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Philosophy of science and the study of religion
Religion 39 (2009) 356–360
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Philosophy of science and the study of religion Peter Machamer History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
a b s t r a c t This paper responds to the six papers from the Tokyo IAHR session. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
People who study religion, in whatever way, oftentimes worry about the fact that religion gets explained in ways that diminish its importance or dismiss its reality. The deepest forms of this worry raise the questions: what is the reality involved in religion and religious experiences, and what gets lost in explanations? Put more forcefully, should those who study religion, and are not theologians or proselytizers, be concerned about what is the true ontology?1 This is not a problem unique to students of religion. The same questions must be raised when looking at any historical endeavor.2 One common way to think about the historical enterprise is as an attempt to capture the mental set of the historical actors and to describe what they believed and the ways in which these beliefs mattered to them. A purported alternative historiographic model is to look at history from our point of view, from what we now believe to be true. This often is called Whiggish or anachronistic history. It is cogently arguable that we cannot avoid some degree of anachronism because of where we are historically situated compared to our historical objects of study. Analogous points may be made concerning anthropological investigations into other cultures. I shall return to these ontological themes towards the end of this essay. The papers in this issue discuss concepts in the philosophy of science as they might apply to the study of religion. As a philosopher and historian of science, I applaud this effort, and though I may be critical of some of the implementations, this is an insightful set of papers and the use of concepts from philosophy of science is a good way to bring new insights to the study of religion. My friend and colleague, Colin MacCabe and I occasionally teach a graduate seminar entitled ‘Philosophy of Science for Humanists’. MacCabe is a professor of English and Film Studies. We are both convinced that all the humanities can benefit from thinking more in terms of philosophy of science. In this set of papers we find discussions of concepts such as explanation, interpretation, causality, models, and, especially, reduction. There seems to be a common theme running through most of them that reflects the deep question I raised at the startda basic fear of reduction and the elimination of what is distinctively religious about religious studies. Similar fears are not uncommon in philosophy. For example, my old friend Wilfrid Sellars distinguished between the space of causes and the space of reasons. The space of reasons was the space of the person and/or the space of the social, while the space of causes was the space of science. In making this distinction, Sellars is followed by many others including John McDowell and Robert Brandom (see Brandom, 2001; McDowell, 1996, 2001; Sellars, 2007). Yet one has to wonder here and in the following papers about religion, why such a strong bifurcation is needed. It seems that people are afraid that if the realm of causes extends to persons and the social, then there can be no attributions of reason, responsibility, morality, or religious spirit. In the realm of causes, they think that there are no norms, only descriptions. In this paper I wish to challenge this way of thought, and in so doing allay this fear. I do not have space to present detailed arguments for the claims I have adumbrated here. Sometimes my mode will be solely assertive or derogatively interrogative. But there are stronger, more cogent arguments. I hope here that I present enough to intrigue readers to read and think further, and in new ways. Behind this fear of eliminativist reduction lays another related, somewhat pervasive, yet equally mischievous set of beliefs about causes. As Jeppe Jensen, in his paper here, puts it, ‘a ‘‘cause’’ is only considered a true cause if it necessitates its effect’. He thinks that there are causal explanations, e.g., singular causal explanations, that fall outside the scope of scientific theory and which
E-mail address: [email protected] As I was writing these remarks I chanced to read a symposium on ‘abundant’ history, in which Orsi (2008) argues for a history that somehow captures the ‘experiences of radical presence or realness. abundant events’. He contrasts this with modernist epistemology and historiography, by which he seems to mean a view that takes naturalism or science as the proper way to think about the world. He and his commentators are addressing this question about ontology. 2 For example, see the collection of papers in Daston (2000), which are attempts to show the ways and why of doing historical ontology. There is a corresponding movement of these days in historical epistemology. 1
0048-721X/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.religion.2009.08.006
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presumably do not require necessity attaching to them. But why should anyone hold an outmoded and never-explicated view of causes in science or anywhere as being necessary? The origin of this bizarre idea lies in views about the necessity of (universal) laws as distinguished from accidental generalizations. Necessity, supposedly, was shown through connecting causal claims to laws and/or to the support of counterfactual propositions. However, recent philosophical work on the biological sciences shows impressively that most of biology, neuroscience, and, we might add, social science, does not have anything like traditionally characterized universal or statistical laws. Yet biology explains phenomena in coherent and intelligible ways by means of mechanisms.3 Jensen seemingly recognizes this when discussing his contextual or positional (5th kind) explanations. But he does not elaborate this type of explanation by discussing mechanisms, rather he holds that in such explanations ‘the explanatory process consists of placing the unknown in a context of things known’. In some sense that needs to be described more clearly all explanations do this. Jensen, however, ties this point to a narrative model of explanation. There are ways in which this kind of narrative explanation can be seen as compatible with explanations by mechanism, as I shall explain a bit more below. But this insight by Jensen is unfortunately tied to a trichotomous division that assigns causal explanations