You can listen to the episode here.Links to other recent radio and television interviews can be found here.

Fallacies physicists fall for

In his essay “Quantum Mechanics and Ontology” in his anthology Philosophy in an Age of Science , Hilary Putnam notes that “mathematically presented quantum-mechanical theories do not wear their ontologies on their sleeve… the mathematics does not transparently tell us what the theory is about.  Not always, anyhow” (p. 161).  Yet as Putnam also observes:
The reaction to [such] remarks of most physicists would, I fear, be somewhat as follows: “Why bother imposing an ‘ontology’ on quantum mechanics at all?... [Q]uantum mechanics has a precise mathematical language of its own.  If there are problems with that language, they are problems for mathematical physicists, not for philosophers.  And in any case, we know how to use that language to make predictions accurate to a great many decimal places.  If that language does not come with a criterion of ‘ontological commitment,’ so much the worse for ‘ontology.’”…
[But] to say “We physicists are just technicians making predictions; don’t bother us with that ‘physically real’ stuff” is effectively to return to the instrumentalism of the 1920s.  But physical theories are not just pieces of prediction technology.  Even those who claim that that is all they are do so only to avoid having to think seriously about the content of their theories; in other contexts they are, I have observed, quite happy to talk about the same theories as descriptions of reality – as, indeed, they aspire to be.  (pp. 153-4)
The problem is not confined to the interpretation of quantum mechanics.  The metaphysical implications of relativity theory, or indeed of any theory in physics, is something the physics itself does not reveal.  Then there are more general philosophical questions about science which science itself does not and cannot answer.  For example, what is the relationship between the abstract mathematical representation of nature afforded by physical theory and the concrete reality that it represents?  Is there more to nature than mathematical representations can capture?  What demarcates science from non-science?  What is a law of nature?  Why is the world law-governed in the first place?  And so on.

The tendency of those beholden to scientism, including professional scientists who are beholden to scientism, is to dismiss such questions on the grounds that the only thing worth talking or thinking about is whether the predictions pan out – which entails positivism, or instrumentalism, or some other form of anti-realism.  And yet, when pressed about this implication, or when presenting the findings of science to the layman, the same people will usually insist on a realist understanding of scientific theories – apparently blithely unaware of the contradiction.  And this is an equal-opportunity form of cognitive dissonance, afflicting everyone from whip-smart Ph.D.’s down to the dumbest combox troll.  

You can’t have things both ways.  If you insist that nothing worthwhile can be said about any matter that is not susceptible of experimental testing, then you have indeed ruled out of bounds philosophical questions like the ones just referred to.  But you have also thereby ruled out a realist interpretation of theoretical entities, because realism is not susceptible of experimental testing.  That’s the whole point of the debate between realism and anti-realism – that the experimental results would come out the same whether or not theoretical entities are real or just useful fictions, so that the dispute has to be settled on other grounds.

Indeed, you can’t have things even one way.  For suppose the physicist or the combox troll beholden to scientism sees the problem and, to be consistent, adopts an across-the-board instrumentalism.  He avoids philosophical issues like the ones mentioned, and he also refrains from endorsing realism.  The problem here, of course, is that even instrumentalism itself is a philosophical thesis and not a scientific one – again, the dispute between realism and anti-realist views like instrumentalism cannot be settled experimentally – so he is not really being consistent after all.  

Scientism is simply not a coherent position.  You cannot avoid having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments, because the very attempt to do so entails having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments.  And if you think that these commitments are rationally justifiable ones – and of course, anyone beholden to scientism thinks his view is paradigmatically rational – then you are implicitly admitting that there can be such a thing as a rationally justifiable thesis which is not a scientific thesis.  Which is, of course, what scientism denies.  Thus scientism is unavoidably self-defeating.

The fallacy is simple, and blindingly obvious once you see it.  So why is it so common?  Why do so many otherwise genuinely smart people (as well as people who merely like to think they are smart, like combox trolls) fall into it? 

