Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom: Studies in the Philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell 9783110319439, 9783110319101

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Leemon McHenry (Ed.) Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom Studies in the Philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell

Leemon McHenry (Ed.)

Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom Studies in the Philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell

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Contents v

Preface

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How Can Life of Value Best Flourish in the Real World? Nicholas Maxwell I. FROM KNOWLEDGE TO WISDOM

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Sonnets on Wisdom in Honour of Nicholas Maxwell Alan Nordstrom

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Nicholas Maxwell in Context: The Relationship of His Wisdom Theses to the Contemporary Global Interest in Wisdom Copthorne Macdonald

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Prolegomena to a Critique of Pure Wisdom Steve Fuller

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Why is it So Hard to Move From Knowledge to Wisdom? John Stewart

111 The Urgent Need for an Intellectual Revolution: Maxwell’s Version Joseph Agassi 129

No Easy Answers: Wisdom and Cognitive Science Margaret Boden

147 How Should Research be Organised? An Alternative to the UK Research Assessment Exercise Donald Gillies

II. HUMAN WORLD AND THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE 169 Our Place in Nature Jeremy Shearmur 183

Maxwell on Free Will, Science and Determinism Mathew Iredale

199 The Limits of Physicalism David Hodgson III. PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 217 Metaphysics and Methodology: Aim-Oriented Empiricism Karl Rogers 233 Popper and Maxwell on Scientific Progress Leemon McHenry IV. REPLIES AND REFLECTIONS 249 Replies and Reflections Nicholas Maxwell 315 Selected Publications of Nicholas Maxwell 321 Notes on Contributors

Preface I first met Nicholas Maxwell when he lectured in a course I took on Contemporary British Philosophy at the London School of Economics in 1979. While several of the lecturers in that course were eminent professors at the cutting edge of analytical philosophy, Maxwell stood out as having something to say on things that really mattered. Here was a whole new way of doing philosophy that did not treat the problems and issues as merely linguistic or conceptual analysis, but as powerful ideas to change the world. I continued to follow Maxwell’s work over the years, one book after another, and saw the system develop in ever more precise refinement. In retrospect, what might have been juvenile fascination with idealistic schemes was replaced by respect for ideas that stood the test of time and critical scrutiny. His focus on the importance of reforming human learning by making the pursuit of knowledge part of a larger project in achieving global wisdom struck me as a much-needed solution to many of the world’s problems, beginning with a reform of education. So, thirty years later I am honored to edit this Festschrift, one that brings together a group of international scholars from diverse disciplines to celebrate Maxwell’s work. With a philosopher’s comprehensive breadth and a scientist’s mastery of technical detail, he has produced a system of thought that commands our attention. Yet his work has suffered disappointing neglect by the academic world, even in his own subject, the philosophy of science, to which he has contributed for over forty years. Part of the explanation for the lack of attention to Maxwell’s work concerns the highly original nature of his vision and the criticisms he has advanced against the orthodox scientific tradition. In fact, it is difficult to place his thought in any school of philosophy of science that has developed out of the 20th century. Maxwell, nevertheless, has been undaunted in his persistent devotion to the cause of humanity. The contributors to this volume offer a corrective to the neglect his work has received. Maxwell’s work covered in this volume falls into three different, but related categories: (1) his argument that science and academic inquiry more generally should move from knowledge to wisdom, (2) his formulation and solution to the human world and physical universe problem, and (3) his work in philosophy of science that emerged from his critical evaluation of Karl Popper. There is yet another, more technical aspect of Maxwell’s work not covered in the essays below, namely, his

papers in physics that focus on the problems in the orthodox interpretation of quantum theory. I wish to thank Professor Michael Krausz for the idea that set this volume in motion. I am especially grateful to Dr. Rafael Hüntelmann for recognizing the value of the project and publishing this book. Leemon McHenry Los Angeles, California

How Can Life of Value Best Flourish in the Real World? Nicholas Maxwell 1. The Urgent Need for an Intellectual Revolution 2. Two Fundamental Problems 3. Autobiographical Remarks 4. What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Life of Value to Flourish? 5. How is Life of Value Possible in the Physical Universe? 6. Connections between the Two Problems 1. The Urgent Need for an Intellectual Revolution For much of my working life (from 1972 onwards) I have argued, in and out of print, that we need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods of science – and of academic inquiry more generally. Instead of giving priority to the search for knowledge, academia needs to devote itself to seeking and promoting wisdom by rational means, wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides. A basic task ought to be to help humanity learn how to create a better world. Acquiring scientific knowledge dissociated from a more basic concern for wisdom, as we do at present, is dangerously and damagingly irrational. Natural science has been extraordinarily successful in increasing knowledge. This has been of great benefit to humanity. But new knowledge and technological know-how increase our power to act which, without wisdom, may cause human suffering and death as well as human benefit. All our modern global problems have arisen in this way: global warming, the lethal character of modern war and terrorism, threats posed by modern armaments (conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear), vast inequalities of wealth and power round the globe, rapid increase in population, destruction of tropical rain forests and other natural habitats, rapid extinction of species, even the AIDS epidemic (AIDS being spread

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by modern travel). All these distinctively modern crises have been made possible by modern science dissociated from the rational pursuit of wisdom. If we are to avoid in this century the horrors of the last one – wars, death camps, dictatorships, poverty, environmental damage – we urgently need to learn how to acquire more wisdom, which in turn means that our institutions of learning become effectively, rationally, devoted to that end. The revolution we need would change every branch and aspect of academic inquiry. A basic intellectual task of academic inquiry would be to articulate our problems of living (personal, social and global) and propose and critically assess possible solutions, possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life. This would be the task of social inquiry and the humanities. Tackling problems of knowledge would be secondary. Social inquiry would be at the heart of the academic enterprise, intellectually more fundamental than natural science. On a rather more long-term basis, social inquiry would be concerned to help humanity build cooperatively rational methods of problem-solving into the fabric of social and political life, so that we may gradually acquire the capacity to resolve our conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than at present. Natural science would change to include three domains of discussion: evidence, theory, and aims – the latter including discussion of metaphysics, values and politics. Pursued for its own sake, science would be more like natural philosophy, intermingling science, metaphysics and philosophy as in the time of Newton. Academic inquiry as a whole would become a kind of people's civil service, doing openly for the public what actual civil services are supposed to do in secret for governments. Academia would actively seek to educate the public by means of discussion and debate, and would not just study the public. Above all academia, internationally, would be devoted to helping humanity learn what we need to do in response to the impending crisis of global warming. The intellectual/institutional revolution, from knowledge to wisdom, that I have been arguing for, has dramatic consequences both for the internal structure and organization of academia, and for its relationship with the rest of the social world. These changes are not arbitrary. They all come from demanding that academia cure its current structural irrationality, so that reason – the authentic article – may be devoted to promoting human welfare. The upshot is a new kind of inquiry – wisdom-inquiry – of which natural

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science forms an integral part. Wisdom-inquiry puts into the hands of humanity, for the first time, an instrument of learning rationally designed to help us realize what is of most value to us as we live – rationally designed to help us make progress towards a good world. Wisdom-inquiry is the solution to the profoundly important, fundamental, but much neglected philosophical problem: What kind of inquiry can best help humanity learn how to make progress towards a civilized world? 2. Two Fundamental Problems Even though this is where the main effort of my working life lies, it does not sum up everything I have sought to do. Many years ago I came to the conclusion that all my work, and much of my teaching, have been concerned, in one way or another, with two fundamental, inter-related problems. Problem 1: How can we understand our human world, embedded as it is within the physical universe, in such a way that justice is done both to the richness, meaning and value of human life on the one hand, and to what modern science tells us about the physical universe on the other hand? Problem 2: What ought to be the overall aims and methods of science, and of academic inquiry more generally, granted that the basic task is to help humanity achieve what is of value – a wiser, more civilized world – by cooperatively rational means (it being assumed that knowledge and understanding can be of value in themselves and form a part of civilized life)? Both problems have played a central role in the history of thought. The first problem begins with Democritus; aspects of the problem can be found in the writings of Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Newton; it is central to the work of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and, in more recent times, has been of concern to such diverse thinkers as Whitehead, Russell, Stebbing, Popper, Dennett, Nagel and Searle. The second problem (appropriately interpreted) occupies a central place in the thought of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; it is basic to the work of Francis Bacon, Descartes, Locke; it has a fundamental role to play in Enlightenment thought of the 18th century; and that aspect of the problem that has to do with the pursuit of knowledge

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has continued to play a central role in philosophy and philosophy of science down to the present. The first problem includes the mind/body problem, the problem of free will and determinism, and the problem of the relationship between facts and values; it includes problems concerning the relationship between perceptual and physical properties, and problems concerning the relationship between different branches of the sciences, from physics via biology to psychology. It involves problems concerning the interpretation of the neurosciences, Darwinian theory, and modern physical theory, especially quantum theory; and it involves questions concerning scientific realism, scientific essentialism and instrumentalism. Work that I have done on this problem includes: my MA thesis,1 my first three papers (published in 1966 and 1968),2 a series of papers on quantum theory,3 parts 1

N. Maxwell, Physics and Common Sense: A Critique of Physicalism (MA thesis, Joule Library, Manchester University, 1965). 2 N. Maxwell, “Physics and Common Sense”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16 (1966), pp. 295-311; “Can there be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19 (1968), pp. 1-25 (reprinted in R. Swinburne, (ed.) The Justification of Induction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 149-174; “Understanding Sensations”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1968), pp. 127-146. 3 In the first of these papers, published in 1972, I argued that orthodox quantum theory is seriously defective: as a result of being about measurement, the theory consists of two incompatible components, a quantum mechanical component, and a component describing measurement consisting of some part of classical physics. In order to cure this defect, I argued, all reference to measurement and “observables” needs to be removed from the postulates of the theory, precise quantum mechanical conditions being specified for probabilistic events to occur: see N. Maxwell, “A New Look at the Quantum Mechanical Problem of Measurement”, American Journal of Physics 40, (1972), pp. 1431-1435. I was immediately ticked off by two American physicists for failing to understand quantum theory: see W. Band and J.L. Park, “Comments concerning “A New Look at the Quantum Mechanical Problem of Measurement”, American Journal of Physics 41 (1973), pp. 1021-1022. Actually, it was Band and Park who got things wrong, as I pointed out at the time: see N. Maxwell, “The Problem of Measurement – Real of Imaginary?”, American Journal of Physics 41 (1973), pp. 1022-1025. I might add that John Bell subsequently put forward a somewhat similar criticism of orthodox quantum theory from 1973 onwards: see J. Bell, Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). In my paper I hoped to get across to physicists the idea that, in order to cure quantum theory of its defects, what was needed was not philosophical interpretation, but

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of What's Wrong With Science?,4 "Methodological Problems of Neuroscience",5 chapter 10 of From Knowledge to Wisdom,6 and part 2 of "Induction and Scientific Realism".7 Especially significant are: "Physics and Common Sense" (1966), chapter 10 of From Knowledge to Wisdom (1984), and "The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism" (2000).8 The various strands of this long-standing research were brought together in my book The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will and Evolution (2001).9 straightforward physics: testable conjectures concerning the occurrence of probabilistic transitions, to be put to the test of experiment. As there was no sign of any physicist taking any interest in the idea, I struggled to develop my proposal further: see for example my “Towards a Micro Realistic Version of Quantum Mechanics”, Foundations of Physics 6 (1976), pp. 275-92 and 661-76. Eventually I came up with a fully micro-realistic, fundamentally probabilistic version of quantum theory, free of the defects of, and testably distinct from, orthodox quantum theory: see my “Instead of Particles and Fields: A Micro Realistic Quantum "Smearon" Theory”, Foundations of Physics 12 (1982), pp. 607-31. This was further clarified in N. Maxwell, “Quantum Propensiton Theory: A Testable Resolution of the Wave/Particle Dilemma”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 39 (1988), pp. 1-50; and received a precise formulation in N. Maxwell, “Particle Creation as the Quantum Condition for Probabilistic Events to Occur”, Physics Letters A 187 (1994), pp. 351-355. (I was prompted to develop a precise version of the theory by Euan Squires’s criticism of my 1988 paper: see E. J. Squires, “A Comment on Maxwell's Resolution of the Wave/Particle Dilemma”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (1989), pp. 413-417. For my latest exposition of my fundamentally probabilistic, micro-realistic version of quantum theory see: N. Maxwell, “Is the Quantum World Composed of Propensitons?”, in M. Suárez (ed.), Probabilities, Causes and Propensities in Physics, (Boston: Synthese Library, 2009). 4 N. Maxwell, What’s Wrong With Science?: Towards a People’s Rational Science of Delight and Compassion (Hayes, UK: Bran’s Head Books, 1976). 5 N. Maxwell, “Methodological Problems of Neuroscience”, in D. Rose and V. G. Dobson (eds.), Models of the Visual Cortex (Chichester: John Wiley, 1985), pp. 11-21. 6 N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984; 2nd ed., revised throughout, new introduction and three new chapters, London: Pentire Press, 2007). 7 N. Maxwell, “Induction and Scientific Realism: Einstein versus van Fraassen”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (1993), pp. 61-79, 81-101 and 275305. 8 N. Maxwell, “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism”, Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 49-71. 9 N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will

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The second problem includes standard epistemological and methodological problems about scientific progress, the rationality of science, the aims and methods of natural and social science. But it goes beyond these standard issues in embracing the whole of academic inquiry – the humanities, technological research and education in addition to natural and social science – and in raising the question of how inquiry, in this broad sense, can best help people realize what is genuinely of value in life. It is very definitely not assumed that the proper intellectual aim of inquiry is knowledge. My published work on this problem began with “A Critique of Popper’s Views on Scientific Method”,10 and “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery”.11 The first full statement of the argument for the need for a revolution, from knowledge to wisdom, is to be found in my first book What’s Wrong With Science? (1976);12 it is restated, in a much more detailed and careful way in From Knowledge to Wisdom,13 and it receives a more up to date restatement in Is Science Neurotic?.14 A detailed statement of the first part of the argument concerning natural science is to be found in The Comprehensibility of the Universe.15 I have also published numerous papers spelling out various aspects of the argument over the years: four examples are: “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism” (1980), “What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Us Create a Good World?” (1992), “Can Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization” (2000), and “From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution” (2007).16 and Evolution (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). 10 N. Maxwell, “A Critique of Popper's Views on Scientific Method”, Philosophy of Science 39 (1972), pp. 131-52; reprinted in A. O’Hear, (ed.), Popper: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. II, Part 3, (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 463-87. 11 N. Maxwell, “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery”, Philosophy of Science 41 (1974), pp. 123-153 and 247-295. 12 N. Maxwell, What’s Wrong With Science?, op.cit. 13 N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit. 14 N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic? (London: Imperial College Press, 2004). 15 N. Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe: A New Conception of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 16 N. Maxwell, “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism”, Inquiry 23 (1980), pp. 19-81; “What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Us Create a Good World?, Science, Technology and Human Values 17 (1992), pp. 205-227; “Can

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In what follows I shall call the first problem the “Human World/Physical Universe Problem” (HWPhU problem), and the second the “wisdominquiry problem”. These two problems are, of course, interconnected in many ways (a point I shall return to below). The first concerns how it is possible for life of value to exist in the physical universe. The second presumes that the first has been solved and seeks to discover what kind of inquiry can best help life of value to flourish in the physical universe. Taken together, they ought, but are not, to be regarded as the fundamental problems of philosophy, embracing as they do, not just epistemology, philosophy of science and metaphysics, but also moral and political philosophy. They may be regarded as two aspects of an even more fundamental problem: How can life of value best flourish in the real world? This is indeed, in my view, the proper basic problem, not just for philosophy, but for all of science and scholarship. It is our fundamental problem in life, practical, theoretical and conceptual, personal, social and global. Certainly all my own work has been directed towards contributing towards improving our solutions of this fundamental problem. 3. Autobiographical Remarks How did I come to be preoccupied – or obsessed – with the above two problems? It goes back to my childhood. From a young age (and probably in common with most other young children) I passionately wanted to understand. I can remember wondering, as a four-year old, how space ends. I came to the conclusion that it must end with an enormous wall. Then the awful thought occurred: What is behind the wall? I had discovered a fundamental problem of cosmology. At the same age I invented a theory as to why the sky is blue. It is blue because air is very slightly blue. I told my father about my idea, and was outraged when he seemed unconvinced. When I was six I discovered the problem of perception. I knew that when we see, light enters our eyes. This must mean, I suddenly realized, that this room I see must be inside my Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 17 (2000), pp. 29-44; “From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution”, London Review of Education, 5;2 (2007), pp. 97-115, reprinted in R. Barnett and N. Maxwell (eds.), Wisdom in the University (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1-19.

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head. But that is absurd: How can it possibly be inside my head? At about the same time I discovered an argument for the existence of atoms. People, animals, plants are all of a characteristic size. There must therefore, I felt rather than thought, be something in the constitution of things which makes it possible for these things to determine what size to be. Ultimately matter must be made up of atoms, of a definite size, to make it possible for familiar things to fix their size. My parents, somewhat amused by my passion to understand, gave me a book for children about science for my eighth birthday. I discovered that it is theoretical physics which seeks to understand the ultimate nature of the universe. My task in life was clear: I would become a theoretical physicist, discover the secret of the universe (the secret of life as I then thought it to be), and reveal it to everyone. At the age of ten I devoured Penguin Science News 2,17 devoted to nuclear physics and the bomb. I was fascinated and appalled. I was horrified that nuclear tests might create a hydrogen bomb out of the heavy hydrogen in the oceans, exploding the earth and everyone on it, including me. But what enthralled me was the mystery, the utter strangeness, of the universe revealed by physics, solid matter mostly empty space, velocity causing lengths to shrink and clocks to go slow, space-time not flat but curved, particles no more than waves of probability, the real world so utterly different from how we ordinarily experience it to be. To live and die and never know what sort of universe this really is struck me as the ultimate catastrophe, almost equivalent to not living at all. Nothing, nothing must divert me from the task of discovering the secret of the universe, the secret of life. None of this, by the way, should be taken to mean that I was fiercely precocious. Not at all. In those far off days in England, 11 year olds had to take an exam which decided whether they could go on to grammar school or not. Failure more or less condemned you to leaving school without academic qualifications (unless your parents could pay for your education). I failed this crucial exam, not once, but twice! My problem was that, though not especially bright, I was insanely, pathologically intellectually ambitious. Then, with adolescence, I began to feel it was far more important to understand people than the universe, the way to do that being via the novel. Instead of reading Jeans, Eddington, and Fred Hoyle, I plunged into the 17

R.E. Peierls and J. Enogat (eds.) Science News 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947).

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worlds of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Stendhal, Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Flaubert. My real education began. I would become a novelist and dare to reveal dark secrets of the human heart no one before had dared utter. I would depict worlds with such intense imaginative power that they would seem more real than reality itself But the educational system had stamped me science rather than humanities. Off I went to University College London to study mathematics. Earlier, I had read Eddington, and he had persuaded me that physics is really mathematics, the ultimate nature of the universe being mathematical in character. I thought I would find mathematics easy, and I would be able to devote myself to writing novels. But I was miserable, I didn't know what to write about, and I never discovered how to fabricate in order to tell the truth. And mathematics seemed both hollow and very difficult. It did not seem to be about anything – apart, that is, from analysis, which I found fascinating because it seemed to probe the foundations. I passed all my exams but, abruptly, in my second year, my grant was stopped because I had not attended enough lectures. So I did my National Service, and became a Sergeant in the Educational Corps. And then I went to Manchester University to do Philosophy. I had failed miserably as a physicist, and as a novelist, but I was interested in philosophical problems, so I would do that for three years, and then join the grey shuffle of ordinary, uncreative life (as I then saw it). I found I knew how to do philosophy. In our first week, Professor Arthur Prior (logician and moral philosopher) set us, as an essay subject, “Do we see stars?”. When Prior gave me my essay back, he told me that he had set the subject for an open essay competition, and my essay included all the points made in the essays of the competition, but no single essay had managed to include all of mine. For my next essay, Prior asked me to read a paper in the current issue of Mind on McTaggart on time. I read it, decided the author was mistaken, and said so in my essay. “Yes, I think you’re right” Prior said as he handed back my essay. I was pleased: here I was, apparently, at the coal face of philosophical research, holding my own with the philosophical professionals. Another triumph – which I only saw as a triumph some years later – came towards the end of my first year. I had to write an essay on the mind/body problem for Arthur Prior’s seminar. I went for long walks in Whitworth Park (near Manchester University) in an agony of thought, and came to the conclusion that we do not ordinarily know enough about our

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inner experiences to know that they are not brain processes. In perception we see, not what is inside our heads, but what we ordinarily suppose we see, the world around us. After I had read out my essay in the seminar, Prior asked, rather sharply, what I had been reading. “Nothing”, I replied. “I went for walks in Whitworth Park and thought about the problem”. Prior, from New Zealand, and a friend of J. J. C. Smart, must have been somewhat startled to discover that a first year undergraduate had rediscovered for himself some of the key points made earlier in print by U. T. Place18 (1956) and Smart.19 But by the end of the academic year I had made myself utterly miserable, struggling hopelessly with the tangled brambles of impossible philosophical problems, locked in a nightmare of contradictory intellectual impulses. When the summer vacation came, I took a job in a factory, and in the evenings began to keep a diary, noting down my thoughts and feelings. The outcome was a series of psychic explosions which tore me apart and changed the rest of my life. I decided that my earlier desire to be a great theoretical physicist and master the universe, and my desire to be a great novelist and master of human life, were both, when pushed to the limit of absurdity, manifestations of the desire to become God. Not only was this absurd; it was undesirable. Far more desirable was to be something that, up to then, had seemed too insignificant to deserve any consideration at all: myself. This long-neglected, fragile, worthless scrap of almost nothing now seemed to me to be, for me, the most precious thing in existence, something holy and sacrosanct. But what was it? What was I? I had no idea. Having ignored myself, in some sense, for so long, in my striving to become acquainted with, identified with, some profoundly significant otherness (ultimate physical reality, ultimate human reality), my self had become a stranger to me. It felt like a young plant, fragile from neglect and lack of nourishment, needing attention and care to grow and flourish. When we are born, I wrote in the diary, we do not know how to distinguish "me" from "not me": there is just things happening. But then we do discover how to make the distinction, and we discover we are tiny 18

U.T. Place, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?”, British Journal of Psychology, 46 (1956), pp. 44-50. 19 J.J.C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).

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and vulnerable in a vast, strange, and sometimes terrifying world. We falsely half remember the earlier state as a time when we were "everything", and our life project, in one way or another, becomes to return to this earlier, God-like state. One strategy is to try to convert the "not me" into "me", by conquering it, knowing and understanding it, acquiring power over it, or even literally trying to swallow it. Another standard strategy is to do just the opposite: shrink the "me" until it disappears, and there is only "everything". This is the strategy of the mystic who seeks mystical union with God; it is the strategy of the humble, and of those who commit suicide. But both these conventional and absurd strategies rest on a mistaken view about the nature of the "me", the nature of personal identity. Our identity is not what is inside us. What lies within us is just as mysterious as what lies without us. Our identity exists in the interplay between what lies within and without. If the distinction between "me" and "not me" is depicted as a circle on a surface, the "me" is not, as we ordinarily assume, what lies within the circle; it is rather the line of the circle itself. We should not, ludicrously, try to increase the circle until, in the limit, everything is incorporated within it; nor should we, almost equally ludicrously, try to decrease the circle until it becomes a dot and disappears and there is just "everything": instead, we should "relax the muscles of identity" (as I wrote in my diary) so that the line of the circle becomes permeable, and there can be an easy interplay between what lies within and without, and we become our authentic selves, without striving to expand until, in the limit, we become everything, or shrink until we become nothing (and there is only everything). My earlier projects to know and understand the nature of the universe by means of physics, and to know and understand humanity by means of literature, now seemed variants of the strategy to expand and expand the circle of identity. Pushed to the limits of absurdity, it was as if my ultimate aspiration had been to become God. But an infinitely more worthwhile goal lay before me, up till now neglected as worthless: to become myself. "The riddle of the universe" I wrote "is the riddle of our desires". The fundamental question of philosophy is not "How do I acquire knowledge?" but rather "What do I want? How should I live?". These ideas, which now seem to me somewhat absurd, exaggerated and dubious at best, were for me, at the time, the stuff of my life; they were experienced and lived. Before these "revelations", I had half believed in

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Descartes' picture of the self being the mind, linked to the brain but utterly different from anything physical, the whole experienced world being locked away within the prison of one's skull. This picture was shattered. What was within was just as much a mystery as what lay without: "I" was the region of interplay between these two mysteries. I became whatever I saw or experienced, my self being created and dying many times during the day. In one of his letters, John Keats spoke of becoming the bird he saw pecking on a path. That was how it now was with me. I would be whatever I experienced: seeing a blade of grass, I became that blade of grass; talking with a friend, I became that "talking with the friend". For six weeks it was as if I was high on some hallucinatory drug: visions of exhilarating and terrifying intensity came before breakfast, and throughout the day. I had become a prophet, and my prophecy was: be your own prophet, discover for yourself your own true self, what you really desire in life. In the end I found having a great message for the world such a contradiction that I finally hit upon the idea: there are only stories or myths. One is that of science; another is that of personal experience. Not till I read Karl Popper did I free myself of this nonsense – still so fashionable in some quarters. I vowed that when I got back to Manchester University in the autumn, I would tell the Philosophy Department about my earth-shaking discoveries of the summer – especially, that philosophy should be about how to live, and not about how to acquire knowledge. I found I could not even open my mouth. Ecstasy gave way to persistent black despair. I knew I had discovered something of profound importance. But what exactly? In my misery, I felt my miraculous discovery had been mislaid. I laboured to rediscover what I had lost. And very slowly, over a period of some ten to twenty years, I did rediscover and further develop my initial, slightly mad ideas. For those six weeks of ecstasy and terror are the key to all my subsequent work. What I have done since is to recoup, develop, elaborate and apply the stark, crude ideas I lived with such intensity that summer. Looking back now, I would say that the key discovery was that "the riddle of the universe is the riddle of our desires" – or, in other words, that our aims, in science and in life, are profoundly problematic. Tied in with this was the idea that philosophy should be about how to live, not about how to acquire knowledge – and certainly not about solving conceptual problems. I generalized this, later, to become the idea that all of inquiry,

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and not just philosophy, should be about how to live – our fundamental problems being problems of living rather than problems of knowledge. Tied in with all this, too, was the discovery that the world as we experience it is as objectively real as the world revealed by theoretical physics. Physics and literature, the two passions of my youth, each hitherto making nonsense of the other, suddenly achieved a kind of problematic synthesis in the idea that our human world and the physical universe coexist with equal reality. My struggles with physics and literature, instead of being just abject failures, became something like apprentice work for the task in hand: to bring my discovery, whatever it might be, out into the clear light of day. The roots of the human world/physical universe problem lay, for me, deep in my childhood, deep in my being. After obtaining my degree in 1963, I decided I would devote two years to trying to capture what I had discovered, in the summer of 1961, in an MA thesis. My initial idea was to argue that there are only different stories, different myths, it being vital not to take any one story, such as that of science or common sense, too seriously. My tutor, Ted Dawson, persuaded me to restrict my attention to just two "stories", or cosmological views, that of physics and common sense. I discovered Karl Popper, and was immensely impressed. One passage in particular made an impact: The belief of a liberal – the belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of equal justice, of fundamental rights, and a free society – can easily survive the recognition that judges are not omniscient and may make mistakes about facts and that, in practice, absolute justice is hardly ever realized in any particular case. But this belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case: and that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about the facts than he can be right.20 I found this moral argument for factual realism convincing. It made clear that to abandon the notion of factual truth is shameful, and potentially 20

K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 5.

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disastrous. I converted my initial idea that physics and common sense are rival, equally valid stories about the nature of reality into the very different idea that they specify different aspects of reality. My task then became to pin down precisely what aspects, and how they are inter-related. I discovered J.J.C. Smart's Philosophy and Scientific Realism, which impressed me with its clarity, simplicity and comprehensiveness – and its freedom from any hint of awful Oxford conceptual analysis. My thesis became a criticism of Smart's radical version of physicalism ("everything is made up exclusively of fundamental physical entities"). I expounded and defended a view that I have called experiential physicalism (it might be called naive realist physicalism). Physics seeks to specify only that aspect of the world which determines (perhaps probabilistically) how events unfold in time. Colours, sounds, smells, as experienced by us, exist objectively in the world, in addition to, and not reducible to, physical properties. Our inner experiences are brain processes. These have experiential features not reducible, even in principle, to physics. Understanding a person as a person is distinct from, and cannot be reduced to, scientific understanding. The overall argument of the thesis was summarized in my first published paper “Physics and Common Sense” (1966).21 Two further papers spelled out more detailed points of my thesis: “Can there be Necessary Connections Between Successive Events?”, (which specifies precisely what aspect of the world it is that physics seeks to describe, and refutes Hume on causation), and “Understanding Sensations”,22 (which spells out the "two aspect" version of the brain process theory I defend). With the completion of my MA thesis (in 1965), and the publication of these three papers, I had completed the kernel of my solution to the problem of how it is possible for the world as we experience it to exist embedded in the physical universe, although I continued to develop further aspects of this proposed solution over the years. I expected these three papers, when published, to provoke a philosophical uproar. That they were passed over in almost complete silence left me bitterly disappointed. I came to the conclusion that publishing papers had nothing to do with communicating ideas or results, and had everything to do with promoting 21

N. Maxwell, “Physics and Common Sense”, op. cit. N. Maxwell, “Can there be Necessary Connections Between Successive Events?”, op. cit.; and “Understanding Sensations”, op. cit. 22

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academic careers. For a time, I stopped publishing altogether. (Some of the content of these papers did, however, receive considerable attention as a result of subsequent publications by, among others, Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, Fred Dretske, M. Tooley, and David Armstrong.23 However, these subsequent publications missed the most important points that I was concerned to make. Nagel and Jackson failed to appreciate that, once it is established that physics cannot predict experiential qualities as we experience them, the silence of physics about colours and other experiential qualities provides no grounds whatsoever for holding they do not exist objectively, in the world around us – in one sense of “objective” at least – a point I shall return to below. Dretske, Tooley, and Armstrong, in giving their essentialistic, anti-Humean accounts of laws, failed to explain how laws can be both necessary and empirical, which is just what my account of 1968 succeeded in doing. As I explained in my 1968 paper refuting Hume, the empirical content of an essentialistically interpreted theory lies in its existential claims; the laws are all necessary analytically, and hence not empirical.) A year or two later, I made what I can only regard as the most important discovery of my life. Having solved the problem of how it is possible for life of value to exist in the physical universe, I was abruptly confronted with the discovery that academic inquiry must be radically transformed if it is to be rationally designed to help life of value to flourish in the physical universe. In the next section I give an account of this discovery. In the section after, I summarize the details of my proposed solution to the first problem – the problem of how life of value is possible in the physical universe. I conclude with some remarks about interconnections between the two contributions. 4. What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Life of Value to Flourish? A year or two after the publication of my first three papers – around 1970 – 23

T. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, The Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp. 435450: F. Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know”, Journal of Philosophy 3 (1986), pp. 29195; F. Dretske, “Laws of Nature”, Philosophy of Science 44 (1977), pp. 248-68; M. Tooley, “The Nature of Law”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1977), pp. 667-698; and D. Armstrong, A Theory of Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), and What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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I began to wonder whether Popper really had solved the problems of induction and demarcation or, more fundamentally, the problem of exhibiting science as a rational endeavour. I came to the conclusion he had not. Popper, like almost all scientists and philosophers of science, took it for granted that the basic intellectual aim of science is to acquire knowledge of factual truth, nothing being persistently presupposed about the truth independently of evidence. But this seriously misrepresents the real aim of science. Physics persistently only accepts unified theories even though endlessly many even more empirically successful disunified rivals can always easily be concocted. This means physics makes a persistent metaphysical assumption: the universe is such that no disunified theory is true. Or, in other words: the universe is more or less physically comprehensible (only unified theories being explanatory, or depicting a physically comprehensible range of phenomena). The aim of physics is not truth per se, but rather truth presupposed to be physically comprehensible. Popper had, in short, failed quite fundamentally to solve the problem of the rationality of science. He had failed to acknowledge the real, profoundly problematic aim of science. A new conception of science, and a new kind of science, were required which acknowledge with greater honesty the real, highly problematic aim of science of seeking explanatory truth, and which seek to improve this problematic aim as an integral part of scientific research. In order to facilitate this, the metaphysical presuppositions of science, concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, need to be represented as a hierarchy of assumptions (and associated methods), the assumptions asserting less, and thus being more likely to be true, as one ascends the hierarchy. In this way, a framework of relatively unproblematic assumptions and associated methods (aims and methods), high up in the hierarchy, is created within which much more substantial and problematic assumptions and methods can be critically assessed and improved. This new conception of science, emerging from my criticism of Popper, which I called aim-oriented empiricism, I first spelled out 1974 in a two-part paper provocatively called “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery”.24 Then, walking home one evening from work, it occurred to me (and I 24

N. Maxwell, “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery”, Philosophy of Science, 41 (1974), pp. 123-153 and 247-295.

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can remember the precise spot near Grays Inn Rd. where this thought occurred) that, taking aim-oriented empiricism as my starting point, I could tread a path parallel to that taken by Popper. Beginning with his view of science of falsificationism, Popper had generalized this to form a new conception of rationality, critical rationalism, which he had then used to make profound contributions to political philosophy and philosophy more generally, to ideas about the social sciences, to education, to a wide range of issues concerning civilization, culture, the open society. I had no doubt whatsoever of the immense importance of this line of argument of Popper, from falsificationism to critical rationalism and all the riches of his The Poverty of Historicism, Conjectures and Refutations, and above all The Open Society and Its Enemies.25 But now I had a far better starting point than Popper's. Instead of his seriously defective falsificationism, I could begin with my superior aimoriented empiricism. I could then tread a path parallel to Popper's, generalizing aim-oriented empiricism to become a new conception of rationality, aim-oriented rationality, which stresses that whenever aims are problematic, as they so often are in life and politics (and not just in science), we need to represent our aims in the form of a hierarchy so that we may improve our aims, and associated methods, as we act, as we live. And I had rediscovered my insight of the summer of 1961 – "our aims are profoundly problematic" – but in a far more powerful and general form. I now had available a heuristic scaffolding guiding the construction of my thesis and argument. All I had to do was tread a parallel path to Popper's, but because of my much improved starting point, my path would lead to much improved results. I spelled it all out in a manuscript entitled The Aims of Science. A succession of editors at Macmillans got excited about the work, but after some four years, a new editor rejected it. Then a friend introduced me to an amateur publisher. Because of the deadline he set me, I wrote my first book, What's Wrong With Science?, published in 1976, in just three weeks. Most of it takes the form of a debate between a Philosopher and a Scientist. The Philosopher argues passionately that science misrepresents its profoundly problematic aims, and thus betrays both reason and 25

K.R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit.; The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969; first published 1945).

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humanity. Science needs to acknowledge problematic assumptions concerning metaphysics, values and politics inherent in the aims of science, so that these assumptions can be critically assessed and improved. The upshot is a new kind of science, and a new kind of academic inquiry more generally, which does better justice to both the intellectual and the practical aspects of inquiry. But my "from knowledge to wisdom" argument only received its full, detailed statement eight years later with the publication of From Knowledge to Wisdom in the Orwellian year of 1984. In this book I distinguish two kinds of inquiry which I shall call here knowledge-inquiry and wisdom-inquiry.26 Both hold that a basic social or humanitarian aim of inquiry is to help promote human welfare, enhance the quality of human life, whether by intellectual or practical means. Knowledge-inquiry, however, holds that the proper way for science, and for inquiry more generally, to pursue this social aim is, in the first, instance, to pursue the quite distinct intellectual aim of acquiring knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to helping solve social problems. Knowledge-inquiry restricts what can enter the intellectual domain of inquiry, in lectures and publications: a contribution must be a potential contribution to knowledge, or must contribute to the assessment of such contributions. Problems of knowledge can be discussed, but not problems of living. Proposals for action, political programmes, religious ideas, values, expressions of feelings and desires are all excluded from the intellectual domain of inquiry. This is done so that genuine, objective knowledge of fact may be acquired, and inquiry may be of genuine value to humanity. At the core of knowledge-inquiry there is a conception of science: standard empiricism. This is even more restrictive: in order to get into science, a potential contribution to knowledge must be empirically testable. The basic intellectual aim of science is taken to be knowledge of factual truth (nothing being presupposed about the truth), the basic method being to assess theories exclusively with respect to evidence (and perhaps simplicity or unity), nothing being permanently assumed about the universe independently of evidence. According to standard empiricism and knowledge-inquiry, disciplines are partially ordered in terms of how 26

These conceptions and kinds of inquiry are called “the philosophy of knowledge” and “the philosophy of wisdom” in my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op cit.

