princeton definition of Fiction: * a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact
* fabrication: a deliberately false or improbable account
Definition of Science: The collective discipline of study or learning acquired through the scientific method; the sum of knowledge gained from such methods and discipline; A particular discipline or branch of learning, especially one dealing with measurable or systematic principles rather than intuition or natural ...
I have not yet listened to the podcast, so I’ll have to reserve my opinion about the body of the discussion until then, but I fail to understand where these two definitions meet or agree with each other.
PZ invited me to give a lecture on the different types of atheism, and I claimed that, according to postmodern atheists, science is a fiction. PZ said that scientists would neither accept nor appreciate this claim. But I retorted: fiction is a positive phrase for us in the humanities. It doesn’t mean that something is not “true.” From a postmodern perspective, all concepts are fictions. Why? They start with the claim that, because there is no God, there can be no pre-existent concepts waiting to be discovered. What we have of concepts are human constructions. Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Nietzsche’s will to power, and gravity are all concepts about the world. In the Gay Science, Nietzsche clarifies this point nicely: “We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument.” The word table is not the same thing as the referent table, and for Nietzsche (and most postmodernists), the moment we enter the world of language, we have entered the world of fiction. Given this view of language, does it follow that language is useless or meaningless? While Nietzsche and many postmodernists insist that there is no metaphysical Truth, they do insist that truth, as a constructed fiction, is crucial for human living. When I say that science is a fiction, I mean this in a positive sense—I consider scientists artists. Indeed, I consider them some of the most important artists alive. Now here’s the key point that I, as a postmodern humanist, would make. The fiction of Enlightenment reason marks a decisive advance in human history, because scientists have created (not discovered) a rigorous method for systematizing our experiences in the world. If traditional humanists favored science over religion because science gave them epistemological access to Truth, postmodern humanists favor science over religion because science has created a system and method of knowledge that is democratically accessible to all people. Religion, in my view, is a closed system of knowledge—when somebody claims that they have knowledge of a moral Truth because God disclosed it to them, I am absolutely lost, because I have no idea what the word God means. But science has created a method that allows us to test and verify its propositions. My motivation, therefore, for favoring science is not that it gives me Truth, but that it is an empirically verifiable system of constructed knowledge.
What a mess. Which is it? Is science a fiction? Or does it provide us concepts which can be used to make empirically verifiable predictions?
If it is the latter, then it is not the former.
There is a distinction between fictional concepts like phlogiston and concepts which hook onto reality like electron and gravity.
I have to say, this was a hopelessly confused podcast, and I don’t think DJ did enough to illuminate the deep problems with it. Firstly, I have no idea what “absolute truth” or “truth with a capital ‘T’” means. These are buzzwords of some sort; no scientist uses them, and no decent philosopher does, either. All there is is “truth” with a lower-case ‘t’.
Secondly, if Lackey believes that there is no such thing as truth, or that there are no true concepts, then how is he going to argue that in fact slavery was wrong, and that in fact African Americans were subjugated by European Americans? How is he going to argue that certain white concepts about blacks (their supposed moral and intellectual inferiority) were false? Simply because all concepts about everything are false? That is an absurd argument.
Third, if in fact there are no true concepts, and if all arguments end up being a species of fiction, how does Michael Lackey go about writing a scholarly essay for publication? Does he do research? Does he care what his primary sources actually say? Or does he feel free to make up what he will about them, as a species of fictional construction?
Fourth, Lackey claims that “humanists” asserted all sorts of racist rot about black inferiority. But if so, the problem is not a “lack of humility about the concept of truth”, instead there is a lack of knowledge about the truth of racial equality. Lackey claims that if one understands that the concept “human” is merely human-created, that is, a species of fiction, one will be able to have a “life-affirming form of humanism”. But this has things precisely backwards. If the concept “human” is always and only a species of fiction, then the racist concept of human is just as good, just as justified as the concept which implies racial equality. Again, this is an absurd argument.
Fifth, at several times in the podcast Lackey refers to certain novels, certain philosophers and certain claims as being particularly good. Does he really mean that they are good, or simply that he is able to write up some fiction about them being good? Would it be just as good a fiction for one of his colleagues to write that they were some of the worst? If not, why not? And if so, then of what use is Lackey’s claim that they are good?