to the physical, functional explanations to the life sciences, and intentional explanations to the social and human sciencesdas if, indeed, these were fundamentally different. Presumably the intentional is the domain of narrative explanations. I think functional explanations are causal, and that not all social and human explanations are intentional. Consider a function of the heart, which is to the pump the blood, or what comes to the same, the cause of the blood’s circulation is the pumping of the heart. Or, I may intentionally brake my car at when I see a stop sign. But there is no clear intention that explains why there are laws about stop signs, unless one attributes intentions collectively to legislatures, which may be one could argue. But more basically, seeing the stop sign is what caused me, by virtue of my prior learning, to form the intention to brake my car. But there is no clear intention involved in the seeing, although there is in the attending. Another form of such a divisive mode of thinking, now in a dichotomous version, is also present when distinguishing between interpretation (understanding) and explanation (explaining by causes). Benson Saler locates the issue through his opposition to those who believe that the sciences are arranged in a hierarchical order, where the ideal is to find something basic. Particularly egregious to him are the ‘nothing but’ forms of reduction. I agree with his position against strict hierarchies and basic fundamentality. But Saler backs off too much when he confines his worries to Robert Nozick’s ‘inappropriate reductions in value’. He approves an example of heat, where apparently thermodynamics is properly reduced to statistical mechanics. However, he says, ‘We should not look at reduction as a doctrine or across-the-board commitment’. His cogent call is for compatibilities, unification (Chomsky) or ‘conceptually integrated theory’, though, unfortunately, he seems committed to achieving this through evolutionary theory (Cosmides et al., 1992). Evolutionary theory, conceived of as adaptation by natural selection, has neither the explanatory power nor even evidence for its particular claims that would allow it to integrate all the aspects of cultural and cognitive life that are relevant (see Buller, 2006). Let us just look briefly at an example of heat being reduced that is used by Churchland (1993) and by Carl Craver and William Bechtel (2007). They all fault Betty Crocker for explaining how heat is caused in a microwave by Betty’s description of the molecules as moving fast. They claim that heat is not caused by this movement, rather heat just is (identical with) the mean kinetic energy of an isolated group of moving molecules. And this is a good case of what some physicists take heat to be. But why privilege the physicist over the cook? Heat for the cook is the intensity of the sensation of hotness that she feels coming off the pan while ascertaining whether the oil has enough heat to fry properly. There is no need, theoretically or practically, to restrict the concept of heat to being only understood in terms of mean kinetic energy, or being really nothing but mean kinetic energy. We talk causally about heat in many ways and differently in different contexts. Heat is a complex concept. Consider the question, ‘Is it warm enough for you?’ This warmth is not metaphorical extension, and the question cannot be answered if one treats heat just as kinetic energy. Moreover, it seems that few if any of the complexities of heat will be explained by evolutionary biology, however loosely construed. The conceptual integration that Saler seeks may better be thought of through Sandra Mitchell’s idea of integrated pluralism (see below and Mitchell, 2003, 2009a,b). Robert Segal too has some worries about reduction, though most of his essay deals with how far Kuhn’s work is applicable to the study of religion. The reduction issue arises, mistakenly for Segal, when social scientists (like radical externalist historians of science) push a reductionist causal line that eliminates religious content. Segal, rightly, claims Kuhn argued for a combination of internalist (history of ideas) and externalist (social context) causes. And he criticizes the religionists (as he calls them) for thinking that ‘to reduce X to Y is not to explain X in terms of Y but to cease explaining X’. But some social scientists and philosophers seek to do this, which is why they are eliminativist reductionists. They think, minimally, that X is not really a phenomenon that needs explanation and, as Saler has it, Y is basic or fundamental. So the justifiable claim here is also about rejecting reduction and fundamentality, and following Kuhn to somehow integrate the epistemological, cognitive, personal, and social aspects.4 The two papers that deal with neuroscience and the study of religion also exhibit worries about reduction, though with a twist. David Goldberg goes after d’Aquili and Newberg (1999) for their reductionist attempt to discover and localize how and where the association areas of the brain produce mystical experiences. He cogently criticizes them for ignoring the brain’s plasticity and how it is affected by social and historical contextualization. Goldberg stresses the embodied nature of the brain and the functioning of the whole person as he grows and adapts to the ‘cultural hermeneutics that surround the developing child’. In a similar vein, though in a strikingly different manner, Armin Geertz critiques the science that underlies neuro-theology. His critique, following Ratcliffe (2006), lays out some of the ways in which religious biases and convictions about the true ontology of the believer affects methodology, experimental design and interpretation of evidence. Both of these papers are anti-reductionist, but unlike those discussed above, they accuse the neuro-religionists of being simple-minded reductionists, and, more significantly, of doing bad science because of this. These essays are examples of what good philosophy of science does, though they could be better grounded in relevant research. Philosophy of science is a highly theoretical and methodological enterprise that critiques not only how philosophers have understood the workings and implications of science, but also and
3 See, for example, Beatty (1995). Mitchell (2003) argues that laws may be taken in ways other than the traditional. Machamer et al. (2000) explore explanations by mechanisms. For a hybrid view that still takes the necessity of laws seriously without any argument, and that does not come to any obvious conclusion about the nature of laws, see Rosenberg and McShea (2007); but see Dupre´ (2007). 4 For more detail see Machamer and Osbeck (2003, 2004).