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fundamental they are. At the most fundamental level, there is logic and mathematics; then theoretical physics, phenomenological physics and applications of physics such as astrophysics; chemistry, biology, ethnology; and then psychology and the other social sciences, with humanities such as philosophy and cultural studies as the least fundamental of all.27 Knowledge-inquiry, I argue, exercises a profound influence over almost every aspect of academic work, and is overwhelmingly the dominant conception of inquiry. Knowledge-inquiry is still almost universally accepted as the only rationalist conception of inquiry, nearly one quarter of a century after the publication of From Knowledge to Wisdom in 1984. Some academics, working in such fields as cultural studies, history of science and so-called Continental philosophy, reject both knowledgeinquiry and the whole idea of rational inquiry, influenced by doctrines such as Romanticism, the Counter-Enlightenment (as Isaiah Berlin has called it), postmodernism and social constructivism. But this is very much a dissident, minority view: almost all current academic work proceeds officially in accordance with the edicts of knowledge-inquiry.28 Despite this, knowledge-inquiry is damagingly irrational, especially when judged from the standpoint of being a kind of inquiry designed to help enhance the quality of human life.29 The successful scientific pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from the more fundamental pursuit of wisdom is, I argue, behind all our current global crises, from global warming, the menace of modern armaments, the lethal character of modern warfare, to the destruction of tropical rainforests, rapid extinction of species, and pollution of earth, sea and air. For the sake of the future of humanity, and for the sake of inquiry itself, we urgently need to correct the damaging irrationality of knowledge-inquiry, thus creating a new kind of inquiry rationally designed to help humanity learn how to create a better world. This new kind of inquiry is what I call “wisdom-inquiry”. What do I mean by “rationality”? No more than what is required. The term “rationality”, as used here, appeals to the idea that there is some, no doubt rather ill-defined, set of meta-methods, strategies or rules which, if 27

See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., ch. 2. See Ibid., ch. 6. See ch. 6 of the 2nd edition for a more up-to-date account. 29 Ibid., ch. 3. 28

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implemented, give us our best chances of solving our problems, realizing our aims. These meta-methods of reason assume there is much that we can already do, and help us marshal these actions, these already-solved problems, so as to give us the best chance of solving new problems. Rational methods do not dictate what we should do, and do not guarantee success.30 There are two arguments designed to establish the profound structural irrationality of knowledge-inquiry, the second deepening the first. The first appeals to methods of rational problem-solving,31 the second – presupposing and building on the first – to methods of rational aim pursuing when aims are problematic.32 Four elementary rules of rational problem-solving are: (1) Articulate and seek to improve the articulation of the basic problem(s) to be solved. (2) Propose and critically assess alternative possible solutions. (3) When necessary, break up the basic problem to be solved into a number of specialized problems – preliminary, simpler, analogous, subordinate problems – (to be tackled in accordance with rules (1) and (2)), in an attempt to work gradually toward a solution to the basic problem to be solved. (4) Inter-connect attempts to solve the basic problem and specialized problems, so that basic problem solving may guide, and be guided by, specialized problem solving. Rules (1) and (2) may be regarded as encapsulating Popper’s critical rationalism, arrived at by generalizing his falsificationist philosophy of science. Popper was too vehemently opposed to specialization to consider rules (3) and (4), which recognize the value of specialization and effectively deal with its dangers. Knowledge-inquiry, we shall see, violates three of these four elementary rules of reason. Two preliminary points. First, granted that academic inquiry has, as its fundamental aim, to help promote human welfare by intellectual and educational means, then the problems that inquiry fundamentally ought to try to help solve are problems of living, problems of action. From the See Ibid., 1st ed., pp. 67-71; 2nd ed., pp. 79-84. 31 Ibid., ch. 4. 32 Ibid., ch. 5. 30

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standpoint of achieving what is of value in life, it is what we do, or refrain from doing, that ultimately matters. Even where new knowledge and technological know-how are relevant to the achievement of what is of value – as it is in medicine or agriculture, for example – it is always what this new knowledge or technological know-how enables us to do that matters. Second, in order to achieve what is of value in life more successfully than we do at present, we need to discover how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than we do at present. There is a spectrum of ways in which conflicts can be resolved, from murder or all out war at the violent end of the spectrum, via enslavement, threat of murder or war, threats of a less extreme kind, manipulation, bargaining, voting, to cooperative rationality at the other end of the spectrum, those involved seeking, by rational means, to arrive at that course of action which does the best justice to the interests of all those involved. A basic task for a kind of academic inquiry that seeks to help promote human welfare must be to discover how conflict resolution can be moved away from the violent end of the spectrum towards the cooperatively rational end. If inquiry put the above four rules of rational problem-solving into practice, in seeking to help promote human welfare, then it would, as a matter of absolute intellectual priority: (1*) Articulate and seek to improve the articulation of those personal, social and global problems of living we need to solve to achieve what is of value in life (a better world). (2*) Propose and critically assess alternative possible solutions – possible and actual cooperative actions (policies, political programmes, philosophies of life), to be assessed from the standpoint of their capacity, if implemented, to help realize what is of value in life. Knowledge-inquiry encourages rational exploration of problems of knowledge but bans exploration of problems of living from the intellectual domain of inquiry. (Factual claims to knowledge enter the intellectual domain, but not expressions of human feelings, desires, aspirations and values, not proposals for action.) Knowledge-inquiry thus violates the two most fundamental rules of rational problem-solving conceivable (granted inquiry has the aim of helping to promote human welfare by intellectual means). (1*) and (2*) do get put into practice on the fringes of academia, as it exists at present, in departments devoted to such matters as peace, policy, the environment, politics and economics. But they are not

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intellectually fundamental, at the core of the whole academic enterprise. Knowledge-inquiry succeeds in implementing rule (3) to splendid effect – hence the vast tree-like structure of specialized disciplines and specialized problem-solving of academia today. But, having failed to implement (1) and (2), knowledge-inquiry cannot implement (4) either. Knowledge-inquiry is so seriously irrational it violates three of the four most elementary rules of reason in a wholesale, structural manner. This structural irrationality is no mere formal matter. It has had, and continues to have, profoundly damaging consequences. The successful pursuit of scientific knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from a more fundamental concern with problems of living, dissociated from implementation of (1*) and (2*) in other words, as required by knowledge-inquiry, has had all sorts of beneficial consequences, but has also made possible all our current global problems, such as those indicated above. Modern science and technology make possible modern armaments and the lethal character of modern warfare; they make possible modern agriculture and industry, modern medicine and hygiene, and rapid population growth, which in turn are responsible for global warming, the destruction of natural habitats and extinction of species, and the pollution of the environment. All this is to be expected. Science and technology enhance our power to act, but not our power to act wisely. If academia implemented (1*) and (2*) at a fundamental level, this would not of course guarantee that humanity would learn to resolve its problems in wiser, more cooperatively rational ways, but academia would at least be rationally designed to help humanity learn this vital lesson. Knowledge-inquiry, bereft of (1*) and (2*), is a recipe for disaster. Failure to implement (4) has adverse consequences as well. It means that the aims, the priorities of scientific and technological research cannot be related to and influenced by sustained discussion of what our most important problems of living are, and what we need to do about them. As a result, the priorities of specialized research are likely to be influenced, not by human need, but by commercial and military pressures, and the needs of narrow specialized research interests themselves. Modern science exhibits just such tendencies. Wisdom-inquiry (first version) emerges when knowledge-inquiry is modified just sufficiently to implement all four rules of rational problemsolving, (1) to (4). Some of the consequences of this are as follows. The intellectually central and fundamental task of wisdom-inquiry is to

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Diagram 1: Wisdom-Inquiry Implementing Problem-Solving Rationality articulate, and improve the articulation of, those personal, social and global problems of living that need to be solved if people are to realize what is of value in life, and to propose and critically assess possible and actual actions (policies, political programmes, philosophies of life) for their capacity to help realize what is of value. This task is undertaken by social inquiry and the humanities, intellectually more fundamental than natural science. Emerging out of, and feeding back into, this intellectually fundamental activity, the natural, and technological sciences tackle secondary problems of knowledge, understanding and know-how, in accordance with rules (3) and (4). Social inquiry and humanities also, of course, seek to acquire relevant knowledge and understanding of the human world, as a secondary concern, in accordance with rules (3) and (4).

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The formal sciences, mathematics, statistics and logic, do not acquire knowledge of anything actual at all, but rather develop abstract problemsolving methods, applicable to as wide a range of circumstances as possible. Computer science and artificial intelligence straddle technology, biology, psychology and formal science. In the end, what really matters is the thinking that goes on as an integral part of personal, social and global life, guiding action. A basic task of academia is to promote the cooperative rationality of this socially active thinking. Academia is a specialized part of the social world, and needs to interact with the rest of the social world in accordance with rules (3) and (4). The outcome of ensuring that academic inquiry puts all four rules, (1) to (4), into practice (in seeking to help promote human welfare by intellectual means) is that almost all aspects and departments of academia are changed, some quite radically. Some features of the outcome, wisdom-inquiry, are depicted in diagram 1. It may be asked: If academia really is as grossly and damagingly irrational as the above argument would seem to indicate, when and how did this come about? My answer is that it came about as a result of the botched implementation of what may be called “The Enlightenment Programme” of learning from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world. The philosophes of the French Enlightenment – Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the rest – thought that this programme involved developing social science alongside natural science. This idea was further developed throughout the 19th century by figures as diverse as Marx and Mill, and was implemented in the early 20th century with the creation of departments of social science. The outcome was what I have been criticizing, knowledge-inquiry. In order to implement the Enlightenment Programme properly, the following three points need to be got right: 1. The progress-achieving methods of science need to be correctly identified. 2. These methods need to be correctly generalized so that they become fruitfully applicable to any human endeavour, whatever the aims may be, and not just applicable to the endeavour of improving knowledge. 3. The correctly generalized progress-achieving methods then need to be exploited correctly in the great human endeavour of trying to make social progress towards an enlightened, wise, civilized world. Unfortunately, the philosophes of the Enlightenment got all three points

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wrong. And as a result these blunders, undetected and uncorrected, are built into the intellectual-institutional structure of academia as it exists today. I now spell out what these blunders are, and what needs to be done to remove them. This constitutes my second argument for the urgent need to transform knowledge-inquiry into wisdom-inquiry.33 First, the philosophes failed to capture correctly the progress-achieving methods of natural science. From D’Alembert34 in the 18th century to Popper in the 20th, the widely held view, amongst both scientists and philosophers, has been, and continues to be, that science proceeds by assessing theories impartially in the light of evidence, no permanent assumption being accepted by science about the universe independently of evidence. But this standard empiricist view is untenable. If taken literally, it would instantly bring science to a standstill. For, given any accepted theory of physics, T, Newtonian theory say, or quantum theory, endlessly many empirically more successful rivals can be concocted which agree with T about observed phenomena but disagree arbitrarily about some unobserved phenomena. Physics would be drowned in an ocean of such empirically more successful rival theories. In practice, these rivals are excluded because they are disastrously disunified. Two considerations govern acceptance of theories in physics: empirical success and unity. But in persistently accepting unified theories, to the extent of rejecting disunified rivals that are just as, or even more, empirically successful, physics makes a big persistent assumption about the universe. The universe is such that all disunified theories are false. It has some kind of unified dynamic structure. It is physically comprehensible in the sense that explanations for phenomena exist to be discovered. But this untestable (and thus metaphysical) assumption that the universe is physically comprehensible is profoundly problematic. Science is obliged to assume, but does not know, that the universe is comprehensible. Much less does it know that the universe is comprehensible in this or that way. A glance at the history of physics reveals that ideas have changed dramatically over time. In the 17th century there was the idea that the universe consists of corpuscles, minute billiard balls, which interact only 33

Ibid., ch. 5. J. d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963; originally published in 1751). 34

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by contact. This gave way to the idea that the universe consists of pointparticles surrounded by rigid, spherically symmetrical fields of force, which in turn gave way to the idea that there is one unified self-interacting field, varying smoothly throughout space and time. Nowadays we have the idea that everything is made up of minute quantum strings embedded in ten or eleven dimensions of space-time. Some kind of assumption along these lines must be made but, given the historical record, and given that any such assumption concerns the ultimate nature of the universe, that of which we are most ignorant, it is only reasonable to conclude that it is almost bound to be false. The way to overcome this fundamental dilemma inherent in the scientific enterprise – as I have already indicated – is to construe physics as making a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, these assumptions becoming progressively less substantial and thus more likely to be true, and also more nearly such that their truth is required for science, or the pursuit of knowledge, to be possible at all, as one ascends the hierarchy: see figure 2. In this way a framework of relatively insubstantial, unproblematic, fixed assumptions and associated methods is created within which much more substantial and problematic assumptions and associated methods can be critically assessed, changed, and indeed improved (partly in the light of the relative empirical success and failure of associated scientific research programmes). Put another way, a framework of relatively unspecific, unproblematic, fixed aims and methods is created within which much more specific and problematic aims and methods evolve as scientific knowledge evolves. (A basic aim of science is to discover in what precise way the universe is comprehensible, this aim evolving as assumptions about comprehensibility evolve.) Science adapts its nature to what it finds out about the universe There is something like positive feedback between improving knowledge, and improving aimsand-methods, improving knowledge-about-how-to-improve-knowledge – the nub of scientific rationality, and the methodological key to the unprecedented success of modern science.35 35

See N. Maxwell, “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery”, op. cit.; What’s Wrong With Science?, op.cit.; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., chs. 5 and 9; The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit.; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit.; “Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism”, Philosophia, 32;1-4 (2005), pp. 181239; From Knowledge to Wisdom, 2nd ed. (London: Pentire Press, 2007), ch. 14.

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Natural science has made such astonishing progress in improving knowledge and understanding of nature because it has put something like the hierarchical methodology, indicated here, into scientific practice. Officially, however, scientists continue to hold the standard empiricist view that no untestable metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe are accepted as a part of scientific knowledge. In Is Science Neurotic? chapter 2, I argue that science would be even more successful, in a number of ways, if scientists adopted and explicitly implemented the hierarchical methodology indicated here.36 But it is not just that there are unacknowledged, highly problematic metaphysical assumptions inherent in the aims of science; there are, in addition, unacknowledged, problematic assumptions concerning values, and politics (the human use of science). Science does not just seek explanatory truth; more generally, it seeks important truth, and this is sought so that it will be used, in one way or another, ideally to contribute to the quality of human life. These evaluative and political assumptions implicit in the aims of science are, if anything, even more profoundly problematic than the metaphysical assumptions. Here, too, problematic aims need to be represented in the form of a hierarchy, aims becoming less specific and problematic as one goes up the hierarchy, to facilitate the critical assessment and improvement of aims (and associated methods). Philosophy of science – the study of aims and methods of science – becomes a vital, integral part of science itself.37 So much for the first blunder of the traditional Enlightenment, and how to put it right. Second, having failed to identify the methods of science correctly, the philosophes naturally failed to generalize these methods properly. They failed to appreciate that the idea of representing the problematic aims (and associated methods) of science in the form of a hierarchy can be generalized and applied fruitfully to other worthwhile enterprises besides science. Many other enterprises have problematic aims – problematic because aims conflict, and because what we seek may be unrealizable, undesirable, or both. Such enterprises, with problematic aims, would 36

See also my “Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?”, Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry, 8;3 (September 2008). 37 From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., ch. 5; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., ch. 2.

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Diagram 2: Hierarchical Aim-Oriented Empiricist Conception of Science benefit from employing a hierarchical methodology, generalized from that of science, thus making it possible to improve aims and methods as the enterprise proceeds. There is the hope that, as a result of exploiting in life methods generalized from those employed with such success in science, some of the astonishing success of science might be exported into other worthwhile human endeavours, with problematic aims quite different from those of science. Third, and most disastrously of all, the philosophes failed completely to try to apply such generalized, hierarchical progress-achieving methods to the immense, and profoundly problematic enterprise of making social progress towards an enlightened, wise world. The aim of such an enterprise is notoriously problematic. For all sorts of reasons, what constitutes a good world, an enlightened, wise or civilized world, attainable and genuinely desirable, must be inherently and permanently

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problematic. There are a number of ways of highlighting the inherently problematic character of the aim of creating civilization. People have very different ideas as to what does constitute civilization. Most views about what constitutes Utopia, an ideally civilized society, have been unrealizable and profoundly undesirable. People's interests, values and ideals clash. Even values that, one may hold, ought to be a part of civilization may clash. Thus freedom and equality, even though inter-related, may nevertheless clash. It would be an odd notion of individual freedom which held that freedom was for some, and not for others; and yet if equality is pursued too singlemindedly this will undermine individual freedom, and will even undermine equality, in that a privileged class will be required to enforce equality on the rest, as in the old Soviet Union. A basic aim of legislation for civilization, we may well hold, ought to be increase freedom by restricting it: this brings out the inherently problematic, paradoxical character of the aim of achieving civilization. One thinker who has stressed the inherently problematic, contradictory character of the idea of civilization is Isaiah Berlin.38 Berlin thought the problem could not be solved; I, on the contrary, hold that the hierarchical methodology indicated here provides us with the means to learn how to improve our solution to it in real life. Here, above all, then, it is essential to employ the generalized version of the hierarchical, progress-achieving methods of science, designed specifically to facilitate progress when basic aims are problematic: see Figure 3. It is just this that the philosophes failed to do. Instead of applying the hierarchical methodology to social life, the philosophes sought to apply a seriously defective conception of scientific method to social science, to the task of making progress towards, not a better world, but to better knowledge of social phenomena. And this ancient blunder is still built into the institutional and intellectual structure of academia today, inherent in the current character of social science.39 Properly implemented, in short, the Enlightenment idea of learning from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened 38

I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 74-79. See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., ch. 5; “Do Philosophers Love Wisdom?”, The Philosophers’ Magazine, Issue 22, 2nd quarter (2003), pp. 22-24; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., ch. 3 and 4. 39

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world would involve developing social inquiry, not as social science, but as social methodology, or social philosophy. A basic task would be to get into personal and social life, and into other institutions besides that of science – into government, industry, agriculture, commerce, the media, law, education, international relations – hierarchical, progress-achieving methods (designed to improve problematic aims) arrived at by generalizing the methods of science. A basic task for academic inquiry as a whole would be to help humanity learn how to resolve its conflicts and problems of living in more just, cooperatively rational ways than at present. This task would be intellectually more fundamental than the scientific task of acquiring knowledge. Academia would have just sufficient power (but no more) to retain its independence from government, industry, the press, public opinion, and other centres of power and influence in the social world. It would seek to learn from, educate, and argue with the great social world beyond, but would not dictate. Academic thought would be pursued as a specialized, subordinate part of what is really important and fundamental: the thinking that goes on, individually, socially and institutionally, in the social world, guiding individual, social and institutional actions and life. Instead of the intellectual and humanitarian aims of science being distinct, as for knowledge-inquiry, these aims become one and the same: to help humanity acquire wisdom – wisdom being the capacity to realize (apprehend and create) what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge and technological know-how but much else besides. One outcome of getting into social and institutional life the kind of aimevolving, hierarchical methodology indicated above, generalized from science, is that it becomes possible for us to develop and assess rival philosophies of life as a part of social life, somewhat as theories are developed and assessed within science. Such a hierarchical methodology provides a framework within which competing views about what our aims and methods in life should be – competing religious, political and moral views – may be cooperatively assessed and tested against broadly agreed, unspecific aims (high up in the hierarchy of aims) and the experience of personal and social life. There is the possibility of cooperatively and progressively improving such philosophies of life (views about what is of value in life and how it is to be achieved) much as theories are cooperativelyand progressively improved in science. In science, ideally, theories are critically assessed with respect to each other, with respect to metaphysical ideas

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Diagram 3: Hierarchical Social Methodology Generalized from Science concerning the comprehensibility of the universe, and with respect to experience (observational and experimental results). In a somewhat analogous way, diverse philosophies of life may be critically assessed with respect to each other, with respect to relatively uncontroversial, agreed ideas about aims and what is of value, and with respect to experience – what we do, achieve, fail to achieve, enjoy and suffer – the aim being to improve philosophies of life (and more specific philosophies of more specific enterprises within life such as government, education or art) so that they offer greater help with the realization of what is of value in life. This hierarchical methodology is especially relevant to the task of resolving conflicts about aims and ideals, as it helps disentangle agreement (high up in the hierarchy) and disagreement (more likely to be low down in the hierarchy). Wisdom-inquiry, because of its greater rigour, has intellectual standards

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that are, in important respects, different from those of knowledge-inquiry. Whereas knowledge-inquiry demands that emotions and desires, values, human ideals and aspirations, philosophies of life be excluded from the intellectual domain of inquiry, wisdom-inquiry requires that they be included. In order to discover what is of value in life it is essential that we attend to our feelings and desires. But not everything we desire is desirable, and not everything that feels good is good. Feelings, desires and values need to be subjected to critical scrutiny. And of course feelings, desires and values must not be permitted to influence judgements of factual truth and falsity. Wisdom-inquiry embodies a synthesis of traditional rationalism and romanticism. It includes elements from both, and it improves on both. It incorporates romantic ideals of integrity, having to do with motivational and emotional honesty, honesty about desires and aims; and at the same time it incorporates traditional rationalist ideals of integrity, having to do with respect for objective fact, knowledge, and valid argument. Traditional rationalism takes its inspiration from science and method; romanticism takes its inspiration from art, from imagination, and from passion. Wisdom-inquiry holds art to have a fundamental rational role in inquiry, in revealing what is of value, and unmasking false values; but science, too, is of fundamental importance. What we need, for wisdom, is an interplay of sceptical rationality and emotion, an interplay of mind and heart, “so that we may acquire heartfelt minds, and mindful hearts”.40 Wisdom-inquiry promises to heal the great rift in our culture, so graphically depicted by Snow.41 All in all, if the Enlightenment revolution had been carried through properly, the three steps indicated above being correctly implemented, the outcome would have been a kind of academic inquiry very different from what we have at present, inquiry devoted primarily to the intellectual aim of acquiring knowledge.42 A number of objections may be made to these two arguments designed to establish that knowledge-inquiry urgently needs to be transformed into wisdom-inquiry. 40

N. Maxwell, What’s Wrong With Science?, op. cit., p. 5. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 42 See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., chs. 5 and 7; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., chs. 3 and 4. 41

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It may be objected that these arguments assume that a basic aim of science, of inquiry, is to help promote human welfare, knowledge being a means to that end. But this assumption may be challenged. The proper basic aim of science (or of inquiry), it may be held, is to acquire knowledge, whether this benefits humanity or not. Once this is acknowledged, the two arguments above collapse. I have three replies. First, even if it is conceded that the proper aim of science is just knowledge, this does not tell against the decisive point that the scientific aim of acquiring knowledge makes implicit, problematic assumptions concerning metaphysics, values and politics. The idea that science seeks truth dissociated from assumptions concerning metaphysics, values and politics (the human use of science) is untenable. Once this point is acknowledged, it becomes clear that science is more rigorous intellectually if it subjects assumptions concerning metaphysics, values and politics to sustained criticism, in an attempt to improve them. Science pursued in this manner cannot be regarded as seeking knowledge dissociated from all considerations of its human value and use. Second, once it is acknowledged that problematic assumptions concerning values and politics are, inevitably, inherent in the aims and priorities of research, it becomes a matter of vital importance that academia has available intellectual/institutional means progressively to improve these assumptions. Wisdom-inquiry provides these means, whereas knowledge-inquiry does not. Finally, one may well hold that it is immoral to defend the view that science should restrict itself to seeking knowledge irrespective of its human value. There are three points to note. First, substantial public funds are devoted to supporting science in the expectation that science will benefit humanity. Given this, how can it be morally justifiable to defend a conception of science (a) which holds that any human value science has is purely incidental, and (b) which is damagingly irrational when judged from the standpoint of human value? Second, science in any case has a massive impact on society. Do not scientists have a prime responsibility to ensure that science is pursued in such a way that this impact is as good as possible? This means science should be pursued within the framework of wisdom-inquiry. Third, humanity is in deep trouble, and urgently needs to learn how to manage its affairs more wisely. It must be immoral to oppose a kind of academic inquiry rationally designed to help humanity learn this vital lesson. Another objection that may be made to the whole argument is that it

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cannot be correct to hold that social inquiry is intellectually more fundamental than natural science. Before problems of living can be tackled, relevant knowledge must first be acquired. I have decisively refuted this orthodox view.43 Simply in order to know what is relevant, we have to have some preliminary idea about what to do in response to a problem of living. More fundamentally, action, and the capacity to act, is more fundamental than propositional knowledge. Knowing how, to use Ryle’s terms, comes before knowing that. Finally, it may be objected that wisdom-inquiry may do better justice to the practical aspects of inquiry, but does not do justice to the intellectual or cultural aspects of inquiry – inquiry pursued for its own sake. My reply, here, is that wisdom-inquiry does better justice to both aspects of inquiry, “pure” and “applied”. From the standpoint of the intellectual or cultural aspect of inquiry, what really matters is the desire that people have to see, to know, to understand, the passionate curiosity that individuals have about aspects of the world, and the knowledge and understanding that people acquire and share as a result of actively following up their curiosity. An important task for academic thought in universities is to encourage non-professional thought to flourish outside universities. As Einstein once remarked "Knowledge exists in two forms – lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position".44 Wisdom-inquiry is designed to promote all this in a number of ways. It does so as a result of holding thought, at its most fundamental, to be the personal thinking we engage in as we live. It does so by recognizing that acquiring knowledge and understanding involves articulating and solving personal problems that one encounters in seeking to know and understand. It does so by recognizing that passion, emotion and desire, have a rational role to play in inquiry, disinterested research being a myth. Again, as Einstein has put it "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 171-181; 2nd ed., pp. 194-205.. 44 A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (London: Souvenir Press, 1973; first published 1954), p. 80. 43

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wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed".45 Knowledge-inquiry, by contrast, all too often fails to nourish "the holy curiosity of inquiry",46 and may even crush it out altogether. Knowledgeinquiry gives no rational role to emotion and desire; passionate curiosity, a sense of mystery, of wonder, have no place, officially, within the rational pursuit of knowledge. The intellectual domain becomes impersonal and split off from personal feelings and desires; it is difficult for "holy curiosity" to flourish in such circumstances. Knowledge-inquiry hardly encourages the view that inquiry at its most fundamental is the thinking that goes on as a part of life; on the contrary, it upholds the idea that fundamental research is highly esoteric, conducted by physicists in contexts remote from ordinary life. Even though the aim of inquiry may, officially, be human knowledge, the personal and social dimension of this is all too easily lost sight of, and progress in knowledge is conceived of in impersonal terms, stored lifelessly in books and journals. Rare is it for popular books on science to take seriously the task of exploring the fundamental problems of a science in as accessible, non-technical and intellectually responsible a way as possible. (A recent, remarkable exception is Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality.47) Such work is not highly regarded by knowledge-inquiry, as it does not contribute to "expert knowledge". The failure of knowledge-inquiry to take seriously the highly problematic nature of the aims of inquiry leads to insensitivity as to what aims are being pursued, to a kind of institutional hypocrisy. Officially, knowledge is being sought "for its own sake", but actually the goal may be immortality, fame, the flourishing of one's career or research group, as the existence of bitter priority disputes in science indicates. Education suffers. Science students are taught a mass of established scientific knowledge, but may not be informed of the problems which gave rise to this knowledge, the problems which scientists grappled with in creating the knowledge. Even more rarely are students encouraged themselves to grapple with such problems. And rare, too, is it for students to be encouraged to articulate their own problems of understanding that must, inevitably arise in absorbing all this information, or to articulate their instinctive criticisms of 45

Ibid., p. 11. A. Einstein, “Autobiographical Remarks”, in P. A. Schilpp. (ed.) Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1949), p. 17. 47 R. Penrose, The Road to Reality (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). 46

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the received body of knowledge. All this tends to reduce education to a kind of intellectual indoctrination, and serves to kill "holy curiosity". Officially, courses in universities divide up into those that are vocational, like engineering, medicine and law, and those that are purely educational, like physics, philosophy or history. What is not noticed, again through insensitivity to problematic aims, is that the supposedly purely educational are actually vocational as well: the student is being trained to be an academic physicist, philosopher or historian, even though only a minute percentage of the students will go on to become academics. Real education, which must be open-ended, and without any pre-determined goal, rarely exists in universities, and yet few notice.48 I might add that the hierarchical conception of science indicated above does better justice to the scientific quest for understanding than does orthodox standard empiricist views – and thus does better justice to the value of science pursued for its own sake.49 In order to enhance our understanding of persons as beings of value, potentially and actually, we need to understand them empathically, by putting ourselves imaginatively into their shoes, and experiencing, in imagination, what they feel, think, desire, fear, plan, see, love and hate. For wisdom-inquiry, this kind of empathic understanding is rational and intellectually fundamental. Articulating problems of living, and proposing and assessing possible solutions is, we have seen, the fundamental intellectual activity of wisdom-inquiry. But it is just this that we need to do to acquire empathic understanding. Social inquiry, in tackling problems of living, is also promoting empathic understanding of people. Empathic understanding is essential to wisdom. Elsewhere I have argued, indeed, that empathic understanding plays an essential role in the evolution of consciousness. It is required for cooperative action, and even for science.50 Granted knowledge-inquiry, on the other hand, empathic understanding hardly satisfies basic requirements for being an intellectually legitimate 48

These considerations are developed further in my What’s Wrong With Science?, op. cit.; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit.; and Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit. 49 See my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., chs. 4 and 8; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., ch. 2. 50 For a fuller exposition of such an account of empathic understanding see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 171-189 and ch. 10; 2nd ed., pp. 194-213, and ch. 10; and The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., chs. 5-7 and 9.

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kind of explanation and understanding.51 It has the status merely of “folk psychology”, on a par with “folk physics”. Here again, wisdom-inquiry does better justice to inquiry pursued for its own sake than does knowledge-inquiry.52 After the publication of From Knowledge to Wisdom in 1984, I published a number of summaries of the argument, striving always to put the argument over in as fresh, lucid and convincing a way as possible.53 In 1998 I published The Comprehensibility of the Universe, which spells out in some detail the argument for aim-oriented empiricism, and considers implications of the view for theoretical physics. I argue that aim-oriented empiricism solves a range of fundamental problems in the philosophy of science which cannot be solved within the framework of standard empiricism, including the problem of induction, the problem of verisimilitude, and the problem of simplicity, or unity, of theory. The latter problem is one that I had racked my brains over ever since 1972, when aim-oriented empiricism first occurred to me. I only began to solve the problem when I appreciated that simplicity, or unity, refers, not to the axiomatic structure or form of a theory, but to its content, to what the theory says about the world. For unity, we require that a theory asserts precisely the same for all the phenomena to which the theory applies. Given that a theory makes somewhat different assertions about different ranges of phenomena, degrees of disunity can arise depending on how different, how seriously different, these different assertions are.54 See From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 183-189; 2nd ed., pp. 206-213. For my responses to further objections, see Ibid., ch. 8; Is Science Neurotic?, pp. 121-147; and From Knowledge to Wisdom (2007), ch. 13. 53 For the best of these short expositions, see “What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Us Create a Good World?, op. cit.; “Can Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization”, op. cit.; “Two Great Problems of Learning”, Teaching in Higher Education 8 (January 2003), pp. 129-34; “Do Philosophers Love Wisdom?”, op. cit.; “A Revolution for Science and the Humanities: From Knowledge to Wisdom”, Dialogue and Universalism, XV;1-2 (2005), pp. 29-57; “Philosophy Seminars for Five-Year-Olds”, Learning for Democracy, 1;2 (2005), pp. 71-77 (reprinted in Gifted Education International, 22;2/3 (2007), pp. 122-7); “From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution”, op. cit; “Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?”, op. cit. 54 For details see The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., chs 3 and 4; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., appendix, section 2; and From Knowledge to Wisdom (2007), ch. 14. 51 52

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My exposition and defence of aim-oriented empiricism and wisdominquiry is further elaborated in Is Science Neurotic? and in chapters 6 and 12 to 14 of the second edition of From Knowledge to Wisdom. 5. The Human World/Physical Universe Problem (HWPhU Problem) I turn now to spelling out what I have done in connection with my first problem – the problem of how it is possible for there to be life of value (the human world as we experience it) embedded in the physical universe. I summarize what I have done in 37 numbered points. 1. We should seek to solve the most severe version of the problem. No attempt should be made to make the problem less severe by espousing antirealist interpretations of physics, behaviourist views about inner experiences, or subjectivist views about what is of value.55 2. The problem is generated by physicalism – the doctrine that the world is made up entirely of fundamental physical entities interacting in accordance with some unified pattern of physical law. Physicalism may be false, but in what follows physicalism is assumed to be true, and the task is to see whether justice can be done to what seems to be most characteristic and of value in our human world granted the truth of physicalism.56 3. An early and massively influential attempted solution is Cartesian dualism. Granted Cartesian dualism, the HWPhU problem tends to reduce to two problems: (1) what is the relationship between mind and brain? (2) How can mind influence the brain – required for free will? Even philosophers who reject Cartesian dualism tend to concentrate attention on these two problems. It is vital, however, to return to, and give priority to, the more general, more fundamental HWPhU problem – the problem which Cartesian dualism fails to solve. (1) and (2) need to be put into the broader, more fundamental context of the HWPhU problem.57 4. This needs to be done because the solutions to (1) and (2) require it. Thus, in order to solve the mind/brain problem we need, initially, to turn our backs on the mental and consider very carefully the nature of the 55

The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p. 6. “Physics and Common Sense”, op. cit.; From Knowledge to Wisdom, ch. 10; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 5-6. 57 From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 260-264, 2nd ed., pp 280-285; The Human World in the Physical Universe, p. 5 and p. 97. 56

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physical. Furthermore, we need to take seriously that non-physical, perceptual properties, such as colours, exist objectively in the world. Such considerations arise naturally within the context of the HWPhU problem, but do not within the context of the mind/brain problem. The brainprocess theory of inner experiences that emerges has a major impact on how the problem of free will is conceived.58 5. The crucial step that one needs to take in order to solve the HWPhU problem is to recognize that physics seeks only to provide the means (in principle) for a complete description of the world of a very special type. A complete physical description of the world would not, in other words, be a complete description. The silence of physics about experiential, human and evaluative features of things – such as perceptual properties of things external to us, inner experiences, the meaningful and evaluative, provides no grounds whatsoever for holding that such things do not exist – just as long as it can be shown that these are the kind of features of things physics does not seek to describe.59 6. Physics is concerned only with what may be called the causally efficacious aspect of things. Given any isolated system, physics seeks only to describe that aspect of it which determines necessarily (but possibly only probabilistically) subsequent states of the system when described in the same terms. All non-causally efficacious features of things, such as experiential and value-laden features, will receive no mention whatsoever by the complete physical description, although physical correlates of these features will be described.60 7. More specifically, a basic aim of theoretical physics is to discover a theory, T, which is true, unified, applicable in principle to all phenomena, and such that, given any isolated system, S, it provides the means for a true description of the state of S at any instant such that this description implies true descriptions of subsequent states of the system, couched in the same terms. (This characterization of the aim of theoretical physics needs to be improved in various ways to take into account such things as probabilism, From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 260-264, 2nd ed., pp. 280-285; The Human World in the Physical Universe, p. 97, pp. 141-142 and 155-156. 59 “Physics and Common Sense”, op. cit.; “Can there be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?”. op. cit.; “Understanding Sensations”, op. cit.; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., ch 10; The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 5. 60 As in previous note. 58

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the non-existence of isolated systems, field theory, special and general relativity and quantum theory. I here ignore these complications, as they do not affect the basic point being made concerning the inherent incompleteness of even a complete physics.) This requires that T is true when interpreted “essentialistically”, as attributing necessitating properties to fundamental physical entities (or the fundamental physical entity). T provides the means for a complete or comprehensive description of the world in two senses. First, T applies to any isolated system. Second, T refers to everything that needs to be referred to in order to carry out the predictive task just indicated. But this does not mean that the predictive description, couched in the terms of T, describes all that there is. If the isolated system in question includes a person who perceives colours, sounds and smells, has inner experiences, thinks thoughts and utters or writes meaningful sentences, then none of this will be included in the predictive description provided by T (although physical correlates of these things will be included) just as long as this omission does not interfere with the predictive task indicated above.61 8. A key element of this proposal is that theoretical physics seeks to characterize “necessitating properties” of fundamental physical entities, and does not just specify laws or regularities in phenomena. It requires a thoroughly anti-Humean account of causation. It requires that necessary connections between successive states of affairs are possible – a point I argued for in my MA thesis and second published paper (1968a). It also requires, not just scientific realism but, rather more strongly, scientific essentialism. In order to be ultimately acceptable, physical theories must be amenable to essentialistic interpretation. This in turn requires that a fully micro-realist, essentialist version of quantum theory needs to be developed – something I have sought to supply with my work on “propensiton” quantum theory. Essentialistic probabilism is, I argue, the key to making sense of the quantum domain. I put forward such a version of quantum theory: it is fundamentally probabilistic, fully micro-realistic, able to recover all the empirical success of orthodox quantum theory, and yet empirically distinct from that theory for experiments not yet performed.62 61

Ibid., plus “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism” op. cit. For conjectural essentialism see my “Can there be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?”, op. cit.; The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., pp. 14162

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9. Recognizing clearly what it is physics aims to do – so that a complete physical description of the world would not be a complete description – solves a fundamental mystery about consciousness and the experiential. In seeking to understand consciousness, we may invoke the best mode of understanding available, namely scientific understanding. But when we do this, and explore what goes on inside our heads scientifically, we learn much about such things as neurons, synaptic junctions, exchange of sodium and potassium ions and so on, but never seem to encounter anything remotely like a thought, a feeling, an inner sensation, a moment of conscious awareness, as we experience these things. Before the gaze of science, consciousness seems to evaporate; it seems to become a profound mystery, utterly resistant to scientific explanation and understanding. But once we have grasped the above account of what physics, and all of natural science in principle reducible to physics, aims to achieve, it is clear that the fact that the scientific account of what goes inside our heads tells us nothing about consciousness as we experience it does not mean consciousness is inherently and profoundly mysterious. It just means that the experiential aspect of what goes on inside our heads is of no interest to physics because no reference needs to be made to it to complete the predictive task of physics. Consciousness and the experiential evade physical explanation, not because they are inherently mysterious, but because they are, from the standpoint of physics, entirely without interest, irrelevant to the task in hand.63 10. But might not it be possible for physics to describe experiential aspects of things? A simple argument establishes that the answer is “no”. In order to know what sort of property redness as we perceive it is, one must oneself have at some stage in one’s life have perceived red things, or at least experienced the visual sensation of redness. Simply in order to know 155. For an account of my development of essentialistic quantum theory, and references to relevant publications see note 3 above. See also “Are Probabilism and Special Relativity Incompatible?”, Philosophy of Science, 52 (1985), pp. 23-43; “Does Orthodox Quantum Theory Undermine, or Support, Scientific Realism?”, The Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1993), pp. 139-57; The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit. ch. 7; “Does Probabilism Solve the Great Quantum Mystery?”, Theoria, 19/3; 51 (2004), pp. 321-36. 63 See “Understanding Sensations”, op. cit.; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 261-267, 2nd ed., pp. 282-288; “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism” op. cit.; The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 5.

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what “roses are red” means (where “red” refers to the perceptual property), one must oneself have had the visual sensation of redness – which we may take to mean that one has had occur in one’s brain a particular kind of brain process. A person colour-blind, or blind, from birth, cannot know what redness is. But such a person is not thereby debarred from understanding all of physics, just as well as any sighted person. Such a person is not debarred from understanding everything implied by physics – which means no purely physical description can imply “This is red”, where “red” is understood to refer to the experiential or perceptual property. (The colour-blind person can understand everything implied by physics, but cannot understand “This is red”; hence “This is red” cannot be implied by physics.) Not only does physics not need to refer to redness; it cannot do so. This argument does not establish that redness exists, it just establishes that the silence of physics about redness – and endless other experiential and value-laden features of things – provides no grounds whatsoever for supposing that such features do not really exist.64 This is the argument, first spelled out by me in 1966 and 1968 65 which, wrenched out of context, received a great deal of subsequent attention as a result of subsequent publications of Thomas Nagel66 and Franck Jackson,67 eight and twenty years later.68 Closely related theses of experiential physicalism have not, unfortunately, received a similar degree of attention. I still hope that, one day, philosophers might come to consider, not just this argument, but the thesis of, and arguments for, experiential physicalism as a whole. 11. Might not postulates be added to the true physical theory of everything, T, linking physical and experiential features, so that a new theory, T*, is arrived at, genuinely complete and comprehensive, capable of predicting and explaining experiential features in additional to physical features, 64

Physics and Common Sense: A Critique of Physicalism, op. cit.; “Physics and Common Sense”, op. cit.; “Understanding Sensations”, op. cit.; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., pp. 262-263, 2nd ed., pp. 283-284; “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism” op. cit.; The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 5. 65 “Physics and Common Sense”, op. cit.; “Understanding Sensations”, op. cit. 66 T. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, op. cit. 67 F. Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know”, op. cit. 68 When I drew Thomas Nagel’s attention to my papers of 1966 and 1968 he wrote in a letter, with great generosity “There is no justice. No, I was unaware of your papers, which made the central point before anyone else.” Jackson acknowledged, however, that he had read my 1968 paper before writing his.

