From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 02:48:43 GMT
Horse, Glenn, anybody else,
I've written on science before and I know a little about what Glenn's
getting at, so I thought I'd add a little grist for Glenn's mill.
In an essay at the site ("Mechanistic Philosophy ..."), I tried to argue
that, to put it mildly, mechanistic philosophy had its limits. Though the
essay is part of my immature thinking, I think it best to think of it as
saying, "Hey, science isn't all its cracked up to be." The real enemy I
was after wasn't mechanistic philosophy, or even science, really, but
scientism. I think Glenn shows some scientistic tendencies.
Here's what I mean: Science ascended to the top of the cultural pile
during the Enlightenment. People began to think that science would solve
all of the worlds problems. All we would have to do is make a discipline a
science. This didn't work out all the time, and when it didn't, like in
literature, the subject would get a bad name. The main proponents of this
scientism were the logical positivists, which Pirsig takes on.
In this sense, Glenn is right. Pirsig is trying to snipe science from its
place at the top. In this same sense, Horse is right: "science is not
beyond criticism." Sure its not. Its the type of criticism that Glenn
doesn't like. What I see Pirsig doing is taking science and trying to
expand its meaning so that we can have a "science of morals" (which some
people have characterized the MoQ as). But at the same time he tries to
expand morals to mean something that can be made a science. I think both
attempts to be wrongheaded. (Thanks to everyone who pointed out that
teleological explanations, which I still hold that the MoQ uses, have no
business in science. I think my earlier essay is a confused example of why
the MoQ shouldn't be a science, all the while that I think it succeed's in
saying that we need to allow room for things other than science, other than
mechanistic explanations.)
What I think it would be better for Pirsig to do is to stick to the
pragmatist, Kuhnian train of thought on science: to level it down to
cultural size, on par with the other disciplines. Scientists ignore
philosophers who think that philosophy of science somehow has something to
do with science. Philosophers ignore scientists who think that by doing
science they somehow have special knowledge of the philosophy of science.
Pragmatists say that this is fine, what the two are doing is different, but
on a par with each other, just doing different things, for different purposes.
Glenn won't like this, but I think this gives him a substanative opponent.
I think its best to see Pirsig as saying that science is a system of
explanation, sure, but there are other ways to explain a thing. Some use
Cartesian coordinates, others polar coordinates. It just depends on what
you are trying to do.
Matt
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