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more importantly how science is actually working. That is, it critiques the practice of science itself. I should point out that not everyone in philosophy of science agrees with this position. But I do believe the best and brightest do. Both of these neuroscience papers call for a better methodology. Both invoke the need for more attention to social developmental context. If I were to frame these issues in a different way, I would say that their insights are about the fact that neither the human being nor the human brain are isolated, closed systems. The human being and the human brain function in a complex environment that is always social, cultural, and natural as well as personal, neurological, and biological. One may completely agree with this insight, yet contend that there is no reason not to treat these complex phenomena in terms of the causal mechanisms that constitute and affect them. The mechanisms involved are at many levels and often simultaneously acting. They are social, cultural, physical, biological, cognitive, and other kinds of mechanisms. Since all mechanisms of whatever type are multi-leveled, reduction in the manner envisaged by the eliminativists, or ‘nothing but’ people, is impossible.5 If explaining phenomena in terms of mechanisms is disturbing, one may rephrase the points I have just made (and I am aware that I have not argued for them) in terms of models. Bryan Rennie in his paper discusses models of and models for. Religious narrative, he says (following Clifford Geertz), is a model of experience and a model for behavior. But models, most often, are models of causal mechanisms. Narrative models are linguistic models that use causal verbs to describe the activities of the entities in the narrative. So the allegories or parables of which Rennie speaks are models of life’s actions, describing ways that show how and sometimes why the actions took place. Rennie is absolutely right when he writes ‘Assuredly, scientific method fails us when it comes to the whole span of human experience, and it is notoriously unhelpful in the day-to-day solution of ethical problems’. But the scientific method that fails is that which presupposes ‘explanation as causal reduction’ (as Jensen calls it). Jensen too invokes models as devices through which we understand (to paraphrase Jensen) the human and social by connecting many of the factors and conditions about something, and then showing their reciprocal relations. This is just building a model, or attempting to find the mechanisms by which these some things work, so that we may explain how they work. Still in the grip of the bad way of thinking about the causal, he wants to contrast it against the structuralist concept of explanation. Yet in the next sentence he quotes Lawson and McCauley (1990) as saying that the aim of structuralists is to ‘constitute hypotheses about the underlying mechanism responsible for observable effects’. This is the explanation by mechanisms of which I have been talking above. The only strange difference is that he somehow contrasts such mechanistic explanation with the causal. So let us look at bit more at the nature of the causal. As noted above, causes form a major part of narratives, and certainly causes occur abundantly in our explanations of everyday affairs. Moreover, we treat beliefs as causal in that intentions to act often are the causes of why we act in the way we do. We even treat reasons as causes, in such cases as when we think things through, and then act because of the reasons we have reasoned. Moreover social or cultural norms are causal factors in our lives. We know and perceive situations in life that include learned norms as part of their constitution. These norms constrain (at least probabilistically) how we act. For example, I see from the situation I am in that this is not the time to start dancing in my underwear. This is a form of social causation. We need to be able to explain how normative constraints, be ethical, religious, or prudential, function as causes of human behavior. There is nothing strange about this use of ‘cause’. Nor need it be construed as different from how the physicist uses the term. What one has to deny is that physics, in whatever branch, is somehow more basic or important than the other levels we use to assess human life. That is, we must deny that eliminative reduction is even a possibility. If one does this, then one does not have to go searching for non-causal forces nor make unclear distinctions between explaining and understanding. In all cases at all levels we learn by discovering the mechanisms that produce the phenomena of interest, while at the same time we are developing theories or models about what causes what. Strangely enough physicians, in some instances, have had this idea for years. When you go to the doctor complaining of undue frequency or intensity of headaches, a good physician will ask you about stresses in your life (social), what you are worried about (personal), about your ingestion of drugs (including alcohol), and will order a blood workup (looking for physiological causes). Perhaps also she’ll order up an MRI scan (looking for CNS or brain malfunctions). Notice how this approach amalgamates the social, personal, and biological. And this is not unusual. When you want to help a friend or family member who is depressed, you ask questions such as have you eaten recently, have you been in an accident, have you had any bad experiences, what’s going on with your emotional state, have you been checked out by a physician? In dealing with most aspects of human life, we treat the complex systems that we are involved in as interactive and inseparable. The only time this does not occur is in domains (often scientific) where we pretend that we may treat a level (say, the molecular level) as a closed system. But this is an experimental pretense necessary for research and for designing controlled experiments. Even here, it must be noted that the levels are pragmatically and contextually determined, not fixed or ontologically differentiated. So let us assume that we have all given up eliminative reduction.6 Where does that leave us with the ontological problems that were used to begin this essay? Herein lies one big problem for the study of religion (and many other disciplines). It is reported that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin said, in 1997, that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time, and that she saw human footprints in the fossil remains of the dinosaurs (Braun, 2008). Now in explaining her claim I can indicate that she sincerely believed what she said. But what kind of stance can I hold toward the content of her belief. Is it possible to be neutral about such a claim without falling into the most bizarre and unhealthy form of relativism imaginable? Do we really want an epistemological view of the world that treats all beliefs, even all sincere beliefs, as equally true? It is true that what humans take to be facts, and what humans believe to be true, change over time. These are historical, and so changing, phenomena. Further, what we take to be the allowable or sanctioned mechanisms that are useable for explanations also changes. This type of historicity seems an undeniable fact. It is also true that these beliefs have effects. They affect our intentions to act and even in some cases affect our physiological responses. The placebo effect is a real effect even if the mechanisms by which it (they) work(s) not understood. Can philosophy of science help to say anything about the positive claims concerning what makes religion special? As noted, we do not want anything resembling an eliminativist reductivist position. Neither do we want to go back to the old positivist dogma of an emotivist/ cognitivist dichotomy. We need to recognize that religion, and religious practices, have cognitive and emotional, social dimensions, and may
5