Sixth, Lackey defines post-modernism as claiming that “all knowledge is human construct”. In that case, the (claimed) crimes against black people are themselves human constructs, on the same footing as people who claim that there were no crimes against black people. Or, perhaps more accurately, they are on the same footing unless it makes you happier to believe one rather than the other, in which case, whichever one you prefer will be the better one for you. There is no independent way to decide if crimes were actually perpetrated, since anyhow it’s all just a species of fictional narrative.
Seventh, Lackey says he has profound respect for scientific truth and that human reason was a great invention. But this appears only to be a species of rhetorical ploy, since there is no correspondence between scientific claims and external reality, and no way that human reason can actually lead us to any knowledge of the world. Nevertheless he says he would accept doctors rather than angels when it comes to his own health; this is inconsistency on his part, or perhaps it’s just that doctors make him happier and angels don’t. He says that he likes science and feels “blocked off” by religion, however his reasoning about the distinction between the two simply falls apart. If there is no actual correspondence to reality which science can reveal by repeated experiment, then what precisely is the distinction between science and religion? It seems to come down to his own personal feeling of being “blocked off”, but I have no idea what that means. I do not feel “blocked off” from a concept of God, I simply believe that it is fictional in the way that other concepts are not. Lackey can’t go that route, which is what leads him to these weird emotional falsity-substitutes like “blocking off”.
Eighth, as erin said very well already, there is a lot of really silly confusion about the distinction between concepts and reality. Of course, in a sense, all concepts are human-created.
DJ said it well—this is not only not very profound, it is positively banal. But also of course, some of them are accurate representations of reality, as was DJ’s example of gravity. One cannot on the one hand claim that the concept of gravity is a human fiction and on the other hand claim that you could survive jumping off a ten story building. You cannot, at any rate, if you want to be consistent. The concept of gravity that allowed you to survive would be erroneous.
So in sum it looks as though this strategy blocks one off from being able to actually make sense of racial injustice or indeed any honest claim about the way the world actually is.
Retrospy and Tinyfrog, I want to briefly respond to your posts. First, Retrospy says: “Michael & DJ agreed on the short definition that postmodern thought was (correct my paraphrasing) ‘skepticism to the extreme.’ Even to the point that our concept of ‘truth’ is really just a collection of pragmatic connections.” From my particular postmodern perspective, I would not call postmodernism extreme skepticism. In fact, I am planning to write an essay to explain why postmodernism ultimately makes skepticism incoherent. But you should know that this idea is only in its early stages of development. So what is my definition of postmodernism? For most postmodernists, because there is no God, there can be no pre-given truth or concept about the world. Concepts are not mind-independent facts dangling from a heaven of Ideas. Rather, they are human-constructed fictions that assume a provisional form. Does this position imply that concepts are false or useless? Absolutely not. In fact, they have considerable value, because they help us to systematize our experiences of the world. But why can’t they be true, one might ask. The answer here is two-fold. First, there is no God who has authored the concept, so the concepts must be of human origin, rather than from some neutral or objective source, such as God. Second, by acknowledging that concepts are created by humans, we simultaneously acknowledge that they are limited and provisional, because they were constructed by limited and biased humans. So whatever constructs we construct, we must acknowledge that they will probably shift and evolve in relation to the new systems of knowledge that the language community adopts. In a sense, DJ is a postmodernist because his approach to truth is somewhat (not totally) similar to mine. He says: “There’s not one thing called science that says, ‘x, y and z’. Scientists are human each with their own motivations, backgrounds, and biases. It just so happens that the methods of science are the best methods we’ve found to overcome personal bias, personal motivations and all that stuff.” DJ, if you object to me referring to you as a rational postmodernist, please let me know, and I won’t do it again.
