I Can't Help But Wonder Who is Peterson Plagiarizing now?

The catch-all forum for general topics and debates. Minimal moderation. Rated PG to PG-13.
_MrStakhanovite
_Emeritus
Posts: 5269
Joined: Tue Apr 20, 2010 3:32 am

Re: I Can't Help But Wonder Who is Peterson Plagiarizing now

Post by _MrStakhanovite »

Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Scientism, as I use the term, isn’t science at all. It’s an ideological position about the scope and ability of science.


It is interesting to compare these two sentences of Daniel’s to the first two sentences in the scientism entry of ‘The Oxford Companion to Philosophy’:

TOCtP wrote:Scientism is a term of abuse. Therefore, perhaps inevitably there is no one simple characterization of the views of those who are thought to be identified as prone to it. (p.814)


I’d also like to point out that both the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy do not have entries for scientism, searches in both will only yield occurrences in other pages where the definition is provided by the context of the entry and isn’t uniform.

TOCtP wrote:In philosophy, a commitment to one or more of the following lays one open to the charge of scientism.

(a)The sciences are more important than the arts for understanding of the world in which we live, or even, all we need to understand it.
(b) Only a scientific methodology is intellectually acceptable. Therefore, if the arts are to be a genuine part of human knowledge they must adopt it.
(c) Philosophical problems are scientific problems and should only be dealt with as such.

A successful accusation of scientism usually relies upon a restrictive conception of the sciences and an optimistic conception of the arts as hitherto practised. Nobody espouses scientism; it is just detected in the writings of others, Among the accused are [Paul and Patricia Churchland], W.V. Quine and Logical Positivism. (p.814)


Daniel’s definition appears to be a blend of both (a) and (b):

Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Scientism claims that all questions can and should be answered by science, that all questions are, in the end, reducible to scientific questions.


Now I am aware of one philosopher who doesn’t mind getting labeled as an advocate for scientism, Alex Rosenberg. I found it revealing to compare comments from both about the idea of “reductionism”:

Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Plainly, scientism (in my view) is connected with reductionism. But another way of looking at it is to see it as a form of imperialism. As the old saw has it, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. So, too, an occasional scientist will insist that his discipline offers the key to the entire universe. (Attempts to seize moral behavior and ethical theory for evolutionary biology seem a fairly obvious example of this.) More often, though—at least in my experience—it isn’t scientists who engage in the most flagrant examples of scientism. They’re too busy counting caribou in the Canadian Rockies, monitoring fruit fly genetics, peering into telescopes, and clambering about in the Grand Canyon—that is, doing actual science—to engage in such fantasies. Rather, it’s typically non-scientists, amateurs, who, in their understandable enthusiasm for the achievements of science and the marvels of technology, go much too far. Hammers are very useful tools, but they’re not equally useful for all purposes. Science is powerful, but its power comes, to a large extent, from its precise and limited focus. Properly understood, it doesn’t claim to be able to do all things—and it’s exactly that modesty that enables it to do certain things extremely well.


The following comes from an interview found in 3AM Magazine:

Alex Rosenberg wrote:I’ve always been interested in reduction and reductionism. Laying cards on the table, I’ve been arguing for reductionism in biology for a very long time. I was doing this even when I was offering accounts of why the positivist and post-positivist accounts of reduction in terms of theoretical derivation could not be satisfied—owing to supervenience of multiple realized macromolecular arrangements. Then, and today, I was still trying to figure out how reduction proceeds. I know it proceeds, because I see it reported every week in the pages of Nature and in Nobel Prize winning research. But obviously, as in the philosophy of mind and psychology, the reductionists are in the minority and most people are physicalists but antireductionists. How to reconcile physicalism and antireductionism remains a vexed question in biology, in psychology, and of course among metaphysicians as well.

But philosophers of biology have stopped trying to nail down any reduction in the field. They no longer seek to define the gene in terms of DNA. We’re more interested in questions of whether the gene/DNA make a unique contribution to heredity and development, or whether the latest science shows that nucleic acids are on a par with a lot of other factors in transmission of traits between generations and development of traits within generations. You’d think these are empirical questions for molecular biologist, but the molecular biologists answers turn on concepts like information, causation, and reproduction that are rife with ambiguities that can easily shift the answers biologists give. Philosophers are sensitive to the ambiguities and we take sides on the questions ambiguously expressed.

One reason I am so interested in matters of reduction is that I think that most of the evidence that decides biological claims is molecular. Just consider what DNA evidence—genetic and somatic–is telling us about systematics, phylogeny, development, or neuroscience, etc. One area that I follow closely and has the greatest implication for human evolution, human culture and human prehistory is the sequencing of the genomes of the four different Homo species that have been alive together on the planet in the last 60,000 years. Every few months more comes out from the Max Planck institute in Leipzig that help us understand differences between these species and scenarios that led to the extinction of three of them and the domination of one. I think and I hope that we are going to be able to shed increasing light on problems about human cultural evolution from these sources. That’s a tangential reason I remain interested in reductionism.
Last edited by Guest on Sat Aug 04, 2018 7:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
_Gadianton
_Emeritus
Posts: 9947
Joined: Sat Jul 07, 2007 5:12 am