For more on mechanisms, see Craver (2007), Darden (2006), and Machamer et al. (2000), though they may not agree with all that I claim here. Of course, this assumption is false. But even the eliminativists have to fudge a bit, introducing weasel terms like ‘supervenience’ in order to account for much a human behavior (see Kim, 2005). 6
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be some others. Given this complexity it may prove instructive to consider briefly some aspects of the recent debate about the nature of emotions and that going on about psychiatric diagnosis. Summarizing the debate about the nature of emotion breaks the various claims about the nature of emotions down into six types: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Emotions are belief states or judgments, sometimes issuing in intentions to act in certain ways (cognitive tradition). Emotions are results of or perceptions of bodily states, neurological, or physiological changes (biological tradition). Emotions are special kinds of first person feelings (feeling tradition). Emotions are biologically based solutions to fundamental life tasks (evolutionary tradition). Emotions are culturally specific social artifacts normatively affecting and constraining interpersonal relationships (social constructionist tradition). 6. Emotions are behavioral predispositions (behaviorist tradition). Sometimes 2 and 3 are run together, where the emotional feeling is the form that perception of bodily states takes. (Based on Andrea Scarantino, Explicating Emotions, Ph.D. Dissertation University of Pittsburgh, 2005.) What is strange about this list is that emotions may be, and sometimes are, complexes of some or all of these, the point here being that some or all these aspects of emotion need to be integrated or used together when discussing the nature and emotions mechanisms by which emotions work. Like religion, an emotion is not just simple, one-dimensional phenomenon. (For a detailed argument for this multi-dimensionality see Kagan, 2007; however, he does not have much to say about modes of integration.) We can find analogous complexities in the debates now raging over psychiatric diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. These are especially prevalent at present due to the impending revision of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-TR, 2000. The new version V is scheduled for publication in 2012. Two of the major debates deal with complexities very much like those we found in the religion literature and in the work on the emotions. The first debate opposes categorical diagnosis against dimensional diagnosis. As the psychiatrist First (2008, p. 14) writes: The yes/no nature of categorical diagnosis also serves to facilitate clinical decision-making, which is typically characterized by a number of yes/no decisions (e.g., whether to treat, whether to hospitalize). Moreover, it has traditionally been assumed that most medical diseases are discrete entities. However, while this assumption might be true for a few conditions (e.g., Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, Alzheimer disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease), the vast majority of psychiatric disorders exist on a continuum with no discrete boundaries between disorders (e.g., schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) and between disorders and normality (e.g., depression). The next, even more relevant, debate concerns what is called the multiaxial system approach. Here the various possibly contributing factors are specified as lying along different axes that somehow ought to be considered in most every case. As the DSM puts it: ‘A multiaxial system involves an assessment on several axes, each of which refers to a different domain of information that may help the clinician plan treatment and predict outcome’ (DSM-IV-TR, 2000). I will not develop this theme in detail, but below are the axes they selected. Multiaxial assessment Axis I: Clinical disorders; other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention, including major mental disorders, as well as developmental and learning disorders. Axis II: Personality disorders; mental retardation, underlying pervasive or personality conditions. Axis III: General medical conditions; acute medical conditions and physical disorders including brain injuries and other medical/physical disorders which may aggravate existing diseases or present symptoms similar to other disorders. Axis IV: Psychosocial and environmental problems; psychosocial and environmental factors contributing to the disorder. Axis V: Global assessment of functioning, Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) Scale: ‘Axis V is for reporting the clinician’s judgment of the individual’s overall level of functioning. This information is useful in planning treatment and measuring its impact, and in predicting outcome. The reporting of overall functioning on Axis V can be done using the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) Scale. The GAF Scale may be particularly useful in tracking the clinical progress of individuals in global terms, using a single measure. The GAF Scale is to be rated with respect only to psychological, social, and occupational functioning. The instructions specify, ‘Do not include impairment in functioning due to physical (or environmental) limitations’. To this list might be added other criteria for understanding mental illness, such as Jerome Wakefield’s evolutionary criterion of harmful dysfunction (see Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007). The discussions of how to treat and use multiply caused disorders have not received much illuminating or extensive treatment as yet (though see Cohen, 2003; Kendler et al., 2006). The more general problem is how to intelligibly treat multi-level, multi-dimensional phenomena. In philosophy of science this problem has recently arisen under the rubric of how to understand complex phenomena. Some of the treatments of this complexity problem have
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arisen in the literature on emergence (see Bedau and Humphreys, 2008). The literature in this area is still young and underdeveloped. Perhaps the goal to be sought was captured best in a phrase coined by Sandra Mitchell, ‘integrative pluralism’. She has developed this area probably more than anyone else (see Mitchell, 2003, 2009a,b), but the structure of integration except at ad hoc levels is still a work in progress. But the goal is there, and the moral for many areas of study including religion: one should not let forms of ontological or epistemological arrogance inhibit the many ways we have making things intelligible; at the same time, we must adhere to arguably reasonable standards of evidence and coherence. These issues are important ones. They take one into an area that might be called epistemological ethics. In closing, I shall only raise some of the important questions. How far should one be tolerant of the beliefs of others? Am I morally obligated to tolerate or respect the belief (or someone who holds the belief) that the world is 4000–6000 years old? What are the limits one should have about tolerating or respecting the beliefs of others? The sincerest, most fervent believers are absolutist dogmatists, and they are usually the ones least tolerant of the beliefs of others. Need we respect them, especially if such an attitude is not at least reciprocal? Basically, the problem is how to avoid an unacceptable relativism without becoming an objective absolutist. The answer has to lie in what, at a time and place, it is reasonable to believe. Yet about what is reasonable, reasonable persons may, to some degree, disagree.
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Peter Machamer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and an Associate Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Pitt and CMU) and Pitt’s Cultural Studies Program. His recent work has been on mechanisms in scientific explanations, on Descartes and other 17th Century thinkers, and on science and values. A new book, by Machamer and J.E. McGuire, Descartes’s Changing Mind was published by Princeton University Press in July 2009.
