EPISTEME ’12 coming up very soon.
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Science, the Market and Iterative Knowledge
Coming soon, the second paper co-authored with Dave Hardwick to appear in Studies in Emergent Order
Abstract: In a recent paper (Hardwick & Marsh, in press) we examine the recent tensions between the two broadly successful spontaneous orders, namely the Market and Science. We argued for an epistemic pluralism, the view that freedom and liberty (indeed the very concept of liberalism and civil society) exists at the nexus of a manifold of spontaneous forces, and that no single epistemic system should dominate. We also briefly introduced the concept of “iterative” knowledge to characterize the essentially dynamic nature of scientific knowledge. Herein lies a tension. The Market (and perhaps the prevailing culture at large) sees scientific knowledge in cumulative terms, that is, progressing to a conclusion in a linear fashion. This relatively static understanding of medical science as it relates to pharmaceutical studies can have a corrosive effect on the practice of medicine and ultimately, we believe, on the proper functioning of the market itself. In this paper we examine this tension in much closer detail by focusing upon the demands of the market, specifically the pharmaceutical industry, and the science upon which it is based. In other words, we expound upon a clash of epistemic value – one (science) that sees knowledge as essentially iterative (dynamic yet tentative) and the other (the Market) that harvests conclusive scientific knowledge (ostensibly as a fixed and firm commodity) functional to its own interests. Clinical Trials that are sharply focused with precisely determined deliverables often manifest this tension in the sharpest of relief. As a means of recovering drug development and testing costs, conclusive assessment is required to avoid creating serious financial problems for the companies themselves not to mention issues in the public interest.
The Trouble with Scientism: Why history and the humanities are also a form of knowledge.
Philip Kitcher, prominent philosopher of science in The New Republic:
The problem with scientism—which is of course not the same thing as science—is owed to a number of sources, and they deserve critical scrutiny. The enthusiasm for natural scientific imperialism rests on five observations. First, there is the sense that the humanities and social sciences are doomed to deliver a seemingly directionless sequence of theories and explanations, with no promise of additive progress. Second, there is the contrasting record of extraordinary success in some areas of natural science. Third, there is the explicit articulation of technique and method in the natural sciences, which fosters the conviction that natural scientists are able to acquire and combine evidence in particularly rigorous ways. Fourth, there is the perception that humanists and social scientists are only able to reason cogently when they confine themselves to conclusions of limited generality: insofar as they aim at significant—general—conclusions, their methods and their evidence are unrigorous. Finally, there is the commonplace perception that the humanities and social sciences have been dominated, for long periods of their histories, by spectacularly false theories, grand doctrines that enjoy enormous popularity until fashion changes, as their glaring shortcomings are disclosed.
Human social behavior arises, in a complex social context, from the psychological dispositions of individuals. Those psychological dispositions are themselves shaped not only by underlying genotypes, but also by the social and cultural environments in which people develop. Cultural transmission occurs in many animal species, but never to the extent or to the degree to which it is found in Homo sapiens. Human culture, moreover, is not obviously reducible to a complex system of processes in which single individuals affect others. Rigorous mathematical studies of gene-cultural coevolution reveal that when natural selection combines with cultural transmission, the outcomes reached may differ from those that would have been produced by natural selection acting alone, and that the cultural processes involved can be sustained under natural selection. Whether this happens in a wide variety of areas of human culture and domains or is relatively rare is something nobody can yet determine. But culture appears to be at some level autonomous and in some sense irreducible, and this is what scientism cannot grasp.
Knowing-how and knowing-that
Jason Stanley one of the leading writers on this topic has this piece in the NYT. Here is a copy of Jason’s paper that reignited interest in the topic and has since generated quite a large body of literature. (The featured photo here is of course by Steve Pyke).
EPISTEME: A NEW SELF-DEFINITION
With this issue Episteme makes its debut with Cambridge University Press, after eight successful years of publication at Edinburgh University Press. The journal’s new subtitle reflects a significant expansion in scope and mission. Our previous subtitle, ‘A Journal of Social Epistemology’, reflected our earlier focus on the nascent field of social epistemology. The new subtitle, ‘A Journal of Individual and Social Epistemology’, reflects a new self-definition as a full-spectrum journal of epistemology, including the complete remit of analytic epistemology. Our special interest in social epistemology remains, but it will no longer be our sole or primary mission. We aim to publish quality epistemological work representing the broad tradition of epistemology, using both informal and formal methodologies. We also add a commitment to include a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to epistemology, drawing on such fields as cognitive science, political theory, computer modeling, and linguistics.