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unlike T? Such a theory, T*, would be so horrendously complex and ad hoc that, even though predictive, it would not be explanatory. Each correlating postulate would be horrendously complex. Given the complexities of colour vision, it is clear that the postulate specifying physical correlates of the perceptual property “red” would be almost inconceivably complex. And given what we may presume to be the complexity and variety of brain processes that correlate with the visual experience of redness, we may assume that the postulate specifying physical correlates of the visual experience of redness would also be extraordinarily complex. Furthermore, when one takes into account the great number and variety of non-physical experiential and personalistic features of things, actual and potential, associated with human beings, other sentient animals and beings, actual and possible, it becomes clear that there would be a vast number of additional postulates associated with T*, each one of which would be incredibly complex. T* would be so complex and ad hoc as to be entirely non-explanatory. Here, in other words, is the explanation as to why physics eschews all reference to the experiential: physics must do this in order to develop the powerfully explanatory theories that it does develop. Physics fails to explain the experiential, not because the experiential is inherently mysterious and inexplicable, but rather because excluding all reference to the experiential is the price that must be paid to have the astonishingly explanatory theories of physics that we do have.69 12. Two rival theories of perception need to be distinguished, which may be called internalism and externalism. According to internalism, what we directly perceive, what we directly know about in perception, is our inner experiences: knowledge of external objects is inferred, somewhat shakily, from our immediate knowledge of our inner experiences. According to externalism, it is exactly the other way round. What we directly perceive, what we directly know about in perception, is what we ordinarily assume we perceive, objects external to us, tables, trees and houses; our knowledge of our inner sensory experiences is inferred, somewhat shakily, from our immediate knowledge of objects external to us. 13. Physicalism may seem to imply internalism, for at least two reasons. 69

See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 263-264, 2nd ed., pp. 284285; “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism”, op. cit., pp. 64-65; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp.119-121.

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First, the silence of physics about perceptual properties may be taken to mean that they do not exist, and hence externalism cannot be correct because what we ordinarily assume we know about objects external to us in perception is almost entirely false. Second, physicalism applied to perception may seem to imply internalism, because it implies that a complex chain of processes links the external object to our perceptual experience of it: light is reflected from the object, enters our eyes, activates cells in our retina which cause neurons of the optic nerve to fire, which in turn cause vast numbers of neurons in the brain to fire, eventually leading to the experience of seeing the external object. What we really know about is the last event in this chain of events, namely the inner perceptual experience. From that we infer (shakily) our knowledge about the external object.70 14. Both arguments are invalid. The first has already been shown to be invalid. The second is invalid because the existence of the chain of events provides no grounds whatsoever for holding that what we directly see and really know about in perception is the last event in the chain of events associated with perception. What we directly perceive is what we primarily know about in perception, and that, we may argue, is what we ordinarily assume we know about in perception, external perceived objects (when we are not suffering from illusions or hallucinations). That a chain of events exists between the perceived object and our brain does not mean that what we directly perceive is the last event in the chain. On the contrary, we do not perceive our inner experiences at all. Our knowledge of our inner perceptual experiences is derived from our more direct, primary knowledge of perceived objects external to us. If I have the experience of seeing a red rose, what I know about this experience is merely: something is going on inside me which is the sort of thing that goes on when I see a red rose.71 15. We may adopt the view, in short, that colours, sounds and other perceptual qualities are real, objective properties of things in the world around us, and we know about these qualities as a result, and only as a result, of perceiving these things. Objectivism about perceptual qualities, 70

“Physics and Common Sense”, op. cit., pp. 300-301; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 75-76. 71 “Physics and Common Sense”; “Understanding Sensations”; “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism”; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 98-100.

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and externalism, are linked together, just as subjectivism about perceptual qualities, and internalism, are linked together.72 16. But can it really be the case that colours (and other perceptual qualities) are objective? In one sense of objective, yes, in another sense, no. If by objective we mean “really existing in the external world”, then what the above arguments have shown is that we have every reason to believe colours are objective, and no reason to believe that they are not. But if by objective, we mean capable of being known about whatever your sense organs and brain may be like, then the answer must be no, colours are not objective. In order to see and know about colours, as we noncolour-blind humans perceive them, you must have the physiology of a non-colour-blind human being. Aliens, with brains so different from ours that brain processes that are colour experiences cannot occur in them, cannot know what red, blue, green, as experienced by us, are. In this second sense, colours are subjective, not objective. Colours are, I argue, objective in the first sense, subjective in the second sense. They exist out there in the world, but can only be known about by beings sufficiently like ourselves73 17. The transition from internalism to externalism has dramatic consequences for the mind/brain problem. Internalism implies that we directly “see” and know about our inner experiences. But these inner perceptual experiences – of red roses, green trees and blue skies – are clearly utterly different from all processes going on in the brain (firing of neurons, etc.). Internalism all but forces us to adopt some version of dualism which postulates mental entities or processes utterly distinct from neurological or physical processes going on in the brain. All this is changed profoundly the moment externalism is adopted. For, according to externalism, we simply do not ordinarily know enough about our inner experiences to exclude the possibility that these inner experiences are brain processes. Given the known intimate connections between inner experiences and brain processes, the obvious conjecture to adopt, once externalism is accepted, is that our inner experiences are brain processes – 72

“Physics and Common Sense”; “Understanding Sensations”; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 251-252, 2nd ed., pp. 273-274; “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism”; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 97-121. 73 “Physics and Common Sense”, pp. 310-311; “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism”, pp. 56-57; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 3437 and 112-119.

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or “head processes” as they may be called, to adopt neutral terminology between the physical and the experiential.74 18. Head processes, it may be held, have two aspects: physical and experiential. The experiential aspect of a head process is what one learns about when a sufficiently similar head process occurs in one’s own brain. This is what the experiential aspect of a head process is – this and no more.75 19. A complete physical description of a conscious brain would be entirely silent about consciousness, about the experiential aspects of the physical processes going on in the brain, for exactly the same reason as a complete physical description of a tree would be silent about the greenness of its leaves: experiential features of brain processes, and perceptual features of leaves, are entirely without interest to physics. No reference to them is needed for the predictive task of physics to proceed, and no reference can be made if physical theory is to be explanatory.76 20. This is a version of the identity thesis. It requires that Kripke’s (very weak) arguments concerning contingent identity with rigid designators are invalid. I have shown that Kripke’s arguments are indeed invalid.77 21. This two-aspect version of the identity thesis has dramatic consequences for the free will/physicalism problem. It means that mental processes, such as decisions to act, can play a crucial causal role in the production of the intended action because these mental processes are also physical processes occurring in the brain. The Cartesian nightmare as to how the mind can influence the brain disappears because the mind is the brain.78 22. Even though the experiential cannot be understood scientifically (for perfectly understandable reasons), it can be understood personalistically – a distinct kind of explanation and understanding as fundamental, in its own 74

“Physics and Common Sense”; “Understanding Sensations”; From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 259-264, 2nd ed., pp. 280-285; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 97-103 and 112-119. 75 “Physics and Common Sense”; “Understanding Sensations”; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 117-119. 76 “Physics and Common Sense”; “Understanding Sensations”; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 261-264, 2nd ed., pp. 281-285; “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism”; The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 5. 77 Ibid., Appendix 3. 78 Ibid., pp. 141-142.

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way, as scientific understanding. I understand another personalistically if I can, in imagination, see, feel, experience, desire, fear, believe what the other person sees, feels, etc. I must experience, in imagination, what the other person desires and fears, what he seeks, what he sees as his problems, and what actions he considers taking to solve these problems.79 23. Granted knowledge-inquiry, personalistic explanations do not qualify as genuine explanations; they reduce to “folk psychology” to be replaced by authentic explanations when psychology and neuroscience have advanced sufficiently to provide them. Granted the more rigorous wisdom-inquiry, however, personalistic explanations are intellectually fundamental, being associated with the intellectually fundamental tasks of articulating problems of living, and proposing and critically assessing possible solutions.80 24. Viewed from a scientific perspective, the experiential domain (consciousness, mental features of brain processes, perceptual qualities) seems utterly mysterious and inexplicable because it seems inherently beyond the scope of scientific explanation and understanding. This inherent apparent scientific inexplicability of consciousness and the experiential is, I claim, close to the nub of the mind/brain problem and, more generally, the HWPhU problem. The viewpoint sketched here – experiential physicalism – solves this part of the problem by (a) explaining why it is that science cannot explain the mental, the experiential (points 9 and 10 above), and (b) demonstrating that consciousness, the experiential, can be genuinely explained and understood by means of intellectually authentic personalistic explanation and understanding. That part of the experiential that we can ourselves experience is, potentially, fully intelligible and understandable personalistically to us. But point (b) only goes through if the arguments for wisdom-inquiry are valid. Granted knowledge-inquiry, personalistic explanation is merely folk psychology; its explanations are intellectually spurious and illusory. But grant wisdominquiry instead, and personalistic explanation becomes intellectually genuine, an authentic mode of explanation that cannot be eliminated or replaced. The experiential can indeed be genuinely understood by its 79

From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 174-189 and 264-273, 2nd ed., pp. 197-213 and 285-294; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 103-112. 80 From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 183-189, 2nd ed., pp. 206-213; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 109-110.

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means. Here is one way in which my proposed solution to the “wisdominquiry problem” has a major impact on my proposed solution to the mind/brain problem and the more general HWPhU problem.81 25. Personalistic understanding can be of intrinsic value; it makes possible friendship, intimacy and love; it enables us to become acquainted with what is of value in the lives of others. Unlike good scientific explanation, personalistic explanation does not provide reliable prediction, and is thus not a reliable tool for manipulating people. Instead, it is essential for cooperation.82 26. Personalistic understanding is essential for science. In seeking to acquire personalistic understanding of another, we may have two rather different motives: we may want to understand the person, or we may want to improve our knowledge and understanding of the world, and we seek to discover what the other person believes about the world because we hope this will contribute to our own knowledge. Science is the outcome of a multitude of such acts of personalistic understandings between scientists, with the personal dimension largely suppressed. Communication by means of language, meaningful sentences, propositions, and thus theories too, presuppose and are an elaboration of personalistic understanding.83 27. Grice showed that human communication involves multi-layered interactions and acts of mutual understanding. This can be understood as evolving, layer by layer, from elementary, one-layered, accidental animal communication.84 28. A basic task for neuroscience is to discover what the neurological correlates of consciousness are – how, that is, personalistic and neurological (i.e. scientific) accounts of what goes on inside our beads are correlated. This task must appeal to both scientific and personalistic modes of explanation. The personalistic cannot be reduced to the neurological (i.e. the scientific).85 29. A basic first step is to locate consciousness in the brain – i.e. to identify From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 261-273, 2nd ed., pp. 281-294; The Human World in the Physical Universe, chs. 5 and 7. 82 From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 185-189, 2nd ed., pp. 208-213; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 108-109. 83 From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 188-189 and 264-267, 2nd ed., pp. 210-213, and 285-288; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 110-111. 84 Ibid., pp. 189-190. 85 See Ibid., ch. 8. 81

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neurological processes that are conscious processes (as opposed to neurological processes that support, that are necessary for but are not identical to, conscious processes). I conjecture that consciousness is to be identified with neurological processes occurring in the mid brain (the limbic system) together with whatever neurological processes happen to be in strong two-way interaction with the mid brain. This hypothesis – a modification of a hypothesis put forward by Wilder Penfield,86 Donald McKay,87 and Francis Crick88 – can do justice to the key function of animal consciousness: to guide the animal in its changing environment so that it acts in such ways conducive to survival and reproductive success. In the case of humans, the hypothesis can do justice both to the persistence, the continuity, of consciousness, and to its immense variability and variety of content, involving as it does perception, imagination, emotion, desire, thought, and volition – the initiation and control of action.89 30. Why are brain processes and sensations correlated in the way that they are? No one has been able to think of even a possible explanation. My proposal is this. Our sensations – of sight, sound, smell, touch – are isolated, widely separated, minute patches in a vast, smoothly varying, multidimensional space of all possible sensations. The points of this space can be put together in only one way so as to preserve experiential “smoothness”, so that as one moves through the space, sensations vary smoothly, like a sound, of fixed timbre and loudness varying smoothly as the pitch is continuously varied. This smoothly varying space of all possible sensations can only be correlated with smoothly varying, functionally described brain processes in one way (so as to preserve smoothness in both experienced sensation and corresponding functionally described brain process). It is this unique matching which provides the 86

W. Penfield, “The cerebral cortex in man. 1. The cerebral cortex and Consciousness”, Arch. Neurol. and Psychiat. 40 (1938), pp. 417-442; The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958); The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 87 D. MacKay, “Cerebral Organization and the Conscious Control of Action", in J. Eccles, (ed.), Brain and Conscious Experience (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1966), pp. 422-445 and 312-313; “Divided Brains, Divided Minds?” in C. Blakemore and S. Greenfield, (eds.), Mindwaves (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 5-16. 88 F. Crick, “Function of the thalamic reticular complex: The searchlight hypothesis”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 81 (1984), pp. 4586-4590. 89 The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 8.

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explanation for the fact that the sensations we experience are correlated in the specific way that they are with corresponding neurological processes occurring in our brain. Any other correlations would violate the unique smoothness-preserving mapping from the space of all possible sensations to the space of all possible sensory brain processes.90 31. Human beings (and other sentient animals) are intelligible simultaneously in two ways: personalistically and physically. I propose a compatibilist solution the free will/ physicalism problem, the nub of which claims that, for free will, we require that freedom-ascribing personalistic explanations of human actions are both true and compatible with physical explanations (counterfactuals implied by these two kinds of explanation all being true). That this kind of double comprehensibility exists is possible but almost miraculous. Compatibilism, in order to be acceptable, must provide an explanation for this apparent miracle.91 32. In order to do this, a third kind of explanation needs to be invoked: purposive explanation. This is applicable to any goal-pursuing entity, whether sentient or not, and explains actions as being designed to realize goals of the entity in question in the given environment. It is applicable to all living things, to thermostats, guided missiles and robots. The atom of purposiveness is the feedback mechanism.92 33. Darwinian theory needs to be interpreted in such a way that it helps explain how and why purposive life has evolved and proliferated (and should not be interpreted as explaining apparent purposiveness away). Darwin is an exemplary philosopher, in that he helps to solve the fundamental problem of how purposive beings, namely living things, can have come to exist in a purposeless universe, in an extraordinarily fruitful way. The idea that Darwinian theory, interpreted as being about the evolution of purposive living things, can help us understand human history and aspects of our human world, is sketched, as “the generalized Darwinian Research Programme”, in From Knowledge to Wisdom, and elaborated subsequently in The Human World in the Physical Universe. 93 90

The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 126-129; “Three Problems about Consciousness and their Possible Resolution”, PMS WIPS 005 (November 15), http://www.petemandik.com/blog/pms-wips/ . 91 The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 7. 92 From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 267-269, 2nd ed., pp. 288-289; The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 130-131. 93 See From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 269-275, 2nd ed., pp. 290-296; and The

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34. Reinterpretation of Darwinian theory is required in order that the theory should help explain the existence, the evolution, of sentience and consciousness. This reinterpretation emphasizes that the mechanisms of evolution themselves evolve as evolution proceeds, gradually acquiring purposive and personalistic aspects, via unconscious animal breeding (offspring, sexual, and prey and predator selection), and cultural evolution (based on individual learning and imitation). I have proposed a number of key stages in the evolution of sentience and consciousness, from active and motivational control to the emergence of imagination, personalistic understanding and language.94 35. Human evolution has created fundamental new problems of living: discovery of death; dramatic changes in environment and way of life; clash of control systems (conscious and long-term); science without wisdom.95 36. I defend the view that what is of value exists objectively as a part of the fabric of the human world, and rebut metaphysical, moral and epistemological objections to this thesis of value-realism. What is of value, I conjecture, is living life lovingly – or what comes into existence when we live life lovingly.96 37. I put forward an argument for the reality of free will. First, wisdom, construed as the capacity to realize what is of value in life (for oneself and others) is a stronger notion than free will, in that it implies but is not implied by free will. Second, what poses a threat to the reality of wisdom or free will is the picture of the universe that emerges from modern natural science (physicalism). But if science, as construed by aim-oriented empiricism, is broadly correct, then we have achieved something of undeniable and great value: we have immensely enhanced our knowledge and understanding of the world. Thus, that which threatens to annihilate free will actually demonstrates its reality. Either modern science is broadly correct, in which case free will exists, or it is not, in which case the threat Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 7. See also From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 174-181, 2nd ed., pp. 197-205; and “Methodological Problems of Neuroscience”, op. cit. 94 The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 7. 95 The Human World in the Physical Universe, pp. 190-192. See, too, From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 193-195, 2nd ed., pp. 216-218. 96 From Knowledge to Wisdom, ch. 10; The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 2.

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to free will disappears.97 6. Connections Between the Two Problems That there is a connection between the two problems is immediately obvious. The problem “What kind of inquiry can best help life of value to flourish in the physical universe?” hardly arises unless there is a solution to the problem “How is life of value possible in the physical universe?”. But this connection is even tighter than one might at first suppose. Aimoriented empiricism, it will be remembered, is the conception of science at the core of wisdom-inquiry; it is the first step of the second argument in support of wisdom-inquiry. But, according to aim-oriented empiricism, physicalism is a basic tenet of (conjectural) scientific knowledge. It is more secure, indeed, than any accepted physical theory, such as Newtonian theory, quantum theory or general relativity. For theories which clash with physicalism too severely are rejected, whatever their empirical success might be; and even accepted theories are held to be false, whatever their empirical success, because they clash with physicalism. (Science might, one day, reject physicalism, but this would constitute a major revolution comparable to the one that initiated modern science.) Thus, the argument for wisdom-inquiry has the paradoxical consequence that, in establishing physicalism as a rather secure item of scientific knowledge, it calls into question the very possibility of there being life of value in the world at all. Clearly, a solution to the HWPhU problem is required if the argument for wisdom-inquiry is to have any coherence whatsoever. The solution I propose to the HWPhU problem, just indicated, makes viable the arguments I have sketched in support of wisdom-inquiry. A second connection has to do with the problem of simplicity or unity, and the meaning of physicalism. A great success of aim-oriented empiricism (integral to wisdom-inquiry) is that it solves a long-standing problem in the philosophy of science which baffled even Einstein:98 what does it mean to say of a theory that it is unified? My proposed solution leads one to distinguish eight different kinds of unity, which in turn 97

From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 273-274, 2nd ed., pp. 294-295; see, too, The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 6. 98 A. Einstein, “Autobiographical Remarks”, op. cit., pp. 21-23.

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correspond to eight different versions of physicalism. A flood of light is thrown on what physicalism can mean, and hence on what creates the HWPhU problem in the first place.99 A third connection concerns personalistic explanation and “double comprehensibility”. A basic feature of experiential physicalism (the solution I propose to the HWPhU problem) is that it holds that sentient beings are comprehensible in two very different ways: physically, and personalistically. Granted knowledge-inquiry, however, personalistic explanation hardly qualifies as an intellectually legitimate mode of explanation in its own right. It amounts to little more than “folk psychology”, to be replaced by something better when psychology advances. Reject knowledge-inquiry, and accept wisdom-inquiry in its place, and the situation is transformed: personalistic explanation becomes intellectually uneliminatable, and certainly not reducible to scientific explanation. Indeed, scientific explanations can only exist because scientists can acquire implicit personalistic understanding of each other. That wisdom-inquiry enormously enhances the intellectual status of personalistic explanation, in this way, enormously strengthens experiential physicalism, considered as a possible solution to the mind/brain problem, and the more general HWPhU problem (as I remarked in point 24 above), and enhances the force and plausibility of the proposed compatibilist solution to the free will/physicalism problem, which depends on personalistic explanation being an authentic mode of explanation in an essential way.100 One feature of experiential physicalism is value realism. This may be regarded as giving support to wisdom-inquiry, even though the latter does not depend on value realism. Finally, wisdom-inquiry and experiential physicalism combine in strongly implying that aims are bound to be, at some point, profoundly problematic, the task of improving aims also being profoundly problematic. Granted physicalism, it is, in any case, little short of a miracle that there exists anything capable of pursuing aims at all, let alone sentient or conscious beings able to pursue aims of value. In considering, at a fundamental level, the nature of the problems that confront us in 99

See my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, chs. 3 and 4; Is Science Neurotic?, Appendix, section 2; From Knowledge to Wisdom (2007), ch. 14. 100 The Human World in the Physical Universe, ch. 6.

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seeking to realize what is of value in life, we need to take into account the manner in which we, and all purposive things, have come to exist in the physical universe. We need, in short, to consider the implications of Darwinian theory, appropriately interpreted. One immediate implication is that human learning is a development of animal learning. Just as animal leaning is, fundamentally, learning how to live (how to act in pursuit of survival and reproductive success), so too human learning is, fundamentally, learning how to live, how to act. This is, of course, central to wisdom-inquiry. One big difference is that, whereas animals have a given basic aim set by evolution, we humans do not. Our task is to transform the basic aim we have inherited from evolution – survival and reproductive success – into the realization of what is of value, which includes, but goes beyond, mere survival and reproduction. At once a number of points deserve to be made. First, nothing in evolution equips us to transform the basic aim of survival and reproduction into the aim of realizing what is of value. Evolution designs things capable of pursuing survival and reproduction in an immense variety of ways, but leaves this basic aim fixed. This should alert us, immediately, to the likelihood that we will find it very difficult indeed to transform aims inherited from our evolutionary past into the aim of realizing what is of value. The machinery of aim-oriented rationality, designed specifically to help us do this, is likely to be urgently needed. As it is, aim-oriented rationality has yet to enter public consciousness, despite my thirty years’ campaign on its behalf. Our plight is dire indeed. We have not yet appreciated just how fundamentally important and difficult it is progressively to improve our aims in life, personal, social, and institutional – and thus how vital to put in place intellectual/social structures designed to help us do this. Second, taking into account our evolutionary past and manner of creation, it is all too likely that humanity will misconstrue and misrepresent what its aims are, in an all-pervasive fashion. Darwinian theory is a relatively recent discovery – when put into the context of human history and pre-history. The idea that Darwinian theory is relevant to thought about how we should live and tackle our problems of living is even more recent. Until very recently, in short, a Darwinian understanding of what our basic aims are in life has not been available to us. Aims have been interpreted and understood in all sorts of other terms, religious, cultural, social, personal. Misrepresentation of aims will have been endemic from

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the outset of the possibility of misrepresentation, with the beginnings of culture. All this massively reinforces the first point: the machinery of aimoriented rationality is likely to be urgently needed to help us become more honest about what our aims really are, as a first step towards discovering how our aims can be improved. Third, our psyches were designed to enable us to pursue survival and reproduction successfully while living in hunting and gathering groups of about 150 to 200 people. Change the conditions of life, and this same psyche may produce actions thoroughly deranged from the standpoint of survival and reproduction. But billions of people living in crowded cities today do indeed live in a world very different from that of hunting and gathering people. This in itself poses problems for the pursuit of survival and reproduction, let alone what is of value in life. Fourth, and closely connected with this last point, culture makes it possible to interpret evolutionary aims in new, and sometimes newly disastrous, ways. Survival and reproduction, for example, given culture, may receive many diverse interpretations, many thoroughly deranged and leading to deranged pursuits. Thus, given religion, survival may be interpreted to be survival after death: the suicide terrorist may be driven, in part, by the urge to survive. Once again, an evolutionary perspective throws into sharp relief the fundamental importance of employing aimoriented rationality to help us develop our aims in worthwhile directions. Fifth, humanity, perhaps uniquely among living things, is confronted by the discovery of the inevitability of death. The pursuit of survival is, for each one of us, ultimately doomed. Much of our culture has sought to deny this grim truth. Given that the urge to survive is such a fundamental part of our makeup, the temptations to deny death, in all sorts of ways, will be immense. Once again we see just how important aim-oriented rationality must be. Death ensures that our life aims become, at some point, horribly problematic. We need aim-oriented rationality to help us solve these death-generated problems concerning our aims, insofar as they can be solved, and to help us avoid the temptations of denial and delusion. Finally, humanity, again uniquely, seeks to plan consciously its way of life, a task for which consciousness was not designed by evolution. Consciousness in mammals, it is reasonable to hold, has the task of deciding, from moment to moment, or at intervals of minutes at the most, what is to be done. It does not plan the way of life. But human beings, as a result of the development of imagination, personalistic understanding and

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culture, can consciously act in a vastly expanded arena, taking in thousands of miles and decades into the future. This will, almost inevitably, lead to a clash between the system of hormones and so on which once controlled our way of life, and our conscious minds. Furthermore, consciousness will not have been equipped by evolution to take on the task of planning the way of life. Once again, aim-oriented rationality will be needed to help resolve conflicts that arise as a result of our evolutionary past. In short, put human life into the context of experiential physicalism, and Darwinism appropriately interpreted, and it becomes abundantly clear that aim-oriented rationality and wisdom-inquiry need to be built, urgently, into our culture, into our human world. A human world which has had the good sense to take wisdom-inquiry seriously would have the capacity to improve aims as a part of life, and would thus be able to make progress towards a better world. A world without wisdom-inquiry will continue to blunder, I fear, from disaster to disaster, the disasters becoming more serious as our powers to cause havoc become greater and more widely distributed.

Sonnets on Wisdom in Honour of Nick Maxwell Alan Nordstrom

FAUSTUS IS US Faustus personifies our lust to know, That science which we seek so avidly, Since knowing leads to doing as we grow In power to control our destiny. But Faustus sold his soul for what he learned, His bargain with the Devil granting him A period of supremacy unearned By merit, making his moral vision dim. And so it is with us, so powerful In realms of science and technology, Who know so much of how, much less of why Or what is wise, who rather play the fool Than seek to earn the true supremacy Of knowing how to live, not how to die.

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WISE AT HEART To realize what is of highest worth And do it is the purpose of our birth As human beings who rightly would be wise, For wisdom is the grandest human prize. To lead a life of value is the goal Implicit in our slow unfolding soul, Which seeks for sacred light to feed and nourish Those deeds that let it beautifully flourish. The deeds of love, compassion, empathy That recognize our own identity With others in their suffering and need Lie at the heart of each religious creed To guide those with the eyes and ears to know That as it is above, so must it be below.

Sonnets on Wisdom

THE WAY OF WISDOM To know what is of value, then to do What most needs doing sets us right and true Along the Way of Wisdom, rarely trod, Though in our fond supposal blessed by God. Why is it that this Way’s so hard to find, And most of us poor travelers seem blind And wayward, lost, benighted, dazed, Stumbling in woods in search of trails unblazed? Perhaps it’s that we seek with heads and eyes What only hearts and souls can realize, And Wisdom is a sensing more sublime Than knowledge, less like reason than like rhyme, Whose graceful provenance, though mystery, Yet ends our rough-hewed lines harmoniously.

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THE SPIRIT OF WISDOM I ask again: what is it to be wise? For I’ve been told that I must realize What is of value to myself and others (Since we are all akin, sisters and brothers), And I must make and do what we most need To help our earthly enterprise succeed. But what is that? Is it material, A scheme; or something more ethereal, A dream? I say it’s both: we surely need What cunning intellect contrives to feed And keep us safe, yet we crave something higher Toward which to aim and evermore aspire. What is this thing that we should seek above All other earthly things? No thing but love.

Nicholas Maxwell in Context: The Relationship of His Wisdom Theses to the Contemporary Global Interest in Wisdom Copthorne Macdonald 1. Introduction In the opening pages of his 1984 book From Knowledge to Wisdom, Nicholas Maxwell said: What I advocate is a radical change – a radical evolution – in the overall, fundamental aims and methods of inquiry. At present we have a kind of academic inquiry that has, as its basic intellectual aim, to improve knowledge. This needs to be transformed, I shall argue, into a kind of rational inquiry that has, as its basic intellectual aim, to improve wisdom.1 Maxwell was not the first to express concern about this issue. Four hundred years earlier Michel de Montaigne had written: I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and etymology.2 While these two philosophers expressed similar concerns, the urgency of the situation has escalated drastically during the intervening 400 1. N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 4. 2. M. de Montaigne, "On Presumption," The Complete Essays, ed. M.A. Screech, (London: Penguin Books, Penguin Classics edition, 1993), Book II, Essay 17, pp. 74950.

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years.When Montaigne was writing, world population was less than half a billion and Galileo had not yet invented the telescope. Today, world population is approaching 7 billion and our advanced technologies – coupled with our lack of wisdom – have created multiple crises. As Maxwell has put it: Before the advent of modern science and technology, lack of global wisdom did not matter too much; we lacked the power to wreak too much havoc on ourselves and our surroundings. Now, with modern science and technology, our power is terrifying, and global wisdom and civilization have become, not a luxury, but a necessity.3 For decades now, Maxwell has called upon us to deal with this “major intellectual disaster at the heart of western science, technology, scholarship and education”4 In a recent article in the London Review of Education,5 Mathew Iredale pointed out that although Maxwell’s ideas have been endorsed by respected academics, and his ideas have influenced the work of others, his hoped-for restructuring of whole institutions and the entire academic enterprise has not yet happened. That said, Ireland also pointed out a variety of situations, most in the UK, and most connected with science and scientists, that are supportive of Maxwell’s more general aim of acquiring knowledge that 1) sheds light on what is of value for humanity and 2) helps us to bring that into existence. This chapter is devoted to further exploring what has been happening in recent years that is germane to Maxwell’s wisdom-associated proposals. It will relate his work to  new academic courses, programs and departments formed in response to human problems,  academic research associated with “what is of value in life,” and  the growing interest in wisdom education.

3. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), p. 71. 4. N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., p. 3. 5. M. Iredale, “From knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry: is the revolution underway?” London Review of Education, 5:2, July 2007, pp. 117-129.

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2. New Academic Courses, Programs and Departments Formed in Response to Human Problems Maxwell has called for a shift in academic focus from knowledge acquisition for its own sake to “what is of value in life” for human beings. Knowledge acquisition is to continue, of course, but now in the service of realizing that which is widely beneficial. As he has put it: “The basic task of rational inquiry is to help us develop wiser ways of living, wiser institutions, customs and social relations, a wiser world.”6 In 1984 Maxwell hoped for a sweeping revolution in academia from (using his current terminology) knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry. He defines the latter as “rational inquiry devoted to promoting wisdom.”7 Twenty years later he expressed disappointment that this revolution had not yet occurred: Discussion of problems of living and how to solve them goes on at present at the fringes of academic inquiry, within such disciplines as peace studies, development studies, social policy studies, medicine, agricultural science, and other applied sciences. The crucial point is that such discussion is at the periphery; it is not intellectually central and fundamental.8 Is this a fair characterization of the situation? Are the programs he mentions indeed peripheral? Or do they, perhaps, represent important early steps in implementing the revolution which Maxwell seeks? Let’s look more closely at some of these activities. A. The Environment Among the most serious global problems to which Maxwell has called attention are several associated with the environment. They include global warming, destruction of tropical rain forests and other natural habitats, rapid extinction of species, depletion of vital natural resources such as oil, 6. N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit, p. 66. 7. N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will, and Evolution (Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001), p. 14. 8. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., pp. 92-93, note 20.

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and pollution of the sea, earth, and air.9, 10 Academic institutions have responded to these concerns in a quite remarkable way by establishing courses, programs, departments, and institutes devoted to the study and amelioration of these problems. The statistics are impressive. One tabulation compiled by Brown University’s Center for Environmental Studies lists 251 US colleges and universities that have Environmental Studies programs, departments or institutes, 13 Canadian universities, 11 in the UK, 6 in Australia, and at least one in each of several other countries.11 Another website, which bills itself as “The Environmental School Directory,” lists programs worldwide and has a breakdown by type. Their tally of offerings is Environmental Studies 261, Environmental Policy 222, Environmental Engineering 122, and Environmental Education 100. In addition, an increasing number of university law schools now have Environmental Law programs. B. International Development Studies Another “most serious” problem that Maxwell has identified is third world poverty, and he has called for “a massive effort by the wealthy of the first world to help the poor of the third world to help themselves” as well as “a more just distribution of the world’s wealth, and fairer trade arrangements.”12 This area of concern has not been ignored by the world’s institutions of higher learning, and many now have graduate and undergraduate programs in international development studies. The Canadian-based International Development Studies Network lists 18 Canadian Universities with International Development Studies programs, 8 universities in the UK that have them, and universities in Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, South

9. N. Maxwell, “From knowledge to wisdom: the need for an academic revolution” London Review of Education, 5:2, July 2007, p. 97. 10. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., pp. 131-132. 11. “Environmental Studies Programs at Other Institutions,” Brown University, Center for Environmental Studies. Retrieved October 26, 2007 from http://envstudies.brown.edu/oldsite/Web/academics/gradprogramsotherinstitutions.htm 12. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., p. 132.

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Africa, and Sweden.13 Another website lists 95 international development graduate programs in the United States.14 Even in practical fields like engineering, within universities there is a deep concern about these issues. The recently-formed (2000) Engineers Without Borders organization now has student chapters at 18 Canadian, 8 Australian, 15 UK, and 128 US universities.15 C. Peace and Conflict Resolution “War and the threat of war, including terrorism” is one more of Maxwell’s “most serious” global problems.16 Again, universities around the world have responded to this issue by creating Peace Studies, Conflict Studies, Conflict Resolution, and Dispute Resolution courses, programs, departments and institutes. The Conflict Resolution Information Source describes 319 of these in some detail.17 D. Women's Studies Maxwell recognizes the inequalities that women have faced, and recently wrote: “If women had been permitted to play an equal role in creating modern science and academia, things might have developed in a very different way, and we might today possess something more like full 13. “IDS Programs,” International Development Studies Network, Retrieved October 28, 2007 from http://www.idsnet.org/programs.html 14. “International Development Graduate Programs in the United States U.S.A,” GradSchools.com, Retrieved October 28, 2007 from http://programs.gradschools.com/usa/international_development.html 15. Information on Engineers Without Borders chapter numbers retrieved October 23, 2007 from the following web sites: http://my.ewb.ca/chapter/ListChapters http://www.ewb.org.au/chapter/ http://www.ewb-uk.org/branches http://www.ewbusa.org/chapters.php?name=&type=Student&state=&city=®ion=&x=16&y=13 16. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., p. 131. 17. “Higher Education Programs,” The Conflict Resolution Information Source, Retrieved October 28, 2007 from http://www.crinfo.org/action/searchportal.jsp?pid=4540

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fledged wisdom-inquiry.”18 A great many people have been concerned about the status of women in both the Western industrialized countries and around the world, and roughly 25 years ago universities began to offer Women’s Studies Programs. Today, sometimes expanded into Gender Studies, hundreds of universities are offering these programs. Gerri Gribi lists 675 US colleges and universities that offer such programs,19 and Joan Korenman identifies 258 institutions in 58 countries outside the US that offer them.20 So what do we make of all this? In the chapter Maxwell wrote for this book he says “The revolution we need would change every branch and aspect of academic inquiry.” That, very clearly, has not happened. Also in that chapter he proposes that rational problem solving in the service of wisdom-inquiry will require those attempting it to: (1*) Articulate and seek to improve the articulation of those personal, social and global problems of living we need to solve to achieve what is of value in life (a better world). (2*) Propose and critically assess alternative possible solutions – possible and actual cooperative actions (policies, political programmes, philosophies of life), to be assessed from the standpoint of their capacity, if implemented, to help realize what is of value in life.21 Isn’t that what has been happening in the programs just discussed? Although focused on some relatively narrow aspect of the human problematique, haven’t these programs been using rational problem

18. N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities, 2nd Edition (London: Pentire Press, 2007), Chapter 12. 19. “Women’s Studies Programs - Gerri Gribi,” CreativeFolk.com, Retrieved October 28, 2007 from http://creativefolk.com/ws.html 20. “Women’s Studies Programs Worldwide,” University of Maryland Baltimore County, Retrieved October 28, 2007 from http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/programs.html 21. N. Maxwell, “How Can Life of Value Best Flourish in the Real World?”, this volume.

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solving to 1) better understand the problems and how they arose, and to 2) “assess alternative possible solutions”? No doubt the quality and effectiveness of individual programs varies. My point is that they are there, and the sheer numbers tell me that something important is going on. It is not the total revolution of academia that Maxwell has called for. But back in 1984 he also used the word evolution, and that is what the data tell me is going on. I see these programs as the edge of the transformative wedge. Behind these programs are concerned faculty members who want to offer them, and filling the classroom chairs are concerned students who want to take the courses. Furthermore, each program represents university resources taken away from knowledge acquisition for its own sake and directed toward the discussion and solution of human problems, toward the development of wisdom, toward the realization of “what is of value in life.” University governing bodies have decided that these programs, departments, and institutes are an important addition to their universities, worthy of the provision of scarce university resources to establish them and keep them going. If I am correct about this being a leading-edge phenomenon, we will be seeing much more of it in the future. 3. Academic Research Associated with “What is of Value in Life” What of academic research? Is it all directed at acquiring knowledge for its own sake, or is a significant portion of it now in the service of wisdominquiry and exploring/solving significant human problems? At one point in his 2004 book Is Science Neurotic? Maxwell wrote: We lack what at present we most need: sustained, intelligent, imaginative, unconstrained exploration of our local and global problems of living and what we might do to help solve them, carried on in a public, influential manner.22 It seems to this observer that academic institutions worldwide are very much involved with sustained, intelligent, imaginative research intended to reveal and solve many of “our local and global problems of living.” More recently, Maxwell has acknowledged some important research of this kind, 22. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., p. 93.

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while at the same time strongly criticizing the UK’s system for distributing research funds.23 Here, let’s look at a few examples of research focused on betterment of the human situation. A. Environmental Research We begin with climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) “to assess scientific, technical and socio-economical information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”24 The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the IPCC for its work, and to former US Vice President Al Gore for his activities in raising public awareness. In November 2007 the IPCC released “Climate Change 2007,” its fourth comprehensive assessment report. This report was the distillation of research done by 2500 scientists25 – some employed by government agencies and NGOs, but many affiliated with universities and doing their research at those universities. University-based researchers have been active in many other areas of environmental research. Among these are species extinction, habitat issues, issues concerning global water availability and consumption, and issues concerning food production. B. Economic Research Considerable economic research is taking place within universities, government departments, and independent “think tank” institutes. Much of it concerns the functioning of present economic systems and optimizing their functioning. The negative aspects of these systems – which include unequal wealth distribution, negative environmental impacts, and resource 23. N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, 2nd Edition, op. cit., Chapter 12. 24. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Retrieved October 29, 2007 from http://www.ipcc.ch/ 25. Reuters, “FACTBOX—Draft U.N. study shows climate risks and solutions,” Environmental News Network, Retrieved October 29, 2007 from http://www.enn.com/climate/article/22477/print

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depletion – lead many to doubt that this kind of research increases human wisdom. Yet there is some economic research which clearly does. One example is research on wealth distribution. Research into income and wealth levels is revealing,26 as is research into the underlying mathematics which predicts that unequal wealth distribution is simply what happens unless corrective measures are implemented.27 Another example has to do with better ways of measuring the level of human well-being. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the standard index, but it measures only one aspect of well-being. Other indices, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), take into account many additional factors.28 C. Wisdom Research Despite the fact that the word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” academic philosophy largely avoided the subject of wisdom for much of the twentieth century. So did academic psychology. Even those doing research in developmental psychology rarely used the word. That began to change in the late 1970s, and wisdom has once again become an acceptable topic for scholarly discussion and study. Central questions in wisdom research have been, and continue to be: What is wisdom? What are its characteristics? How do we define it? How do we measure it? How do people develop it? Also, is wisdom strictly personal, or can societies and their institutions also be wise? About some things there is much agreement and overlap of views. Monika Ardelt has pointed out that many researchers agree that “wisdom is the quintessence of successful human development” and that “wise people are considered to be exceptionally mature, integrated, satisfied with life, able to make decisions in difficult and uncertain life matters, and capable

26. C. Macdonald, Matters of Consequence: Creating a Meaningful Life and a World That Works (Charlottetown Canada 2004), pp. 114-115, 207. 27. M. Buchanan, “The Mathematics of Inequality,” The Australian Financial Review, September 2002, Retrieved October 29, 2007 from http://www.austms.org.au/Jobs/Library4.html 28. “Genuine Progress Indicator,” Redefining Progress, Retrieved October 29, 2007 from http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm

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of dealing with any crisis and obstacle they encounter.”29 There is also general agreement that wise people care about the well-being of others. Getting more specific, Paul Baltes, Ursula Staudinger and their colleagues at the Max Plank Institute for Human Development have put forth “the Berlin wisdom paradigm” and say that “wisdom in this paradigm is defined as an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life. These include knowledge and judgment about the meaning and conduct of life and the orchestration of human development toward excellence while attending conjointly to personal and collective well-being.”30 Robert Sternberg sees wisdom as “the application of tacit knowledge as mediated by values toward the achievement of a common good through a balance among multiple (a) intrapersonal, (b) interpersonal, and (c) extrapersonal interests in order to achieve a balance among (a) adaptation to existing environments, (b) shaping of existing environments, and (c) selection of new environments.”31 Ardelt notes that “overall, most definitions of wisdom describe the concept as a multidimensional and multifaceted construct with cognitive, reflective, and affective (emotional) elements that are inherently related to each other,” and she notes that her own definition is in line with this.32 One important research activity has been the development of techniques for evaluating the level of wisdom that specific individuals have developed. The Berlin group and Ardelt have each developed methodologies for doing this – two different methodologies that reflect the different views that each has about the nature of wisdom. For Maxwell, wisdom has a seeking, investigative quality as well as an active doing quality. He has called wisdom “the desire, the active endeavor, and the capacity to discover and achieve what is desirable and of value in life, both for oneself and others.”33 Furthermore, he has indicated 29. M. Ardelt, “How wise people cope with crises and obstacles in life,” ReVision, June 22, 2005. 30. P. B. Baltes and U. M. Staudinger, “Wisdom: A Metaheuristic (Pragmatic) to Orchestrate Mind and Virtue Toward Excellence,” American Psychologist, 55:1, January 2000, p. 122. 31. R. J. Sternberg, “A Balance Theory of Wisdom,” Review of General Psychology, 2:4, 1998, p. 347. 32. M. Ardelt, “How wise people cope with crises and obstacles in life,” op. cit. 33. N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit, p. 66.