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Religion journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/religion
Philosophy of science and the study of religion Peter Machamer History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
a b s t r a c t This paper responds to the six papers from the Tokyo IAHR session. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
People who study religion, in whatever way, oftentimes worry about the fact that religion gets explained in ways that diminish its importance or dismiss its reality. The deepest forms of this worry raise the questions: what is the reality involved in religion and religious experiences, and what gets lost in explanations? Put more forcefully, should those who study religion, and are not theologians or proselytizers, be concerned about what is the true ontology?1 This is not a problem unique to students of religion. The same questions must be raised when looking at any historical endeavor.2 One common way to think about the historical enterprise is as an attempt to capture the mental set of the historical actors and to describe what they believed and the ways in which these beliefs mattered to them. A purported alternative historiographic model is to look at history from our point of view, from what we now believe to be true. This often is called Whiggish or anachronistic history. It is cogently arguable that we cannot avoid some degree of anachronism because of where we are historically situated compared to our historical objects of study. Analogous points may be made concerning anthropological investigations into other cultures. I shall return to these ontological themes towards the end of this essay. The papers in this issue discuss concepts in the philosophy of science as they might apply to the study of religion. As a philosopher and historian of science, I applaud this effort, and though I may be critical of some of the implementations, this is an insightful set of papers and the use of concepts from philosophy of science is a good way to bring new insights to the study of religion. My friend and colleague, Colin MacCabe and I occasionally teach a graduate seminar entitled ‘Philosophy of Science for Humanists’. MacCabe is a professor of English and Film Studies. We are both convinced that all the humanities can benefit from thinking more in terms of philosophy of science. In this set of papers we find discussions of concepts such as explanation, interpretation, causality, models, and, especially, reduction. There seems to be a common theme running through most of them that reflects the deep question I raised at the startda basic fear of reduction and the elimination of what is distinctively religious about religious studies. Similar fears are not uncommon in philosophy. For example, my old friend Wilfrid Sellars distinguished between the space of causes and the space of reasons. The space of reasons was the space of the person and/or the space of the social, while the space of causes was the space of science. In making this distinction, Sellars is followed by many others including John McDowell and Robert Brandom (see Brandom, 2001; McDowell, 1996, 2001; Sellars, 2007). Yet one has to wonder here and in the following papers about religion, why such a strong bifurcation is needed. It seems that people are afraid that if the realm of causes extends to persons and the social, then there can be no attributions of reason, responsibility, morality, or religious spirit. In the realm of causes, they think that there are no norms, only descriptions. In this paper I wish to challenge this way of thought, and in so doing allay this fear. I do not have space to present detailed arguments for the claims I have adumbrated here. Sometimes my mode will be solely assertive or derogatively interrogative. But there are stronger, more cogent arguments. I hope here that I present enough to intrigue readers to read and think further, and in new ways. Behind this fear of eliminativist reduction lays another related, somewhat pervasive, yet equally mischievous set of beliefs about causes. As Jeppe Jensen, in his paper here, puts it, ‘a ‘‘cause’’ is only considered a true cause if it necessitates its effect’. He thinks that there are causal explanations, e.g., singular causal explanations, that fall outside the scope of scientific theory and which
E-mail address: [email protected] As I was writing these remarks I chanced to read a symposium on ‘abundant’ history, in which Orsi (2008) argues for a history that somehow captures the ‘experiences of radical presence or realness. abundant events’. He contrasts this with modernist epistemology and historiography, by which he seems to mean a view that takes naturalism or science as the proper way to think about the world. He and his commentators are addressing this question about ontology. 2 For example, see the collection of papers in Daston (2000), which are attempts to show the ways and why of doing historical ontology. There is a corresponding movement of these days in historical epistemology. 1
0048-721X/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.religion.2009.08.006
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presumably do not require necessity attaching to them. But why should anyone hold an outmoded and never-explicated view of causes in science or anywhere as being necessary? The origin of this bizarre idea lies in views about the necessity of (universal) laws as distinguished from accidental generalizations. Necessity, supposedly, was shown through connecting causal claims to laws and/or to the support of counterfactual propositions. However, recent philosophical work on the biological sciences shows impressively that most of biology, neuroscience, and, we might add, social science, does not have anything like traditionally characterized universal or statistical laws. Yet biology explains phenomena in coherent and intelligible ways by means of mechanisms.3 Jensen seemingly recognizes this when discussing his contextual or positional (5th kind) explanations. But he does not elaborate this type of explanation by discussing mechanisms, rather he holds that in such explanations ‘the explanatory process consists of placing the unknown in a context of things known’. In some sense that needs to be described more clearly all explanations do this. Jensen, however, ties this point to a narrative model of explanation. There are ways in which this kind of narrative explanation can be seen as compatible with explanations by mechanism, as I shall explain a bit more below. But this insight by Jensen is unfortunately tied to a trichotomous division that assigns causal explanations to the physical, functional