This inaugural issue at Cambridge seeks to exemplify and illustrate our general aims. The issue’s central focus is a three-article symposium on pragmatic encroachment, a topic intensively discussed and debated in contemporary epistemology. Chandra Sripada and Jason Stanley, in one article, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath, in another, defend pragmatic encroachment. Jessica Brown, by contrast, is critical of it. The Sripada-Stanley article uses an interdisciplinary methodology, i.e. experimental philosophy, by now a staple of contemporary philosophy. The other full-length paper in this issue, by Richard Bradley and Christopher Thompson, exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach to social epistemology. In the spirit of the epistemic approach to democracy, it advocates a novel approach to voting based (mainly) on its epistemic merits. The Bradley-Thompson paper also exemplifies a formally oriented approach to social epistemology. The final piece in the issue is Mikkel Gerken’s critical review of Sanford Goldberg’s Relying on Others. Goldberg’s book is both a contribution to social epistemology (specifically, testimony) and to the question of how best to conceptualize ‘processes’ when working within the tradition of process reliabilism. So this topic straddles mainstream and social epistemology.
Going forward we are open to epistemological work of many varieties, including the basic epistemology topics of knowledge, justification, skepticism, evidence, rationality, and epistemic value. Approaches of relevance to these topics include (but are not limited to) evidentialism, reliabilism, internalism, externalism, contextualism, invariantism, contrastivism, virtue theory, and Bayesianism. Special domains for epistemic analysis include perception, memory, intuition, belief (categorical and graded), confirmation, modality, mathematics, and language. Within social epistemology topics of interest include testimony, peer disagreement, collective epistemology, judgment aggregation, internet epistemology, expert scientific testimony, epistemic approaches to democracy, and computer simulation of social networks. Our team of associate editors stands ready to oversee the assessment of submissions on these and related topics. The team is composed of Jessica Brown, Igor Douven, Don Fallis, Branden Fitelson, Jennifer Lackey, Christian List, Jack Lyons, Matthew McGrath, Jonathan Schaffer, Frederick Schmitt, Jonathan Weinberg, and Michael Weisberg.
Alvin Goldman
Rationalism in Politics
In anticipation of a talk I’m giving later on in the week on Oakeshott’s so-called “dispositional conservatism”, here is a nice little piece by my chum Gene Callahan serving as a good introduction to RIP.
The British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott is a curious figure in twentieth-century intellectual history. He is known mostly as a “conservative political theorist,” although he rejected ideology and his conservatism was primarily temperamental. Furthermore, his work on politics was only a fraction of his output, which comprised idealist philosophy, aesthetics, religion, education, the philosophy of history, and even horse racing. His popularity reached its zenith in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was well known on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing on the BBC and becoming the favorite philosopher at National Review. But he never seemed to seek popularity, and did little or nothing to boost his own when it subsequently faded. Today, despite the growing interest in Oakeshott since his death in 1990, even his best-recognized work, his essay “Rationalism in Politics,” is, I contend, not appreciated widely enough—thus, this article.
Lovers of liberty should keep Oakeshott’s work on rationalism in mind for at least two reasons. First, it offers a complementary but still significantly different critique of planning to those of Mises and Hayek. However, at the same time, it provides a warning to the advocates of freedom not to fall into the rationalist quagmire themselves. The relevance of the latter point is demonstrated by, for example, the tendency of many development economists, even those who are “market oriented,” to attempt to impose their theoretical schemes for taking a shortcut to westernization on some Third World country, while running roughshod over all the traditions, customs, and morals native to the place, which, whatever their short-comings, at least managed to sustain the society in question over previous centuries. Freedom cannot be “imposed” on a people according to some preconceived scheme. We all need to watch out for “the rationalist within.”
Collective Intelligence 2012
Just under a week until the CI2012 shindig – as it so happens I’m busy co-writing a paper and co-editing a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on a species of CI – surprise, surprise “stigmergy.”
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Of the External Senses
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Why we still need a mark of the cognitive
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Steps to a “Properly Embodied” Cognitive Science
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Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl
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Epistemological Problems of Privacy and Secrecy
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Science, the Market and Iterative Knowledge
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The Goldilocks problem and extended cognition
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Is external memory memory? Biological memory and extended mind
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Brain (call) box
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A liberal arts education
