Short Reviews That Instead Turned Into a Rant on “Refuting” Relativism. Sorry.

While discussing Lewis Wolpert’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (2006) with my suitemate last week, she made an interesting point. As I complained about the oversimplification of various philosophical and logical points, she said, reasonably, “Well, these books aren’t written for us.”

What she meant was that popular science books and popular philosophy of science books aren’t written for people who’ve spent some time studying the field and/or who already have an intellectual investment in particular theories; they’re written for people with little or no background. And she’s right.

So I guess this is a  mea culpa. Wolpert’s opus is a popular philosophy of science book, not an academic one. Someone like me, who studies history and philosophy of science at the graduate level, is not the intended reader. So as much as I enjoy the writing style of authors like Dr. Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, and as much as I consider myself to hold the same ultimate philosophical positions (atheism; materialism; etc.), there are still some parts of their arguments that frustrate me beyond belief.

…

… no pun intended.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is an otherwise enjoyable book. Dr. Wolpert makes an interesting argument that the penchant for entertaining causal belief is an evolutionary adaptation that benefited early humankind. If you’ve read people like Daniel Dennett who claim that religious beliefs are likely the evolutionary result of the psychological adaptation required for us to form social ties, it makes Wolpert’s take more interesting, but it’s not incomprehensible if you haven’t.

That part was all well and good, and though Wolpert’s writing style doesn’t quite do it for me (too few intermediate steps in arguments*; too much unexamined Eurocentrism; and too many “he”, “him”, and “mankind” when he’s talking about all humanity),  I enjoyed the evolutionary biology sections. Where it all came apart for me was where he sort-of-but-not-quite tried to show that it’s more rational to believe scientific beliefs than other kinds.

Look, I know it’s a difficult problem. I personally know dozens of academics who spend their working lives trying to figure it out, and there’s still no good answer. It’s like logic: as Lewis Carroll pointed out, there’s no logical way to prove the validity of traditional, deductive logic; as long as it’s internally consistent, the best justification you can give is, “Well, it’s worked so far.”

I don’t consider myself to be a relativist: I really do believe that “my” preferred way of thinking – call it scientific, Western, or what have you – is right. But I also acknowledge that as much as I don’t like the idea of relativism, I’ve not yet heard a solid argument against it. Scientists writing philosophy of science like Wolpert and Dawkins tend to argue along the lines of, “It goes against common sense!” They point out that most of us intuitively dismiss the idea of relativism and/or highlight infamous incidents in postmodern academia, such as the acceptance of a nonsensical article by a prominent journal.

For instance, Dawkins points out that talking about things like alternative truths is all well and good, but “we” would never accept an alibi like, “Well, according to your truth, I was at the murder scene, but according to mine, I wasn’t” in court. Wolpert appeals to the intuitive absurdity (and implied intellectual snobbery) of ideas like “hermeneutics”.

Arguments like these feel right, but they beg the question: that is, they assume what’s to be proven. One of the key points of relativism which Drs. Wolpert and Dawkins are trying to refute is: what is true depends the social circumstances of one’s life**. The courtroom and reduction ad absurdum arguments can be boiled down to this:

1) Imagine yourself in a specific social environment (eg. a Western courtroom or the culture in which you live).
2) Imagine an alternate truth that is not normally considered truth in that social environment (eg. ideas of  a member of a non-Western culture or a spiritualist or a weirdo academic)
3) Doesn’t it seem counterintuitive to put those two things together???

Er… well, yes, it does. The trouble is, that fact doesn’t refute relativism at all. In fact, the idea that one culture’s definition of truth shouldn’t work within another culture’s ideological space is exactly what relativism is trying to say.

Dawkins’s and Wolpert’s arguments are solid if you assume they’re arguing for a weaker thesis: that science/Western thinking might ultimately turn out to be false but nonetheless it’s practical for everyone to believe it’s true. Want your iPod repaired or your infection cured? Then it makes sense to believe in the laws of electrical resistance or the theory of germs is correct, even if all misfortune is really caused by evil spirits who for some reason go away when you replace the battery or take penicillin. Apple stores and hospitals have a better track record than exorcisms.

But – and my apologies to Wolpert and Dawkins if I’ve misinterpreted their aims – it seems to me that they and authors like them are not interested in having people believe in science merely because it’s useful. They also want science to be useful because it’s true – that is, because it most accurately of all potential beliefs reflects an objective world around us in the way that, say, parapsychology, homeopathy, or theistic religion does not.

This is considerably more difficult to defend, and I can’t blame anyone for failing to cinch it when philosophers from antiquity and earlier have been grappling with the same sort of skeptical arguments with little success. What I’m missing from popular science/philosophy of science authors like Wolpert and Dawkins is any sort of acknowledgment that science cannot be shown to be true even within its own logical, empirical framework. You can still lead me where there are holes in the ground, but unless you show me that you know where they are, I’m not going to want to follow.

* Including a strange syllogism that Wolpert says is correct despite its appearance, as part of a bid to show the reader that one’s sense of logic can be fooled by the context of the problem, but I can’t for the life of me see how it’s logically valid like he claims. Incidentally, this is why I showed the book to my suitemate in the first place – she’s a an abstract mathematician. She can’t see how either.

** This is different from the weaker statement “what appears to be true depends on the social circumstances of one’s life”. Although neither Dawkins nor Wolpert ever makes this point explicitly, I think they’d both agree that one’s background affects one’s perspective on the world. The difference between this statement and the other is one of implied validity: when we accept things can appear to be true to one person and not another, we’re just saying people have different access to evidence and different backgrounds upon which to form belief. When we say things are true to one person and not another, we’re denying that there’s a single true state of the world. Hence, all perspectives should have equal weight.