Consider my home discipline of philosophy. Pinker himself mentions the strong recent connections of philosophy of mind to cognitive science and neuroscience. What he doesn’t note is that philosophers of mind — David Chalmers is a striking example — who work in cognitive science are typically highly trained in that discipline. Few cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have comparably strong backgrounds in philosophy of mind. As I’ve argued in previous Stone columns, this is a major disadvantage when scientists try, as they often do, to interpret the bearing of their results on philosophical issues such as free will and happiness.
Similarly, epistemologists like Stephen Stich, Philip Kitcher and Hilary Kornblith have integrated empirical psychological studies of cognition and error into their work on “naturalized epistemology.” Likewise, experimental philosophers interested in areas like epistemology, philosophy of mind and ethics have employed the survey methods of the social sciences to enrich their philosophical reflections.
The disparity between philosophers’ knowledge of science and scientists’ knowledge of philosophy is even greater in the areas of philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology. In the early 20th century, most of the major philosophers of science (Morris Schlick, Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap, for example) had done advanced work in physics. Current philosophers of physics continue to have a high professional level of training in physics, with many even publishing in physics journals. Philosophers of biology like David Hull have been similarly well versed in that discipline.
Historians of science are also immersed in the areas of science they study. Graduate programs in the discipline typically expect strong undergraduate majors or even a master’s degree in a particular science, and often require further advanced scientific work. Thomas Kuhn, the most influential historian of science ever, had a doctorate in physics from Harvard. By contrast, few current scientists do serious work in the histories of their discipline.
Social scientists have also been far more open than natural scientists to history and other humanistic disciplines, and there are many examples of fruitful interdisciplinary interactions in the area of social science history. Geography, in particular, has emerged as a thoroughly interdisciplinary study, combining natural science with both social scientific and humanistic studies.
Pinker notes the antiscientific tendencies of what he calls “the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness.” But literary studies, the bastion of these tendencies, have long been moving in other directions, including a strong trend toward applying scientific ideas and methods. There is, for example, the evolutionary and neurological study of literature and, most recently, the use of computer data-mining.
There is, then good reason to think that the greater problem is scientists’ failure to attend to what’s going on in the humanities. Even Pinker himself, who is obviously well versed in many areas of the humanities, could have profited in this article from a deeper acquaintance with philosophy and its history.
For example, Pinker opens with the claim that “the great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists,” mentioning, in particular, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant and Adam Smith. These thinkers were, of course, all interested in scientific questions, but they all quite correctly viewed themselves as philosophers and readily combined empirical or formal mathematical accounts with philosophical arguments, historical facts, or introspective observations. (Pinker’s claim that they “crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data” ignores Descartes’ and Leibniz’s work in mathematics, Spinoza’s geometric method and Hume’s “History of England.”) They were, in fact, models of the broadly and deeply educated intellectual that today’s typical scientist is not.
The problem of disciplinary narrowness became critical only with the advent of “scientists” — a term invented in the 19th century — whose work became so technical that it was hard to avoid the perils of overspecialization. Pinker’s ideal of interdisciplinary integration was from the beginning a humanistic project — and, as we have seen, was continued into the present by humanists much more than scientists.
Pinker also claims that science has shown that all traditional religious accounts of “the origins of life, humans, and societies — are factually mistaken,” since “we know. . . that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history.” Here Pinker ignores the numerous religious thinkers, from Augustine to John Paul II, who have accepted an evolutionary account of human origins, maintaining that the process itself is the work of a creative God.
Finally, Pinker confidently asserts that, given merely the “unexceptionable convictions” that “all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct,” science can lead us to “a defensible morality.” “This morality, he says, derives from the injunction to “maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings.” But this claim runs into trouble if we raise the philosophical questions of what Pinker means by “our welfare” and “the flourishing of humans.” A utilitarian morality will understand these terms in one way, a deontological (for example, Kantian) morality in quite another way, an Aristotelian virtue morality in yet another way. These differences derive from conflicting normative judgments about what ought to be the ethical ideal, something not determinable by scientific observation.
Pinker is looking for a new meaning of scientism. But, despite the best intentions, he winds up something close to the old meaning: a scientific attitude that underrates the achievements of the humanities.
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