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that what is of value in life is not just some arbitrary personal choice. “What is of value is to be discovered, it is not simply what we decide.”34 There are many lists of “wise values” and human virtues and, as one might expect if the things that wise people value are not arbitrary, there is much list-to-list similarity.35 Most wisdom researchers consider wisdom to be a personal characteristic – a level of psychological development or a personality trait. But what of cultural and societal wisdom? What do we mean when we speak of a wise society or a wisdom-based culture? Nobelist Roger Sperry considered human values to be decision-making determinants. He wrote: Human values, in addition to their commonly recognized significance from a personal, religious, or philosophic standpoint, can also be viewed objectively as universal determinants in all human decision making. All decisions boil down to a choice among alternatives of what is most valued, for whatever reasons, and are determined by the particular value system that prevails. Human value priorities, viewed thus in objective control–system theory, stand out as the most strategically powerful causal control now shaping world events. More than any other causal system with which science now concerns itself, it is variables in human value systems that will determine the future.36 Societal institutions also have deeply-embedded values, and those values are determinants of the decisions the institution makes. Personal wisdom can become societal wisdom if and when wise people succeed in embedding “the values of the wise” in the decision-making processes of institutions. Maxwell, too, recognizes that wisdom has both a personal dimension and a societal dimension, and has referred to academia as “an intellectual and educational force for the promotion of personal and global wisdom.”37 34. Ibid, p. 120. 35. “Values that Various People Have Associated With Wisdom,” The Wisdom Page, Retrieved October 30, 2007 from http://www.wisdompage.com/valueslists.html 36. R. W. Sperry, “Bridging science and values: A unifying view of mind and brain,” American Psychologist, April 1977, p. 237. 37. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., p. 117.

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Key to personal wisdom is psychological development beyond “normality.” As Martin Seligman, one of the leading “positive psychology” researchers and a former President of the American Psychological Association, put it: “I realized that my profession was halfbaked. It wasn’t enough for us to nullify disabling conditions and get [from minus five] to zero. We needed to ask, What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five.”38 His extensive research led to the development of a Character Strengths and Virtues document, and he says about it, “we intend it to do for psychological well-being what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders...does for the psychological disorders that disable human beings.39 Meditation is a proven aid to psychological development. Ken Wilber cites research which indicates that meditation is the only proven way to move our psychological development beyond what he calls the “sensitive self” stage to the “integrative” and “holistic” stages. He noted, “Less than 2 percent of the adult population scores at Jane Loevinger’s highest two stages of self development (autonomous and integrated),” and went on to say, “No practice (including psychotherapy, holotropic breathwork, or NLP) has been shown to substantially increase that percentage. With one exception: studies have shown that consistent meditation practice over a several-year period increases that percentage from 2 percent to an astonishing 38 percent….”40 (Emphasis his.) Neurological research is starting to tell us why meditation is such a powerful tool. Tenzin Gyatso (the current Dalai Lama) wrote in the New York Times about research by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin that explored the effect of mindfulness meditation on brain 38. C. Wallis, “The New Science of Happiness,” Time Magazine, January 17, 2005. Retrieved November 2, 2007 from http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/images/TimeMagazine/TimeHappiness.pdf 39. M. E. P. Seligman et al, “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions,” American Psychologist, 60:5, July-August 2005, p. 411 40. The quote is from Wilber’s online announcement of the formation of the Integral Institute. Retrieved October 24, 2000 at http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/formation_int_inst.cfm/xid,8287/yid,9296268 .

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function. In the Dalai Lama’s words: “mindfulness meditation strengthens the neurological circuits that calm a part of the brain that acts as a trigger for fear and anger.” Some of Davidson’s research involved people who worked in highly stressful jobs. Regarding this, the Dalai Lama said: “These people — non-Buddhists — were taught mindfulness, a state of alertness in which the mind does not get caught up in thoughts or sensations, but lets them come and go much like watching a river flow by. After eight weeks, Davidson found that in these people, the parts of their brains that help to form positive emotions became increasingly active.” The Dalai Lama went on to say, “It’s worth noting that these methods are not just useful, but inexpensive. You don’t need a drug or an injection. You don’t have to become a Buddhist or adopt any particular religious faith. Everybody has the potential to lead a peaceful, meaningful life.”41 An important point here is that meditation can be approached as a secular, psychological practice, devoid of any association with religion or spirituality. 4. Wisdom Education Is education for wisdom really a possibility? Many people admire wise individuals but assume that wisdom’s arrival in their own life is just a matter of chance. That, however, is not the view of people who have spent time exploring what wisdom is and the various factors involved in its development. They understand that people can help themselves and each other to become wiser. Let’s look at what wisdom education might look like 1) in K-12 elementary and secondary schools, 2) in colleges and universities, and 3) for self-directed adults. A. In Elementary and Secondary Schools Maxwell has recognized the need to begin wisdom education at an early age. Furthermore, he has suggested a promising approach: At the centre of wisdom-education, from the age of five (let us suppose) onwards, there would be a discussion seminar, concerned to encourage children to engage in the activity of articulating and 41. T. Gyatso. "The Monk in the Lab," New York Times, April 6, 2003.

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What of other approaches that have already been put into practice? Wisdom researcher Anne Adams has explored eight “integral” education programs. “Integral education,” she says, “addresses the whole person by creating an environment in which students engage in learning processes and experiences that focus on developing and integrating the mental, physical emotional, and spiritual intelligences.”43 She explored programs associated with 1) Sri Atmananda, 2) Krishnamurti, 3) Montessori, 4) Fox (Quaker schools), 5) Sri Aurobindo, 6) Gandhi, 7) Yogananda (The Living Wisdom Schools), and 8) Steiner (creator of the Waldorf Schools). In her doctoral dissertation she presents the results of her research and offers a “systemic integral model of education...designed to initiate a paradigmatic

42. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., p. 139. 43. A. Adams, “Education: From Conception to Graduation. A Systemic, Integral Approach,” A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies, 2006, p. v. Retrieved November 2, 2007 from http://www.wisdompage.com/AnneAdamsDissertation.pdf

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shift in our relationship with education.”44 She would start this integral education at conception, with the parents-to-be, in a campus-like environment where people of all ages have access to resources: The campus is a learning community and epitomizes a living system that is dynamic and co-created by its members. People of all ages, i.e., young people, couples, children, students, parents, elders, teachers, community members, etc., come to the campus for education: classes, workshops, access to experts, resources, e.g., books, tapes, experiential practices. They are assisted in learning more about what education, learning experiences, practices and knowledge are essential in developing and integrating their mental, spiritual, emotional and physical intelligences. Whatever they are addressing in their current stage of growth is supported by an integral education approach.45 Since values are central to wisdom, an excellent beginning to wisdom education would seem to be the introduction of values education in public school systems. North American parents with strong religious views have resisted the idea, but beginning in the 1990s values education began to find acceptance as “character education.” The most popular of these programs is called CHARACTER COUNTS!. According to the program’s staff, CHARACTER COUNTS! “affects over 6 million kids worldwide, has over 800 coalition members, and is in thousands of schools.”46 The program is built around “Six Pillars of Character”: Trustworthiness (honesty, integrity, reliability, loyalty), Respect (civility, courtesy and decency; dignity and autonomy; tolerance and acceptance), Responsibility (accountability, pursuit of excellence, self-restraint), Fairness (process, impartiality, equity), Caring, and Citizenship.47 The Josephson Institute of Ethics originated the program, and supplies schools with materials to help teachers implement the program in their classrooms. 44. Ibid., p. 198. 45. Ibid., p. 192. 46. Personal email from Megan Robertson, Program Assistant, CHARACTER COUNTS!, [email protected], on July 9, 2007. 47. “The Six Pillars of Character,” Josephson Institute of Ethics. Retrieved July 8, 2007 from http://www.josephsoninstitute.org/MED/MED-2sixpillars.htm

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Mindfulness meditation was mentioned earlier, and a New York Times article titled “In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind” presents examples of how in its secular form mindfulness meditation is being employed in classrooms. One study of the practice revealed “increased control over attention and less negative internal chatter.” Another “found that meditation techniques helped improve mood disorders, depression, and self-harming behaviors like anorexia and bulimia.” The Principal of one elementary school that uses the technique commented: “If we can help children slow down and think, they have answers within themselves.”48 Dirk Windhorst has reported on a program in which history was used as a vehicle for teaching wisdom. The “Teaching for Wisdom through History” course materials were developed at the PACE center headed by wisdom researcher Robert Sternberg. The developers say, “This curriculum goes beyond the teaching of content knowledge to integrate wise and critical thinking skills into a historical context.” Windhorst reports on the application of the materials in one eighth-grade class. Students were led to examine a number of “historical dilemmas” faced by the American colonists in 1776. They read different accounts of the same events, and considered discordant elements such as Thomas Jefferson writing “the lofty sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence while at the same time owning black slaves whom he believed were inferior to whites.”49 B. In Colleges and Universities Aside from the various programs already mentioned, what wisdomfostering activities are going on in universities today? Positive psychology courses are one, and they are currently being offered at more than 100 US colleges and universities. The most popular of these appears to be the one taught by Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard. In the spring of 2006 enrollment was 855 students, making it Harvard’s most popular course. Ben-Shahar has 48. P. L. Brown, “In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind,” New York Times, June 16, 2007. 49. D. Windhorst, “Educating for Wisdom: Can an ancient virtue be cultivated in postmodern times?,” Professing Education, 3:2, Retrieved September 13, 2007 from http://profed.brocku.ca/docs/vol3/num2/anum1.htm

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said, “My goal is to create a bridge between the Ivory Tower and Main Street, to bring together the rigor of academia and the accessibility of selfhelp. If the class has a rigorous academic foundation, which it does, then why not try to help people lead better lives?”50 For those interested, videos of the 23 lectures that Ben-Shahar gave that semester can be downloaded from the Harvard website.51 The Association of American Colleges and Universities has more than 1100 member institutions, and has recently initiated a program to bring into the functioning of these schools a greater emphasis on a number of qualities of wisdom, including:  doing one’s best;  integrity;  contributing to local, national and global society;  recognizing and acting on the obligation to inform one’s own judgment;  relinquishing a sense of entitlement;  engaging diverse and competing perspectives; and  refining ethical and moral reasoning. Called the Core Commitments initiative, 196 college and university presidents have, at this writing, “pledged their leadership and best efforts in support of a far-reaching engagement with issues of ethical, personal, and civic responsibility.”52 There are individuals in colleges and universities who are doing what they can to convince colleagues and administrators to move their 50. C. Goldberg, “Harvard’s crowded course to happiness: ‘Positive Psychology’ draws students in droves,” The Boston Globe, March 10, 2006. Retrieved November 4, 2007 from http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/03/10/harvards_crowded_course_to_ happiness/ 51. “Lecture Videos for Psychology 1504,” Harvard University. Retrieved November 4, 2007 from http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k14790&pageid=icb.page69189 52. “Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility,” Association of American Colleges and Universities. Retrieved November 5, 2007 from http://www.aacu.org/core_commitments/documents/brochure.pdf. List of “Call to Action signatories” Retrieved November 5, 2007 from http://www.aacu.org/core_commitments/signatories.cfm

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institutions in the direction that Nicholas Maxwell has outlined for us. One of them is Alan Nordstrom – Professor of English at Rollins College, a liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida. In 2006, I had the pleasure of spending two weeks with him in support of that effort.53 The experience led me to conclude that instututional transformation is likely to take place only if, in the early stages of the process, highly motivated individuals are actively selling the vision. C. For Adults In the late 1990s there were meetings in Burkina Faso of a "Council of the Wise." This was a group of people from different countries and backgrounds who wanted to foster the development of wisdom in African culture. A useful outcome of these meetings was the identification of four levels of wisdom development.  Potential Sages includes almost everyone. These are busy people who have the potential to become wise, but have never felt the call to intentionally develop wisdom.  Sages in Intention have come to understand what wisdom is, realize that they have the potential to become wise, and have decided, as the Council put it, to “follow the path of their potential.”  Developing Sages are actively involved in wisdom-developing activities.  Established Sages are those who are recognized by others as wise people. What can those Sages in Intention do to become Developing Sages? If you live in or near Rochester, New York, you could sign up for Richard Trowbridge’s three-month “Developing Wisdom” course.54 Trowbridge has been deeply involved with the subject – his PhD dissertation being a 53. C. Macdonald, "WISDOM: The Highest Aim of Life and Higher Education," the “Thomas P. Johnson Distiguished Visiting Scholar” address given at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida on April 5, 2006 in text-plus-slides format. Retrieved November 19, 2007 from http://www.wisdompage.com/rollinstalk.html. This talk, with introduction by Alan Nordstrom, is also available in RealAudio-with-slides format at http://www.wisdompage.com/RollinsSlideTalk/slidetalk.smi. 54. “Developing Wisdom,” Wisdom Centered Life. Retrieved November 5, 2007 from http://wisdomcenteredlife.org/default.aspx

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treatise on the history of wisdom and the wisdom research conducted between 1980 to 2005.55 For most of us, however, moving from stage to stage will be an exercise in self-directed learning. To develop wisdom we need to develop the characteristics of wisdom – the relevant perspectives, and values, and intellectual knowledge – and incorporate them into our lives. Elsewhere I have suggested nine wisdomfostering activities and discussed them in some detail:56 1. A clear understanding of what wisdom is 2. Counseling and various kinds of psychotherapy 3. Intellectual knowledge that is relevant to the kind of wisdom we are trying to develop 4. Full and varied life experience 5. Feedback and counsel from wise people 6. The observation of behavior – our own and others 7. Practices that help us internalize values 8. Body–awareness practices 9. Meditation But just how does one develop that “clear understanding of what wisdom is” and learn more about the other items on the list? When writing two general-readership books on wisdom in the early 1990s57 I became acutely aware of the lack of information on the subject. Consequently, in 1995 I decided to move my wisdom education focus to the Internet, and created a website to help fill the void. Called The Wisdom Page, it is a compilation of wisdom-related resources. The site has grown in usefulness and visitor numbers over the years, and is currently located at www.wisdompage.com. It has content in the following categories:  Getting Acquainted with Wisdom Why care about wisdom? What What is wisdom? Words of wisdom Wisdom-literature bibliograph55. R. H. Trowbridge, The Scientific Approach to Wisdom, Doctoral dissertation, Union Institute and University, 2005. Retrieved November 5, 2007 from http://www.wisdompage.com/TheScientificApproachtoWisdom.doc 56. C. Macdonald, “Personal and Societal Wisdom: Some Thoughts on Their Nature and Development,” April 2, 2006 address to the University Unitarian Universalist Society in Orlando, Florida. Retrieved November 5, 2007 from http://www.wisdompage.com/UUUSTalkText/uuustalk.html 57. “Info About Cop Macdonald’s E-books,” The Wisdom Page. Retrieved November 5, 2007 from http://www.wisdompage.com/ebooksinfo.html

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ies The traditional wisdom literature Contemporary books about wisdom wisdom and wise living (including free downloads) Wisdom-related poetry  The Structure of Wisdom The varieties of wisdom Wise perspectives Wise values The integration of truth and the integral vision  Wisdom and Humanity’s Future  Wisdom Research Links to materials of individual researchers  Education for Wisdom  Resources for Wisdom Development Defining the task—constructing a wisdom-based life The meditation tool Other practices and tools Wisdom-related sight and sound media Other wisdom-related resources  Wisdom-Related Issues Transforming academia from knowledgeinquiry to wisdom inquiry Spirituality and wisdom in business  Wisdom in Action Comments on activist wisdom and socio-cultural wisdom World Wisdom Alliance Activist organizations Dialogue instead of debate  Personal Quests for Wisdom The site also incorporates several “Web 2” features including RSS feed and monthly email newsletters to notify interested people of new content, streaming audio and video, podcasts, a custom search engine focused on wisdom-related issues, and free downloads of doctoral dissertations and eBooks. Clearly, The Wisdom Page is not the total answer to the selfdirected learner’s problems, but it is perhaps a helpful place to start. 5. Conclusion Nicholas Maxwell is right; his proposed program has not revolutionized the functioning of entire academic institutions or academe as a whole. But to my eyes, there is much evidence that his core approach – focusing on human problems and then acquiring relevant knowledge to do something about them – is happening in a widespread and gradually increasing way. Individuals who have seen the light, whether via Maxwell’s writings or otherwise, have been developing courses, programs, departments, and in a few cases whole schools, that address some aspect or other of the human problematique. The more successful of these are responding in rational and creative ways to raise awareness of the chosen problem area and, as

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Maxwell put it, to “propose and critically assess possible solutions, possible actions or policies, from the standpoint of their capacity, if implemented, to promote wiser ways of living.”58 Others, like Professor Alan Nordstrom, are attempting to transform their entire institutions – again, via reason and logic in the service of wisdom. It seems to me that From Knowledge to Wisdom was, in 1984, a book ahead of its time. Based on the current evidence, some of which I have presented in this chapter, I conclude that the time for wisdom-inquiry has finally come. One aim of the book you are now reading is the dissemination of Maxwell’s ideas to a wider audience. I hope it succeeds in doing that. I feel confident that there are many people in academic institutions around the world whose personal inclinations toward betterment will find encouragement from, and a helpful framework within, the work of Nicholas Maxwell.

58. N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., p. 119.

Prolegomena To a Critique of Pure Wisdom Steve Fuller 1. Why Wisdom Is Unloved by Western Philosophers I must confess that I have always held the concept of wisdom in some suspicion. Luckily, I have been in good company. Even though the original Greek philosophia is normally translated as ‘love of wisdom’, the Western philosophical tradition has been relatively stingy in its display of such affection. This point alone gives Nicholas Maxwell’s call for science to move ‘from knowledge to wisdom’ a great rhetorical force that has been difficult to resist openly.1 Not surprisingly, then, the responses to his book have mirrored the pattern of those who write about wanting to ‘return democracy to the people’. Given what democracy is supposed to mean, who could disagree? Thus, rather than saying that the argument is fundamentally wrongheaded, a few earnest critics quibble with its details, while the vast majority pass over it in stony silence. Actual philosophers despise ‘philosophy’ just as actual democrats despise ‘democracy’. However, the inconsistency in both cases is due less to hypocrisy than catachresis. In other words, ‘philosophy’ does not quite capture what normatively acceptable histories of Western philosophy are about, just as ‘democracy’ does not quite capture what normatively acceptable histories of democracies are about. But more importantly for our purposes, not only has Western philosophy never really been about wisdom, neither is Maxwell’s book – and just as well. But to those – including Maxwell, it seems – who would cast a rosy glow on ‘wisdom’, my antipathy to the concept needs to be explained. Let me begin, then, with an inventory of generalisations about what ‘wisdom’ has meant in the Western philosophical tradition. Among contemporary philosophers, the Neo-Thomists would probably most warmly embrace the sentiments embodied in this list:

1

N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom. 2nd edn. (Orig. 1984). (London: Pentire Press, 2007).

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 Wisdom is possible in both action and thought. The former, also known as ‘prudence’, consists in finding a middle way between extreme courses. The latter, also known as ‘contemplation’, consists in coming to a state of equanimity.  The individual grows in wisdom but society does not: Everyone must become wise for themselves.  There is ‘modern science’ but no ‘modern wisdom’.  Science, but not wisdom, can be ‘misused’.  Wisdom has an integrative function within the individual person, whereas science distributes its inquires across many specialised individuals. An interesting feature of modern philosophy, starting with Descartes and Hobbes, is its tendency to say that wisdom is a natural consequence of science, clearly a thesis that Maxwell disputes as the ‘philosophy of knowledge’. Over time this argument has served to reduce wisdom to the appliance of science in the aid of benign governance. Correspondingly, it has also served to devalue the qualities classically associated with wisdom, which as the above list illustrates had been largely defined in contrast to the values of science. For example, the two major modern ethical traditions, Kantianism and utilitarianism, demote the signature practical virtue of the wise, prudence: The prudent person may avoid doing harm but fails to perform optimally from the standpoint of a truly rational moral agent. Not surprisingly, both Kant and Bentham, in their rather different ways, took the structure of scientific reasoning as the template for the structure of moral reasoning. It is not difficult to understand how this devaluation of wisdom occurred. Consider Francis Bacon’s interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of phronesis, or practical wisdom. This is the sort of art that, say, a successful politician possesses. Aristotle himself saw it as the product of long and attentive experience that one acquires from being a member of society and contributing to its various functions. For his part, Bacon focused on the politician’s ability to elicit the hidden potential in people, to enable them to be more than they might be otherwise by appealing to their underlying motives. This too requires considerable experience with people, but it involves viewing them in a certain way, more like objects that might be manipulated to one’s advantage under certain conditions. Aristotle, of course, does not deny this aspect of politics. In fact, his works on rhetoric addressed them. However, much more than Bacon, Aristotle is concerned with the character of the politician and the appropriateness of his words to

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the situation. In contrast, for Bacon, the tasks of the sophist and the scientist converge in his version of practical wisdom: Politicians should learn to say and do what works. An illuminating way to characterise the difference between Aristotle and Bacon on wisdom is in terms of the different senses of immanence and transcendence they foster. For Aristotle, the wise person appears immanent in the world in which he acts. The politician succeeds by being recognised as one of the people he would rule, a primus inter pares. His concerns are their concerns. This requires that he minimizes aspects of his thought or being that might differentiate him from them. In that respect, he must transcend his own uniqueness. I put the point this way because Aristotle’s sense of wisdom resonates with so-called Oriental Wisdom that stresses an embedded and contextualised understanding of oneself in the world more generally.2 In contrast, the Baconian politician’s sense of immanence involves his becoming one with his objective and using any means at his disposal to achieve it. He thus suspends whatever common feeling he might have with the people he would rule in order to view them in a way that enables him to get them where he wants to go. The relevant sense of transcendence here is that of a second-order observer capable of manipulating objects in a system. The corresponding sense of wisdom is that of an expert game player or sportsman. The strong temptation to objectify subjects when acting from the Baconian standpoint is the sort of thing that Maxwell condemns as an excess of the Enlightenment. It is worth noting, however, that such ‘inhumanity’ was routinely attributed to God in the 17th and 18th centuries by practitioners of the theological sub-discipline concerned with cosmic justice, or ‘theodicy’. Its guiding idea was that God’s operations are constrained by our imperfect material natures, which means that the service of good may require the imposition of suffering. This perspective was recast in popular secular terms by Hegel as ‘the cunning of reason’, according to which the often ironic twists in the fate of individual human lives provide the means by which humanity as such comes to be full realized. This was the spirit in which Hegel endorsed Lord Bolingbroke’s saying that history is philosophy teaching by examples. The retrospective vision provided by such lessons imparts its own brand of wisdom, but only to the spectators, never to the actors themselves. Specifically, it rationalises 2

R. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently -- and Why. (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2002).

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their plight and presumably puts their minds at ease, for no matter how badly things turn out, it has always been for a greater good. 2. Wisdom as the Enemy of Prophecy and Progress Wisdom also has not fared well in the modern era because, as already suggested, it is biased in favour of the old and experienced. This attitude is clearly related to the modern suspicion, sometimes contempt, attached to tradition, which comes to be associated with mindless repetition, if not downright irrationality. Thus, to the modern mind, the prospect of losing or corrupting the accumulated knowledge of the past in succeeding generations is regarded as more blessing than curse. In the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon and David Hume gave a decidedly positive spin to what had been previously regarded as the barbaric burning of the Library of Alexandria by the Caliph Omar in 642 AD.3 In this context, the old – understood both in terms of particular individuals and dominant social groups – are seen as blocking entire generations and classes of people who promise to bring fresh and different perspectives to the world. Starting with Plato, a minor theme in the history of political thought has been concerned with balancing the competing horizons of the young and the old in a fair system for selecting society’s rulers. For example, Friedrich Hayek proposed that people vote once, in middle age, presumably the point when the natural liberality of youth has been tempered, but not entirely extinguished, by the lessons of age. Thomas Kuhn made an interesting contribution to this general discussion of intergenerational epistemology, which may turn out to have been his most significant insight.4 If wisdom is an epistemic virtue associated with advancing years, the complementary virtue in the young is the ignorance of precedent that enables them to be effortlessly – some would say, witlessly – open-minded, which is to say, open to bold courses of thought and action. Kuhn deployed this point to argue that paradigm-shifts in science occur not because opponents of the same generation manage to reach agreement but because the younger generation of scientists supports the challenger to the orthodoxy. As Kuhn observes, these people are less personally invested in the old paradigm, not having directly experienced 3

S. Fuller and D. Gorman ‘Burning Libraries and the Problem of Historical Consciousness’. Annals of Scholarship 4/3 (1987), pp.105-122. 4 T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd edn. (Orig.. 1962). (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970).

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the benefits it provides in intellectual or professional terms. So they are more likely to take the old paradigm’s long unsolved problems, combined with its relatively rigid authoritarian stance, as prima facie grounds for rejection. At the same, Kuhn realizes that this open-mindedness can equally serve the orthodoxy –not least the incoming one – as the next generation of students are presented an airbrushed ‘Whig’ account of their discipline’s history that obscures the conceptual limitations and foregone alternatives that someone with a longer historical memory would naturally possess.5 However, the various disappointments and disasters of self-identified ‘modernist’ projects over the past 250 years have periodically triggered sceptical reactions to modernity itself. The ‘postmodern condition’ is only the latest of a series of these reactions, which overall have increasingly turned for intellectual sustenance to the ‘wisdom religions’ of the East – Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.6 I shall shortly elaborate on the significance of this development, but first I want to dwell briefly on an additional wisdom-friendly factor of the postmodern condition – namely, its occurrence at a time when people’s life expectancy has never been longer. Never before has there been sheer demographic pressure to promote the care and respect of the elderly. In service of this end, medical research has focused considerable attention on arresting, if not reversing, Alzheimer’s disease. But also there has been a revaluation of what in the past would have been seen as the spontaneous scepticism of the old towards youthful initiatives. The response of ‘We’ve seen that before’ is now re-spun as a ‘fast and reasonably reliable inductive judgement’.7 When the great world-religions were formally classified in the 19th century, the difference between the West and the East was defined in terms of faiths based on prophecy versus wisdom.8 The prophetic religions are the ones descended from the Old Testament – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They feature a single overpowering God in terms of whom humans are privileged by virtue of having been created in his ‘image and likeness’. The prophetic religions are future-oriented. They regard secular life as an 5

S. Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science. (Cambridge: Icon, 2003). 6 J.J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment. (London: Routledge, 1997). 7 E. Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older. (New York: Free Press, 2005). 8 T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

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imperfect material condition that nevertheless provides the means by which a divinely planned order may be achieved. Various theological disciplines, including theodicy (on justice), soteriology (on salvation) and eschatology (on ultimate ends), were created to deal with the various issues raised by the underlying idea of reality as literally a ‘work in progress’. In contrast, the wisdom religions do not accord their signature writings the same sacred status, largely because writing itself is not a privileged activity, since humans do not enjoy any special access to a supreme deity. Insofar as reality is subject to a creative force, it is one that rules humans in much the same sense as the rest of nature. In that case, wisdom comes from disciplining, if not entirely eliminating, any thoughts of overcoming this situation, let alone turning it to our own advantage: Instead of mastering the world, we become one with it. All modern ideologies of progress owe at least a rhetorical debt to the prophetic religions. As I hinted above, a complementary debt is increasingly owed to the wisdom religions for the periodic turns against those ideologies. This became especially clear in the aftermath of the science-backed atrocities of the First World War. From popular works like Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, wisdom emerged from cultures that felt their age (Weltschmerz) – and that it was time for the West to take a page from the East and feel its own age. A culture in its youth might legitimately risk its people and resources on dreams because the stakes are still relatively low. However, there comes a point when the appropriate response to failure is not to try harder but to relent and, as the Freudians say, ‘cope’ – that is, adapt to the most likely conditions and not desire or expect anything more. Wisdom is thus achieved as a kind of lived equilibrium with the environment. A subtle consequence of this value shift from the prophetic to the wisdom religions – also evident in Freud’s work - is that the rejection of a transcendent ‘father-like’ deity came to be taken as a mark of the ‘maturity’ associated with wisdom. One does not become or replace the father, as in Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as our release from ‘nonage’. Rather, we come to realize that the father had never existed, and that the quest had been a waste of time and effort. Over the past two centuries, the respective images of prophecy and wisdom as paradigms of religious knowledge have fluctuated. Originally the distinction was made clearly to the advantage of the prophetic religions, reflecting the tendency of the first wave of critical-historical scholarship of the Bible in the 18th century to group Judaism, Christianity and Islam together as species of ‘monotheism’, the religious precursor of

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the universalistic humanism that characterised Enlightenment thought. In this context, Islam was sometimes even portrayed as a purer form of monotheism than Christianity, given its more consistently spiritualised conception of the supreme deity, Allah. However, by the early 19th century, a literally ‘anti-Semitic’ turn was taken by German philologists who became convinced that an early version of Sanskrit was the root of what came to be known as the ‘Indo-European’ languages. The Hebrew and Arabic of the Jews and Muslims belonged to a different linguistic-cumethnic heritage that potentially contaminated the line of descent that made its way from the Aryan regions of North India to Greece, Rome, Christendom and modern Europe. In this context, Plato’s caste-like approach to politics and metaphysics started to look like the Buddha’s refinements of Hinduism, both conforming to the contemplative mode of being characteristic of the wisdom religions. Correspondingly, Judaism and Islam as standard-bearers of the prophetic religions started to appear barbaric and increasingly unfit for modern civil society. This is the image that Edward Said notoriously dubbed ‘Orientalism’, which subsequently contributed to more recent forms of anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic thought.9 3. Is ‘Maxwellian Wisdom’ Really Wisdom or Simply Finalized Science? In sum, then, the prophetic religions live ever in anticipation, the wisdom religions in adaptation. The former strives to complete a Gestalt, the latter to match a template. If prophetic religions appeal to youthful ambition, wisdom religions speak to the lessons of age. These differences suggest a further interesting difference over how to interpret free will: that we can get what we want versus that we want what we can get – i.e. prophecy versus wisdom. Put this way, Maxwell would seem to be on the side of prophecy over wisdom, at least vis-à-vis a ‘virtual exchange’ of views he had with Daniel Dennett over what it means to increase our sphere of freedom.10 On the one hand, Maxwell places the emphasis on expanding the axiological imagination, taking the success of science itself as indicative of just how much the human condition has improved in spite of Darwinian and larger physical constraints. On the other hand, Dennett stresses the need to live within our epistemic means. Freedom thus comes 9

E. Said, Orientalism. (New York: Random House, 1978). N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., pp. 294-5; D. Dennett, Freedom Evolves. (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 302. 10

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from wanting the achievable and hence avoiding the sort of endless frustration that, say, religious beliefs tend to foster. Of course, what is achievable changes as science changes, but Dennett is clear that science leads values -- not the other way round, as Maxwell seems to maintain. Thus, for Maxwell the main problem with science is that it is not consistently put to humanly beneficial ends, while for Dennett the problem is more simply that science does not have sufficient purchase in the wider culture. Here I am definitely on Maxwell’s side but I am not sure what wisdom has to do with it. The least attractive feature of wisdom, which is typically associated with ageing, is the recognition that one’s sphere of freedom has contracted. In other words, no matter what one does in a given situation, the result will fall within a predictably narrow range of outcomes. Thus, the ‘wise’ person will tend to want something that can be reasonably expected. In youth we might shoot for the moon, but as adults we adapt to circumstances. In this respect, the difference between wisdom and cynicism is simply a matter of tact. Cynics ridicule those who do not yet share their wisdom, whereas the truly wise do not. In this particular comparison, I believe that the cynic’s pre-emptive ridicule is the superior form of moral therapy, though others may wish to uphold the virtues of becoming wise ‘the hard way’. But of course, I do not believe that either position really deserves our approval. Both are beholden to the psychic mechanism of ‘adaptive preference formation’, a phrase Jon Elster originally imported into analytic philosophy from Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory.11 It is better known as ‘sour grapes’, after the moral lesson of one of Aesop’s fables. In the face of likely defeat or refutation (based on previous experience), the wise person simply re-specifies her values to aim at goals that are more achievable, so as to minimize her chances for disappointment. This last point raises an important issue concerning the institutionalisation of Maxwellian ‘wisdom’, which takes the form of academia being turned into a civil service dedicated to researching and applying science to solve the public’s needs.12 He recognizes the precedent in Francis Bacon’s House of Solomon but it later crops up as an ideal in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s youthful proposal for liberalising German society, much of which informed his founding of the modern university. And perhaps the most recent precedent may be found in the German 11

J. Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 12 N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., p. 330

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‘finalisation’ movement of philosophers and sociologists who, under the influence of Jürgen Habermas in the 1970s, held that once a science reached a state of Kuhnian normal science, rather than allowing it to solve ever more technical puzzles, the state should turn the science’s attention to interdisciplinary ventures oriented to solving social problems.13 A common feature of all these precedents, though not so prominent in Maxwell, is the idea that science used wisely is an efficiency measure that saves people the trouble of either having to solve problems themselves or commission customised lines of inquiry. Behind this idea is one that Maxwell does stress – namely, that there is a relatively sharp division of labour between the public (who supplies the ends) and the scientists (who supply the means). However admirable, none of these proposals pay sufficient attention to the prospect that scientific inquiry may generate findings that provide grounds for the public to radically re-orient its aims. (Global climate change is an obvious candidate example.) Under those circumstances, is scientific judgement deemed so wise that it can override public opinion – even after a reasonable period of open discussion?

13

W. Schaefer (ed.) Finalization in Science. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984).

Why is it so Hard to Move from Knowledge to Wisdom? John Stewart 1. Introduction The essential idea in From Knowledge to Wisdom1 is both very simple, and manifestly correct. To formulate it in my own words, it rests on the logical principle that no argument can be more rational than the premise on which it is based; and no course of action more rational than the aims it seeks to achieve. My favourite example is provided by Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick. If ever one were to admit Ahab’s premise – that the thing to do was to find out the White Whale, and to engage with it in a showdown lifeor-death struggle – then all his subsidiary actions towards this end were impeccably rational. But this subsidiary rationality was to no avail in the end – indeed it only aggravated the final disaster – because the premise itself was just… stark raving mad. It is therefore an elementary requisite for rationality to give overriding priority to correctly identifying the aims to be achieved and the problems to be solved; and then, since in the end it is action that counts, to propose and critically assess possible personal and social actions as solutions to these problems. In order to count as properly rational, efforts devoted to problems of knowledge must be rigorously connected and subordinated to problems of action. This is the route that Maxwell calls the “Philosophy of Wisdom”. Now at the present time, scientific research and academic inquiry generally are dominated by what Maxwell calls the “Philosophy of Knowledge”: the thesis that the principal aim of rational inquiry is to acquire objective knowledge; and that it is only by dissociating itself decisively from the goals, values and beliefs of common social life, so that claims to “objective” knowledge can be subjected to scrupulously rational assessment, that inquiry can accumulate genuine knowledge. The rub is that this “Philosophy of Knowledge” violates the elementary requisites for rationality that we have just spelled out. Far from giving intellectual 1

N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984). Second edition, enlarged and revised (London, Pentire Press, 2007).

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priority to the tasks of articulating problems of living, then proposing and criticizing possible solutions – problems of knowledge and technology being treated as rationally related subordinate, secondary problems – it is all the other way round: problems of knowledge and technology are tackled in a way that is intellectually dissociated from problems of living, the latter, indeed, being excluded from the intellectual domain of inquiry altogether. Thus, the Philosophy of Knowledge, in spite of appearances and in spite of its own self-image, is actually profoundly irrational: it is a defective pretender masquerading as reason. The fact that a great deal of rationality is deployed in implementing its aim is to no avail, because the aim itself is mistaken; just as for Captain Ahab, this subsidiary rationality only aggravates the final disaster. The problem is not that the Philosophy of Knowledge lays too great an emphasis on reason, as Romantic critics have tended to maintain; quite the contrary, it is a lack of reason that is the problem. It has become something of a truism to note that whereas scientific knowledge, and science-based technologies, have made tremendous progress over the four centuries since their inception at the Renaissance, there has been nothing like the same progress in the human condition. Certainly, there have been many local improvements (such as the effectiveness of modern medicine); but these are counterbalanced, and increasingly more than counterbalanced, by a whole range of new evils that are actually generated by science-based technologies – either deliberately, as in the case of ever-more destructive weapons of warfare, or via unintended side-effects such as population explosion and damage to the eco-system. Maxwell’s point is that this is not simply an unfortunate accident or fatality; on the contrary, it is an only too predictable consequence of misguidedly adopting the Philosophy of Knowledge instead of the Philosophy of Wisdom. The conclusion is simple and obvious, and gives Maxwell’s book its title: it would be far better for all of us if we could move collectively from Knowledge to Wisdom. In this article, I shall not elaborate further on the detailed arguments in favour of this proposal. Not only has Maxwell himself done this eloquently and at length; but I deliberately wish to state the main argument concisely, because in truth the issue is a very simple one and prolonged discussion is merely a source of confusion. I shall therefore take it as read that Maxwell’s fundamental argument is both correct, and manifestly so; and go on to ask why, if this is indeed the case, it is so hard to actually implement the conclusion and to move effectively from Knowledge to

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Wisdom. Naïvely, one might have imagined that since the whole business of academia is to deal with ideas and intellectual inquiry, the reaction of the community would be to say: “Oh yes, of course…. How silly of us not to have thought of that before. Let’s do it.” Even taking into account the fact that Maxwell’s proposal would upset the whole structure of vested interests in current academia, as he himself recognizes clearly, one might somewhat less naïvely have imagined that the proposal would be perceived as a subversive threat, and subjected to violent attack. But none of this has happened. As documented in the second edition 20 years later2, the proposal has attracted a modest amount of attention in academic circles; over a dozen reviews are cited. Of these, a certain number seriously misrepresented the proposal itself, so that their criticisms (often harsh) were actually beside the point; one cannot say that Maxwell’s proposal has been rationally refuted. However, what is maybe of more significance is that although a fair proportion of the reviews were actually favourable in tone, often extremely so, none of these authors has actually gone so far as to put “wisdom enquiry” into practice themselves. The upshot is that to all practical extents and purposes, Maxwell’s proposal has just been ignored. Granted that the proposal is eminently rational, and has not been refuted, the question I wish to address in this article is: why is it so hard to move from knowledge to wisdom? 2. Why not? – The Social Dimension I have stated the basic argument as simply and concisely as possible, because a first level of answer then becomes immediately apparent. If we human beings were fully and properly rational, we would move from knowledge to wisdom. Since, manifestly, are not moving from knowledge to wisdom, it follows – inescapably, as far as I can see – that we are not fully and properly rational. The question then becomes, of course: why are we not rational, whereas by construction it would be in our best interests to be so? Before attempting to answer this question, I want to make it crystal clear that I am asking the question first and foremost about myself. Far from adopting a superciliously superior attitude and criticizing the defective rationality of human beings from the outside, I want to try and answer the question “from the inside”, using the fact that I myself am not fully rational as a resource. After all, I myself have taken cognizance of 2

Ibid..