Now Tinyfrog, you say: “I’ll simply disagree with one thing: this desire to use the word “fiction” in a way that is completely disconnected from the way the majority of English speakers use it. You simply can’t use this word to describe what postmodernists think of science unless you mean “untruth”. First of all, it’s horrendously misleading (if not flat-out deceptive).” To my mind, the real question is this: do postmodernists have a compelling reason for referring to science as a fiction? And I believe that they do. Why? Postmodernists spend a lot of time explaining how people in power have been able to justify degrading others by virtue of controlling language. For instance, from Aristotle, to Aquinas, to Kant, women have been portrayed as inferior to men. Postmodernists argue that Woman, according to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, is not a transcendental signifier (a mind-independent concept), but rather, it is a patriarchal construction. Many postmodernists go on to show how this same thing happens to black people, gays and lesbians, atheists and agnostics, etc. Their point is this: what we have of concepts are constructions, words that humans have been injected with meaning. In Beloved, Toni Morrison puts it this way: “Definitions are for the definers, not the defined.” Obviously, Morrison is being critical of the way discourse functions to secure power for those in power. So why would postmodernists claim that it would be useful to refer to science as a fiction, in a positive sense? The answer is this: a fiction is provisional. We don’t accept it as metaphysical truth, but nor do we reject it as useless. By calling science a fiction, we humbly acknowledge that the concepts we have are of human origin, and therefore cannot be treated as stable ontological structures. But it must be noted here: even though postmodernists acknowledge that science is a fiction, it does not follow that they allow for an anything goes philosophy—this is just the cartoon caricature of postmodernism that I am trying to debunk. If you look carefully at most postmodernists’s work, you will see that social justice is ultimately at the base of their project. Drucilla Cornell’s book The Philosophy of the Limit is one of the best works to document this part of the postmodernist project.
I have much more to say, but I have a ton of student papers to grade.
Barto, I like this claim that you make: “This predictive capacity leads me to think that there is something like reality and we tend to be closer to it with verifiable knowledge than with non-verificable knowledge.” If we, as humans, can construct systems of knowledge that make sense of the world in which we live, systems that have a predictive capacity, does it necessarily follow that there is a reality out there? Granted, we know that there are physical objects out there in the world. But does it necessarily follow that there are corresponding facts and concepts that are best suited to signify those objects? Isn’t it possible that humans simply constructed discourses to systematize their experience of the world? And even if we admit that those concepts are human constructed, does it follow that they are useless and false? When I say that a concept is human constructed, I don’t mean that it is false. Postmodernists don’t live in the world of the either/or absolute. But nor do they hold that anything goes. I emphatically reject religion and God (I have taken a firm stance on this position, and I do so as a postmodernist), because I cannot figure out what people are talking about when they discuss these terms. I privilege science because it has constructed (not discovered) a rigorous method of knowledge that we can use effectively to make sense of the world in which we live. But just because the method is useful and accessible, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is metaphysically true. What it does indicate is that it is superior to religion, because it is something that we can all rationally discuss.
My three-year old daughter is demanding that I read her a book, so I have to stop writing for the moment.
Don’t worry, you won’t be the first! (I’ve been there a few times myself)—-anyway, publicly humiliating participants is not the purpose of these forums!
I see these are wonderful forums and that humiliating participants is not the purpose: I’ve tried hard to achieve a public humiliation but I wasn’t sucesful…
Anyway, I have to battle with my english and with my lack of phylosophy background in this thread
Micheal, I see we agree that there is something like a material reality out there. That’s great. Well, I guess we will agree that there that reality follows what we could call laws, because the same physical objects behave in the same way under the same circumstances.
We develop a system to explain the facts we observe, right. We also have a very good predictive capacity on certain areas because we build models of the reality (we can have this exchange because we can accurately predict the behaviour of solid state physics for instance). Of course we cannot be sure if the models we develop are just a set of convenient representations that give the same outcome than reality for diferents reasons or we have not a convenient model but a description of the reality itself.
My engineering background leads me to think that when two diferents models reach give the same outcome, some underlying concepts are, at least, similars. It is very dificult to build two diferent models, very diferents in theirs underlying mechanism, which reaches the same conclusions in the long run as you add test data. Of course, it could happen, but I’d say it is unlikely.