Part of the reason is precisely because it is so common and so simple.  Again, as Putnam complains, even many professional scientists (by no means all, but many) commit the fallacy.  So, when you call someone out on it, there is a strong temptation for him to think: “If my critic is right, then I and lots of other scientists have been committing a pretty obvious fallacy for a very long time.  Surely that can’t be!”  They think that there must be some way to avoid the contradiction, even if they are never able to say what it is, and always end up doing exactly what they claim to be avoiding, viz. making extra-scientific philosophical claims.  Paradoxically, the very obviousness and prevalence of the fallacy keeps them from seeing it.  As Orwell famously said, “to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

Then there is the element of pride.  You have to be smart to do natural science.  Combox trolls usually are not very smart, but they think of themselves as smart, because they at least have the capacity to pepper their remarks with words like “physics,” “science,” “reason,” etc. as well as to rehearse whatever science trivia they picked up from Wikipedia.  So, suppose you are either a scientist or a combox troll who has gotten your head full of scientism.  You are convinced that philosophers and other non-scientists have nothing of interest to say.  Then one of them points out that you are committing a fallacy so simple that a child can see it.  That can be very hard to swallow.  And if the person pointing out the self-defeating character of scientism happens to be religious, the blow to one’s pride can be absolutely excruciating.  “Some religiousnut is going to catch me out on a blatant fallacy?  No way in hell!  I refuse to believe it!”  One’s pride in one’s presumed superiorrationality locks one into a deeply irrational frame of mind.

A third factor is that, though the fallacy is pretty simple, you have to have at least a rudimentary understanding of certain philosophical concepts – realism, instrumentalism, self-contradiction, etc. – and a basic willingness to think philosophically, in order to be able to see it.  Now, suppose you not only don’t know much about philosophy, but are positively contemptuous of it (as those beholden to scientism often are).  Then you are not going to know very much about it, and you are not likely to be able to think very clearly about even the little bit you do know.  Your prejudices keep getting in the way.  You are bound to be blind even to obvious fallacies like the one in question.

The bottom line is that if you cannot help doing philosophy – for again, the very act of denying that one needs to do it itself involves one in a philosophical commitment – but at the same time also refuse to do it, then you are inevitably both going to do it and do it badly.  

The clueless reactions I have seen to these simple points over the years only reinforce their validity.  For example, many defenders of scientism will, in response to the claim that extra-scientific philosophical commitments are unavoidable, demand that you produce an operational definition for this or that philosophical concept, or experimental evidence for this or that philosophical thesis – thereby adding begging the question to the list of fallacies of which they are guilty.  For of course, such demands presuppose the correctness of scientism, which is exactly what is at issue.

My favorite response is the suggestion that a philosopher who criticizes scientism has gotten too big for his britches.  “How dare you suggest that scientists don’t know everything!  How arrogant!”  Scientism, it seems, kills irony along with basic critical reasoning skills.

In his recent book Enlightenment Now , Steven Pinker summarizes some cognitive science research on bias, and notes that there is a special kind of bias to which those who detect bias in others are prone.  He calls it “bias bias” (p. 361).  The idea is that when you are keen to ferret out biases in others, you are often blind to the biases that influence you as you do so.  As Pinker also points out, people who are well-informed about a subject are also often prone to certain biases, precisely because the interest in the subject that leads them to learn a lot about it also makes it more difficult for them to be objective about it.  As Pinker writes:

[A] paradox of rationality is that expertise, brainpower, and conscious reasoning do not, by themselves, guarantee that thinkers will approach the truth.  On the contrary, they can be weapons for ever-more-ingenious rationalization.  (p. 359)

Pinker also judges, absolutely correctly in my view, that “the major enemy of reason in the public sphere today … is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization” (p. 371).  When you turn an idea into a political cause to promote, with allies to the cause needing to be recruited and enemies of the cause needing to be defeated, etc., then you are bound to let reason give way to rhetoric, to lose the capacity for dispassionate evaluation, and so forth.

These factors account for why defenders of scientism are often so dogmatic and nasty in their dealings with critics, often prone to ridicule and ad hominem attacks rather than the calm and rational discourse you’d think their purported commitment to reason and science would commend to them.  Scientism has become a political cause, and those beholden to it tend to delude themselves into thinking that their loud condemnations of cognitive bias and rationalization somehow make them immune to these very foibles.  There is no one in greater danger of irrational and unscientific thinking than the fanatic who screams “Reason!” and “Science!” in your face at the top of his lungs.