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Maxwell’s proposal; intellectually I agree with the central argument, and I have no decisive objections; and yet… I have not seriously moved on to put “wisdom enquiry” into practice myself. Why not? The answer that comes to mind is that “wisdom enquiry” is not something that either I or anyone else can do on their own. Quite pragmatically, the whole process of rational discussion only functions effectively in a group. Maxwell quotes approvingly from Popper: “… the method of all rational discussion … is that of stating one’s problem clearly and of examining its various proposed solutions critically”3. But this presupposes the existence of a group with a shared culture of functioning in this way, and prepared to “play the game” of identifying the problem and proposing various solutions with a view to examining them critically. In other words, there is a social dimension to the question; and this is at the heart of what makes it difficult. Quite generally, it is indeed a part of the human condition that our whole existence depends on a social world which was there before we were born, and which is constitutive of the very possibility of thinking and acting at all. I am not propounding a doctrine of social determinism, nor denying any individual freedom; but this freedom is not absolute, we cannot do anything just by snapping our fingers; and precisely in order to exercise the degree of freedom that we do have, it is important to be realistic and to lucidly recognize its limits. By the very same process that society makes certain thoughts and actions possible – by furnishing a language, and an intellectual culture – it also inevitably constrains them. At the end of this article, I will come back to the specific question of the perspectives for implementing wisdom enquiry. But before that, I want to enter into the structure of human society, so as to get a feel for the particular sort of difficulty that the social dimension poses for human action. In this short article I cannot do anything like justice to such a general theme; but if only by way of metonymy, I wish to mention two major features of human society as we know it: voluntary servitude, and capitalism. 3. Tyranny and Voluntary Servitude I will start by presenting a central problem in political philosophy, as relevant and painfully acute today as when it was first posed by Etienne de la Boétie in 15534. Generally, it is reasonable to presume that if given a 3 4

Ibid., p. 60. E. de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.

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free choice, people will choose to be free rather than to be slaves: “There can be no doubt that they would much prefer to be guided by reason itself than to be ordered about by the whims of a single man.” But the fact is that tyrannies abound, today as in the 16th century, and that authoritarian states with great social inequality are virtually ubiquitous. Why is this? In his famous Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, written when he was a young man, la Boétie starts by emphasizing the remarkable fact that a tyrant only has power to the extent that the victims consent to their own oppression. After all, the tyrant only has two eyes, two arms, two legs, just like his subjects. “How does he have any power over you except through you?” It follows that in order to overthrow the tyrant the masses would not need to shed their blood, nor even to act positively; they could do so “merely by willing to be free”, by simply withdrawing their consent. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. Put in this way, the conclusion is unavoidable: the masses cannot truly desire freedom from tyranny, for the simple reason that if they desired it they would have it. But this only deepens the initial problem: if servitude can only exist to the extent that it is voluntary, why on earth do the masses submit to their own enslavement? La Boétie himself provides essentially two answers to this conundrum, which are (unfortunately!) as relevant today as when he wrote them. The first answer lies in the fact that the tyrant is not, in fact, a single isolated human being: he is surrounded by successive hierarchical circles. La Boétie himself considers this factor “the mainspring and the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny.” He writes: It is not the troops…, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. There are only five or six who maintain the dictator, who keep the country in bondage to him… The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with Written 1552-53. Translated by Harry Kurz for the edition with Rothbard’s introduction (New York, Free Life Editions, 1975). See also http://mises.org/rothbard/boetie.asp#_ftn4, (Consulted May 29 2008).

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John Stewart their tyrant. The six hundred maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment except through their influence…. The consequence of all this is fatal indeed. And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.

Thus, the hierarchy of privilege descends from the large gainers from despotism, to the middling and small gainers, and finally down to the mass of the people who falsely think they gain more than they lose from the receipt of petty favors. In this way the subjects are divided, and a great portion of them are induced to cleave to the ruler, “just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of the wood itself.” Of course, the train of the tyrant’s retinue and soldiers suffer at their leader’s hands, but they “can be led to endure evil if permitted to commit it, not against him who exploits them, but against those who like themselves submit, but are helpless.” The second part of la Boétie’s answer to his own conundrum is less original, but obviously important: is a combination of the “Bread and Circuses” which goes back at least to the Roman dictators, with the sway of custom. The bread: Roman tyrants ... provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble.... Tyrants would distribute largesse, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, “Long live the King!” The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property… The mob has always behaved in this way – eagerly open to bribes… The circuses: Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these

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practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books. On this aspect, I would like to add a personal comment on the phenomenon that I call “drug addiction”, in a generic sense that includes narcotics, alcohol and tobacco but goes way beyond them to cover all activities that are unhealthily addictive. Examples in my own experience that I have to admit to are being hooked on television, and computer games. The psychological mechanism seems to me this: such activities have an immediate appeal, they are pleasant and/or amusing, but they are above all diverting (in Pascal’s sense of “divertissement”); they distract attention from other worries. This leads to a vicious circle: having wasted already too much time on the drug, the resulting malaise, the disquiet, further fuels the attraction of a distraction until it becomes a compulsion; at that point, one is locked into the addiction. And finally, the sway of custom: la Boétie notes that although “it is truly the nature of man to be free and to wish to be so,” nevertheless a person’s character “instinctively follows the tendencies that his training gives him”. He concludes that “custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude.” It becomes a part of common sense, of common knowledge, to accept that we have always been in well-behaved subjection, as have our parents and generations before us. And the idea that it has always been that way leads us in the end to invest those who are hierarchically superior to us with proprietary rights. The “sway of custom” is a recurrent theme whenever we seek to approach the social dimension, because social norms and social structures are not invented “on the fly” by individuals; when each of us is born into the world as a newborn infant we find these social structures already there, and we grow into them. This can have a negative aspect, as with the custom of “voluntary servitude” criticized by la Boétie; but it can also have a positive aspect. In order to redress the balance, I will next present a human culture which had the “social intelligence” to guard against the establishment of a tyrannical hierarchy. The French anthropologist Pierre Clastres lived for ten years with the Guayaki Indians in Paraguay. As interpreted by Clastres5, this society had a deliberate intent to avert actively 5

P. Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in political anthropology. Translated by

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the rise of despotic power. Wisely, they recognized that it is not enough simply to refuse that anyone behave as a “chief”; because a mere power vacuum would inevitably kindle ambitions to fill the vacant spot. So, the wise social arrangement is that there is a chief; but the tradition is that noone takes him seriously or listens to what he says! Nevertheless, it does remain an honour to be chosen as chief, a position for which real positive qualities, in particular a gift for story-telling, are required; and this apparently thankless role does have its rewards, among them the fact of being favourably viewed by women. Overall, Clastres concludes that these societies are not “too primitive” to have developed a state: on the contrary, they are actually wiser and more sophisticated than we are, because they have rejected the state and the concomitant dichotomy between oppressed and oppressor, as well as the coercion of political power. The more general point I want to make in citing this example is that culture and tradition are a fundamental part of our human condition; for better or worse they can take many forms, but by their very nature they cannot easily be changed; and when they do evolve over historical time, it is rarely as a result of conscious deliberate choice. 4. Capitalism I come now to what is, in my opinion, the major structural obstacle to moving from knowledge to wisdom: the fact that our social relations are massively organized by what is euphemistically called a “free-market economy”, but what would more properly be called “capitalism”. Every human society where there is any significant degree of division of labour requires what Sohn-Rethel6 has called a mechanism of “social synthesis”: a way of deciding who is to do what, of ensuring that the whole panoply of differentiated activities forms a coherent whole, and of distributing the proceeds of the work that is done. Anthropology and history inform us that there are a vast number of “traditional” ways of providing a social synthesis. The massively dominant (but not absolutely exclusive) mechanism in contemporary societies is the “market economy” based on monetary exchanges and the theoretical principle of an equilibrium between supply and demand ensured by variation in the price of goods or services. The very gradual growth in the importance of money, and its Robert Hurley in collaboration with Abe Stein. (New York, Zone Books, 1987). 6 A.R.Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and manual labour: a Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands NJ, Humanities Press, 1977).

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increasing abstraction, is a fascinating history7, but one which I cannot even summarize here. The point I want to focus on, because it is at the heart of our current predicament, is the emergence of a specifically capitalistic economy; my main reference here is Max Weber8. Weber sees the origin of capitalism in the doctrine of Calvinism, a Protestant sect that flourished and had an immense influence throughout the 17th century. A key feature of Calvinism was a belief in predestination: each human being was already determined at birth to be either “saved” or “damned”. Thus – contrary to other currents in Christianity – there was no question of being saved by “works”, i.e. by what you did or did not do during your life. At the same time, it was immensely important for each adherent to Calvinism to believe that he or she was one of the small minority chosen by God to be saved. This creates an immense and searing question for the would-be believer: how can I know for sure that I am indeed one of the chosen few? Faith is not necessarily totally blind; a possible glimmer of hope stems from the fact that God rewards his own, not only in the after-life but already here on earth. In other words, if one prospers in worldly affairs, this can be taken as a sign that one is indeed one of the chosen. If one does not espouse this doctrine, it is not at all difficult to comment ironically on its logical bizarreness and inconsistency. But that is irrelevant here; the point is the overwhelmingly powerful psychological motivation that derives from such a belief. If one were saved by one’s works, the motivation might well be strong – but it would not be an absolute obsession of every moment. Reasonably, one might expect that the rewards would be in some sort of proportion to the good works – so that an occasional lapse would only be mildly punished. But for the Calvinist believer, it is not at all the same: firstly, being saved or not is an all-or-nothing affair from the start; and the least lapse from maximal prosperity could only too easily be the fatal, ominous sign that one was not saved after all. Weber thus invites us to enter into the mind-set that characterizes the thorough-going capitalist: totally ruthless in the pursuit of maximal profit; and not spending any of the capital thus amassed, enjoyment being completely beside the point (in a Puritan perspective it is actually harmful), but re-investing it so as to maximize the exponential 7

G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (German original 1900; London, Routledge, 1990). 8 M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (German original 1905; English translation, Talcott Parsons & Anthony Giddens, London & New York, Unwin Hyman, 1930).

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growth of the capital. The “true” capitalist in this sense is thus bizarrely disinterested in anything but… the growth of capital. Weber insists strongly on this point. As he says, human beings have always been greedy for wealth and power; but “normally”, it is in order to enjoy the fruits of their gains. What is weird about the capitalist, and indeed actually despicable from the normal “healthy greed” point of view, is that capitalists do not even enjoy their wealth. And it is indeed significant that the peculiar sort of ruthlessness of which capitalists are capable only exists because they are not motivated by the enjoyment of their gains; if they were, in a straightforwardly human manifestation of greed, they could not humanly be quite so pitiless in the extremity of their exploitation of other humans, and of natural resources. Now the real drama and tragedy of capitalism is that once this extreme form of utterly ruthless accumulation of capital has actually come into existence, it becomes the inevitable standard by a purely intrinsic mechanism. In a competitive economy, all those economic actors who do not conform to the utmost capitalist standards thereby disappear. There is an intrinsic logic to this, uncannily akin to the most brutal interpretations of Darwinian natural selection. And so it comes about that once the literally infernal logic of capitalism has come into existence, it no longer requires the bizarre psychology of Calvinism to continue on its way: it becomes an autonomous law unto itself. Weber evokes with eloquence the leisured, almost benign regime of the old merchants in the Lancashire cotton industry, who sub-contracted the actual production to cottage industries. When the brash young newcomers arrived, pushing their capitalist profit-margins to the utmost, the old style was swept away. If the bizarre historical accident of Calvinism had never happened, it could well be that capitalism would never have occurred; but once it did, it became unstoppable, spreading like a deadly epidemic with no possible antidote. In terms of dynamic systems theory, it is a strong “attractor”. Let me insist that this logic is totally impersonal. Even the managing director of a multinational corporation or the chairman of the stockholders are not free; if they were to behave in a way that does not maximize the profits and stockmarket rating of the company, they would very quickly be fired and replaced. In order to understand our present predicament properly, it would be necessary to follow the history of capitalism through its various stages. I want to insist that this is not just “knowledge enquiry”; these are issues that we do need to understand if we are to have any chance at all of escaping

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from the systemic logic within which we are trapped. As Marx himself famously said, the point is not just to interpret the world, as armchair philosophers tend to do; the point is, indeed, to change it9. In this short article I will comment briefly on two aspects of capitalism, as it unfolds historically, that seem to me of particular relevance to our present situation. The first of these is rooted in a phenomenon that Marx called the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”. It is indeed an ironical consequence of free-market economics, where the rule of generalized cut-throat competition is rigorously applied, that the rate of profit in any wellestablished line of business tends to fall to zero. The reason is that if you try to maintain a substantial rate of profit, there will come along a competitor who will undercut your prices (and thus compete you out of the market) by functioning with a reduced rate of profit. Thus, an over-riding concern for capitalists is to manage to maintain their rate of profit. Of course, the easiest way to do this is to set up a monopoly, and to exclude competitors by violent and more or less mafia-like means. Ironically, this may actually be a lesser evil in the long run (note that it would also be one way of escaping from the purely capitalist logic per se). But for better or worse, such practices have generally been made illegal. Thus, the only structural way that capitalism can maintain significant profit-margins is by… technological innovation. During the time that it takes for competitors to “catch on” and to imitate (a period that can be prolonged, although not indefinitely, by patents), a substantial profit margin can indeed be achieved. This explains why “innovation” has become such a master-word in the current world. It is not at all that we really need all these innovations in terms of genuine use-value; they are not driven because they are solutions to real problems as these might be identified by genuine wisdom-enquiry. It is innovation for the sake of innovation that is required by capitalist logic. Need I spell out here that this is one of the areas (there are, I think, others) where there is a structural alliance between science, seen here as a source of technological innovation, and capitalism? The problem is that this sort of innovation – mindless with respect to real needs, but stemming from innovation for the sake of capitalist business cycles – generates severe social ills, which were diagnosed with 9

K. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (written 1845, first published 1888. English translation in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 13-15; Moscow, USSR, Progress Publishers, 1969).

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remarkable lucidity by the economist Schumpeter10. He interpreted the “long cycles” in capitalist development as being intimately related to qualitative cycles of technological innovation: he analyses in detail technological breakthroughs in the fields of cotton textiles, railroads, steel, automobiles and electricity – today he would certainly add the new computer and communication technologies. Schumpeter recognized, lucidly again, that the social cost of these repeated technological innovations was terrible indeed; he called the process “creative destruction”. Major innovations wreak havoc on existing social arrangements; whole regional populations were thrown into unemployment, and uprooted from their traditions; so that “the history of capitalism is studded with violent bursts and catastrophes.” It is fascinating to note that Schumpeter himself, who was ideologically a convinced capitalist, was actually pessimistic (in his terms!); he thought that in the long term, “the people” would never stand for such systematic disruption of their whole social fabric, and for this reason would refuse capitalism (as he imagined it, in favour of a bureacratic and lamentably non-adventurous form of welfare state). The irony, of course, is that Schumpeter’s “pessimism” seems to be unjustified; for the moment, anyway, the fundamental capitalist logic seems to be winning out. The second aspect of capitalism that I wish to comment on is related to the major ecological crisis that is now staring us in the face. In a prescient book commissioned by the Club of Rome and published in 1972, the Meadows put forward the basic argument11. The ecosystem of the planet Earth – sources for input to the technological system, and sinks for the outputs which are potential pollutants – is essentially finite. It follows implacably that the sum total of human activity cannot increase indefinitely: there are “limits to growth”. In a second book12, published 20 years later, they refine and strengthen the argument. The usual response to worries about ecological limits is to consider that “technological progress”, by increasing the efficiency with which resources are used and by decreasing pollution, will take care of the problem. The Meadows reply 10

J. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1934); Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (originally published 1942; New York, Harper, 1975;). 11 D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows, J. Randers, & W. W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth (New York, Universe Books 1972). 12 D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows & J. Randers, Beyond the Limits (London, Earthscan Publications, 1992).

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that this is fallacious: technological progress will only ever provide an “algebraic” improvement in the ratio of human activity to sources/sinks, multiplying efficiency by a finite factor; whereas “growth” in general, and capital growth in particular, is intrinsically exponential. Mathematically, in the long run, exponential growth will always end up overcoming merely algebraic improvement. To this, the Meadows add a dire warning as to what will happen if we go “beyond the limits”. If we humans, collectively, wait for absolutely unbearable ecological damage to actually occur before changing our ways, it will be too late to do anything because the global ecosystem will by then be already damaged beyond all possible repair. They take as an analogy the a car which is careering out of control: if one waits for the discomfort of being off the road (bumps and so on) to actually occur before doing anything about changing the course of the car, one is already on a trajectory that can no longer be changed. If we look at the situation rationally, the conclusion seems to me inescapable: if our species is to have any long-term future (to avoid argument, let us say 10,000 years from now), it will be absolutely necessary, sooner or later (if it is not already too late?!), to change our mechanism of social synthesis. We cannot afford a mechanism – capitalism – which has built into it a systematic necessity for exponential growth. Need I spell out that this will be manifestly very hard to do? The example of the problem of global warming is not encouraging. It seems that the best we can hope for would be something like the European Union’s proposal to cut the emission of greenhouse gases by 50% in 2050. Even this is rather puny and insufficient to meet the problem – the greenhouse gases are already there, and the dynamics of the planetary ecosystem is such that even if all emissions were stopped tomorrow (completely utopian, of course), considerable damage is already irreversible (an example of the Meadows crash-course trajectory). And of course, capitalist logic is such that if the EU is the only major economic block to make even this limited effort, the result will merely be that the USA and China will come to dominate world economics even more than they do at present. Looked at dispassionately (and/or passionately!), I can only be pessimistic: I consider that there is an overwhelming probability that severe global warming will occur, over the coming century. The only hope – a rather slim one, I must admit – is that this will serve as a lesson.

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5. Conclusion and Perspectives So: what is to be done? My argument has been that a major reason why it is so hard to move from knowledge to wisdom, is that doing so will require major changes in our whole social system. I am not arguing for total social determinism; I am not saying that nothing can be done. Quite the contrary; but I do think that lucid recognition of the magnitude of what we are up against is necessary, so as to find a “middle way” between grandiose enthusiasm and despair. Paradoxically, these two apparently opposite extremes actually end up reinforcing each other; when overoptimistic ambition meets with failure, as it is predictably bound to do, it feeds into depression and despair. So: what might be done about the disorders in our current social relations that make it so hard to move from knowledge to wisdom? If I have evoked some elements of social theory – notably La Boétie and Weber – this is not (I hope) because I am still entrapped in “knowledge enquiry”; it is because I consider that we would be well advised to take them into account if we wish to seriously engage in “wisdom enquiry”. Let me then take up the analysis centred on the problem of voluntary servitude. La Boétie himself, after having explained the systemic mechanisms whereby tyranny sets in, does not give up hope; on the contrary, he remarks that nevertheless “there are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off.” These are the people who, in contrast to “the brutish mass,” possess clear and far-sighted minds, and “have further trained them by study and learning.” Such people never quite disappear from the world: “Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it.” There is, however, a problem: those who “have preserved their love of freedom, still remain ineffective because, however numerous they may be, they are not known to one another; under the tyrant they have lost freedom of action, of speech, and almost of thought; they are alone in their aspiration.” This diagnosis, as fresh and relevant today as when it was written, contains the germ of a potential remedy: we need to find the means not to remain “alone in our aspiration”. In this respect, my own view is that we have a vital need for what the French philosopher Simondon called “proximity groups”13, to serve as a key intermediate level of social organisation between isolated individuals (who can do little or nothing) and the macro-level of society as a whole 13

G. Simondon, L'individuation psychique et collective. (Paris, Aubier, 1989).

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(which no-one can act on directly). As an order of magnitude, the size of such groups typically lies between 10 and 1000: large enough so that the members are rescued from their isolation; but small enough so that all the members of the group are known to each other personally. It is under these conditions that “psychic and collective individuation” can occur. Each individual who belongs and contributes to such a group thereby becomes “somebody”, with a personal identity related to her or his role in the group; conversely, the group itself only exists because of the time and energy that its members invest in it. This relation of circular dependence between the group and its members is an example of what Simondon calls “transduction”. I consider that proximity groups are both vitally important, and extraordinarily difficult to run successfully. I will address these points in order. They are vitally important, because they create a space which makes it possible for their members to escape from blind alienation and to become socially responsible. Each member is a genuine actor in what happens at the level of the proximity group as a whole. To put this in broader context, proximity groups are the key mechanism for providing a social synthesis in all traditional societies which do not rely on the mechanism of the market economy and the “invisible hand”. Historically, they have been progressively emasculated by the development of the “market economy” and capitalism which systematically reduces human beings to isolated individuals whose social relations are constituted anonymously by the market economy. They are a part of what is lost when Schumpeterian “creative destruction” tears apart the whole social fabric. If we are to have any chance of ever escaping from the stranglehold of the capitalist system, we need to invest in re-inventing and re-creating proximity groups, so as to have a positive alternative to put in its place14. This brings me to the second point: the extreme difficulty of the entreprise. I said above that proximity groups create a space in which 14

This would obviously be the subject for a whole book, at least. Here, I will just mention two examples by way of metonymy. During the very first years following the Russian revolution of 1917, there was an extraordinary flowering of “proximity groups” of many kinds. They were crushed by the advent of Stalinist totalitarianism; a historical disaster from which socialism has never recovered. The second example comes from the collapse of the Argentinian economy 1999-2002, when “proximity groups” sprang up spontaneously as a matter of day-to-day survival. Workers invested the factories abandoned by their owners, started up production on a co-operative basis, and enabled the local community to function on the basis of purely local exchanges in kind.

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social responsibility is possible; the reverse sign of the coin is that a developed sense of social responsibility on the part of the members is also an absolute necessity if a proximity group is to survive and flourish. If a proximity group flounders and fails, this is the fault of no-one other than the members themselves; but as all those who have ever participated in such a group know only too well, this is anything but easy. It is a part of our current historical predicament that we ourselves do not have anything like an adequate culture of making proximity groups work. As I write these lines, we are almost exactly 40 years on from May 1968. During the 1960s and ‘70s there was a flood tide for the creation of “proximity groups” – which have now practically all disappeared, submerged by the neo-liberal counter-revolution. So, to mix the tidal metaphor, I am a member of a generation that “missed the boat”. The only interesting diagnosis, it seems to me, is one of self-criticism: we manifestly did not have sufficient knowhow on making proximity groups survive and last. I say this not in a spirit of masochistic despair, but in the hope that we can knuckle down to the task again and maybe do better in the future. At the present time, there is a clear opportunity in the development of the “Web 2.0” where Internet users themselves become the authors. However, this is anything but a panacea, a “technological fix” for our ills; if this tool is not used wisely by structured, responsible proximity groups it could well just precipitate disaster15. Finally, I want to come back to the specific question of the perspectives – the possibilities and the difficulties – of implementing wisdom enquiry. I have already remarked that rational discussion of any sort has as a prerequisite a shared culture of rational discussion. Rationality is anything but ubiquitous; but it is not uncommon in a subsidiary, local role – in the service of aims that are not themselves examined. I mentioned the prototypical example of Captain Ahab; another example would be stockmarket traders who are doubtless “rational” in implementing their socially irresponsible function of maximizing short-term profits by engaging in financial speculation; and academics who implement a “Philosophy of Knowledge” are doubtless rational enough in what should be the subsidiary aim of accumulating scientific knowledge. The peculiar difficulty of “wisdom enquiry” is that it entails applying rationality to the very identification of the overall aims and problems; and for this, we do 15

For a biting but ominously prescient critique, see Andrew Keen: The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/714fjczq.asp, (Consulted 29 May 2008).

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not have an established culture. But we have to start somewhere; and the idea that comes to my mind as I write this is that maybe we should “just do it”. In other words, start by putting down on paper what are the principal aims, and problems, as each of us sees them16. Now as the “Friends of Wisdom”17 group illustrates very close to home, this is only a preliminary first step, because inevitably enough the initial result is rather chaotic, and doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere in particular. But at least there is a diversity; and this is important, because diversity is the “raw material” for rational discussion. (If there is no initial disagreement, there is simply no room for discussion to do any work!) The real challenge, of course, is to organize productive discussion around this diversity; and this is what is difficult, particularly since we do not have a sufficiently mature culture of “proximity groups” to know how best to go about it. But as I see it, we are here very precisely at the heart of why it is hard to move from knowledge to wisdom…but maybe in a form that we might be able to do something about. 6. Epilogue In a remarkable work of political science-fiction, Pierre Thuillier18 imagines that 7 years from now there will be a “Great Implosion”, a total collapse of all our current social institutions. On this basis, the book is purportedly written by a group of historians in the year 2081. Their purpose is not to review once again the short-term and long-term causes of the Implosion; “this has already been done many times”. No, the focus of their study-group is somewhat different: how was it possible that Western “civilisation” of the year 2008, so intelligent and scientifically informed in many ways, just did not see what was coming?19 My hope in writing this article is that it may contribute, however modestly, to wake us up in time to avoid disaster. 16

Need I say that in fact, this whole article is neither more nor less than my own current attempt to do just that? The identification, through rational discussion, of what the crucial problems are is a logical pre-requisite to brainstorming and critically evaluating possible solutions. 17 http://www.knowledgetowisdom.org/ (Consulted May 29 2008). 18 P. Thuillier, La Grande Implosion. (Paris, Fayard, 1995). Thuillier gives the date of 2002 for the « Implosion » ; I have redated this to avoid destroying his effect by anachronism. 19 I will not even try to spell out Thuillier’s own answer to this question; in a word, for those who do not read French, it is that our “civilisation” has already been in decline for a long time, and that we have lost our sense of “poetry”, of meaning to life.

The Urgent Need for an Intellectual Revolution: Maxwell's Version Joseph Agassi 1. Introduction This paper honors Nicholas Maxwell. His major contribution to philosophy is his peculiar claim and peculiar campaign. His claim is this: academic inquiry is devoted these days, in the first instance, to the pursuit of knowledge; this is damagingly irrational, there being an urgent need – for both intellectual and humanitarian reasons – to put what he calls "wisdominquiry" into academic practice, wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. His campaign is his indefatigable urging of the commonwealth of learning to opt more for wisdom. Now as the wise love knowledge, their wisdom embraces knowledge (including information, understanding, and technological expertise). But, as Maxwell stresses, wisdom includes much else besides: it includes the capacity to realize what is of value in life (for oneself and for others).1 Still, some serious difficulty may lurk here: Maxwell’s ideas look so sane, it seems he is bursting into an open door; it seems no one would disagree with him.2 It a matter of principle that apparently no one would 1 Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 66; 2nd ed. (London: Pentire Press, 2007), p. 79: "Wisdom includes knowledge and understanding but goes beyond them in also including: the desire and also striving for what is of value …, the ability to experience value, the capacity to help realize what is of value …, the capacity to help solve those problems of living that arise in connection with attempts to realize what is of value, the capacity to use and develop knowledge, technology and understanding as needed for the realization of value." 2 The displeasure with the cooperation between science and the military began with the refusal of Robert J. Oppenheimer to cooperate with Edward Teller regarding the production of the hydrogen bomb, that led to his investigation. It never ceased. See Kelly Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Surprisingly, Noam Chomsky shared the recommendation to continue the operations

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seriously oppose: Since the wise endorse science and since advocates of science do wish science to embrace wisdom, science and wisdom seem to coincide,3 and then the Maxwell’s contribution here seems redundant. Let me then sketch briefly the background to Maxwell’s proposal to choose research agendas wisely and the fact that agendas are distinctly matters of wisdom that goes beyond knowledge (scientific or any other). For, the very choice of items for research, the very scientific research agenda, is a matter of wisdom rather than of science, much in Maxwell’s sense. 2. The Advocacy of Knowledge without Wisdom The ideology of the scientific revolution, of the Enlightenment Movement of the Age of Reason that followed it, is still very influential, and modern science still largely rests on it. It is the view that science will bring salvation to humanity at large. The sages of the Age of Reason knew that the growth of science has negative consequences, but they were profoundly convinced that science will rectify these, and that therefore the sum total of the negative impact of science will diminish to the barest minimum. The expectations from the growth of science were thus utopian and rested on the promise that the wells of science will never dry and that every well-formed question will eventually find its answer.4 This hope was not under question. On the contrary, what puzzled the sages of the Age of Reason was not the steady growth of science but its absence during most of of the research lab run in cooperation of MIT and the Air Force; he explained his decision by the observation that closing down that facility will cause unemployment. This excuse is applicable to all such cases, of course, including that of the production of the hydrogen bomb. 3 The idea that knowledge and wisdom coincide seems to me to be the basic thesis of all positivists from Auguste Comte to the Vienna Circle and beyond, with the possible exception of Ludwig Wittgenstein (whose views are too obscure for me to judge on this and many other matters). It is obviously the tacit assumption behind all technocracy. See my Technology: Philosophical and Social Aspects (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1985), Chapters 3 and 10. 4 The optimism of the Age of Reason survived the Romantic Reaction. The socialist movement expressed it in many ways, often relying on the philosophical authority of Marx and Engels. The last bold expression of it was that if Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the Vienna Circle. They distinguished between scientific and unscientific questions and declared the unanswerable ones both unscientific and meaningless. They had no theory of meaning and no theory of questions. Their philosophy was more shallow than one can imagine, yet their optimism and hostility to religion made them practically invulnerable.

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human history and in most places on earth. Already in the ninth century, al-Farabi asked why the ancient Greeks had the privilege of possessing a unique culture that gave rise to the grand philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the year 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan asked the same question regarding Western civilization.5 The answer to this puzzlement was the one given by the great Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the Enlightenment Movement: prejudices and superstitions cloud our vision, and only when we are ready to give them up to the full will scientific discovery begin to flow “by knots and clusters.”6 This determined the agenda of every member of the movement: invest every spare minute in research, as then the rest will take care of itself. This is the thesis that Nicholas Maxwell opposes. Truth to tell, the opposition began during the Romantic Reaction to the Enlightenment Movement, as a result of the failure of the French Revolution that Bacon’s radicalism had inspired. The spokespeople of the Romantic Movement did not dare oppose science, so they declared that its domain of validity is quite limited. Top German researchers like Hermann von Helmholtz7 and Max Planck8 followed this precept. Yet they were more disposed to find excuses for their preference to invest in studies than in political activities, and conservative attitudes are the most suitable for that. One of the best reasons for viewing political theory, as did Saint-Simon9 and Karl Marx,10 is that it seemingly resolves the conflict about agenda. The conflict remains. Its best epitome is the resolution of Arne Naess to devote the rest of his life to deep 5 See Lewis Henry Morgan, Houses and Home-life of the American Aboriginal, 1881, http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/etext05/habor10.htm. The first chapter is a condensation of the four chapters of his Ancient Society, 1877. His having impressed Friedrich Engels rests on his view that technological innovation is the root of social innovation. 6 Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in his Works and Letters and Life (London: Longman, 1857- 1874), Vol. III, p. 246; http://www.fullbooks.com/Valerius-Terminusof-the-Interpretation-of1.html, Ch. 17. 7 David Cahan, “The ‘Imperial Chancellor of the Sciences’: Helmholtz Between Science and politics”, Social Research, 73 (2006), pp. 1093 – 1128. 8 See my “Die gegenwärtige Rolle des Technik und Wissenschaftshistoriker”, ProtoSociology, 8/9 (1996), Rationality II&III, pp. 385-401. 9 Henri Saint-Simon, Selected Writings on Science, Industry, and Social Organization, (London: Croom Helm, 1975). 10 Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Erster Band. Buch I: Der Produktionsprocess des Kapitals. Zweite verbesserte Auflage (Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1872). Afterword to the Second German Edition.

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ecology. Naess argued most cogently that the survival of the human race is the major item on any philosopher’s agenda and so it should occupy most of their attention.11 3. For Wisdom to Take Over The position that Naess advocated and practiced is extreme, and it comes as a response to the traditional position that is likewise extreme. Most of the views on the place of science in society that found public expressions since World War II are in the middle. They claim that knowledge is morally neutral. What is troublesome about this claim is not that it is false, not even that it is patently false, but that it appears as self-evident in utter disregard, and thus in disrespect (hopefully unintended) for the traditional view that dominated the commonwealth of learning between the scientific revolution and World War II. Changes of opinion have to be open and not surreptitious. The demand to avoid surreptitious change should be obvious. It has received proper attention first in the writings of Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. Their works have greatly altered the agenda of philosophical research. Russell’s influence was diverse and profound; let me mention one major item: he declared the search for a comprehensive metaphysical system futile. Popper’s influence was diverse too, and perhaps the most conspicuous one was the elimination from the agenda of philosophy of the mock-proofs of the impossibility of making philosophical statements proper. (This is what Gilbert Ryle, the once very influential editor of Mind, called doing philosophy. He said there is too much talking philosophy and too little doing philosophy.12) The agenda of analytic philosophy is radically different today from what it was fifty years ago. Popper had much less success in the matter of induction. Popper devoted much of his career to the refutation of the received opinion on induction – particularly its specific version that says, empirical support follows the calculus of probability. He refuted it to his own 11 Naess founded the Deep Ecology Movement and wrote the Deep Ecology Platform. See his Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 29. 12 Gilbert Ryle, "Systematically misleading expressions", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 32 (1932). See also G. J. Warnock, “Gilbert Ryle's Editorship” Mind, 85 (1976), pp. 47-56, esp. 51-52. Perhaps it is an error on my part to refer to the output of so blatantly unreliable a witness as Warnock.

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satisfaction in 1935, and produced brilliant counterexamples to it in 1956. In his review of the translation of Logik der Forschung, The Logic of Scientific Discovery of 1959, Mario Bunge says, Popper has crushed the opinions that he was criticizing. Bunge differs from Popper and refuses to see himself a follower of his, but he expressed from the start the same appreciation of Popper’s criticism: it was deadly. It is a pity that Popper ignored Bunge’s review of his great book, perhaps because he did not read Spanish. (The review appeared in Ciencia e Investigacion, 15, 1959.) In any case, Popper continued to argue against the received opinion on induction – in the hope to alter it. In the preface to the 1984 edition of his Logik der Forschung he said of the penultimate appendix to it, Anhang *19, that it puts an end to Aristotelian induction and forces us back to the Socratic method of conjectures and refutations. (He used the expression “we must”.) The appendix ends with a complaint that the philosophical public had ignored his earlier refutations. This one was ignored too, so that his last appendix, Anhang *20, published in his last year, 1994, offers a newer refutation, from his joint paper with David Miller. The philosophical public still ignores it, and its received opinion on science still is that its theories are inductively justified. And the agenda of most philosophers of science still centers on the justification of science by empirical arguments. Question: did Popper have to continue this battle? Do those who side with him have to continue criticizing the received opinion that scientific theories are inductively justified? I think not. On the contrary, in my view Popper made a serious effort when he deemed the opponents rationalists and more so when he deemed it worthwhile to fight for the souls of rationalists by using of the force of arguments to force them to change their minds. Quite possibly, as he taught us to say, his view is true and mine is mistaken. It still is my opinion for what it is worth, that this disagreement that he had with me has priority over the disagreement he had with the philosophical community over induction. Is this opinion of mine true? How do we decide such matters? How do we decide our agendas? This is the problem of my present discussion. 4. Decisions about Agendas The agenda depends on many factors, each of which requires a judicious

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decision that invites some arguments, mostly inherently13 unscientific. One of these is the intended audience14 of one’s discourse. Are we to address only the rationalists among us or should we debate with the irrationalists in the hope to engage them in rational argument? Irrationalists have on their agenda questions that rationalists will not debate. For example, what is the essence of Man? The rationalists said, rationality; Engels said, work; Buber said, encounter; Cassirer said, abstract language; Heidegger said, fear and boredom; Sartre said, fear and nausea. Wow! Before going into all that, we may ask a practical question: do we try to engage in rational debate those who shun it? We need not discuss here the question, how rational is the belief in the Bible or in anything else; rather the question here pertains to the presence and absence of the readiness to engage in debate: should we ignore those who are not ready to argue rationally. The reason for the refusal to argue rationally may be open to rational discussion, and then the question may arise, should we engage in it. But the question here is, should we ignore those who refuse to argue? Take an important example. Bertrand Russell was engaged in a rational debate with Ludwig Wittgenstein and he gave it up, as he explained in his obituary on him15. His criticism of Wittgenstein’s philosophy appears in the Introduction to Wittgenstein’s book16. Fans dismissed it, saying, Russell obviously misunderstood Wittgenstein. As long as they did not take the trouble to explain, Russell 13 That the agenda is inherently unscientific almost follows from the Socratic paradox of learning. See my “The Logic of Scientific Inquiry” in my Science and Society (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 65, Boston, 1981), pp. 223-238. 14 The matter of intended audience is rich, complex, and most interesting. The earliest writings were records (religious and administrative) and advertisements (monuments). Books came later, often as open letters. The idea that a scientific publication is an open letter is one of the many important contributions of Robert Boyle to the scientific tradition. Without published discussions of all this, new conventions developed, partly under the pressure of publishers and distributors on authors. Prefaces of books often specify their intended readership these days. After World War II, the convention among mathematicians developed and in addition to specifying explicitly, what a book requires of its readers and what it promises them in return, its chapter zero specifies more precisely the background knowledge it employs. Research databases may indicate the targeted audience somewhat differently. Somehow, in all this magnificent growth, discussions of agendas are sorely missing. Meanwhile the question has branched out tremendously. See the spontaneous presentation in http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=qUvUqk8LVHk . 15 Mind 60 (1951) pp. 297-8. 16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), Bertrand Russell’s Introduction.