Simply, post-modernism has engaged in a sequence of intellectually dishonest attacks on science motivated by politics. Triggered because science has accidentally stepped on one of the doctrines the post-modernist holds, commonly one used to justify social justice. Science is thus undermined while the fruits of science, as with many anti-science movements, are still enjoyed. This is not coherent, if science is useful it is in its relation to nature, you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Extreme scepticism follows from post-modernist arguments, regardless of whether post-modernists embrace epistemic solipsism or not, post-modernist attacks on empiricism demotes science to the level of religion, that very much is everything goes. The disconnect is in whether post-modernists actually hold these positions, or whether they are feigning them. Moral relativists are not amoral, even though it follows from their arguments. The caricature of post-modernists may be untrue, but it is the post-modernists who perpetuate this idea with the positions they claim to hold.
Furthering the suspicions that post-modernists are charlatans is the consistent engagement of obscurantism, e.g. using an uncommon meaning for a common word, while refusing to define it, where the audience cannot reasonably be expected to understand. Much of post-modernist writing remains meaningless to me almost certainly for this reason, with the odd trivial, or obvious statement, and the positions that I have mentioned. A simple explanation is that this deception is a defence of weak, incoherent, nonsensical arguments. I fail to see a sensible statement that has not, and could not, have been stated as obvious by a scientist like PZ Myers, but in a succinct and lucid way.
Dougsmith: Sixth, Lackey defines post-modernism as claiming that “all knowledge is human construct”.
What is the real objection here? That “all knowledge is a human construct” is an uncontestable statement of fact. The question is what humans construct their knowledge out of... out of close observation of natural and social phenomena in their constant motion, contradiction and development, or out of fairy tales, dreams, and rationalizations which mask, distort and obscure these phenomena?
Without giving a shred of credence to post-modernism… any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society…
Without giving a shred of credence to post-modernism… any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society…
I have the feeling we are agreeing here but using terms in different ways. Let me put it this way, re. the claim that “all knowledge is a human construct.” It is either trivial or false.
Trivially, all knowledge of which we are aware is human, since we are humans and only we have knowledge. (Actually, even this is false since other animals have knowledge; but let’s leave aside that objection as picking nits). Knowledge is made up of concepts, and concepts come from human brains, so knowledge is trivially a human construct.
However, the move that Lackey is making here is not the trivial one. He does not believe that this is a trivial claim. Much the opposite. This is because he seems to believe that anything humanly constructed is a species of fiction. And then we get a claim that is not trivial at all: it is the claim that all knowledge is a species of fiction, a “construct” in the radical sense that it is one way of an infinite number of mutually logically exclusive ways of constructing the world. And this latter claim, while no longer banal, is simply false.
Of course, nobody is claiming that “knowledge” exists somewhere outside of thinking beings. That would be absurd. Instead, what we say is that knowledge is (very roughly; I don’t want to get into a huge essay about epistemology here) justified true belief. So if you know that it is raining in Toledo that is because:
(1) You believe that it is raining in Toledo.
(2) It really is raining in Toledo.
and
(3) You have good justification for believing (1)—e.g., you are in Toledo and looking out your window.
Now, I suppose the response here is that we can not know whether we really have knowledge or not, since we can’t get outside of our heads to see whether or not (2) is true, irrespective of doing the sort of work alluded to in (3). In a sense that is so; we are not guaranteed certainty by our epistemic methods. But so what? Descartes’s foundational epistemology was wrongheaded, and put more pointedly, it does no justice to our ordinary concept of when we know things and when we don’t. Everything we say, we say provisionally, given the best evidence available to us.
So no, all knowledge is not a human construct. Beliefs become knowledge by their relation to the way things are in the world. While human beliefs are human constructs, only some of those beliefs are warranted enough to be knowledge. That warrant is done by the world.
Without giving a shred of credence to post-modernism… any argument to the effect that “all knowledge is NOT a human construct” is simply a religious argument, i.e. positing a ‘knowledge’ that exists somewhere suspended outside time, space and human society…
I have the feeling we are agreeing here but using terms in different ways. Let me put it this way, re. the claim that “all knowledge is a human construct.” It is either trivial or false
Trivially, all knowledge of which we are aware is human, since we are humans and only we have knowledge. (Actually, even this is false since other animals have knowledge; but let’s leave aside that objection as picking nits). Knowledge is made up of concepts, and concepts come from human brains, so knowledge is trivially a human construct.
