Sunday, April 20th
Fideism and Reasonism
Since I was rather rough on Michael Shermer in my last blog entry, I thought it appropriate to give a quote from Why People Believe Weird Things that I think is truly excellent:
(T)here are, I believe, reasonable arguments for why we should not cover up, hide, suppress, or, worst of all, use the State to squelch someone else's belief system, no matter how wacky, unfounded, or venomous it may seem. Why?
*They might be completely right, and we would have just squashed the truth.
*They might be partially right, and we do not want to miss a part of the truth.
*They might be completely wrong, but by examining their wrong claims, we will discover and confirm the truth; we will also discover how thinking can go wrong, and thus improve our thinking skills.
*In science, it is not possible to know the absolute truth about anything, so we must always be on the alert for where we have gone wrong and where others have gone right.
*Being tolerant when you are in the majority means you have a greater chance of being tolerated when you are in the minority.
The fourth point, that science cannot give us absolute truth, is an interesting one. Where does absolute truth come from? Here is one idea:
Reasonism is the intellectual claim that only rationality can correctly, positively, and definitively determine neutral, objective, absolute reality. Reasonism is the argument that only reason leads to certain understanding and unquestionable knowledge.- Kyrel Zantonavich
According to this, reason is the only basis for absolute truth. I found this quote interesting because many people lump science and reason together as basically the same thing, or at least two sides of the same coin. Thus we seem to have a contradiction between what Zantonavich and Shermer believe about absolutes. I don't think I'm a reasonist, at least a la Zantonavich, but rather a fideist:
"Fideism" is thus to be understood not as a synonym for "religious belief," but as denoting a particular philosophical account of faith's appropriate jurisdiction vis-a-vis that of reason.- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
There seem to be things going on in this science/absolute discussion that roughly parallel the is/ought problem of David Hume. Just as there is a hard line that is hard to cross between "is" and "ought" there is a hard line between reason and faith. "Ought" corresponds to reason: we arrive at our opinions about what ought to be by thinking about it. Faith on the other hand, corresponds to what is. (W)ithout faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. But as the above definition of fideism shows, faith is not limited to religious belief, but corresponds more closely to ontology, that is, the realm of what exists. It is notoriously hard to prove things exist by reason, as Descartes found out.
Tuesday, April 15th
No such thing as artistic progress?
Science is progressive because its paradigms depend upon the cumulative knowledge gained through experimentation, corroboration, and falsification. Pseudoscience, nonscience, superstition, myth, religion, and art are not progressive because they do not have goals or mechanisms that allow the accumulation of knowledge that builds on the past. Their paradigms either do not shift or coexist with other paradigms. Progress, in the cumulative sense, is not their purpose.... Artists do not improve upon the styles of their predecessors: they invent new styles. Priests, rabbis, and ministers do not attempt to improve upon the sayings of their masters; they repeat, interpret, and teach them. Pseudoscientists do not correct the errors of their predecessors; they perpetuate them. -Why People Believe Weird Things p. 40
This passage caught my attention as I was reading Michael Shermer's excellent book. I found it a bit weird to find art lumped in with with pseudoscience as something that does not progress. It seems to me against all intuition as a musician. Why does Shermer believe this? This passage, which Shermer quotes, gives a clue:
Raphael's Sistine Madonna without Raphael, Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies without Beethoven, are inconceivable. Science, on the other hand, it is quite probable that most of the achievements of any given scientist would have been attained by the other individuals working in the field.- Sydney Hook
I believe that this is a misinterpretation of how art, or music at any rate, works. Beethoven certainly had an individual style, but this style was with equal certainty based on the style of his predecessors. Of course it is true that if Beethoven had never lived, it is all but certain any one of his works would not have been written note for note. Nevertheless, the classical period is typified by certain unifying features that work as a classical "style" or, if I dare say, a paradigm. This paradigm was shifting during Beethoven's lifetime into something that would be known as the romantic period (or style or paradigm) in music. If Beethoven had never lived, another composer, probably Mendelssohn, would have been chosen as typifying the end of classicism in music and the launching of the romantic era. Would the music of Chopin have sounded much different if Beethoven had never lived? It seems unlikely.
It is true, of course, that scientific progress is unique among all the types of human progress that exist. This doesn't impress me much. For me, Shermer seems to be saying little more than only science makes scientific progress. His point reduces to a tautology.
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