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did not respond. Was he right? I assume here with no discussion that he was: there is no law that imposes rationality on anyone, not even on the learned, and there is no reason to respond to the dogmatists who would not listen. My main reason for this is that the problem of choice of items for debate between bona fide rationalists is already too difficult for me. Here is an example. A classical paper by Erwin Schrödinger, “Are There Quantum Jumps?”17 lead Max Born to express anger at the very fact that Schrödinger had reraised the question.18 It was not agenda and for a good reason, he said. Was he right? Were his reasons cogent? It seems to me obvious he was not. I wrote a comment on this dispute at the time, and Popper suggested to me to make it the topic of my doctoral dissertation.19 My intent was to refute the reasons for Born’s view that Schrödinger was placing on the agenda the wrong question. For, already Schrödinger faced Born’s arguments as he explained why he was deviating from established views about the agenda. He opened his said paper expressing a wish to take a distance from the situation current then. He began with the Copernican hypothesis in order to allow his reader a broader view of what the scientific agenda comprises or encompasses. I do not know what stir the Copernican hypothesis made in the midsixteenth century; in the turn of that century, however, it hardly came to public notice, and its best advocate was the flamboyant Giordano Bruno who died at the stake as a heretic. He was the last martyr of science, but most of the literature does not refer to him as a scientist and it takes Galileo and Kepler to be the legitimate heirs to Copernicus. For decades Kepler’s laws of 1605 won hardly any mention. The leading historian of science, Alexandre Koyré, has discussed the question, how did the astronomical community learn about him, how his ideas entered the astronomical agenda so that in 1687 Newton could take them as given.20 The way people fix their agendas reflects the orders of priority of the questions they wish to discuss. This depends on diverse factors, including 17 Erwin Schrödinger, “Are There Quantum Jumps?”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3 (1952) pp. 109-123, 233-242. 18 Max Born, “The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4 (1953), pp. 95-106. 19 Joseph Agassi, The Function of Interpretations in Physics ( Ph. D. Dissertation, the University of London, 1956, unpublished). 20 Alexander Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution (London: Methuen, 1973, [1965]), Part III, ch. 1. Cp. Newtonian Studies (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965).

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the amount of effort that each question demands decisions on agendas, both private and public. As to private agendas, moralists – religious or Socratic – all moralists demand that we mend them and attend to salvation first. Since the seventeenth century, philosophers have left this message to religious leaders and to artists. It returns to public discussions in disguise. Immanuel Kant called this disguise the architectonic of pure reason and the principle of transcendental unity of apperception.21 I will not discuss this. Fixing public agendas follows public rules. These differ in different times and places. They differ also as to quality: we can compare rules and see that some are better than others. The comparison is relative to the aims of the group that determines its agenda. I will not discuss this either, as my concern here is with the commonwealth of learning. 5. Agendas as Coordinating Institutions The commonwealth of learning is self-selected. It is as open as can be. It has no steering committee. Members are at utter liberty to choose their own personal agendas.22 In the period following the Second World War things changed, as almost all members of the commonwealth are now academics, academies follow established rules of agenda, and these at times pertain to admission and grant giving and thus to research. But as the commonwealth of learning is still varied, this may be a marginal matter. Generally, since the motive of research is in part private, and since the efforts put into research and into the publication of its results are in part 21 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is largely unreadable. Its concluding pages on the architectonic or pure reason and of the transcendental unity of the apperception are readable and until fairly recently relatively neglected. 22 This is where Thomas S. Kuhn broke new grounds: he denied that normal researchers can choose what to study and more so how to study. He even declared that rebels are justly fired from their research posts. See my review of Kuhn’s posthumous work, "Kuhn's Way", Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (2002), pp. 394-430. Of course, his assertion implies that all members of the commonwealth of learning are professionals. This implication was first openly stated in Max Weber’s famous “Science as a Vocation”. See my review of Max Weber's ‘Science as a Vocation’, ‘Bye Bye Weber’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (1991), pp. 102-109. Not only were most members of the commonwealth of learning not professional researchers or academics; even those who were, did not do so for a living. And James Clerk Maxwell suffered pressure to pay more attention to gentlemanly pursuits than to research. See Sir Edmund Whittaker, The History of Theories of the Aether and Electricity, Vol. 1, (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951), p. 246n.

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public, no research is either purely private or purely public. At least the very presence of the information highways has greatly facilitated the access of private scholars to public arenas. This too is not a part of my present discussion – I have discussed it elsewhere.23 My interest in agendas began when I was a student and heard in a science class the observation that around the year 1900 there were three cardinal problems in physics. I do not wish to discuss this here, as I have done so elsewhere. What intrigued me then was the question, how do diverse researchers in one field have a consensus on such matters, and who decides them? I later found questions that are more interesting: how wide was the agreement in 1900 about the cardinal questions of the time? Surely, Planck and Einstein and other pioneers agreed about them, but did everyone? Did everyone agree about who were the pioneers? But let me stick with the easier question: how is the agenda determined? In my entire career, I found only two philosophers who discussed this matter, Sir Francis Bacon24 around 1600 and Michael Polanyi25 around 1950. They were utterly unhelpful: Bacon said, follow every lead. This is obviously impossible. He said, we need teams for that. This raises the problem of coordination and so of agendas. He did not discuss that. Polanyi said, the leaders of a field orchestrate research in it. They decide which leads are important. He did not say how they come to this decision. He said, this is a matter of skills, of personal knowledge, and it is impossible to describe skills – scientific and artistic alike. Now obviously fixing agendas much depends on skills, but some of it is describable and described, in art and in science, in politics and in business, and in other areas of public activities. In politics and in business there are established leading institutions, authorized as leading, with their authority institutionally established. These authorities decide the agendas in politics and in business. The arts and the sciences have leading institutions too, but these have no authority to lead.26 23 See previous note and references there, 24 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum Book 1 (London: J. Bill, 1620), is sufficient as a presentation of his ideas referred to here. 25 Michael Polanyi’s major philosophical work is his Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1958). 26 Of course, the influence of influential scientists is power, and they act as censors who can discourage research and so abort it, and if they fail then they can cause a delay in publication – up to 20 or 30 years. See my “Cultural lag” in my Science and Society, op. cit. Still, this is unofficial and has to do with the recent growth of scientific institutions; it is related to science as an instrument, not as the inherent

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What makes the world of art or the commonwealth of learning decide who the leading authority is? Or what university or learned society leads? What workshop or auctioneer? I asked friends to help me in my study of the question, how does the commonwealth of learning fix its agendas? Their comments baffled me: they asked me, what makes me choose to study the question that is not on the agenda? Will my readers consider this question fit for philosophical disquisitions? I do not know. True, some may say, since it is not an item on the publicly acknowledged philosophical agenda, it does not concern me. But the question is intriguing, be it philosophical or not. Presumably, even those who limit their interest to the current agenda of philosophy may find a problem attractive and interesting enough to pay attention to it regardless of the publicly acknowledged agenda of some academic discipline. The problem has implications both in philosophy and elsewhere. There is little discussion of agendas anywhere in the literature. A former member of the British parliament once told me that he had made great efforts in putting something on the parliament’s agenda without notice that it had no chance of getting to the top of the agenda and gaining discussion time before the elections to a new parliament that erases the agenda and sets it anew. Only the very few items on the top of the agenda ever gain attention. This is why there are different organizations and each has different committees. And at times, of course, one body manages to alter the agenda of a more powerful body. Thus, the ecological movement tries hard to put concerns for the ecosystem on the agendas of national governments and international bodies. They fail because they do not know how to do their own homework of discussing their own agenda: they find too many important items and they do not know how to order their priorities. No one can blame them, though, as there is no known procedure for this, especially when too many vital items crowd the agenda. This is exactly what makes the fixing of agendas less matters of science and more matters of wisdom or of personal knowledge. 6. Agendas in History That the agenda is of the utmost importance is no news. Nor is it news that it is advisable to avoid putting excessive constraints on the agenda and to avoid leaving it too open. Tyrannies can run a semblance of democracy by instituting ineffective parliaments without democratization, simply by characteristic of it that Kuhn describes. Also, Polanyi but not Kuhn took such practices amiss.

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not allowing them free decision regarding their agendas. The commonwealth of learning has no one to impose an agenda on its members. Nevertheless, science progresses along given lines that win great consensus. Most philosophers stress that in science there is a consensus as to which theory is true. This is false. The consensus regards questions. Popper is the first to have observed this significant fact, which is odd, since the choice of questions is not new at all. The traditional importance of the Problemata Physica, misattributed to Aristotle, testifies to that. During the scientific revolution, this work became obsolete. Robert Boyle replaced it with the extremely popular and now forgotten A Natural History of a Country.27 It gained repeated publications, at times by scientific-instrument-makers. One of its famous descendents is the famous Notes and Queries on Anthropology of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.28 Nevertheless, the very idea of a question raises great ambiguity. Robertson Davies, who wrote a few novels on Academe, reports that experimenters say, I do not ask questions but simply record what is in front of my eyes. The source of this observation is Bacon’s inductive philosophy. He said, most astutely, questions are tools for selection; they are filters of sorts. A filter, a rule for selection, rests on an idea. The idea may be scientific, and thus useful to research, or else it is a prejudice, and thus an impediment to research. Hence, to begin with, science must be unselective. He wrote a book called A Forest of Forests. It contains a lot of rubbish, but we should praise it as the first database ever. Already his first great follower Robert Boyle wanted to replace it. He called the replacement The Promiscuous Experiment. He worked on it for decades; he never published it. (A fragment of it appeared posthumously as Experimenta et Observationes Physicae.) What impeded him was a serious problem: he did not have a criterion for pure data, since he deemed only generalizations scientific and since he knew that all generalizations are hypotheses and thus not pure data, and he did not want any hypothesis to have the status of certitude that Bacon had ascribed to pure data. The idea of a database arose again in 27 See J. F. Fulton, A Bibliography of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), (originally published in the Proceedings of the Oxford Bibliographical Society in 1932). 28 See the first page of James Urry, "Notes and Queries on Anthropology and the Development of Field Methods in British Anthropology, 1870-1920”, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1972 (1972), pp. 45-57.

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James Spedding’s life of Bacon in the mid-nineteenth century. He said, we should try out Bacon’s idea and see where it leads us. In a review of this book, the great William Whewell said, the Royal Navy has a database on the weather and it is worthless, as any database must be as long as it is theoretically uninformed. Today, when we have databases galore, it is evident that they must be theoretically informed, since the problem of their classifications and of translations of items – from database to database – engage researchers these days. I will skip this, as it is task-specific. The demand for a database for non-specific scientific use is present in the writings of Charles Saunders Peirce, who said, the assessment of the probability of a hypothesis must make use of all extant data or else it is prejudicial. Rudolf Carnap repeated this idea in 1950. It then suffered neglect, and for obvious reasons: even were it possible to use all the information extant, and even were the theory of the probability of a hypothesis satisfactory, the question raised here remains: how does the commonwealth of learning fix its agenda? Which question do we choose to explore? Which hypothesis to we choose to test? It is becoming to contrast the inductivist and the instrumentalist views of science, as these are the two competing traditional views. Instrumentalists never discussed agendas. Even their own agenda they took for granted. They had a good reason for this: they were conventionalists and they took it for granted that decisions concerning agendas are purely conventional: people determine them in accord with their own concerns and interests, and these are exogenous. Any critique of conventionalism should rest then on the matter of conventions in general not of agenda in particular. The most obvious question is, why do so many people share tastes and agree to set conventions for cooperation? In particular, can there be a non-specific scientific etiquette for fixing agendas? Conventionalists do not care about this question, but some sociologists do. Polanyi agreed that there is non-specific fixing of agendas that goes beyond the concern of specific groups and concerns the commonwealth of learning as a whole, or perhaps it concerns different disciplines within it as wholes. Leading scientists in any given field determine the agenda there, as do leading artists. Most fields do possess agreed agendas. How these crystallize is an interesting problem. The general agreed view of things helps decide such matters, for, fields that house competing schools of thought offer competing agendas, one for each school, and the more these agendas share, the more exciting and fruitful the debate between them can be.

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Popper’s contribution to philosophy is a great contribution to the development of a theory of the agenda. Until he came along, philosophers had little to say on such matters, since they used to explain the unanimity of the endorsement of successful theories and this led them to discus success and its roots. They scarcely discussed other problems and much less the order of their significance – even while acknowledging that in some fields some problems have gained priority as a matter of fact. The question of setting agendas is both theoretical and practical, and I will not discuss them here but rather the importance of the philosophical background to the political variant of the problem. 7. Political Agendas That in politics the control of the agenda is political power is obvious: every time a parliament opens there is a real battle over the control over the steering committee, the parliamentary committee in charge of the agenda. And to discuss the philosophical background to the political background of agenda making, I will take recourse to Popper’s political philosophy, of course. We have here the radical right that is quasi-anarchist, the radical left that is technocratic, and democracy. Democracy conflicts with both extremes. Being reformist it is antiradical; being concerned with legislation it is anti-technocratic. It takes situations as given and attempts to improve upon them by legislation agreed upon through critical discussions and votes. This recipe has its parallel in the philosophy of science. There traditionalism takes traditions as the fund of knowledge. Radicalism ignores traditions and considers knowledge in the abstract. It takes the knowledge in question to be the possession of an individual, and then it has the choice between the fiction of the Enlightenment that everyone is expert or the Platonic ideal of technocracy. Critical rationalism takes knowledge as given and suggests improving upon it by means of critical discussion. Critical rationalism is essential for democracy, and even for much less: for glastnos and peristroika. It is also inherently social and political so that its democracy is not a corollary to it but an integral part of it29. The theory that only science is rationally justified raises the question, how is this applicable to politics and can it allow for pluralism? What is the way in 29 I. C. Jarvie, The Republic of Science: The Emergence of Popper's Social View Of Science, 1935-1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).

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which the philosophy of science enters political philosophy? What is the way in which the political philosophy enters the philosophy of science? In critical rationalism, this is hardly a problem: we can have it any way we want. Not so in either traditionalism or radicalism: their followers shun these problems as they take them into a blind alley. Traditional philosophy deemed the choice of problem individual or private; it took it for granted that society had no role to play in it (although it acknowledged and approved of all individual concern with social problems). This did not go too well with western democracy, but it went very well with western individualism, and individualism had deeper roots in western philosophy than democracy, and perhaps with much justice. For, one may view individualism as but a by-product of the appeal of the Greek ethos to the individual – simply because it was an appeal to be critical of conventional wisdom. (We have a similar aspect in Hebrew tradition: the prophets who attacked convention and had nothing stronger to fall on, tended to appeal to individual conscience. Since the problem and discussion center on the individual, the social component of individual choice entered it as the mere individual concern with social problems. This will not do. Nevertheless, it explains the force of individualism: its roots are in the (philosophical) rebellion against tradition in search of a better world. This explains likewise the traditionally strong ties between the traditional theory of rationality and individualism30. Yet the problem persists on even the most individual level, and even in the most rational aspect of the individual: I have not read all the leading classics in my field and I cannot read all the research material in the field. What comes higher on my agenda? I want to write another research paper and I want to write a monograph; both are important to me and hopefully to my readers, but which comes first?) All this explains the odd fact that no traditional theory of rationality supports democracy, that critical rationalism is its foundation well after the fact. Democracy cannot easily enter philosophy after the fact except if it is an appealing and strong existing option. Where does society enter the 30 The Romantic Reaction did attempt to return to the traditional idea that tradition is the fund of wisdom and knowledge. This idea never took roots. Edmund Burke defended tradition on other grounds, especially by attacking radicalism as prejudicial. This way he indirectly acknowledged the superiority of the traditional theory of rationality despite its individualism. See his Reflections on the Revolution in France, (1790), The Works of Edmund Burke, With a Memoir. In Three Volumes. Vol. 3 (New York: George Dearborn, 1834).

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discussion "naturally"31? At the very start: at the setting of its central problem. The fire burns the same way everywhere, said Protagoras, but the law is different in different societies. What of it? Why did this trouble the ancient Greek sophists so much? Because they discovered32 this way options of whose very existence they had no prior knowledge. Herodotus narrates (Histories, Book 1) that the different social options were not noticed because all customs other than one's own were "naturally" considered inferior; that there was a blind spot that was to be rid of before this was discovered: rationality could be instituted33. Now all this may have been revolutionary in Antiquity and even in some not so distant past, but it is today neither very new nor very exciting. However difficult it is for an individual to break ties with tradition, it can be done, and at known cost, and while raising certain social and political and educational problems, scarcely philosophical ones34. Philosophically, every extant attitude to custom is rather unproblematic, since we have learned to circumvent them: out of so much frustration, perhaps, we have found that a social problem is best attacked by new technology rather than by forging and/or implementing new attitudes. 8. Muddling Through Agendas This leads to the preference of muddling through over the search for radical solutions. This way bottlenecks are not dealt with but postponed 31 The concept of what comes naturally is best understood by the modern concept of the default option. 32 It is obvious to everyone that different societies have different customs, since the taboos of one society clash with those of another. (This holds even for subs-societies, and therefore all societies except those whose members relate to each other face-toface exercise complex rules of circumventing taboos.) This is not true of myths: one tends to identify parts of their own and their neighbors’ mythologies. That is to say, what we call today the clash of cultures differs in modern societies and in preliterate ones. The discovery of the clash of cultures proper seems to belong to Thales of Miletus. 33 See Carolyn Dewald, review of Stewart Flory, The Archaic Smile of Herodotus, 1987, in Classical Philology, 85 (1990), pp. 60-64. 34 The philosophical aspect of the situation is only the discovery of the inevitable failure of any effort to repeat the Cartesian program of utter radicalism in matters intellectual, of total break with the intellectual past, of starting thinking afresh. The strange fact is that one of those who discovered this impossibility of success in performing Descartes’ program was Edmund Husserl whose Cartesian Meditations (1931), (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), is declared an effort to out-Descartes Descartes.

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whenever possible. Postponement has a high interest rate, but this is tolerated because it makes more obvious what items must be high on the public agenda: pressing problems. The long and the short of it is this. The ecological and the peace movement are discussing at such a great and colorful detail the coming cataclysm. All traditional societies, primitive, advanced, and in between, cannot deal with cataclysms of any sort. If the future is anything like the one that they predict, then we are doomed. If the chemical poison the industries of the whole world pour into the ecosystem will not destroy it, and if the enormous amount of waste of fossil fuel will not, then the population explosion will. Alternatively, the population explosion will lead to reckless wars, perhaps with the use of nuclear weapons; and even if the population growth in the poor parts of the world can be contained, there is no reason to assume that the poor nations will be willing to tolerate the status quo. In brief, we need now desperately a new plan – as new as our boldest imagination can offer. There is no way back and slow progress is as dangerous as the status quo or more. And what are the philosophers doing about it? What they have been doing all the time and less. What can they do? How does the proposal relate to any theory of rationality? I do not know.35 If there is any rhyme or reason in current global politics, it is its being so very marginal: almost all global political activity now serves local interests: politicians pay heed to global politics only through the prism of national and party interests. Few politicians ever have the resourcefulness and vision to develop long-range plans, anyway. Progress nevertheless took place, of course: politicians from time to time did recognize the requirement to come up with long-range plans and engage increasingly wider outlooks. Otherwise it would not be possible to develop the modern nation-states out of small local interests. Once a politician saw the advantage of a wider outlook, of planning for larger systems, the ensuing success forced competitors to follow suit. This is no longer the case. If the whole world will not mobilize in order to put global issues high on their agendas, then nothing will ensue: only global solutions may possibly meet the global problems of the survival of humanity; local solutions will not begin to touch them. If anything, if some but not all parties are reluctant to use resources for fear of harming the globe as a whole, then those who do not share the reluctance benefit from it. How then can the world leadership on all of its variety agree that certain moves are essential for global 35 For all this see the concluding chapters of my Technology, op. cit.

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survival? How can we ever hope to alter the habits of millennia and invite more rationality in global politics before it is too late? Is it rational to exhibit a reluctance to use certain resources for fear of extinction? Can there be a strict test for the claim that the overuse of fossil fuel risks our very survival? How much testing is required? Of which kind? Is that not the traditional problem of induction run wild? The present problematic situation is a case of an inability to apply either traditional solutions or classical rationalism – justificationism, or, more specifically, the principle of induction. This is an admission that both views are now bankrupt. What is the situation from a critical rationalist viewpoint? There is a clear sense of crisis in the air. Whether the future of humanity is gloomy or not, it is clearly under a severe threat. If survival is the topmost item on every practical agenda, then the survival of humanity should be the topmost item of every agenda, private, philosophical, national, global. Does any philosophy address this matter? Not that I know of. Back to the drawing board, and fast: the time may be too short, or we may just barely come up with a solution just in time. For my part, I can only pose the problem. What I have ventured to illustrate is that the concern for a rational social order was never far from the deliberations on rationality, that these days we have to be more explicit about it for intrinsic reasons and make it global and paramount for extrinsic ones. The problem of rationality has radically transformed: it reads, how can we save ourselves from destruction? How is global security to be achieved? And if we agree that this is a situation in which traditionalism and radicalism are useless and that critical rationalism is not yet adequate but has offered some possibly useful tools, then we can discuss the question, what is – should be – our agenda today? 9. Conclusion This paper honors Nicholas Maxwell. He is one of the few who have raised the alarm. The cause for the alarm is not new. The combination of Auschwitz and Hiroshima shows us what we are disposed to do and what we are capable of doing: we may be ready and able to destroy ourselves. The novelty is not only in the new ability but also in its roots in science. Winston Churchill noted this in his celebrated Fulton Address that heralded the Cold War: “The dark ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total

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destruction.” 36 The new message in the cautionary writings of Maxwell, as well as in those of Naess and a few others, the one that Churchill’s speech misses is obvious: Churchill did not generalize his case. His call for action may or may not have been right for his time but it is too obviously inapplicable today. We must all declare first that the challenge of our time is immensely significant and urgent and that we are at a loss: there is no proposal in the offing that comes even close to being a possibly reasonable solution. We have partial ideas, and these we should examine seriously, criticize effectively, and try to improve upon. Perhaps we should start (following Maxwell) with the most urgent global problem, that of the pressure of migration from poor countries to rich ones. But this is only one item that we may put on the global agenda. First we must admit our ignorance and declare the agenda of philosophy to include global survival as its first and most urgent item.

36 Sir Winston Churchill, The Sinews of Peace, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946.

No Easy Answers: Wisdom and Cognitive Science Margaret A. Boden 1. Introduction Nicholas Maxwell reminds us of the important distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom, he says, is "the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge, technological know-how and understanding, but much else besides" – where "realize" means both "apprehend" and "make real".1 And he argues that the social institution of science should be driven by a search for wisdom, rather than a hunger for knowledge. If that were done, he says, there would be a revolution in the way we do science: not that the status of evidence and enquiry would be undermined, but that they would be joined by a commitment to, and discussion of, the aim of helping us to live in a more just, enjoyable, and civilized way. Maxwell's own discussion implies that there are no easy answers here. Quite apart from anything else, what is of value in life is, he admits, profoundly problematic. So we couldn't confidently undertake a wisely aimoriented rationality overnight. Indeed, a wisdom-oriented rationality should help us to improve our aims and values as we proceed: "We don't have to decide what is of value in life before we can engage in wisdom: on the contrary, that is one of the things wisdom-inquiry should be helping us to improve our ideas about".2 One could cavil, of course, about his view of wisdom, and about each of the concepts in terms of which he defines it. What counts as "justice", for instance, has puzzled humankind since Socrates. I shan't pursue those abstract questions here. Rather, I'll try to apply his ideas to a specific case – namely, cognitive science. 1

N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic? (London: Imperial College Press 2004), pp. 81 and 89; see also N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science (Oxford: Blackwell 1984), p. 66. 2 N. Maxwell, personal communication.

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I'll ask how certain values, and in particular the value (positive? negative?) of aiding the military, have affected cognitive science in the past, and whether they might be strengthened or abandoned in the future. How might this area of science have been different, if it had been pursued in the wisdom-seeking spirit recommended by Maxwell? And how might it be redirected now, if we were to engage that spirit tomorrow? 2. Computers and Cognitive Science Cognitive science began at a time when computers as we know them were non-existent. Indeed, it was the seminal paper in cognitive science3 which inspired John von Neumann to base his design for a digital computer on binary logic – echoing (so it was then thought) the 'logic' of the nervous system. Over ten years later, hugely influential work was done in cognitive science – by the psychologist Jerome Bruner4 and the linguist Noam Chomsky5 – without recourse to these still very rare machines. Admittedly, the first computer models of human thinking were then being built.6 And entire volumes of comparable work would be published a few years later.7 But the conceptual seeds, and the initial intellectual vision, of cognitive science didn't depend on work with electronic devices. In that sense – and in that sense alone – the field's existence didn't require computers Nevertheless, if computers as such weren't yet crucial, ideas about computing were. Some of these, indeed, were due to future leaders in cognitive science. The key examples were Chomsky's analysis of the computational power of different types of artificial language,8 and Allen

3

W. S. McCulloch and W. H. Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity", Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5 (1943), 115-133. 4 J. S. Bruner, J. Goodnow, and G. Austin, A Study of Thinking (New York: Wiley, 1956). 5 A. N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures ('S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1957). 6 A. Newell, J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, "Empirical Explorations with the Logic Theory Machine", Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, 15 (1957), 218-239. 7 E. A. Feigenbaum and J. A. Feldman, Computers and Thought (New York: McGrawHill, 1963); S. S. Tomkins and S. Messick , S. (eds.), Computer Simulation of Personality: Frontier of Psychological Research (New York: Wiley, 1963). 8 A. N. Chomsky, "Three Models for the Description of Language", I.R.E. Transactions on Information Theory, vol. IT-2 (1956), 113-124.

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Newell and Herbert Simon's pioneering work on list-processing.9 Moreover, the "seminal" paper mentioned above had already assimilated neural processing in the brain, and logical thinking too, to the abstract computing devices described by Alan Turing in 1936. In short, computer hardware wasn't (and still isn't) always in evidence, but theories about computation were (and still are). The reason for this, in a nutshell, is that cognitive science studies the mind or mind/brain – or, if you prefer, thought and behaviour – by using computational concepts of various kinds.10 These are drawn from artificial intelligence and artificial life (AI/A-Life), each of which embraces a number of methodologies. So some "computational" concepts (in the broad sense in which I am using the term here) denote formal computations on symbolic representations, which are typical of classical AI (sometimes called GOFAI: Good Old-Fashioned AI). Others draw on cybernetic ideas about embodied and self-organizing systems, including situated robotics (wherein the robots rely on direct 'reflex' responses to environmental cues), dynamical systems, and self-equilibrating neural networks such as those defined by PDP connectionism(parallel distributed processing). And all of these sometimes include the sort of 'computation' that's effected by evolution, thanks to electronic/informational analogues of biological reproduction, variation, mutation, and natural selection. Cognitive scientists often – though by no means always—express their theories as functioning computer models, because this is the best way of testing both their coherence and their implications. (Testing for their truth, of course, involves comparisons with the actual phenomena.) This practice is significantly different from the practice of chemists, or meteorologists, when they employ computer models of their theories. For in cognitive science, unlike chemistry and meteorology, the computational concepts implemented in the models are substantive theoretical terms. That is, the mind (and the brain) are described, or theorized, as mechanisms that actually carry out computations of one kind and/or another. Put another way, the mind is conceptualized as what computer scientists call a virtual machine, defined in abstract (computational) terms but implemented in the brain.

9

A. Newell (ed.) (1960), Information Processing Language V Manual (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961). 10 M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press , 2006), chap. 1.ii.

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Given these facts, it's clear that the budding cognitive science of the 1940s and early 1950s, which hadn't required computers, couldn't have blossomed without their invention. Indeed, the field today rests on a number of theoretical ideas that can be implemented only in very powerful machines. In principle, to be sure, computational theories (and designs for computer models) could be 'tested' by thought alone. In one famous example, involving the generation of a seemingly highly 'creative' geometrical proof (of the equality of the base angles of an isosceles triangle), that's exactly what happened.11 But that example was very simple, and very early. In the vast majority of cases, the computers are in practice essential. Even theoretical work which isn't actually modeled, such as accounts of hypnosis12 or of mental architecture in general,13 exploits many ideas that are drawn from actual implementations. In brief: no computers, no cognitive science. 3. Computers and the Military Where did those computers come from? In a word, from the military. Granted, the very first computers had nothing to do with war. Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a mechanical digital computer described in 1832 (although never actually built), wasn't designed with war in mind. As for electronic machines, the digital computer built in 1930s Berlin by Konrad Zuse wasn't intended for use in battle either (it was later offered to the German military but, fortunately, they rejected it).14 As for the theory of computer science, this was initiated by Turing for the purposes of pure mathematics alone: not a weapon in sight, nor even in mind. 11

M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit., chap. 10.i.c. Z. Dienes and J. Perner, "The Cold Control Theory of Hypnosis", in G. Jamieson (ed.), Hypnosis and Conscious States: The Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 293-314. 13 M. L. Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); M. L. Minsky, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006); A. Sloman, "Architectural Requirements for Human-like Agents Both Natural and Artificial. (What Sorts of Machines Can Love?)", in K. Dautenhahn (ed.), Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology: Advances in Consciousness Research (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), pp. 163-195. 14 K. Zuse, The Computer - My Life (London: Springer-Verlag, 1993) 12

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However, Turing himself soon turned to war-work, using special-purpose computing machines for code-breaking at Bletchley Park in the early 1940s. At much the same time, the cyberneticists on both sides of the Atlantic were developing feedback systems for guided missiles. And, to cut a very long story short, the development and the commercial manufacture of increasingly powerful computers was massively funded by the American Department of Defense, or DOD.15 Cognitive science as we know it today simply couldn't have existed without the military. Only a handful of individuals were sufficiently prescient—and sufficiently wise? – to recognize the more humane sorts of potential lurking in the early machines. One man even saw this potential before those machines existed, at a time when Bletchley's Colossus16 wasn't even a speculative idea and Zuse was still tinkering with machine-parts in his parents' living-room. This man glimpsed the possibility of a future in which human lives would be aided, and in some respects radically altered, by computing technology. He was Vannevar Bush, a mathematician and analogue-computer engineer soon to be given overall responsibility for the USA's wartime science and technology, including the Manhattan project. Despite his wartime prominence, Bush's interests – and values – went way beyond war, and way beyond science as well. In a paper drafted as early as 1937, and published just after the end of the war, he imagined a user-friendly machine for helping non-military scientists and mathematicians – and doctors, librarians, and even mediaeval historians too.17 His imaginary memex (from "memory extender"), he said, was "a sort of mechanized private file and library" – in effect, a personal data-organizer very like today's Googleinfested PCs. Significantly, his paper was called "As We May Think". For it foresaw both how future machines could help us find our way around the already burgeoning data bank of scientific and non-scientific information and how

15

A. H. Molina, The Social Basis of the Microelectronics Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989); P. N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 16 J. Copeland, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Code-Breaking Computers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 17 V. Bush, "As We May Think", Atlantic Monthly, 176 (July 1945), 101-108. Reprinted in R. Packer and K. Jordan (eds.), Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (London: W. W. Norton, 2001), pp. 135-153.

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that use might actually alter the ways in which we think. (His word "we", of course, referred only to the citizens of industrialized nations.) What has this got to do with Maxwell's work on science and wisdom? Two things. On the one hand, Bush's vision was eventually turned into reality by Douglas Engelbart and Allan Kay, key pioneers of personal computing (the latter having been inspired by the cognitive scientists Bruner and Seymour Papert). Personal computers, together with the Internet and World-Wide-Web, offer a host of welcome opportunities to add to our quality of life, not all of which are trivialities driven by materialistic/hedonistic values. But they offer a host of too-little-noted dangers, too. A wiser science – and a wiser society – might have put more emphasis on the dangers, and less on the more questionable values encouraged by these technologies. On the other hand, the role of the military in the development of computers is now a largely forgotten curiosity of history. Even if one believes that to hold hands with the military is inevitably to forfeit wisdom (a belief which only a strict pacifist has the right to proclaim), these machines are now widespread in our society for all manner of innocent pursuits – including some highly praiseworthy ones. So, however morally problematic their initial development, cognitive science can't be accused of having abandoned wisdom simply because it relies on them. 4. Military Themes The military didn't fund the development only of computer hardware, of course. They also funded specific programmes of computational/empirical enquiry that had (more or less obvious) military potential. These included a wide range of research in cognitive science, drawn from AI, psychology, and linguistics – and, later, neuroscience. For example, both human and animal vision were of interest to the military largely because of possible applications in machine vision. This fact was baldly stated by DARPA (the DOD's research arm) in the late 1980s, when they were considering whether to recommence funding of connectionist research in pattern recognition. (This type of research had fallen into abeyance since a savage attack – couched in mathematical, so seemingly unchallengeable, terms – in the 1960s.18) As they put it, the newly-available money would support the "advancement of technologies 18

M. L. Minsky and S. A. Papert, Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969).

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critical to the development of next-generation, fire-and-forget, autonomous weapons".19 Weapons such as these are all-too-obviously military in intent. But seemingly innocent research can be – and often has been – funded because of its military potential. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who were hugely important figures in the first half-century of cognitive psychology as well as of AI, were initially (and independently) invited to the RAND corporation to work on military-related problems.20 Their topics – the psychology of perception and decision making – can of course be approached in a purely disinterested fashion. And if one wants to find out how people perceive and decide, one had better put the evidence above the agenda. Indeed, that's what Newell and Simon did: I'm not suggesting that they compromised the principles of respect for evidence in scientific enquiry. There's no denying, however, that the agenda here was military. Specifically, it was connected with the 'human factors' involved in the high-tech SAGE defence project, an early forerunner of the 1980s Star Wars project. The widespread military context for early cognitive science in general was largely due to Joseph Licklider, the first head of ARPA/DARPA. He was originally a psychologist himself, an expert on hearing who was given high military ranking on joining ARPA in 1962 (and who designed the interface for the SAGE computer). His early professional colleagues had included many key names in cognitive science, including Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, Jerome Lettwin, George Miller, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and even Donald Hebb.21 What's more, his prescient – and highly influential – interest in man-machine communication and cooperation implied the necessity for doing AI and practical computing in the light of knowledge of human psychology.22 So cognitive science (especially in its early days) not only needed the military to provide the computers, but also relied on it to fund a good deal of broadly military-related research. In that sense, militaristic values were implicit in the field.

19

DARPA Neural Network Study: October 1987-February 1988 (Fairfax, Virginia: AFCEA International Press, 1988). 20 M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit., chap. 6.iii.b-c. 21 M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit., chaps. 5. iv.f and 11.i.b. 22 J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Machine Symbiosis", Institute of Radio Engineers Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, 1 (1960), 4-11.

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This was true above all in AI. A few AI researchers valiantly refused to accept any funding from defence-related sources, and/or even switched their area of intellectual interest. Benjamin Kuipers, for instance, changed his focus from AI vision to AI in medicine, once he realized that vision work— no matter how it was funded – was being exploited for military use. But his scruples came at significant intellectual and professional cost, for his avoidance of DARPA money meant that he could employ only graduate students, not research fellows, as assistants.23 One may admire the courage of such opting-out of the (largely military) system. But is it wise? A cynic would say that it certainly isn't, given the obstacles to research achievement and career progression just noted. But Maxwell is no cynic. Does his notion of wisdom imply that all other cognitive scientists should have done the same? And, had they wanted to avoid helping the military, would it actually have been possible? 5. Keeping One's Hands Clean Unless one is a strict pacifist (as Kuipers, a Quaker, is), it's not clear that one can properly impugn the aims of the specifically war-directed work mentioned in Section 4. Should the Bletchley code-breakers have left the Uboats unmolested, free to sink virtually all the Atlantic convoys? Should the cyberneticists have refused to develop anti-missile defence systems? And, more problematic, should they have refused to work on guided missiles intended for attacking the Nazi enemy, or – trickier still – on the atom bombs destined, by political choice, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In a truly wise society, of course, such troubling dilemmas wouldn't have arisen. (Although whether that society would necessarily be strictly pacifist is not obvious.) But Maxwell is the first to admit that we don't live in such a society, so we have to ask whether – and if so, when—wise compromises are in order.24 "Bletchley Yes, Manhatten project No," perhaps? The U-Boats, and Nazi and Imperial Japanese aggression, posed urgent threats at the time, of course. One might argue that it's allowable, even wise, to counter such threats, since to fail to do so could be disastrous for civilized values in general. (One might also argue that some wartime 23

B. J. Kuipers, "Why Don't I Take Military Funding?" (2004), available on http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kuipers/opinions. 24 J. Ladd, "Computers and War: Philosophical Reflection on Ends and Means", in D. Bellin and G. Chapman (eds.), Computers in Battle, Will They Work? (Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), pp. 297-314.

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research activities are beyond the pale: the fact that two of the physicists on the Manhattan Project later set up the peace-seeking Pugwash Conferences suggests that their consciences weren't entirely easy.) During later military confrontations, the British AI scientist Yorick Wilks declared that if our soldiers had to risk their lives on our behalf then he, safe at home in his laboratory, was glad to support them. One might quibble about the defensive need for a particular campaign – the Vietnam War, for example, or the much more recent Western attack on Iraq. In general, however, for a non-pacifist to refuse to work on any military projects is as squeamishly hypocritical as for meat-eaters to refuse to work in abattoirs. (Maybe, in a truly wise society, we would all be pacifists – but that is a different question.) But war, after all, is war. What of research in peacetime? If the thought of some future military application – or of any other unfortunate application: pornography, for instance – never enters a scientist's head, does it follow that he/she has clean hands? Does innocence of that type constitute wisdom, or rather naivety? And does a scrupulous avoidance of military funding and military aims guarantee that one's work won't in fact be exploited for aggressive purposes? In a word, no. To take just one example, consider a linguist who is interested in the problem of anaphora: that is, of how we manage to interpret pronouns such as he, she, her, and it. They might try to write an AI program that could sensibly identify the referent of "it" in the following snippet: "John brought a toy train for Mike's birthday party. Mary said 'Mike already has a train like the one you just put on the table. He will make you take it back'". Even though the word "table" is nearer to the word "it" than "train" is, it's obvious—to us—that Mary isn't referring to the table. What's not obvious is just how we manage to resolve the pronoun in such cases. Work of this very type, using examples based on children's birthday parties, was done by AI-modelling linguists in the early 1970s.25 A few years later, when DOD funding rules were changed so that funded research had to have some recognizable military potential, its seeming innocence was criticized. As a result, computational linguists started to have difficulty in getting grants for such proposals. But all was not lost: one of them told me that he managed to get funded again by changing his program's scenario 25

E. Charniak, 'He Will Make You Take It Back': A Study in the Pragmatics of Language (Castagnola, Switz.: Istituto per gli Studi Semantici e Cognitivi, 1974).

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from a trivial everyday context to a sea-battle, using sentences like: "The battleship was three miles to the East of the cliff. The gunner aimed at it." One may dispute whether this individual was wise, in Maxwell's sense. Perhaps his canniness was mere cynicism, deliberately pandering to the reprehensible motives of his funders. But the point, here, is that even questions as unexceptionable as how we interpret pronouns, for instance in describing events as banal as birthday parties, can be of interest to people wanting to apply the results in very nasty ways. (The gunner, after all, wasn't aiming at the cliff.) These "people" are not just the military. A pornographer setting up an interactive website for his clients might want to automate HCI dialogues triggered by the computer's saying "The girl standing behind her mother is 4 years old. Do you want to see more of her?" To do that in a flexible (not menu-driven) way, the system would need to be able to interpret the two occurrences of her sensibly. Furthermore, what we are pleased to call "peacetime" includes periods especially prone to sudden military disaster, such as the Cold War and the so-called war on terror. But even a much more pacific global community (falling short of the ideal state dreamed of by Maxwell) would include the risk, threat, and occasional use of military measures. Nuclear disarmament wouldn't change that: Agincourt and Crecy involved plenty of human suffering, and sieges and invasions have always harmed civilians. In short, cognitive scientists – and many other scientists too, of course – will always face dilemmas like those facing the hero of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Les Mains Sales. Avoiding contamination (if that is indeed what it is) with the military, including hostilities and information-gathering motivated by defence, is not easy. 6. Might-Have-Beens and Might-Bes What might cognitive science have been like if it had always been conducted according to Maxwell's precepts of wisdom? And what might it be in future, if it were to be so conducted from now onwards? If one does judge that wisdom excludes dalliance with the military, then the answer to the first question is "Non-existent". For as we saw in Section 2, powerful computers were designed and manufactured thanks largely to the Pentagon – and without them, there would have been no cognitive science.