I would dispute that this awareness is trivial to begin with.
The problem arises exactly where ‘knowledge’ or ‘science’ is institutionally, linguistically and culturally identified with reality itself (i.e. the world as it exists independently of our perceptions). As Lenin pointed out, however, science at best can only provide successively closer approximations in describing how the world works, while always remaining in and of the society which produces it. Hence the misidentification of science, civilization, reason etc. with the imperialist ambitions, crimes and self-interests of ‘the West’ (broadly speaking), a sadly recurring theme which can be traced back to some of the key founders of Enlightenment Rationalism (a tradition which I nonetheless uphold from a Marxist perspective - with this important qualification).
However, the move that Lackey is making here is not the trivial one. He does not believe that this is a trivial claim. Much the opposite. This is because he seems to believe that anything humanly constructed is a species of fiction. And then we get a claim that is not trivial at all: it is the claim that all knowledge is a species of fiction, a “construct” in the radical sense that it is one way of an infinite number of mutually logically exclusive ways of constructing the world. And this latter claim, while no longer banal, is simply false.
This, to the extent that it is true, would be where I too would part company with Lackey and other post-modernists.
Of course, nobody is claiming that “knowledge” exists somewhere outside of thinking beings. That would be absurd.
Wrong, this is exactly what religion claims; but religion is only one species of idealist thinking.
I would argue that CFI suffers from a similar belief that ‘science’ stands outside of human society… which is why it cannot seem to disentangle its ‘humanism’ from loyalty to U.S. imperialism and its institutions, according to which, simply put: ‘We’ bring ‘science’ and ‘enlightenmnent’ while ‘They’ (the official enemy) bring darkness, bigotry and oppression. Any scientific understanding of the actual political and economic motivations and interests which underlie such pronouncements regarding ‘the West’ is thus rendered, by definition, both immoral and irrelevant. (“They hate us for Our Freedoms” blah blah blah).
Exploding this type of dangerously simplistic (and self-serving) amalgam is a vitally important project for any ‘humanism’ worthy of the name.
So no, all knowledge is not a human construct.
Yes it is. And any genuine science must start from the inevitable gap between even the very best, most accurate human construct and the objectively existing reality. That gap is where the ‘fiction’ inevitably resides, and it is eminently reasonable for Mr. Lackey to point it out.
Apologies for not taking on many of your epistemological observations, Doug. Not that I doubt their relevance, only that my brain is too small and philosophical awareness too limited.
Look, Balak, without getting into the political stuff, of course I agree that scientific theories are always approximations to the way the world works, and of course science can be misidentified with improper ends. But to be able to make these observations one has to hold:
(1) that there is a “way the world works” (or an “objectively existing reality” which you also made reference to) that can be approximated, and
(2) that there really are proper and improper ends.
If it’s all just a species of fictional storytelling, then frankly, it’s impossible to get any political or ethical argument off the ground.
Just to emphasize something I said in my last post: reality or way the world works can be approximated by human endeavor and theorizing. If the world is simply some sort of unknowable monad or “thing-in-itself”, then it’s absolutely useless for any purpose other than philosophical hairsplitting.
And if we can approximate it, that means that there are some theories which are closer and others which are farther away. The world is the standard by which we measure our thinking. So again, knowledge is not simply a human construct. At the very least it is a human construct constrained by the way the world is.
So it’s not enough simply to assert that there is some sort of external reality, but that we can’t know anything about it. The distinction between that sort of ontology and Berkleyan idealism (the view that the world is only made up of minds) is trivial.
I have no quarrel with anything you have said above. But I would add that that the distinction between the socially-created (fiction) the and externally-existing (reality) is inherently political while at the same time vitally significant for genuine, scientifically-informed humanism.
That someone like PJMeyers is willing to engage some of Lackey’s points is, in my opinion, a good thing.