Re: I Can't Help But Wonder Who is Peterson Plagiarizing now

Post by _Gadianton »

Doctor Scratch wrote: If he can show that chemistry, neuroscience, physics, and geology are sufficiently different from each other--that the experts in those fields don't know enough about each others' disciplines-
then it also follows that the LGT is sufficiently different from anything else that nobody is qualified to comment on it except for Mopologists.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
_Lemmie
_Emeritus
Posts: 10590
Joined: Sun Apr 05, 2015 7:25 pm

Re: I Can't Help But Wonder Who is Peterson Plagiarizing now

Post by _Lemmie »

Kishkumen wrote:Doctor Scratch shows once again the importance of context. It very well may be that in the context of his conflict with gemli, this post is intended as a shot at gemli adding to the impression that gemli and others like him are victims or proponents of scientism....

Maybe he is trying to make the case that the transhumanist movement supporters are the proponents of scientism, in response to the very poor reception the Interpreter article received:
DCP, final paragraph wrote:... As the old saw has it, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.  So, too, an occasional scientist will insist that his discipline offers the key to the entire universe.... 

More often, though—at least in my experience—it isn’t scientists who engage in the most flagrant examples of scientism.... Rather, it’s typically non-scientists, amateurs, who, in their understandable enthusiasm for the achievements of science and the marvels of technology, go much too far.  Hammers are very useful tools, but they’re not equally useful for all purposes.  Science is powerful, but its power comes, to a large extent, from its precise and limited focus.
_Gadianton
_Emeritus
Posts: 9947
Joined: Sat Jul 07, 2007 5:12 am

Re: I Can't Help But Wonder Who is Peterson Plagiarizing now

Post by _Gadianton »

Some of my critics claim that, by scientism, I mean science that has come to conclusions of which I disapprove, or that conflict with my religious beliefs.


CFR (I'll bet NONE of his critics have EVER said this)


Scientism, as I use the term, isn’t science at all. It’s an ideological position about the scope and ability of science. It is, strictly speaking, metascientific. In at least some cases, one might say that it’s parasitic upon science and that it attempts to wrap itself, quite illegitimately, in the mantle and prestige of science.


A pedestrian observation, but I agree.

Scientism claims that all questions can and should be answered by science, that all questions are, in the end, reducible to scientific questions.


That's pretty extreme. Not sure any of the atheists I'd regard as representatives of "scientism" would be quite that obvious about it.

I also think "scientism" could cover the general approach of a lot of folks he might not expect, including his apologist buddy Jeff Lindsey (and myriads of other Mormons). His review of The Three Body Problem was a textbook example of scientism. There are a lot of these types in Mormonism. A fair number of Mormons believe that their God of flesh and bone is galactic scientist in chief.

No amount of chemical analysis will prove or disprove the existence of God.


What DCP fails to realize is that people invest a lot in their beliefs. DCP probably did too until he encountered folks with an interest in fact checking. Now he admits to nothing, out of fear he will be proven wrong.

When God gets tied up in arguments from design, for instance, then to say science can't say anything about God is incorrect. It's probably the rule rather than the exception for believers to tie their Deity to falsifiable positions. It's mostly those who have gotten their asses kicked as apologists, who fight for God only in the most abstract sense possible.

Yes, the material world around us is made of elementary...(run-on paragraph about this)


In the future, DCP might quote our good friend, Alf Omega (who recently abandoned us), in order to get to the point. Alf once said, "Everything is physics, but physics isn't everything."

Point taken. I assume we all agree.

Plainly, scientism (in my view) is connected with reductionism.


Yeah, he really likes this one. To point it out again, he's battling atheism from a hundred years ago. All the arrogant New Atheists he despises are physical non-reductionists. They have to be, in order to advance their mind modularity / social meme theories. Dennett, Pinker, and Dawkins. Mosts atheists today are physical non-reductionists for the simple reason that they believe machines will one day be, mentally, whatever it is that humans are.

But another way of looking at it is to see it as a form of imperialism. As the old saw has it, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.


Better. As a great example of this kind of imperialism, see Lindsey's book review published by the Interpreter.

So, too, an occasional scientist will insist that his discipline offers the key to the entire universe. (Attempts to seize moral behavior and ethical theory for evolutionary biology seem a fairly obvious example of this.)


So, explaining moral behavior (not even morality per se) by evolutionary biology is an obvious example of insisting that a single discipline -- evolutionary biology -- is the key to the entire universe?

Rather, it’s typically non-scientists, amateurs, who, in their understandable enthusiasm for the achievements of science and the marvels of technology, go much too far.


I agree. But again, scientism in this sense isn't entirely the domain of atheists. My key friends growing up were all future techs and engineers, who basically thought about science and Mormonism as two ways of looking at the same thing. And there are a LOT of Mormons like this.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
_Doctor Scratch
_Emeritus
Posts: 8025
Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2009 4:44 pm

Re: I Can't Help But Wonder Who is Peterson Plagiarizing now

Post by _Doctor Scratch »

One of the main contexts in which he trots out his accusations of "scientism" is when he's discussing near-death experiences. If anyone argues that neuroscience offers a better explanation for NDEs, then DCP immediately starts pounding away at the "scientism" alarm button.
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
Post Reply