explanations to the life sciences, and intentional explanations to the social and human sciencesdas if, indeed, these were fundamentally different. Presumably the intentional is the domain of narrative explanations. I think functional explanations are causal, and that not all social and human explanations are intentional. Consider a function of the heart, which is to the pump the blood, or what comes to the same, the cause of the blood’s circulation is the pumping of the heart. Or, I may intentionally brake my car at when I see a stop sign. But there is no clear intention that explains why there are laws about stop signs, unless one attributes intentions collectively to legislatures, which may be one could argue. But more basically, seeing the stop sign is what caused me, by virtue of my prior learning, to form the intention to brake my car. But there is no clear intention involved in the seeing, although there is in the attending. Another form of such a divisive mode of thinking, now in a dichotomous version, is also present when distinguishing between interpretation (understanding) and explanation (explaining by causes). Benson Saler locates the issue through his opposition to those who believe that the sciences are arranged in a hierarchical order, where the ideal is to find something basic. Particularly egregious to him are the ‘nothing but’ forms of reduction. I agree with his position against strict hierarchies and basic fundamentality. But Saler backs off too much when he confines his worries to Robert Nozick’s ‘inappropriate reductions in value’. He approves an example of heat, where apparently thermodynamics is properly reduced to statistical mechanics. However, he says, ‘We should not look at reduction as a doctrine or across-the-board commitment’. His cogent call is for compatibilities, unification (Chomsky) or ‘conceptually integrated theory’, though, unfortunately, he seems committed to achieving this through evolutionary theory (Cosmides et al., 1992). Evolutionary theory, conceived of as adaptation by natural selection, has neither the explanatory power nor even evidence for its particular claims that would allow it to integrate all the aspects of cultural and cognitive life that are relevant (see Buller, 2006). Let us just look briefly at an example of heat being reduced that is used by Churchland (1993) and by Carl Craver and William Bechtel (2007). They all fault Betty Crocker for explaining how heat is caused in a microwave by Betty’s description of the molecules as moving fast. They claim that heat is not caused by this movement, rather heat just is (identical with) the mean kinetic energy of an isolated group of moving molecules. And this is a good case of what some physicists take heat to be. But why privilege the physicist over the cook? Heat for the cook is the intensity of the sensation of hotness that she feels coming off the pan while ascertaining whether the oil has enough heat to fry properly. There is no need, theoretically or practically, to restrict the concept of heat to being only understood in terms of mean kinetic energy, or being really nothing but mean kinetic energy. We talk causally about heat in many ways and differently in different contexts. Heat is a complex concept. Consider the question, ‘Is it warm enough for you?’ This warmth is not metaphorical extension, and the question cannot be answered if one treats heat just as kinetic energy. Moreover, it seems that few if any of the complexities of heat will be explained by evolutionary biology, however loosely construed. The conceptual integration that Saler seeks may better be thought of through Sandra Mitchell’s idea of integrated pluralism (see below and Mitchell, 2003, 2009a,b). Robert Segal too has some worries about reduction, though most of his essay deals with how far Kuhn’s work is applicable to the study of religion. The reduction issue arises, mistakenly for Segal, when social scientists (like radical externalist historians of science) push a reductionist causal line that eliminates religious content. Segal, rightly, claims Kuhn argued for a combination of internalist (history of ideas) and externalist (social context) causes. And he criticizes the religionists (as he calls them) for thinking that ‘to reduce X to Y is not to explain X in terms of Y but to cease explaining X’. But some social scientists and philosophers seek to do this, which is why they are eliminativist reductionists. They think, minimally, that X is not really a phenomenon that needs explanation and, as Saler has it, Y is basic or fundamental. So the justifiable claim here is also about rejecting reduction and fundamentality, and following Kuhn to somehow integrate the epistemological, cognitive, personal, and social aspects.4 The two papers that deal with neuroscience and the study of religion also exhibit worries about reduction, though with a twist. David Goldberg goes after d’Aquili and Newberg (1999) for their reductionist attempt to discover and localize how and where the association areas of the brain produce mystical experiences. He cogently criticizes them for ignoring the brain’s plasticity and how it is affected by social and historical contextualization. Goldberg stresses the embodied nature of the brain and the functioning of the whole person as he grows and adapts to the ‘cultural hermeneutics that surround the developing child’. In a similar vein, though in a strikingly different manner, Armin Geertz critiques the science that underlies neuro-theology. His critique, following Ratcliffe (2006), lays out some of the ways in which religious biases and convictions about the true ontology of the believer affects methodology, experimental design and interpretation of evidence. Both of these papers are anti-reductionist, but unlike those discussed above, they accuse the neuro-religionists of being simple-minded reductionists, and, more significantly, of doing bad science because of this. These essays are examples of what good philosophy of science does, though they could be better grounded in relevant research. Philosophy of science is a highly theoretical and methodological enterprise that critiques not only how philosophers have understood the workings and implications of science, but also and
3 See, for example, Beatty (1995). Mitchell (2003) argues that laws may be taken in ways other than the traditional. Machamer et al. (2000) explore explanations by mechanisms. For a hybrid view that still takes the necessity of laws seriously without any argument, and that does not come to any obvious conclusion about the nature of laws, see Rosenberg and McShea (2007); but see Dupre´ (2007). 4 For more detail see Machamer and Osbeck (2003, 2004).