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To be sure, cognitive and developmental psychology would still have existed. Indeed, they were getting along fine long before computers came on the scene. Moreover (and also remarked in Section 2), what turned out to be the seminal paper in cognitive science was published in the early 1940s, when the handful of primitive computers that already existed – the ten Colossi at Bletchley Park – were still top-secret. Even the same two authors' second influential paper, which pioneered ideas about probabilistic networks, was being written before the first modern computer ran at Manchester University, in June 1948.26 So it didn't need the presence of computers for the logical possibility of a rich cognitive science to be glimpsed, even optimistically proclaimed. And when John von Neumann, in the 1940s, picked up McCulloch's ideas (about neurones and logic using a binary code) in designing his electronic machine, the practical possibility could be glimpsed as well. In the 1950s, a few maverick individuals, such as Gordon Pask, tinkered their own computers out of biscuit tins and string and used them to do interesting psychological work.27 But much more computing power was needed to get any further. All the significant theoretical advances in cognitive science, and all the rich detail, would depend on concepts and modelling techniques applicable only in machines colossally more powerful than Colossus. In particular, most of the specifically human issues that would feature in a truly wise psychology require those advances. In the 1960s, some cognitive scientists were studying aspects of human personality and psychopathology, such as the effects of emotion on the acceptance and the expression/repression of beliefs.28 But they had no chance of getting very far. Only much later, when AI theory and methodology had been hugely enriched, could these topics be approached fruitfully again. Even today, most – though not quite all – work in this area of cognitive science is painfully shallow. (This hasn't stopped the military from trying to use it for their own ends, nor some of the scientists from taking unjustified advantage of that fact. A British researcher in this area, Aaron Sloman, was recently phoned by someone from a US government-funded research centre in California, asking about the possibility of modelling emotional processes in terrorists. On replying that it was beyond the state of the art, he was disturbed to be 26

W. H. Pitts and W. S. McCulloch, "How We Know Universals: The Perception of Auditory and Visual Forms", Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 9 (1947), 127-147. 27 M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit., Preface. b and chap. 4.v.e. 28 M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit., chaps. 7.i and 7.ii.c.

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told that he was the first person to say that. Everyone else whom the caller had contacted had claimed to know how to to do it – presumably hoping to attract research contracts.) As for the "might-bes", the future of cognitive science were it to adopt wisdom today, the emphasis on the chosen research themes might be rather different. Research on vision and hearing, for instance, would still continue. But they might be joined, perhaps even overshadowed, by work on more human topics. Besides clinical matters such as dyslexia, Williams' syndrome, and psychopathology (neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia ...) – all of which, and grief and mourning too, are already being studied by cognitive scientists29 – there might be more emphasis on issues of everyday communication and conviviality. But the story about the phone-call from California suggests that, even so, unwise persons might seek to use this work for unwise ends. One "unwise end" (in my judgment) that drives an increasing amount of research today is the development of so-called computer companions.30 This work rests on, and prompts, scientific work on human psychology as well as technological work on applications. Computer companions are systems, whether screen-based or robotic, designed to act as conversationalists and confidants for lonely, often elderly, people. The goal is to enable them to adapt to the individual user, learning their interests and preferences and helping them (for instance) to compile autobiographical narratives, which can in turn be used as topics for nostalgic conversations. (Although the "goal" is for conversations guided by nostalgia or information, the reality is sometimes verbal/physical abuse—directed by the human at the putative companion. And this tends to increase, as the computer companion appears more humanlike. Whether facilitating that sort of irritation and frustration, in someone who ex hypothesi is isolated and lonely, counts as wisdom is a moot point.31) There's no doubt that computer conversationalists are possible – indeed, probable. Their use of language will be crude compared with that of their human users, and they may sometimes give idiotic replies to the user's remarks. But they will be able to provide helpful factual information, gleaned from their own memory or from some other computer companion, 29

I. P. Wright, A. Sloman, and L. P. Beaudoin, "Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes", Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 3 (1996), 101-137. 30 M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit., chap. 13.vi.d. 31 B. Whitby, "Sometimes It's Hard to be a Robot", Interacting with Computers, 20:3 (2008), 326-333.

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or attained by automatic googling. In addition, they will be able to broaden/enrich the conversation by using associative memory to say "Oh, that reminds me of X". That "X" might be drawn from the Internet, or – more to the point—from the user's remarks and/or personal narrative already imparted to the machine. What's much more problematic is whether they can be, or should be, used as confidants.32 A confidant is someone to whom one relays personal, sometimes highly sensitive, information, in the expectation of empathy, and sympathy, in response. Sympathetic words, which could indeed be produced by the system, aren't enough. Do we really think that a computer companion could offer us genuine sympathy? And what of the user's secrets, which range from trivial gossip to personal matters whose communication to other people would be inconvenient, embarrassing, hurtful, or even worse? The more the user gets drawn into 'conversing' with the system, and the more personal details they provide to it, the more danger there is that – if their own system can communicate with others – their secrets will be betrayed. They could, of course, say "This is not to be told to Peter". But even if the technology could ensure that Peter would never learn the secret, it's not clear that the user would always remember to say such a thing. In real life, we take for granted, unthinkingly, that certain matters should not be mentioned to certain individuals, or anyway not in certain contexts. Spelling that out, for the purposes of building a reliable ('trustworthy') computer companion, would in practice be impossible. In short, there's a new sort of "frame problem" here. Above all, one must ask whether providing such systems to lonely people, elderly or not, would be short-changing them horribly – not to say cruelly. Even if we could solve the frame problem just mentioned, isn't this what Joseph Weizenbaum – rightly – would have called an "obscene" use of computer technology (and of the cognitive science necessary to achieve it)?33 Many of the researchers involved, of course, have asked themselves that very question and sincerely answered "No!". But perhaps they were unwise (in Maxwell's sense) to do so? 7. Is Un-Wisdom Built In? 32

M. A. Boden, "Conversationalists or Confidants?", in Y. A. Wilks (ed.), Computer Companions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press). 33 J. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976).

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Thus far, we've mentioned specific examples of cognitive science, such as machine vision, models of emotion, and computer companions. But many people would say that the field as a whole wouldn't exist in a truly wise society. If that's correct, then to adopt wisdom overnight would be to abandon the field for ever. No more might-bes. Where cognitive science differs from other computer-using sciences, such as chemistry, biology, or meteorology, is that it offers us a picture of the human mind – indeed, of humanity as such. It's plausible that how we view humanity – how we conceptualize what goes on in people's minds when they think, act, decide, or emote – is itself a matter where wisdom, or the lack of it, is inherently involved. To give an obvious example: it seems prima facie reasonable to ask whether it's unwise, as well as being scientifically inadequate, to liken human beings to the behaviourist's leverpressing rats. Certainly, such claims have been made. Some were responses to Burrhus Skinner's lengthy defences of the wisdom (his meaning, if not his word) of behaviourism.34 But others came closer to home. Initially, cognitive science grew out of cybernetics, whose manifesto was published in 1948.35 As Norbert Wiener's subtitle (Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine) implied, humans were here being assimilated to machines. Many cultural commentators were outraged. By the late 1960s, by which time the man-machine analogy had developed hugely in scientific terms (and the military applications had burgeoned too), the outrage had grown – anger now often accompanied by despair. That cultural attitude was richly documented, and passionately defended, in Theodore Roszak's hugely influential book The Making of a CounterCulture.36 For Roszak, wisdom and cybernetics were poles apart. He wasn't concerned only – or even primarily – with bombs. Scorning the "commonplace contemporary idiocies which small minds are now busily elaborating into a Weltanschauung", he rued "the degradation of human personality" that he believed was resulting from the use of Wiener's cybernetic metaphors for mind. However, he said, this effect was no mere 34

B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948); B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971). 35 N. Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948). 36 T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969).

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philosophical bagatelle. For it was influencing military policy too: "Not even Jonathan Swift could have invented such pernicious lunacy as the balance of terror or thermonuclear civil defence".37 The "lunacy" was rooted in scientific and technological research in general, and especially in the work of RAND, the Stanford Research Institute, "and ever so many other military-industrial-university think-tanks” – which, as it happens, were crucial in the origins of cognitive science. Very recently, with the rise of A-Life, of computer models of dynamical self-organization, of "situated" robotics, and of "embodied" theories of thought and behaviour, post-modernist writers – naturally sympathetic to Roszak's views – have become somewhat less hostile to cognitive science.38 They still insist that "Cartesian", intellectualist, approaches (such as those of Newell and Simon) are fundamentally misguided. Although they don't normally speak in terms of "wisdom", the clear implication is that they deem that sort of cognitive science to be irretrievably unwise. But the newer approaches just listed, apparently, are not. This cultural volte face may seem surprising. But it's understandable when one considers that the 'reformist' cognitive scientists concerned propound a philosophy of mind that is broadly, and sometimes explicitly, drawn from Continental phenomonology. For that philosophical tradition is the background of post-modernism too. These particular cognitive scientists often cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger with approval.39 But whether that's a good thing is highly controversial. Heidegger, in particular, raises the hackles of analytically-inclined readers. One such has acidly remarked that the absence of any Hebrew translation, despite translations into twenty other languages, is a blessing: "the Jews have surely suffered enough already".40 The "suffering" is caused not only by the notorious unclarity of Heidegger's writing, and of post-modernist writings in general, but also by the "tide of unreason" that they have unleashed (already evident in Roszak's book). In general, those cognitive scientists who take phenomenology as 37

T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture, op. cit., p. 295. M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit, chap. 1.iii.c-d. 39 M. W. Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step (Cambridge , Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); H. L. Dreyfus, "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian", in P. N. Husbands, O. Holland, and M. W. Wheeler (eds.), The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp.331371. 40 P. Edwards, Heidegger's Confusions (New York: Prometheus, 2004), p. 11. 38

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their inspiration rarely realize that they risk undermining both the concept of truth and their (usual) faith in the realism of science. In my judgment, they are not only mistaken but also unwise to scorn scientific realism in this way. Specifically, they risk abandoning the principles of respect for evidence and "truth" (a concept also roundly rejected by post-modernism) which inspire science and enable it to progress. In other words, their emphasis on embodiment could put cognitive scientists into the wrong front-line in the Science Wars.41 I say "the wrong front-line", but I have to admit that there are two philosophically defensible front-lines. In other words, there's no knockdown argument on either side: ultimately, one must opt (sic) for one side of this philosophical fence or the other.42 The strongest argument for scientific realism is that the undeniable practical successes of science are best accounted for by what philosophers of science call "inference to the best explanation".43 But it's in the nature of this type of reasoning that what appears to be the best explanation may later turn out to be mistaken (compare: despite all the initial evidence, it wasn't Jo Bloggs who stole the diamonds). Here too, then, there are no easy answers. Most cognitive scientists would agree with me in placing themselves on the realist side of the fence. Even some of the self-professed Heideggerians explicitly reject the anti-science, anti-realist, bias of Heidegger himself – as well as his refusal to countenance psychological phenomena, or Dasein, in non-human animals.44 Only a few, such as Francisco Varela, take their neoHeideggerian commitment so far as to reject scientific realism outright. And despite Varela's being an intellectual hero to the "embodied mind" movement in general, most of his followers don't ever consider this philosophical question, and (in my opinion) would be somewhat embarrassed if forced to do so. In sum, to follow the 'strong programme' in the philosophy of science is unwise.45 It would be unwise, too, to drive the neo-Heideggerian approach in cognitive science to its logical conclusion. Both these positions would foster a self-defeating and irrational relativism, and undermine the 41

P. R. Gross and N. Levitt (eds.), Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 42 M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine, op. cit., chaps. 1.ii.b and 16.vii-viii. 43 P. Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1991). 44 M. W. Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, op. cit. 45 For an early statement of the strong programme, see D. Bloor, "Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 4 (1973), 173-191.

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investigative enterprise that cognitive scientists are engaged in. To put the point another way, it would be unwise to take the advice of commentators such as Rom Harré (1994, 2002), or even the lately-reconstructed Bruner (2002), both of whom recommend a cognitive science based on narrative and hermeneutics, not on experimental method and/or computer modelling.46 The exercise of wisdom in putting humans first when doing science (in setting the research agenda) shouldn't spill over into metaphysics. Here, I must confess to an uneasiness with Maxwell's work. In insisting that social enquiry must precede science, he appears to believe not merely that social concerns should guide science's research agenda (and, of course, its applications) but also that the philosophy of the conscious human subject/society must underlie the epistemology of science itself. Despite his insistence that the status of evidence remains untouched, that view seems perilously close to the sort of irrationality I've just criticized. Certainly, one should reject what John Ziman has called "the Legend": the comforting (to scientists) myth that science is a wholly objective, disinterested, and fairminded search for truth.47 But to scorn objectivity and truth as selfdeceiving grands recits48 throws the scientific baby out with the philosophical bathwater. Just how far Maxwell's metaphysical position stems the flow of this epistemologically corrosive bathwater I'm not sure. 8. Conclusion Cognitive science has depended for its growth on our communal lack of wisdom in two senses, as we've seen. It needed fancy computing technology, which – in our world – wouldn't have been developed but for the military. And a large proportion of the research that was done was directly funded from military sources (not just in the USA, but also in the UK and elsewhere). Moreover, even research done for wholly innocent purposes, using non-military money, and pursuing themes seemingly utterly 46

R. M. Harré, "The Second Cognitive Revolution: From Computation to Discourse", in A. Phillips-Griffiths (ed.), Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 25-40; R. M. Harré, Cognitive Science: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Sage, 2002); J. S. Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). 47 J. M. Ziman, Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000). 48 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984).

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irrelevant to war (the meaning of it, for example) has often been exploited for military use. Anything that is published, whether in printed media or on the Internet, can potentially be used by someone with sufficient imagination to see its relevance to their own concerns. That last point applies to all research, of course. Cognitive science isn't alone in providing potential grist to the military mill (and the pornographic mill, and the capitalist mill, and ...). As for the first two points, they don't apply to the traditional sciences as such, for these were already established by the mid-twentieth century. But they do apply to much current (and future) work, including entire specialist sub-areas, in those sciences. If for this reason cognitive science is compromised by the lack of wisdom, it's in good – or anyway, very crowded – company. I've argued that this was inevitable, that without computers there would have been no cognitive science as we know it. "So what?," you may ask. "Would that have been a bad thing?" Maxwell's position doesn't allow me to answer merely by saying – what in fact I believe – that this approach has given us a hugely more satisfactory (more rigorous, more detailed, and more testable) scientific picture of the mind/brain than any other available candidate. For Maxwell, that's not enough. I need to say also – again, what in fact I believe – that having a better understanding of the nature of mind, and how it works, can potentially help us in our everyday lives. In domestic, official, and clinical contexts alike, such understanding could help us to avoid some of the interpersonal prejudices and misunderstandings, and the therapeutic helplessness, so widely current today. Of course, it could also help us to engage in deceit, manipulation, and brainwashing. Again, cognitive science finds itself in a motley crowd: all scientific knowledge is potentially dangerous. But Maxwell doesn't argue that science should therefore be avoided. Rather, we should bring our wisdom to bear in using it (or ignoring it), as well as in seeking it. As for "Where could we go from here?", Section 6 implied that this is the most difficult question of all. Even assuming that a large body of (influential? grassroots?) people were to be persuaded of Maxwell's position, refashioning and diverting the stately ship of science – and science policy – would be no small task. It's not even clear where it would be most sensible to begin. In sum, there are no easy answers.

How Should Research be Organised? An Alternative to the UK Research Assessment Exercise Donald Gillies 1. Introduction This paper is a sequel to an earlier paper1 which criticized the UK Research Assessment Exercise (henceforth RAE), and argued that its likely effect is to make the research output of the UK worse rather than better. The aim of the present paper is to complement this criticism by putting forward a positive suggestion, and so, in the paper, I will outline a way of organising research which I think would produce better results than the RAE. Perhaps it would be as well to begin by describing the RAE for those who are unfamiliar with it. The RAE was introduced in 1986 by Thatcher, and was continued by Blair. It works like this. At intervals of a few years, RAEs are carried out in all the universities of the UK. The first step is to appoint a committee of assessors in each subject. These assessors are usually academics working in the field in question in the UK. Next most members of each department in a subject have to select a set of pieces of their research. The department then submits all these pieces of research produced by its members to the assessment committee. The members of the committee study this research output, and, on its basis, grade the department on a scale running from very good downwards. The departments which score well on the RAE are provided with research funds. Those which don’t score so well are less fortunate. They are provided with much smaller funds for research, and the members of such departments have to spend more time on teaching. Recently there have even been moves in some universities to close altogether departments which perform badly on the RAE.

1

D. Gillies, “Lessons from the History and Philosophy of Science regarding the Research Assessment Exercise,” in Anthony O’Hear (ed.), Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007), pp. 37-73.

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As the RAE is an institution specific to the UK, it might be thought that a consideration of its merits would be of parochial interest only. However, this is not the case. Other countries, such as, for example, Italy, are considering introducing a RAE along the same lines of the UK. Moreover, as we shall see, the RAE involves methods, notably peer review, which are used in most countries for evaluation of research. My critique of the RAE applies to many of these methods. Finally the alternative to the RAE outlined in this paper is a system which could be adopted in any country. My suggested alternative to the RAE is designed to avoid the defects of the RAE which were described in my earlier paper. Thus to make the present paper intelligible without the need for reading the earlier one, I will briefly summarise my earlier critique of the RAE in section 2, and indeed add a metaphor: ‘throwing away the pink diamonds’, which helps to capture the key point of this critique. At the end of this section, I will show that the plan of this paper ties in very well with the philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell. One qualification should now be made. In this paper I will consider only non-laboratory research. This might seem a rather severe limitation since the popular image of research is of white-coated scientists working in a laboratory. However, non-laboratory research is in fact quite an extensive area. It includes all of the humanities such as history, literary and linguistic studies, philosophy, etc. It also includes a good deal of the social sciences, and in particular most of sociology and economics. Then there are disciplines such as mathematics, theoretical physics and computer science. I have two reasons for limiting myself to non-laboratory research. First of all it is the simpler case to consider, and thus is the more natural starting point for trying to devise a system for organising research effectively. It is simpler because the equipment needed, such as libraries, computers, etc., is automatically provided in any university. Thus the problem is only that of choosing the staff who should be allocated time for research. Laboratory research involves additional, and often very expensive, equipment. So there is the further problem of deciding what pieces of such equipment should be purchased. The second reason why I will not consider laboratory research is that I have never taken part in such research either as an individual or as part of a joint project. By contrast I have carried out a great deal of non-laboratory research which has been

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mainly in my own subject (history and philosophy of science and mathematics), but has also involved working on interdisciplinary research projects with computer scientists, mathematicians, and economists. My long years of carrying out research (so far 42 in number) have taught me that research is a strange activity which often works in quite counterintuitive ways. Thus it is highly dangerous for anyone without direct experience to suggest rules for how research should be organised. As I lack experience of laboratory research, I prefer not to discuss it. However, I do think that some of the principles developed in this paper for nonlaboratory research could be extended to laboratory research, and I hope that someone who is sympathetic to the approach and has experience of laboratory research will carry out this extension. 2. Critique of the RAE. Throwing Away the Pink Diamonds I will now give a summary of the arguments against the RAE presented in my earlier paper2. The RAE relies on what is known as peer review. This means that the value of a researcher’s work is judged by a group of researchers working in the same field – the ‘peers’ of the given researcher. Indeed the RAE in a sense involves a double use of peer review. To be entered for the RAE, a work usually has to be published in an academic journal, and most academic journals use peer review to assess whether submitted papers are worth publishing. Then of course the already published work is submitted to the RAE committee for a further peer review evaluation. There is, however, a major problem with peer review. A study of history shows that it can in some cases go very wrong. It can happen that the majority of contemporary researchers in a field can judge as worthless a piece of research which is later, with the benefit of historical perspective, seen as constituting a major advance. In my earlier paper1, I consider in detail three examples of major research advances which were judged by contemporary researchers to be valueless. The first is Frege’s introduction of modern mathematical logic, which has become an essential tool for computers. The second is Semmelweis’s introduction of antiseptic precautions in hospitals such as washing the hands with antiseptic. This is now routine practice, but Semmelweis’s suggestions when he introduced were regarded as absurd by the medical community of the time. The third 2

Ibid., pp. 60-61.

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is Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis which, when it was introduced, was considered absurd not only by the general public but by most professional astronomers of the time. To make matters worse, what the study of history shows is that peer reviews most often go wrong for the really important research advances. Suppose a researcher makes a small, but competent, advance of a routine kind. Peer reviews in such circumstances will usually be able to give his or her work a reasonable evaluation. When, however, a researcher makes an advance which is later seen as a key innovation and a major breakthrough, peer review may very well judge it to be absurd and of no value. An analogy will help to explain this crucial defect of peer review. Suppose we have a system to separate flawed diamonds, which have little value, from clear diamonds which are valuable. This system, let us suppose, works very efficiently in eliminating worthless flawed diamonds, but then it turns out to have a crucial defect. As well as eliminating the flawed diamonds, it eliminates the pink diamonds, and pink diamonds have a value a thousand times greater than that of the ordinary clear diamonds. Once our system had been found to have this defect by diamond producers, they would hastily stop using it. My claim is that systems based on peer review, such as the RAE, have exactly the same defect. They are liable to throw away the pink diamonds. I try in my earlier paper to clarify this point by introducing1 the distinction between Type I and Type II errors. A research assessment procedure commits a Type I error if it leads to funding being withdrawn from a researcher or research programme which would have obtained excellent results if it had been continued. A research assessment procedure commits a Type II error if it leads to funding being continued for a researcher or research programme which obtains no good results however long it goes on. In terms of our analogy with sorting diamonds, throwing away a pink diamond is committing a Type I error, while retaining a genuinely flawed and hence valueless diamond is committing a Type II error. Now the problem with the RAE is that it concentrates exclusively on eliminating Type II errors. Yet the history of science shows that Type I errors are much more serious than Type II errors. The case of Semmelweis is a very striking example. The fact that his line of research was not recognised and supported by the medical community meant that, for

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twenty years after his investigation, thousands of patients lost their lives and there was a general crisis of the whole hospital system. But how is it possible for peer reviews to go so wrong, and to throw away pink diamonds, i.e. to judge as worthless what are later seen as major advances in the subject? At first it may seem paradoxical that this should occur. After all, the peers, who do the reviewing, are all experts in the field and active researchers. Surely they, of all people, should be able to recognise good research when they see it. Despite the apparent strangeness of this situation, the reasons why it occurs can in fact be quite well explained using ideas from the philosophy of science, more specifically using Kuhn’s paradigms, and Lakatos’ research programmes. Kuhn argues that scientific research is usually carried on by groups of scientists who all accept, as the basis of their research, a general framework of assumptions, called a paradigm. In periods of ‘normal science’, the correctness of the paradigm is never questioned. Only in occasional revolutionary periods is the paradigm criticized, and a scientific revolution can result in an old paradigm being replaced by a new paradigm. Once the revolutionary period is over, however, normal science resumes but on the basis of the new paradigm rather than an old one. Given this model of scientific development, it follows that most researchers in a period of normal science will regard as absurd any development which contradicts the dominant paradigm. This provides a neat explanation of why the ideas of Frege, Semmelweis, and Copernicus were rejected by most contemporary researchers in the field. Later, however, when a new paradigm has been accepted, the ideas of Frege, etc. seem obvious to the experts in the field and they find it difficult to understand why they were rejected earlier. In terms of peer review, we can say that any idea contradicting the dominant paradigm is very likely to be rejected by peer review, but many such ideas will be seen later as introducing revolutionary advances in the subject. However, the failure of peer review need not be exclusively associated with scientific revolutions. It can occur in what Kuhn calls ‘normal science’ as well. To see this, let us suppose that research is being carried out on some problem and that four different research programmes have been proposed to solve it. We can further suppose that all four of the programmes are compatible with the dominant paradigm, so that we are not dealing with revolutionary science. It may be almost impossible to say at the beginning which of the four programmes is going to lead to success. Suppose it turns out to be programme number 3. Let us suppose further

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(which indeed is often the case) that initially programme 3 attracts many fewer researchers than programmes 1, 2 & 4. Now it is characteristic of most researchers that they think their own approach to the problem is the correct one, and that other approaches are misguided. If a peer review is conducted by a committee whose researchers are a random sample of those working on the problem, then the majority will be working on programmes 1, 2 & 4, and are therefore very likely to give a negative judgement on programme 3. As the result of the recommendation of such a peer review, funding might be withdrawn from programme 3, and the solution of the problem might remain undiscovered for a long time. This example shows not only why peer reviews can give the wrong answer, but also that Type I errors are more serious than Type II errors. Suppose programme 3 is cancelled in order to save money (Type I error), then all the money spent on research in the problem will lead nowhere. It will be a total loss. On the other hand if another programme (5) is also funded, the costs will be a bit higher but a successful result will be obtained. This suggests that funding bodies should make sure that some funding at least is given to every research school and approach, rather than concentrating on the hopeless task of trying to foresee which approach will in the long run prove successful. So we can sum up as follows. The main defect of the peer review system is that it is likely to throw away pink diamonds. Conversely anyone trying to design a system for organising research should ensure that the probability of throwing away pink diamonds is made as low as possible. Any suggested system for organising research should in my view be subjected to what I call the WFS test. This test consists in taking some leading research achievements from the past, and seeing whether those who carried them out would have fared well under the proposed system. If they would have fared well, the system passes the test. If they would have fared badly, it fails the test and should be altered. In the light of my earlier paper1, I consider the achievements of Wittgenstein (W), Frege (F), and Semmelweis (S). However, obviously other examples could be chosen. So far I have mentioned Frege and Semmelweis. The problem with Wittgenstein was a different one. Wittgenstein published nothing during the last 17 years of employment at Cambridge. On the current RAE system, he would have been classified as research inactive, and have had

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his research time removed and would perhaps even have been sacked. Yet during these 17 years Wittgenstein wrote the Philosophical Investigations, which many regard as the best philosophical work of the 20th century. To generalise from this case, we want our research system to allow researchers, if they are so inclined, to spend a long time polishing and repolishing their works before publication. We know that this strategy can sometimes result in durable masterpieces. The conclusion to be drawn from these various arguments is that the RAE is likely to encourage working within standard paradigms and mainstream research programmes, and making small contributions. It is likely to discourage new approaches and minority research programmes, and so tends to eliminate major innovations (pink diamonds). It is likely to encourage boring routine research at the expense of interesting, novel and exciting research. This analysis of the RAE ties in very well with the philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell, as I will now explain. It is a very great pleasure to contribute a paper to this volume in honour of Nick Maxwell since we have been friends during nearly all of those 42 years when the two of us have been carrying out research in London. We have met on numerous occasions and had as many stimulating discussions. What has made these discussions with Nick so valuable for me is that we always seem to agree on many things but not everything. Our two positions have a lot of overlap, but do not quite coincide. There is enough in common to make a discussion possible, with enough divergence to make it stimulating. I have chosen a paper on the RAE for this collection since Nick and I certainly agree in general attitude to the RAE, but yet, as usual, there is a difference as well. However, to discuss this matter more fully, let me revert to the formal academic style of ‘Maxwell’ rather than ‘Nick’. Maxwell discusses the RAE in the second edition (2007) of From Knowledge to Wisdom. A Revolution for Science and the Humanities. He makes encouraging remarks about my own paper on the subject, and goes on to reinforce my argument by giving a further series of examples of scientists and mathematicians whose work was not recognised for many years: There are many other cases of people making important scientific or intellectual contributions and receiving no recognition for their work for twenty years or more. Thomas Young’s discovery of the wave character of light via his interference experiment was initially dismissed by his peers. Gregor Mendel’s discovery of some basic

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laws of genetics famously had to wait several decades before it received recognition. This was true, too, of Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, and John Waterston’s contribution to statistical mechanics. Georg Cantor met with opposition when he developed set theory – of profound importance to the whole of mathematics. E. Stückelberg failed to receive recognition for his important contributions to quantum field theory. And Guy Callendar failed to convince when he announced in 1938 that increased emissions of carbon dioxide as a result of human activity was leading to global warming. These cases, I am sure, merely scratch the surface. 3 Maxwell then goes on to relate the RAE to the question of wisdominquiry. Maxwell’s general position is that current academic life is dominated by a philosophy of knowledge and that there should be a shift towards a philosophy of wisdom. However, he thinks that the RAE will impede this desirable development, saying4 ‘It may well be especially difficult for a revolutionary ideas like that of wisdom-inquiry to get a fair hearing in an academic world constrained by the RAE.’ Maxwell also gives a striking specific example of a case where the RAE is inhibiting wisdom-inquiry. He writes: But how, it may be asked, may the RAE impede acceptance and implementation of wisdom-inquiry? To begin with, as long as knowledge-inquiry intellectual standards are in place, the RAE will make it even more difficult to do wisdom-inquiry research. The point was made to me in a striking way by Dr. Caren Levy, director of the Development Planning Unit at University College London. Her work and research, like those of others in her Unit, is concerned to help the poor tackle their problems of living in Africa and Asia. Here, if anywhere in academe, wisdom-inquiry is being put into practice. But this creates a dilemma. On the one hand, Dr. Levy can publish papers in relevant academic journals, which gain recognition by the RAE but 3

N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom. A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (Second Edition, London: Pentire Press 2007), p. 317. 4 N. Maxwell, op. cit., p. 318.

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may not lead to anything of value in the real world. On the other hand, reports produced by Levy, dealing with developmental problems in Africa and Asia, widely read by many grappling with these problems, taken up and implemented by the UN and other organizations, and having practical consequences of value in the real world, receive no recognition from the RAE at all, because the relevant reports are not published in academic journals acknowledged by the RAE. In this way, the RAE increases the pressure on academics to produce orthodox, and often useless, knowledge-inquiry work – pressure, I hasten to add, which Levy resists (even if other departments do not).5 This criticism of the RAE seems to me entirely correct. Moreover the system proposed here as a replacement of the RAE would, I believe, genuinely help researchers like Dr Caren Levy do their valuable work. It is clear from this that Maxwell and I are in very broad agreement regarding the RAE, and yet there is still, I think, a difference between our positions – even if this difference is perhaps one of emphasis. The difference is this. My own criticisms of the RAE and suggestions for an alternative are based very strongly on considerations which may not have the same weight for Maxwell. These considerations are a desire for efficiency and a wish that research should lead to wealth-generating innovations. A system of organising research should, in my view, be as efficient as possible where efficiency is measured by the amount of good quality research produced per dollar, euro, or pound put into financing the system. The RAE reduces efficiency in this sense because it is costly both in money and the amount of time researchers have to devote to it rather than to getting on with their research. Moreover the RAE reduces the amount of good quality research produced. My proposed alternative is designed to be more efficient. Regarding wealth-generating innovations, the most striking of these (as I discuss in my earlier paper1) are made possible by the real breakthroughs in research (the pink diamonds). The RAE, however, reduces the probability of such breakthroughs by forcing researchers into routine, incremental, research, and so it reduces the probability of important wealth-generating innovations. This interest in increasing efficiency and helping to promote wealthgenerating innovations puts my thinking more in line with the more 5

N. Maxwell, op. cit, p. 317-18

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standard government approach, since almost all governments profess these goals, even if their policies are sometimes a hindrance rather than a help to achieving them. At this point, however, it might begin to seem that there is no way of solving the problem of designing an efficient way of organising research. The key problem is that we cannot properly judge the value of a research contribution until about 30 years after it has been made. Contemporary valuations are shown by history to be very misleading. Contributions which in the perspective of history are seen to be major advances are sometimes judged to be valueless by contemporary researchers. Conversely research which seems brilliant at the time is often seen later to be merely a passing fashion which proved to be of no significance in the long run. If, however, we can only evaluate research properly after 30 years, how can we decide now what research to fund. The problem does indeed look insoluble. But the problem is not really insoluble. All that is needed is a new approach, which I will now explain in outline and then elaborate in the rest of the paper. What we need to do is to shift our focus away from research to another activity which nearly always accompanies research, namely teaching. So far we have considered the effects of the RAE on the research output of the UK, but what about its effect on teaching in the UK universities? In the next section (3) I will argue that the RAE as well as damaging the UK’s research output also damages the teaching in UK universities. It is just as bad for teaching as it is for research. However, this result suggests the following idea. The RAE was designed to improve research, but ended up damaging both research and teaching. Suppose now we shift from an attempt to improve research to an attempt to improve teaching. As the results of teaching are more straightforward to assess, this might be an easier problem to deal with. Moreover, if we solve it, it could be that the new system designed to improve teaching might as a spin-off (so to speak) improve research as well. It could be that the connections between teaching and research are such that improving one will result in an improvement in the other, just as damaging one results in damage to the other. I believe that this is really the case, and will show that a system proposed to improve teaching will, as an indirect consequence, improve research as well. This will be done in section 4. So, in a nutshell, the

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system I propose is designed to improve teaching, and it will be shown that the effect of this improvement will be to improve research as well. 3. Why the RAE Makes Teaching Worse There are three separate reasons why the RAE has a bad effect on teaching in the universities, and I will deal with these in turn. The first, and perhaps most obvious reason is concerned with the reward and hence incentive structure introduced by the RAE. Departments get more money if they do well on the RAE, and have their budgets cut if they do badly. However, whether the department’s teaching is good or bad has little, if any, effect on its income. In these circumstances, economic rationality dictates that departments should concentrate their efforts on doing well at the RAE, but not bother so much about teaching. Of course humans are not entirely motivated by economic rationality. Many academics feel they have a professional duty to teach the students well, and this sense of duty may counteract the dictates of economic rationality. Still economic rationality is bound to have some effect, and so the incentive structure introduced by the government in the shape of the RAE is bound to have a negative effect on teaching. Against this argument, it might be pointed out that the government has also introduced an assessment of the quality of teaching in departments, the QAA assessment (or QAAA), and this will ensure, so it could be claimed, that there is no decline in the quality of teaching. The problem here, however, is that there are rewards for doing well on the RAE and penalties for doing badly, but no such rewards and penalties exist for the QAAA. Hence once again economic rationality dictates not paying much attention to the results of the QAAA. But why are there are no rewards and penalties for performance on the QAAA? Could they not be introduced? A little reflection, however, shows that the two cases are not symmetric. Suppose a department does well on the RAE. It gets a larger budget and this translates into the staff getting more research time and having to do less teaching. Given the present structure of universities, this is interpreted as a reward. Similarly doing badly on the RAE, and hence having less research time is interpreted as a punishment. But now suppose we wanted to introduce similar rewards and punishments for performance on the QAAA. How could it be done? If a department did well on the QAAA, this should, if the two cases were really parallel, result in the staff having more teaching time. However,

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unfortunately, this would be interpreted as a punishment, and so departments would endeavour to do badly on the QAAA in order to escape this punishment. But could we then give more teaching to those departments which did badly on the QAAA, and less teaching to those which did well. This would give the correct incentive for departments to do well on the QAAA, but the net result would be that teaching would be done more and more by those departments which were bad at teaching. This is hardly desirable. The net result is that a department’s performance on the QAAA has little effect, and the QAAA is largely just another timewasting bureaucratic exercise. Let me now go on to the second reason why the RAE has a negative effect on teaching. This is connected with a curiously out-dated feature of the RAE. The RAE assesses departments, thereby presupposing that departments are the units of research. Now 30 or 40 years ago, that was largely the case. Research schools were indeed principally located in specific departments. However, during the last 20 or so years, this has been completely changed by the development of globalisation. Everyone knows that globalisation has transformed the world economy, and it has similarly transformed research. Typically nowadays research groups, far from being located in single departments, are scattered throughout the world. Their members communicate on a day to day basis by email, and meet regularly at international conferences. I can illustrate this change by own experiences. When I started research as a graduate student working for a PhD, I joined the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics in 1966. The head of department was then Professor Sir Karl Popper, and my supervisor was Imre Lakatos. At the time this department was indeed the centre of a very distinctive research school in history and philosophy of science and mathematics. In the last 20 years, I have continued to do research in the history and philosophy of mathematics, but I have never had a colleague in my department who was researching in this particular area. Did this mean I was isolated and had no one with whom to discuss the problems of the field? On the contrary, I have had many more discussion partners in the last 20 years than I did in 1966. The only difference is that, far from being in the same department, they are located all over the world. Of course these days that does not prevent regular

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discussions by email, and regular meetings in diverse places. This is wellillustrated by listing some of the collections of papers produced by this lively and stimulating group of researchers. I edited one such collection: Revolutions in Mathematics, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1992.6 There were 12 authors – no two of whom were in the same department. By location 1 was from China, 3 from Germany, 1 from Italy, 3 from the UK, and 4 from the USA. However, 1 of those located in Germany was an Italian national, as was one of those located in the USA. As can be seen, we have here a truly multi-national research group. Subsequent collections of papers in this field tell the same story. One published by Kluwer in 2000 was entitled: The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge, and was edited jointly by Emily Grosholz of the Pennsylvania State University in the USA, and Herbert Breger of the University of Hannover, Germany.7 It was the revised proceedings of conferences held in Pennsylvania State University in 1995 & 1996. Next in the series is: Mathematical Reasoning and Heuristics published by King’s College Publications in 2005. This was edited by Carlo Cellucci of Rome University and myself.8 It contains the revised proceedings of a conference held in Rome University in 2004. I mention this example from my own experience because I believe that it is typical. The research group based on a single department or university has largely disappeared to be replaced by multi-national research groups. This parallels the increasing transformation of national companies into multi-national companies. From my own experience I would say that this new form of research organisation is much superior to the old. It allows a much wider range of contacts and discussion partners than did the old system, and this is very important in specialised fields. It also leads to much better human relations within the group, and many fewer quarrels. If a number of researchers, in the same field but holding different opinions, see each other every day in the same department, the outbreak of quarrels in more or less inevitable. (Such quarrels were a striking feature of the philosophy department at the London School of Economics in the late 1960s.) Moreover the situation is 6

D. Gillies (ed.) Revolutions in Mathematics (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992). 7 E. Grosholz and H. Breger (eds.) The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer 2000). 8 C. Cellucci and D. Gillies (eds.) Mathematical Reasoning and Heuristics (London: King’s College Publications 2005).