Scientism is, by the way, self-defeating in more than just the way already identified.  Consider that scientific methodology involves both the construction of mathematical representations of nature, and the experimental testing of those representations.  If you think carefully about either of these components – including even the second one – you will see that it cannot be correct to say that we can have no rationally justifiable belief in what cannot be experimentally tested.  

This is most obvious in the case of mathematics.  Even those beholden to scientism will typically admit that even those parts of mathematics that do not have application within empirical science constitute genuine bodies of knowledge.  And even the parts of mathematics that do have application within science operate in part by distinctively mathematical rules of reasoning rather than being evaluated solely by experimental testing.  

Now, defenders of scientism are often willing to expand their conception of what counts as “science” to include mathematics.  But there are two problems with this.  First, once they do this, then they can no longer consistently criticize philosophical claims for not being susceptible of experimental testing.  For their admission of mathematics into the fold concedes that there are rational forms of discourse that don’t involve empirical testability.  Second, the thesis that empirical science and mathematics exhaust the genuine forms of knowledge is not itself a proposition of either empirical science or mathematics.  Admitting mathematics into the science club simply does not suffice to save scientism from self-refutation.

Turn now to the notion of experimental testing.  Obviously, this presupposes that we have experiences.  Now, the fact that we have experiences, and certain very general features of experience, are themselves known through experience.  However, these particular facts are not susceptible of experimental testing.  The reason is that experimental testing – and in particular, the possibility of falsification – requires that experience can go in one direction or another.  We predict that it will go in direction A rather than B – that we will observe this rather than that – and then try to set up an experiment or observational scenario in which we can see whether this prediction pans out.

But not everything that is true of experience is testable in this way, not even in principle.  To take an example beloved of us Aristotelians, consider the proposition that change occurs.  We know this is true from experience.  But that does not mean that it is empirically testablein the sense of falsifiable.  It is notfalsifiable.  For the very possibility of testability or falsifiability presupposeschange.  You predict that you will have such-and-such an experience and see whether it happens, and that procedure itself involves change.  You go from thinking “Let’s see if this happens” to thinking “Ah, it did happen” or “Oh, it didn’t happen,” and either way a change will have occurred.  The thesis that change occurs is, accordingly, not falsifiable or empirically testable.  And yet we know it from experience, and the very possibility of empirical testing presupposes it.  Any appeal to empirical testability thus presupposes that we know at least some things that are not empirically testable (such as the reality of change).  Which is precisely what scientism denies.  Hence, once again, scientism is self-refuting.

Those beholden to scientism don’t see this because they conflate empirical with experimentally testable.  And these are not the same thing.  Again, the proposition that change occurs is empirical in the sense that we know it via experience, but it is not experimentally testable or falsifiable.  Aristotelian philosophers like Andrew van Melsen and Henry Koren characterize propositions like this as grounded in “pre-scientific experience.”  They are grounded in experience in the sense that we know them empirically rather than a priori.  They are pre-scientificin the sense that science involves empirical testability or falsifiability, and these propositions concern facts about experience that are deeper than, and presupposed by, anything testable or falsifiable.  

Hume’s Fork famously holds that all knowable propositions concern either matters of fact or relations of ideas.  The logical positivists drew a similar dichotomy between analytic and synthetic propositions, and contemporary naturalists often claim that all significant propositions concern either empirical science or conceptual analysis.  These are all variations on the same basic idea, and scientism typically appeals to one or another of them.  But as I have argued elsewhere, they are all self-refuting.  Hume’s Fork is not itself true either by virtue of relations of ideas or by virtue of matters of fact.  The positivist’s principle of verifiability is not itself either analytic or synthetic.  The naturalist’s dichotomy of empirical science and conceptual analysis is not itself knowable either by way of empirical science or conceptual analysis.  Like the adherent of scientism caught in his self-refutation, none of the adherents of these related views has much more to offer in response than a shit-eating grin.

Anyway, propositions of mathematics, propositions grounded in “pre-scientific experience,” and philosophical propositions (such as the thesis of scientism itself, which is philosophical rather than scientific) fall into a third (and indeed, perhaps a fourth, a fifth, etc.) category beyond the two that these self-defeating views are willing to recognize.

Metaphysics, as Gilson said, always buries its undertakers.   Or it would do so if those untertakers weren’t so busy burying themselves.