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more importantly how science is actually working. That is, it critiques the practice of science itself. I should point out that not everyone in philosophy of science agrees with this position. But I do believe the best and brightest do. Both of these neuroscience papers call for a better methodology. Both invoke the need for more attention to social developmental context. If I were to frame these issues in a different way, I would say that their insights are about the fact that neither the human being nor the human brain are isolated, closed systems. The human being and the human brain function in a complex environment that is always social, cultural, and natural as well as personal, neurological, and biological. One may completely agree with this insight, yet contend that there is no reason not to treat these complex phenomena in terms of the causal mechanisms that constitute and affect them. The mechanisms involved are at many levels and often simultaneously acting. They are social, cultural, physical, biological, cognitive, and other kinds of mechanisms. Since all mechanisms of whatever type are multi-leveled, reduction in the manner envisaged by the eliminativists, or ‘nothing but’ people, is impossible.5 If explaining phenomena in terms of mechanisms is disturbing, one may rephrase the points I have just made (and I am aware that I have not argued for them) in terms of models. Bryan Rennie in his paper discusses models of and models for. Religious narrative, he says (following Clifford Geertz), is a model of experience and a model for behavior. But models, most often, are models of causal mechanisms. Narrative models are linguistic models that use causal verbs to describe the activities of the entities in the narrative. So the allegories or parables of which Rennie speaks are models of life’s actions, describing ways that show how and sometimes why the actions took place. Rennie is absolutely right when he writes ‘Assuredly, scientific method fails us when it comes to the whole span of human experience, and it is notoriously unhelpful in the day-to-day solution of ethical problems’. But the scientific method that fails is that which presupposes ‘explanation as causal reduction’ (as Jensen calls it). Jensen too invokes models as devices through which we understand (to paraphrase Jensen) the human and social by connecting many of the factors and conditions about something, and then showing their reciprocal relations. This is just building a model, or attempting to find the mechanisms by which these some things work, so that we may explain how they work. Still in the grip of the bad way of thinking about the causal, he wants to contrast it against the structuralist concept of explanation. Yet in the next sentence he quotes Lawson and McCauley (1990) as saying that the aim of structuralists is to ‘constitute hypotheses about the underlying mechanism responsible for observable effects’. This is the explanation by mechanisms of which I have been talking above. The only strange difference is that he somehow contrasts such mechanistic explanation with the causal. So let us look at bit more at the nature of the causal. As noted above, causes form a major part of narratives, and certainly causes occur abundantly in our explanations of everyday affairs. Moreover, we treat beliefs as causal in that intentions to act often are the causes of why we act in the way we do. We even treat reasons as causes, in such cases as when we think things through, and then act because of the reasons we have reasoned. Moreover social or cultural norms are causal factors in our lives. We know and perceive situations in life that include learned norms as part of their constitution. These norms constrain (at least probabilistically) how we act. For example, I see from the situation I am in that this is not the time to start dancing in my underwear. This is a form of social causation. We need to be able to explain how normative constraints, be ethical, religious, or prudential, function as causes of human behavior. There is nothing strange about this use of ‘cause’. Nor need it be construed as different from how the physicist uses the term. What one has to deny is that physics, in whatever branch, is somehow more basic or important than the other levels we use to assess human life. That is, we must deny that eliminative reduction is even a possibility. If one does this, then one does not have to go searching for non-causal forces nor make unclear distinctions between explaining and understanding. In all cases at all levels we learn by discovering the mechanisms that produce the phenomena of interest, while at the same time we are developing theories or models about what causes what. Strangely enough physicians, in some instances, have had this idea for years. When you go to the doctor complaining of undue frequency or intensity of headaches, a good physician will ask you about stresses in your life (social), what you are worried about (personal), about your ingestion of drugs (including alcohol), and will order a blood workup (looking for physiological causes). Perhaps also she’ll order up an MRI scan (looking for CNS or brain malfunctions). Notice how this approach amalgamates the social, personal, and biological. And this is not unusual. When you want to help a friend or family member who is depressed, you ask questions such as have you eaten recently, have you been in an accident, have you had any bad experiences, what’s going on with your emotional state, have you been checked out by a physician? In dealing with most aspects of human life, we treat the complex systems that we are involved in as interactive and inseparable. The only time this does not occur is in domains (often scientific) where we pretend that we may treat a level (say, the molecular level) as a closed system. But this is an experimental pretense necessary for research and for designing controlled experiments. Even here, it must be noted that the levels are pragmatically and contextually determined, not fixed or ontologically differentiated. So let us assume that we have all given up eliminative reduction.6 Where does that leave us with the ontological problems that were used to begin this essay? Herein lies one big problem for the study of religion (and many other disciplines). It is reported that Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin said, in 1997, that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time, and that she saw human footprints in the fossil remains of the dinosaurs (Braun, 2008). Now in explaining her claim I can indicate that she sincerely believed what she said. But what kind of stance can I hold toward the content of her belief. Is it possible to be neutral about such a claim without falling into the most bizarre and unhealthy form of relativism imaginable? Do we really want an epistemological view of the world that treats all beliefs, even all sincere beliefs, as equally true? It is true that what humans take to be facts, and what humans believe to be true, change over time. These are historical, and so changing, phenomena. Further, what we take to be the allowable or sanctioned mechanisms that are useable for explanations also changes. This type of historicity seems an undeniable fact. It is also true that these beliefs have effects. They affect our intentions to act and even in some cases affect our physiological responses. The placebo effect is a real effect even if the mechanisms by which it (they) work(s) not understood. Can philosophy of science help to say anything about the positive claims concerning what makes religion special? As noted, we do not want anything resembling an eliminativist reductivist position. Neither do we want to go back to the old positivist dogma of an emotivist/ cognitivist dichotomy. We need to recognize that religion, and religious practices, have cognitive and emotional, social dimensions, and may
5
For more on mechanisms, see Craver (2007), Darden (2006), and Machamer et al. (2000), though they may not agree with all that I claim here. Of course, this assumption is false. But even the eliminativists have to fudge a bit, introducing weasel terms like ‘supervenience’ in order to account for much a human behavior (see Kim, 2005). 6
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be some others. Given this complexity it may prove instructive to consider briefly some aspects of the recent debate about the nature of emotions and that going on about psychiatric diagnosis. Summarizing the debate about the nature of emotion breaks the various claims about the nature of emotions down into six types: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Emotions are belief states or judgments, sometimes issuing in intentions to act in certain ways (cognitive tradition). Emotions are results of or perceptions of bodily states, neurological, or physiological changes (biological tradition). Emotions are special kinds of first person feelings (feeling tradition). Emotions are biologically based solutions to fundamental life tasks (evolutionary tradition). Emotions are culturally specific social artifacts normatively affecting and constraining interpersonal relationships (social constructionist tradition). 6. Emotions are behavioral predispositions (behaviorist tradition). Sometimes 2 and 3 are run together, where the emotional feeling is the form that perception of bodily states takes. (Based on Andrea Scarantino, Explicating Emotions, Ph.D. Dissertation University of Pittsburgh, 2005.) What is strange about this list is that emotions may be, and sometimes are, complexes of some or all of these, the point here being that some or all these aspects of emotion need to be integrated or used together when discussing the nature and emotions mechanisms by which emotions work. Like religion, an emotion is not just simple, one-dimensional phenomenon. (For a detailed argument for this multi-dimensionality see Kagan, 2007; however, he does not have much to say about modes of integration.) We can find analogous complexities in the debates now raging over psychiatric diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. These are especially prevalent at present due to the impending revision of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-TR, 2000. The new version V is scheduled for publication in 2012. Two of the major debates deal with complexities very much like those we found in the religion literature and in the work on the emotions. The first debate opposes categorical diagnosis against dimensional diagnosis. As the psychiatrist First (2008, p. 14) writes: The yes/no nature of categorical diagnosis also serves to facilitate clinical decision-making, which is typically characterized by a number of yes/no decisions (e.g., whether to treat, whether to hospitalize). Moreover, it has traditionally been assumed that most medical diseases are discrete entities. However, while this assumption might be true for a few conditions (e.g., Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, Alzheimer disease, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease), the vast majority of psychiatric disorders exist on a continuum with no discrete boundaries between disorders (e.g., schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) and between disorders and normality (e.g., depression). The next, even more relevant, debate concerns what is called the multiaxial system approach. Here the various possibly contributing factors are specified as lying along different axes that somehow ought to be considered in most every case. As the DSM puts it: ‘A multiaxial system involves an assessment on several axes, each of which refers to a different domain of information that may help the clinician plan treatment and predict outcome’ (DSM-IV-TR, 2000). I will not develop this theme in detail, but below are the axes they selected. Multiaxial assessment Axis I: Clinical disorders; other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention, including major mental disorders, as well as developmental and learning disorders. Axis II: Personality disorders; mental retardation, underlying pervasive or personality conditions. Axis III: General medical conditions; acute medical conditions and physical disorders including brain injuries and other medical/physical disorders which may aggravate existing diseases or present symptoms similar to other disorders. Axis IV: Psychosocial and environmental problems; psychosocial and environmental factors contributing to the disorder. Axis V: Global assessment of functioning, Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) Scale: ‘Axis V is for reporting the clinician’s judgment of the individual’s overall level of functioning. This information is useful in planning treatment and measuring its impact, and in predicting outcome. The reporting of overall functioning on Axis V can be done using the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) Scale. The GAF Scale may be particularly useful in tracking the clinical progress of individuals in global terms, using a single measure. The GAF Scale is to be rated with respect only to psychological, social, and occupational functioning. The instructions specify, ‘Do not include impairment in functioning due to physical (or environmental) limitations’. To this list might be added other criteria for understanding mental illness, such as Jerome Wakefield’s evolutionary criterion of harmful dysfunction (see Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007). The discussions of how to treat and use multiply caused disorders have not received much illuminating or extensive treatment as yet (though see Cohen, 2003; Kendler et al., 2006). The more general problem is how to intelligibly treat multi-level, multi-dimensional phenomena. In philosophy of science this problem has recently arisen under the rubric of how to understand complex phenomena. Some of the treatments of this complexity problem have
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arisen in the literature on emergence (see Bedau and Humphreys, 2008). The literature in this area is still young and underdeveloped. Perhaps the goal to be sought was captured best in a phrase coined by Sandra Mitchell, ‘integrative pluralism’. She has developed this area probably more than anyone else (see Mitchell, 2003, 2009a,b), but the structure of integration except at ad hoc levels is still a work in progress. But the goal is there, and the moral for many areas of study including religion: one should not let forms of ontological or epistemological arrogance inhibit the many ways we have making things intelligible; at the same time, we must adhere to arguably reasonable standards of evidence and coherence. These issues are important ones. They take one into an area that might be called epistemological ethics. In closing, I shall only raise some of the important questions. How far should one be tolerant of the beliefs of others? Am I morally obligated to tolerate or respect the belief (or someone who holds the belief) that the world is 4000–6000 years old? What are the limits one should have about tolerating or respecting the beliefs of others? The sincerest, most fervent believers are absolutist dogmatists, and they are usually the ones least tolerant of the beliefs of others. Need we respect them, especially if such an attitude is not at least reciprocal? Basically, the problem is how to avoid an unacceptable relativism without becoming an objective absolutist. The answer has to lie in what, at a time and place, it is reasonable to believe. Yet about what is reasonable, reasonable persons may, to some degree, disagree.
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Peter Machamer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and an Associate Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Pitt and CMU) and Pitt’s Cultural Studies Program. His recent work has been on mechanisms in scientific explanations, on Descartes and other 17th Century thinkers, and on science and values. A new book, by Machamer and J.E. McGuire, Descartes’s Changing Mind was published by Princeton University Press in July 2009.