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made worse by the fact that members of the same department are often competing against each other for promotion. Discussion by email and occasional meetings cools the situation, and makes such quarrels less likely. Moreover the members of a multi-national research group are not competing against each other for local promotions. Indeed they can help each other to obtain such promotions. If the group as a whole succeeds internationally, its members are more likely to succeed in their own countries. All this leads to a more pleasant and constructive atmosphere within the research group. Whoever designed the RAE was, however, obviously not aware of these developments, and, as a result, the RAE introduces incentives which have a negative effect. Although university departments are ceasing to be centres for research groups, they remain centres for teaching. Students join a particular department and take most of their courses within that department. If a department is offering degrees in a particular subject, then it is in the students’ best interest for it to make appointments in every branch of the subject. Each branch will then be taught by a specialist in that particular field, who will know more about it, and be able to present the results better. This appointments strategy which is best for teaching, is, however, undermined by the RAE. If a department wants to do well in the RAE, it has to present itself as being an international leader in some particular branch of research. To do so, the best appointments strategy is to appoint a large number of staff in one particular branch so that it can then claim to be internationally known for that speciality. So, for example, a mathematics department might appoint researchers in a particular branch of mathematics, say category theory, as half its staff. It can then claim to be a world leader in research in category theory. The problem here is that students taking a mathematics degree in that department do not want half their courses to be in category theory. They want a broad coverage of the subject. This means that either the syllabus of the degree offered will be highly distorted, or half the courses will be taught by people who are not specialists in that field. Either way, teaching is bound to suffer. Many departments in the UK have followed just such an appointments policy in order to shine in the RAE, and this must have had a negative effect on teaching. The irony of the situation is that researchers in a particular speciality are being collected into a single department just at the time when

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the emergence of globalisation and multi-national research groups makes this quite unnecessary and indeed undesirable. It is interesting to note here how damage to research is going hand in hand with damage to teaching. The RAE is inhibiting the development of the superior multi-national research group, while, at the same time, encouraging an appointments policy which is worse for teaching students. I now pass to the third reason why the RAE is damaging teaching in UK universities. I will explain this by a fictional example which is in fact based on a real life case. It will be clear to the reader why I do not want to give the details of the actual characters involved. My fictional characters are a Ms A and a Mr B. Ms A is a good researcher but a bad teacher. She has a brilliant facility for generating new ideas and lines of research. She can quickly turn out papers which are admired by her peers and published in the top journals. Unfortunately, however, Ms A cannot get her ideas across very well to a student audience. She is rather shy and tongue-tied, and cannot understand the difficulty which some students have in grasping points which to her are obvious. Mr B is exactly the opposite. He is highly studious, and knows his subject well. Unfortunately though, he just doesn’t seem to get many new ideas when it comes to research. Moreover while Ms A can dash off a research paper in a couple of days, for Mr B writing is a slow and painful process and he may take months to complete a short article. On the other hand, once in front of a class of students, Mr B is in his element. He speaks well with a great command of rhetoric. He is a charismatic figure loved by the students, and expounds even the hardest points so clearly that every one can understand them. In this fictional example, based on reality, common sense obviously dictates that Ms A should do more research and less teaching, while Mr B should do less research and more teaching. Before the RAE, such an arrangement would without doubt have been made informally. I will now show, however, that a desire to perform well on the RAE could lead to exactly the opposite allocation of research time. The rules of the RAE have varied over time, but in most RAEs, including the present 2008 one, there has been an upper limit to the number of items (papers or books) which an individual member of staff can submit. In the current RAE it is 4. Moreover the more members of staff of a department who can submit to the RAE, the better the rating of the department is likely to be. Now suppose, to continue our fictional narrative, that there is a five year period from the last RAE to the next one, and that a year and a half has elapsed. The prodigious Ms A has already

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completed 4 brilliant papers, while Mr B the poor researcher and slow worker hasn’t even managed to complete one. The head of department now considers what must be done to get the best rating for the department at the next RAE. Ms A has already completed all that needs to be done, and to a very high standard. Thus there is no point in giving her more research time. Mr B is a slow coach, but, if he is given a lot of extra research time, he might just manage to get the necessary 4 papers completed. Thus the rational policy for doing well on the RAE is to cut Ms A’s research time and give her more teaching, while allocating more research time and less teaching to Mr B. Thus the requirements of the RAE lead to a strategy which makes the teaching much worse for the students, and, at the same time, reduces the quality of the department’s research output. Having shown that the RAE reduces the quality of teaching, I will argue in the next section that measures to improve teaching will have a positive effect on research as well. 4. Why Rewarding Teaching Will Improve Research I am dealing in this paper with non-laboratory research. The vast majority of such research is carried out in universities by academics who are not exclusively research workers. In fact these academics generally have 3 rather different activities in their work, namely (1) research, (2) teaching, and (3) administration and management (which I will abbreviate to admin). There are typically 4 grades in the academic hierarchy. In the UK, academics start at the lecturer grade, and can then, if they are fortunate, obtain promotions to senior lecturer, reader, and finally professor. Most universities internationally have four grades of this type, though they often have different names. As regards obtaining promotion, however, there is a very striking difference between the 3 academic activities just listed. Promotions can be obtained for either research or admin, but rarely, if ever, for teaching. An academic who concentrates on teaching might, if he or she is lucky, obtain a promotion from lecturer to senior lecturer, but, generally speaking, that is as high as he or she can hope for. To get to a readership or professorship, success in research or admin is what counts. Typically someone might be at the reader grade,

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and then after taking on an important admin job, such as head of department, would obtain a professorship. Of course professorships are sometimes obtained just by success in research with little admin activity. However, admin is usually a better bet than research for climbing the ladder. The highest grade a research specialist is likely to obtain is professor, while a specialist in admin can go to higher and better paid jobs such as dean, pro-vice-chancellor, or even head of the whole university. I remarked earlier that teaching is at present of low status in UK universities, and having to do more teaching is usually regarded as a punishment. This is not, I claim, because teaching at university level is an intrinsically unpleasant or unrewarding activity. Quite the contrary is the case. Teaching bright students who give a stimulating feedback, preparing new courses covering the latest discoveries in the field, etc., all these can be very enjoyable and intellectually demanding. Indeed, generally speaking, teaching is a much more interesting activity than admin. Still ambitious and talented academics prefer to do research or admin, and this is for the obvious reason that work in research or admin can enable a person to climb the status hierarchy, while work in teaching cannot. How can this situation be put right? There is an obvious way. The criteria for promotion must be altered so that it is just as easy, or perhaps even easier, to climb the ladder by working as a teacher as by working at research or admin. Actually it is much easier to assess a person’s performance as a teacher than to assess someone’s performance as a researcher. The quantity of teaching carried out in terms of number of hours and number of students is immediate. As usual, an assessment of quality is more problematic, but not nearly as problematic as is the case with research. One can use student feedback, and exam results. Then there are more subtle and important criteria, such as those of introducing new teaching methods, up-dating courses to contain the latest results in the field, and so on. Note, however, that I am not arguing for teaching only posts. In fact I will argue against such posts in a moment. My argument is that an academic’s teaching activities should count just as much towards promotion as his or her research and admin activities. If this were to happen, the status of teaching would rise, and the quality of teaching would improve. I will next show that this would also improve the quality of research. I will now give an outline of the system I propose. As we have seen, academics have 3 activities between which they divide their time, namely (1) research, (2) teaching, and (3) admin. The problem is how research

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time should be allocated. The RAE attempts to solve this problem along the following lines. An assessment is made of how good an academic department is at research and those departments which are better are allocated more research time. Then, following assessments within the department itself, this is translated into more or less research time for individuals. There are two fundamental difficulties with this approach. First of all carrying out the assessments is very costly, and secondly their results are very dubious. It is perfectly possible that someone who is really a brilliant researcher could end up being allocated little or no research time, thereby throwing away a pink diamond. Instead of this approach, I therefore propose that academics themselves should decide whether they want to do more research, more teaching, or more admin. This I call the principle of self-selection. It will be seen at once that this principle solves both the main problems besetting the RAE. First of all it becomes unnecessary to carry out a complicated assessment of all researchers, and so there are enormous cost savings. Secondly, the risk of committing a type I error (throwing away a pink diamond) is reduced almost to zero. It is not possible to recognise the pink diamonds of research immediately, but they all have one characteristic in common. They love research and are very keen to do it. Thus, given a principle of self-selection, they would all go for the research option. However, at this point, many readers will perhaps smile and conclude that I am proposing a purely utopian scheme which has an obvious flaw. Surely, the objection will be made, if a principle of self-selection is adopted, everyone will opt for research whether they are pink diamonds or plain incompetents, and so it will be impossible to get any teaching or admin done. This objection has an apparent force because there is a certain hypocrisy in academic circles. I have yet to meet an academic who did not claim that what he or she really loved best was research. However, observing the behaviour of those who make such professions, one has to conclude that they are often false. Academics typically start with great enthusiasm for research, but, after a number of years working at research, they often become rather bored with it. They may have run out of ideas. They may have come to realise that their youthful hopes of becoming the next Einstein were an illusion, while the reality is that there are quite a number of younger researchers doing better than they are. In these

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circumstances the sensible move is into administration and management where a tempting career ladder stretches before them. Indeed many who do switch from research to admin may have carried out quite a lot of brilliant research, but do not think they have the capability of continuing. This is often the case with mathematicians who characteristically make their best contributions when young. Several eminent mathematicians who have proved deep theorems in their youth switch in middle life into administration and management and are often successful at that as well. In so doing they are following in the footsteps of the great Sir Isaac Newton. His masterpiece Principia Mathematica was published in July 1687 when its author was 44. However, Newton did not spend the rest of his life carrying our research in mathematics and physics, but rather switched into a new career in administration and management, not in Cambridge University but at the Royal Mint in London. He became Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, and was promoted to Master in 1699. Apparently he ran the Royal Mint very well. What I am saying is that many academics would be quite happy to switch their activity away from research provided they do not lose any status thereby and indeed have instead the chance of climbing a career ladder. Given the present set-up, such academics will choose the admin path and shun teaching which gets nowhere. However, if a switch into teaching could lead to a successful career, many academics would be happy to follow that path, and indeed many might much prefer it to the admin path. These considerations lead to the following outline of my suggested system. A young academic is given a first appointment with a fairly generous allowance of research time. Later on, however, he or she can decide whether to continue with that amount of research time or to switch to doing more teaching or more admin or more of both. The incentive for doing less research and more teaching or admin would be that it would make it easier to obtain promotion and extra money. Obviously the easier it was to gain promotion and extra money by doing say teaching, the more academics would choose the teaching option. Hence the difficulty of getting promotion in the various kinds of academic activity could be adjusted empirically, so that, overall, the required amount of research, teaching and admin was carried out. To put it another way, academics would be tempted into doing more teaching and less research by the possibility of climbing the ladder more easily in this way, rather than, as in the present system, prevented from doing research because their

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department obtained a low rating on the RAE. However, though some academics would do less teaching and more research and others more teaching and less research, I would argue that all academics should do some of both. I strongly oppose the idea of teaching-only posts for the simple reason that they would result in a decline in the quality of teaching. Suppose someone is appointed to a teaching-only post. In the first few years he or she might be excellent, but, after twenty years, the subject would have moved on. With no research time to study the new developments our ‘teacher-only’ would inevitably have become out of date, and his or her teaching would suffer. Besides this, teaching in the final year of an undergraduate degree and at master’s level involves setting students research projects, and a teacher with no links to research would be unable to do this satisfactorily. The situation would be made even worse by the creation of teaching-only universities. So, if we want to improve teaching rather than make it worse, it is necessary that every university teacher should have an allocation of research time. This time need not necessarily be used for writing new papers and books (what could be called ‘active research’). It could be used for studying the latest developments in the field, attending research seminars etc (what could be called ‘study research’). Obviously carrying out active research requires also carrying out study research, but it is possible to do only the latter. Conversely I believe that all researchers should do some teaching. It is very helpful to any researcher trying to formulate new ideas to try to expound them to a student audience. Incomprehension by the students can be an incentive to improve the clarity of the formulation, while often students make critical comments and useful suggestions which lead to an improvement of the content of the research. Thus all academics should do some research and some teaching, but it is perfectly legitimate and indeed desirable that some should do more research and less teaching while other should do more teaching and less research. Remember the story of Ms A and Mr B given in the previous section. We have already indicated how promotions could be based on the quantity and quality of teaching. Promotions on the basis of admin could remain as they are now, while promotions for those specialising in research would be based on peer review carried out in something like the following manner. Researchers who wanted promotion on the basis of a number of

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years’ work since their last promotion would prepare an account of the research they had done with a list of books and papers published, and then submit this together with a selection of say the 3 or 4 of their publications which they consider to be the best. This submission would then be sent round to a number (say 3) of researchers in the same field for evaluation. Now it may seem rather inconsistent on my part to re-introduce peer review at this point, having criticized it earlier. However, there is no real inconsistency here. The problem with peer review in the RAE was that it might result in throwing away the pink diamonds. However, there is no such consequence here. A ‘pink diamond’ might fail to gain promotion on the present system, but there would be no question of him or her being ‘thrown away’, i.e. prevented from doing further research. Moreover pink diamonds are always recognised by their peers after the passage of a number of years. So, in most cases, pink diamonds would obtain promotions after a delay of some years. All this will become clearer if we now apply what I earlier called the WFS test to the proposed system for organising research. How would Wittgenstein, Frege and Semmelweis have fared in the proposed system? In fact all three would have been allowed to continue their research. Wittgenstein by refusing to publish anything would have failed to obtain promotion and so remained at a low grade. However, this would have suited him very well. Although heir to one of the largest fortunes in Europe, he gave all his money away and liked to live in what can only be described as ‘ostentatious poverty’. To have a low-grade and poorly paid academic job would have suited him down to the ground. Frege’s fate under the suggested system would be much what it was in real life. He was never recognised by his academic peers during his years at Jena University and in fact was never promoted to the highest grade (Professor Ordinarius). As it took nearly 40 years for his work to become generally recognised, then, in the suggested system, he would have had great difficulties in getting promotion on the basis of peer review, but he would still have been allowed to continue his research. However, Frege is really exceptional from this point of view. While it is not so uncommon for innovators to have to wait some years for their work to be recognised, the number of these years is usually less than twenty or thirty, so that an innovator who, like Frege, produced a great research work at 31 would usually have received enough recognition to climb to the top of the promotion ladder before retiring at 65. Semmelweis died at only 47, but had he lived to be 60, i.e. until 1878, he would have seen his approach

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become generally accepted by the medical profession, and would, without doubt, have had all the honours, promotions, and acclaim which he failed to obtain because of the shortness of his life. So we can conclude that the suggested system passes the WFS test which is so strikingly failed both by the RAE. As it would also be much cheaper than the RAE, it must surely be judged to be superior.

Our Place in Nature Jeremy Shearmur 1. Introduction I have known Nick Maxwell for many years, and when I was working as Popper’s assistant in the 1970s, I enjoyed many fascinating conversations with him and our mutual friend Larry Briskman.1 We shared much in common, both Larry and I having been educated in Popper’s philosophy department at the London School of Economics; Nick’s perspective, while distinctive and highly original, was in some ways close to ours. He, however, shared with Popper the concern – and the ability – to pursue his concerns into the detailed interpretation of science itself, whereas Larry and I were much narrower in our interests and abilities. Nick always impressed me as a philosopher: for his obvious intelligence, his concern with real-world issues, and for the passion with which he pursued his ideas – although this sometimes meant that conversations could become uncomfortable. For Nick combined a forceful personality and a staunch rationalism with an attachment to an almost mystical vision of how things should fit together. This was not so easy for him to communicate with others in such a way that they found it as telling as did he. Their failure to grasp this often led to a certain exasperation, on his part. It must have been particularly frustrating for Nick, because Larry and I both shared a certain sympathy for his approach, but did not go the whole way with him. Larry in the end moved away more radically from Nick’s approach – an approach stressing the significance of the critical articulation of aims and their rationality – towards a more minimalistic one influenced by Jagdish Hattiangadi, which was based simply on problem-solving.2 My view – on matters of philosophy other than in the social and political sphere – stayed closer to that of the later Popper. In the rest of this essay, I 1

Conversations towards which Chris van Meeteren displayed a remarkable tolerance. This may be found in his University of Edinburgh Ph.D. thesis, Problems and their Progress, which I hope will be published by Rodopi in 2009. The ideas of Hattiangadi’s which influenced him were ‘The Structure of Problems Part 1’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 8 (1978), pp. 345-365, and ‘The Structure of Problems Part 2’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (1979), pp. 49-76. 2

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will explain my reasons for disagreement with Nick, with particular emphasis on his approach to the philosophy of mind and, more particularly, to his key concern about our place in nature. In order to do so, however, I will need to say something about my disagreements with him more generally; for, as the reader of his work will appreciate, his treatment of issues concerning the philosophy of mind and our place in nature, is closely tied in with his views on epistemology and the philosophy of science. Of necessity, however, my discussion here must be limited in its character – not least because, in Nick’s approach, many things are deeply inter-connected. I can here, for reasons of space, engage with but one small sliver of his argument. However, I hope in the spirit of Nick’s own approach, I will address it in as broad a compass as possible. In what follows, I find myself playing a role which goes back to our conversations from the 1970s. For – and I fear in a way that will lead again to Nick’s frustration – my argument will draw broadly on my understanding of Popper,3 and on the view that while Nick’s concerns are important, they can be addressed in ways that do not involve going all the way with his perspective. Further – and here I suspect that I may be influenced by my having worked with Popper when I was his assistant – I will defend what I will call a prima facie interactionist pluralism, against what might be called Nick’s pluralistic physicalism. My ideas here are highly tentative; but it seems to me that, in fact, it is only such a view – rather than Nick’s own physicalism – which can actually do justice to his own passionate concerns about rationality in knowledge and above all about the role that our purposes, aims and ideals should play in the improvement of the world. 2. A Starting-Point: a Take on Popper’s Epistemology The point from which my argument starts relates to my reading of Popper’s epistemology,4 and in particular to the way in which from The 3

There are other issues – e.g. in respect of politics – in which I am in disagreement with both Nick and Popper; but I will not explore these further here, as I have written about them (in the context of Popper’s work) at some length in my Political Thought of Karl Popper (London: Routledge, 1996). 4 For a more detailed account of these matters, see my ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’ in John Shand (ed.), Central Works of Philosophy: Volume 4: The Twentieth Century: Moore to Popper (Chesham, Bucks: Acumen, 2006), pp. 262-86.

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Logic of Scientific Discovery onwards, his ideas about methodology were made explicitly dependent upon our view of the aims of science. In a sense, one might say that the very heart of Popper’s epistemology related to his choice for what was quite clearly a realist view of the aims of science, and his exploration of how one’s methodology would be different, depending upon whether one made a choice for a realist or for a conventionalist view of the aims of science. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery itself, as Popper did not then have a theory of how metaphysical claims could be appraised, this was made a matter of decision. Popper was later to develop a theory about the rational discussability of metaphysical theories, ideas about ‘metaphysical research programmes’, and to argue more specifically for the specific metaphysical ideas that he favoured.5 He also made reference to the role to be played by metaphysical ideas in the methodological appraisal of theories, notably in his ‘Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Knowledge’, in his Conjectures and Refutations. Popper also emphasised, in the ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ (1965) of Conjectures and Refutations, that in his view, our methods depend upon our aims; also explicitly arguing that ‘our system of aims not only changes, but it can also grow in a way closely similar to the way in which our knowledge grows’.6 However, Popper – on this issue and elsewhere7 – seemed reluctant to go back to his earlier writings, and to re-work them in the light of later developments. As a result, the different elements in his work on this topic seem to me not to have been properly integrated, and problems about them were never resolved. However, it seems to me that they leave open the possibility – which I am happy to grasp – that one can agree with Popper that our ideas about methodology (and epistemology) depend on our ideas about our aims, and that these are open to rational discussion and improvement. I would see this as usefully taking place particularly by way 5

Material about this is to be found in essays subsequently collected in his Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963), and also in his Postscript. See his Realism and the Aim of Science (London: Hutchinson, 1983); The Open Universe (London: Hutchinson, 1982); and Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (London: Hutchinson, 1982). 6 See Conjectures and Refutations, second edition, p. ix. 7 For example, as Agassi, for example, has discussed (compare, for example, his ‘Sensationalism’, Mind, 75, 1966, pp. 1-24), there is the issue of the implications of his Duhem-influenced ideas about ‘fact-correcting’ explanations (as set out, for example, in ‘The Aim of Science’, now in his Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)), for his earlier views about explanation.

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of the elaboration of competing research programmes which serve to guide our more specific work, and between which ongoing argument can take place not only as to the extent to which they are making empirical progress, but also as to the cogency, coherence etc of their key assumptions.8 What this offers – or so it seems to me – is a theory which differs significantly from Nick’s approach; not least because it does not make metaphysics part of science in the kind of way in which he does. In addition, while I would argue for the importance of the kind of discussion that Nick favours, and take the view that it can and should play an important role in the development of science, I perhaps differ from him in taking the view that the role that critical reason can play here is a modest one, and that our situation will typically be characterized by a pluralism of competing approaches. I will not even try to explain here what this would mean in more detail, or how exactly it relates, say, to Nick’s criticisms of Popper. I have described it, however, so as to make it clearer where I am coming from – and also why I suspect my perspective is still likely to be a source of continuing frustration to him. For, within such a perspective, one can allow for much of the kind of discussion that Nick thinks is so important, yet at the same time, take a more pluralistic view of things than does he, and can thus express agreement with many of his concerns, without, however, being in systematic agreement with him. From Nick’s perspective, however, what follows in this chapter will only get worse. 3. Reduction Here, I wish to bring together some ideas from two of Popper’s late essays, which – it seems to me – offer a distinctive approach to the issue of reduction, and provide some context to Popper’s various writings about ‘world 3’. The first of these essays is his ‘A Realist View of Logic, 8

Compare for a discussion of this – and a differentiation between it, and what seems to me the more instrumentalist approach that comes out of Lakatos – my ‘Popper, Lakatos and Theoretical Progress in Economics’, in N. de Marchi and Mark Blaug (eds), Appraising Economic Theories (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991), pp. 35-52, and for applications of these ideas to political philosophy, my Hayek and After (London: Routledge, 1996), and my ‘Commitment, Scholarship, and Classical Liberalism’, Independent Review (Spring 2003), available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_hb3316/is_/ai_n28991135?tag=artBody;col1.

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Physics and History’, which was republished in his Objective Knowledge.9 The second is his ‘Scientific Reduction and the Essential Incompleteness of All Science’, which was republished in one of the volumes of the Postscript.10 They seem to me important, as offering an alternative to Nick’s argument that the truth of physicalism is presupposed by science,11 and as forming a useful point of entry to the deployment of ideas suggested by Popper’s contributions to The Self and its Brain,12 in the criticism of Nick’s views. Let me turn, first, to ‘Scientific Reduction…’. Popper’s argument, there – which he set out, giving various examples from the history of science – was that scientific reductions have seldom been completely successful. Yet, at the same time, he argued that the method of scientific reduction – of attempting reductions – was extremely fruitful, and that it made sense to pursue it, even if we thought that it may not, in the end, be fully successful. This, in itself, immediately offers an alternative to Nick’s view of physicalism and of its significance for understanding our place in the world. For it allows the possibility that we may pursue physicalist methods – and may, indeed, value them, and learn an enormous amount from them – even if we think that physicalism as such may not actually be correct. But what of the other piece? Popper, in part of ‘A Realist View…’ argued that we should distinguish between what he called ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’ reductions. Scientific reductions, on his account, were cases in which we were able to explain one thing in terms of another. Clearly, given what he has written elsewhere about what is often referred to as ‘fact-correcting explanation’,13 we should take it that a successful example of a ‘fact-correcting’ explanation – say, in the philosophy of mind – would be if we were to explain while at the same time correcting 9

Karl Popper, ‘A Realist View of Logic, Physics and History’, now chapter 8 in his Objective Knowledge, op. cit. 10 Karl Popper, ‘Scientific Reduction and the Essential Incompleteness of All Science’, reprinted in The Open Universe, op. cit., pp. 131-62. 11 See, for example, his The Human World in the Physical Universe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), Chapter 3. 12 Karl Popper and J. C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York etc: Springer, 1977). I will not have the opportunity here to engage in detail with how Popper’s arguments from this book (his perspective should be distinguished from that of Eccles); but I would see the kind of argument that I am offering in what follows in the text, as being in the spirit of Popper’s work in this volume. 13 Compare, for example, his ‘The Aim of Science’, reprinted as chapter 5 in his Objective Knowledge, op. cit.

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conscious phenomena in terms of purely physical ones. Here, it thus seems to me that it was Paul Feyerabend who was correct in his version of eliminativist materialism,14 in offering us a picture of what a successful scientific reduction of the mental to the physical would look like (although I am sceptical – not least for some of the reasons that Nick himself advances – as to whether it is something that we will ever be able to accomplish). By contrast with this, Popper argued that ‘philosophical’ reductions – essentially, elaborate ways of talking, avoiding reference to what was to be reduced – were, to put it bluntly, a waste of space. One might, I think, elaborate upon this point, in terms that mark clearly the difference between a Popperian approach, and the kind of view that one gets, for example, in J. J. C. Smart. Popper’s argument is to say that current science cannot explain all features of the world, that we need to recognise this – and to appreciate that it means physicalism in its usual reductionistic form (rather than in its pluralistic, Maxwellian form) is false if it is taken as a claim about current science. If, however, we ask: but what about some future science? then on the face of it, if future science looks pretty much like current science, it is still false, while if we allow that future science might look very different from current science, it becomes difficult to discuss. (Although one might here argue that, if Nick is correct in his claims about the kinds of intelligibility that are likely to characterize the scientific enterprise as such, and if we can expect these to characterise future science, too, then reductionistic physicalism will remain false.) However, Popper’s methodological argument is that we should not – after the fashion of Ryle and of Smart – seek to diminish the scope and significance of what cannot be explained.15 How then should we proceed? Popper’s suggestion is that we should proceed initially by ‘fluffing up Plato’s beard’ – i.e. by describing adequately, in its rich and non-reductive fullness, the phenomena in which we are interested, prior to then trying to offer reductive scientific explanations of them. (Popper’s own account in ‘A Realist View…’ suggested that the fluffing up should take place prior to using Ockham’s razor; but – or so it seems to me – Popper should not have anything to do 14

See, for example, his ‘An attempt at a realistic interpretation of experience’, in his Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method: Philosophical papers volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 17-36. 15 And that we should also be acutely aware of the difference between a genuine scientific explanation, and talking about mental phenomena in a sort of non-scientific material mode, in the hope that we might, then, overlook them.

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with Ockham’s razor, just because, on the one side, what matters for the early Popper is testability rather than an a priori assumption that the world is simple in a particular manner. Alternatively, if one is going to work with assumptions about simplicity, they must be part of an arguable – and argued – metaphysics, after the fashion of Nick’s work, rather than a conventionalist-looking assumption that we should simply choose the simplest theories that fit our data.) Now if one puts the ideas from these two papers of Popper’s together, it seems to me that one has an interesting alternative to Nick’s account. It is one in which we should initially be as metaphysically expansive as seems adequate to us to do justice to the phenomena with which we are dealing. We then attempt scientific reductions. This, from Popper’s perspective, is an ongoing enterprise. We need also, however, to take seriously the tentative character of science, and – to take a view for which one can argue from the history of science – to take seriously the view that there is no reason to suppose that current science will necessarily look anything like what a completed science in the future might look like, in terms of the fundamental picture that it offers of the world. At the same time, however, it may well be the case that there is, in fact, genuine emergence: that the world may have to include things over and above what a completed science would tell us exists. In particular, with the emergence of life, and with the development of consciousness, cultures and traditions, and reflective human self-consciousness, we may, indeed, encounter phenomena which we can’t explain in scientific terms, but which, as such, have effects upon the physical world (i.e., here the world as physics and biology set out to explain it) which we cannot properly comprehend if we restrict ourselves to understanding things in terms depicted by our physical and biological theories. One might, I would suggest, interpret Popper’s work on ‘world 3’ in the spirit of these ideas – i.e. as an exercise in the fluffing up of Plato’s beard. Above all, this approach would mean both the recognition – at least at the level of prima facie description – of the existence of phenomena, including human mental states, moral ideas, aesthetic ideas and so on – which were not around at the time of the earliest days of the universe, which seem to emerge only with life and with human beings, and which on the face of it are not explicable in terms of current (and possibly future) physicalistic theories. With so much, Nick is in agreement.16 Where he would seem to 16

Although it is not clear to me what view he holds about the pre-existence of those things which become the concerns of personalistic explanation.

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me to disagree is that, from my more Popperian perspective, we need to insist that to understand what happens to the physical world, we have to understand these things as making a difference to the objects, if one can so put it, with which the physical sciences are concerned. For example, we need to appreciate that our ideas, as such, are, through the medium of human consciousness and purposive action, making a difference to the physical world. From such a perspective, our understanding of things in physicalist terms will not enable us to explain the differences to the world that these things make. It will be incomplete, not just in that sense that Nick would wish to emphasise – that there is a way of understanding and explaining things in personal terms – but, rather, because one cannot understand what is taking place, physically, without it. (It would be akin to an attempt to understand a world which was largely mechanical, but in which there were, say, also magnetic effects, in a purely mechanical way.) From my Popperian perspective, if these things had not been there, then the relevant changes would not have occurred in the physical world. Our concerns, from such a view, thus make a real difference to the world: this, in a sense, gives their pursuit its point. By contrast, Nick’s view – for all his passionate concern about the non-physical side of things, and despite the ingenuity of the account that he offers – seems to me to lead to the consequence that everything would have been the same in terms of the physical movements of things, had our physical theories been true, but we had, in fact, been zombies, or if we had been conscious, but our conscious experience was either a jumble, or was of a dream-like character which had no connection whatever to our physical movements. In the end, such a view seems to me inadequate to explain the very phenomena with which we are both concerned, and the passion that we share about the importance of improving our aims and institutions so as to make the world a better place. Indeed, given, particularly, the emphasis that Nick places upon the human, upon understanding, upon wisdom, and so on, it seems to me not a little ironic that, had we no conscious experience whatever, everything would, on his account, be exactly the same from the perspective of a (conscious) outside observer, who looked just at the physical aspects of things. 4. Maxwell and Popper on Our Place in Nature In the first chapter of his The Human World in the Physical Universe, Nick sets out – in a way which seems to me both moving and clear – just

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what the problem is that faces us. As the ‘new science’ developed from the time of Galileo, Descartes and Newton to our own day, we found ourselves faced with an ever more powerful understanding of the world – in which all that matters to us, in human terms, seemed to have no place. With Newton, the picture became more stark, such that Laplace was subsequently able to offer a picture of the world as being determinate, and as simply unfolding relentlessly into the past or future, on either side of his Intelligence. As Popper argued in his ‘Of Clouds and Clocks’,17 this led to what he called ‘the nightmare of the physical determinist’ – in which, one might say, the things about which we care most, seemed to play no role in explaining what happened in the world. Clearly, as science has subsequently developed, it may be argued that there is objective indeterminacy in the world. But this, as Popper suggested, is not as such of any help: the problem, indeed, is that what is occurring is purely physical: our ideas, and the human, more generally, play no causal role. One might re-title Popper’s point, ‘the nightmare of the physicalist’. To this situation, one might then contrast the different responses of Popper and of Nick. Popper’s view – or so it seems to me – was initially to argue that one needed, here, to focus upon physical science, and, indeed, science of a kind that looked as if it could offer a detailed explanation of human phenomena. While he did not, I think, put it quite like this, it seems to me that he can be seen as having argued against views – like Hume’s – which wish to bring psychological issues within the sphere of determinism. For there, Popper suggested, what is taking place looks more like a kind of ‘plastic control’. Popper argued, indeed, that we should recognise various forms of ‘plastic control’ – within the purely physical world – which stand between strict determinism and randomness. These, clearly, are to be found in the area of purpose-like phenomena. Of these, from the physicalist side, an account may be given in evolutionary terms: they are the product of natural selection. But it would seem to me that such an account (as Monod and others have claimed; see note 21), in fact replaces purpose, by a form of physicalistic simulation of it. However, it is worth noting that forms of ‘plastic control’ are – and this becomes particularly obvious at higher levels – typically characterized by a lack of detailed determinacy with regard to their effects. We are, obviously, familiar with this at the level of human action: if we turn a car to the right, then our concern is simply that it move within a certain area of 17

Popper, ‘Of Clouds and Clocks’, reprinted as chapter 6 in his Objective Knowledge, op. cit.

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the road, and what we are doing, while controlling what takes place, is indifferent between many detailed alternative ways in which this taking place might be physically realized. The same, indeed, is true of virtually all of our purposeful activities, and of the effects that they have on the world. (The artist, say, may step back from the canvas, analyse the problem-situation that they have on it, and then add some oil paint of a particular colour – possibly mixing it with others, first, on the palate, and then making what are far from tightly controlled, but nonetheless purposeful, moves with it on the canvas.) Popper’s argument – as is wellknown – is that we should understand such systems of plastic control as emerging with biological phenomena; and, further, that human activities (and, indeed, those of many animals), are best to be understood as involving a level of conscious plastic control over our actions; control which is not physical, but which shapes what happens to the physical world. It is worth bearing in mind here that once one moves into the realm of traditions which are passed between different individuals – such as Nick’s example of bluetits breaking through aluminium foil milk-bottle caps to get at cream18 - one faces an interesting problem from a physicalist perspective. It is that, as Nick’s own discussion brings out,19 it is going to be difficult to understand what could be being learned in purely physicalistic terms (just on the grounds that what is learned is a level of plastic control related to the achievement of a particular goal, rather than specific physically-specifiable actions, even though such specific actions will clearly be taking place). Let me return, however, to the main argument. Nick’s view is very different. Or, rather, it is complicated, because he fights a battle on two fronts. At one level, he is a physicalist – and thus is 18

The story would seem remarkable, in that the opening of milk bottle tops (see J Fisher and R. A. Hinde, ‘The opening of milk bottles by birds’, British Birds, 42, 1949, pp. 347-357), seems in fact to have been first reported in 1921, while the first patent for aluminium milk-bottle caps was issued in 1931 (see http://jasonclapper. com/history_of_milk_bottles.aspx). See also, for useful references, Louis Lefebvre, ‘The opening of milk bottles by birds: Evidence for accelerating learning rates, but against the wave-of-advance model of cultural transmission’, Behavioural Processes 34 (1995), pp. 43-54. 19 Cf., also, on this Friedrich Hayek’s discussion in ‘Scientism and the Study of Society’, in his The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), and also The Sensory Order (London: Routledge, 1952), (although I would not wish to endorse Hayek’s specific theory of the character of the human mind).

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in sharp disagreement with Popper, and seems unwilling to take seriously Popper’s ideas about the causal openness of the physical world. At another level, however, he argues passionately for the compatibility of physicalism with the idea that there are real properties of physical objects other than those with which the physical sciences are concerned. He argues that these things matter; that we can also explain things in terms of them, but also against the idea that they have been, or can be, explained by current or future science. Nick further develops an interesting account of how issues of free will can be handled in terms of his ideas, and develops in a fascinating manner an account of how his approach looks from an evolutionary perspective, here taking further speculative ideas in biology that were offered by Baldwin, Hardy and Popper.20 (Indeed, it is striking the degree to which Nick is able to make use of, but to develop in radically different ways, various themes that arise in Popper’s work.) Nick offers a powerful and original case. He also develops it with great power and sophistication, and it seems to me something of a scandal how little attention from philosophers Nick’s work has received. 5. Some Argument I think that Nick’s work is both powerful and important. I am also attracted to the robust realism of his account. At the same time, however, if I have understood it correctly, I also find it profoundly unsatisfactory. The key reason is this. Nick offers us something like a two-aspect, or possibly multi-aspect, theory as it will allow for lots of different kinds of explanation. This seems to me a real strength. It also takes science seriously – and, indeed, Nick displays a passion for science, and the ability and hard work needed to achieve a detailed understanding of it, which I can only envy. However, what concerns me is that each level of understanding would seem to be self-contained (subject, however, to the kinds of insight that Nick illustrates in his discussion of consciousness). By self-contained, I mean that, with regard, say, to the deployment of things in the physical world, all that would seem to matter, would be the kind of understanding that is given to us in the physical sciences. To be 20

Compare, here, Maxwell’s chapter on evolution in The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., and Popper’s discussion in, for example, chapter 7 of his Objective Knowledge, op. cit., not least his appendix on ‘A Hopeful Behavioural Monster’.

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sure, Nick tells us: there are, after all, all kinds of other things going on, too, and if, say, our concerns are to understand the character and activities of others, and so on, then we need to work in terms of personalistic understanding. But, it seems to me, what happens in the physical world is, on Nick’s view, to be understood purely in physical terms. The deployment of my fingers on the keyboard, the operations of my computer, the development and reception of works of art qua physical phenomena: all this, on his account, are, if understood simply as changes in the physical world, something that can be explained purely in terms of the operation of physical laws. (These, indeed, are explicable as such in terms of the Laplacean story, tempered by some indeterminism and the operations of natural selection.) While, if Nick is right, other things are going on as well, and other explanations may be offered, but it would seem nonetheless to be the case that everything would have been the same, physically, had this not been the case. From the point of view of physical theory, we can thus follow Monod and Dawkins, as seeing evolutionary theory as having explained away purpose.21 And as for ourselves and our activities, and the impact that we make on the physical world, everything would have been the same, had we been zombies.22 Here, it seems to me, we in fact have the re-emergence of the nightmare of the physicalist. For what happens in these cases appears to be completely explicable in terms of the state of the world hundreds of years before I was born, together, possibly with some injection of physical randomness and natural selection – as would be the case when Nick, in exasperation, and with that characteristic mix of passion, excitement and frustration that I know all too well from the conclusion of so many of our conversations in the past, tries to spell out once again, in terms so clear that even I could not misconstrue them, just how I have misunderstood him! 6. Conclusion I do not know what is true in this most complex and important field. As this short chapter indicates, I am drawn here more to what I would take to be Popper’s perspective than to Nick’s. Such a perspective stresses the importance of the fluffing up of Plato’s beard, although it is open to factcorrecting reductive argument. But there is no reason why someone who 21

See Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., chapter 7, note 15. 22 Compare The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p. 129.

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embraces such an approach should, in fact, think that such reductive argument will, in the end, be successful, or that physicalism is true. Here, indeed, I can take encouragement from that side of Nick’s argument which seems to me to pose real problems to those who favour a reductive physicalism. I.e. if Nick is right, here, then they will not in fact be able to explain human and conscious phenomena in scientific terms (even if, in fact, the physical aspects of what they are trying to explain would, in fact, fall purely within the realm of a self-contained physical world). I think that Nick’s work – here and elsewhere – is a quite remarkable achievement, and that it stands as a rebuke to the discipline of philosophy that grappling with it in its entirety has not played a larger role in the recent endeavours of philosophers. Despite what at times might seem its extravagance – coupled also with detailed argument, as analytical and science-informed as anyone who values those things could wish for – it seems to me to say something of the greatest importance, and also to call philosophers back to what they should be doing. At the same time, while I am encouraged and challenged by Nick’s work, I am reluctant to go the whole way with him. I disagree with his approach to politics – as, indeed, I do with that of Popper. While I think that the articulation and critical development of our aims is important, I am more attracted to the less dramatic version of this programme, as it seems to me to emerge from Popper’s work. Above all, however, I am reluctant to embrace Nick’s physicalism. I agree completely with Nick about the importance of the human, and the significance of understanding and explaining animal and human phenomena in purposive terms. But it seems to me that we can’t accord these things – about which Nick is rightly so passionate – the true significance that they have, unless we see them as actually making a difference to what takes place in the physical world. (That is, in insisting that unless those things were there, things could not have occurred, physically, in the way in which they did.) It seems to me that a repudiation of physicalism, and an embracing of the idea that the world, physically, is affected by these things, that it is causally open to them, is essential, as part of a research programme for making sense of ourselves and of the world in which we are living. As such a programme, in the Popperian tradition, it may itself be incorrect. But currently, it seems to me, there is every reason to pursue it. Let me offer one final picture – if not quite an argument – for why I take this view. Once upon a time, there was a man who was skilled in the making of walls out of old, broken bricks. He was able to fit together, in a

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remarkably impressive way, pieces of brick from all over the place, into smooth, stable and long-lasting walls. On seeing his work, however, one is struck by the way in which the fragments in the walls also cohere into impressive murals, spell out the names of the buildings behind the walls, or offer an ironic commentary upon their style or the taste of those who had constructed them. Some of them even form the notation of tunes which fitted the circumstances in which the walls were constructed. On being introduced to the person responsible, one would rush to congratulate him – only to discover, to one’s consternation, that in fact he was blind. He had selected his fragments of brick, purely on the basis of whether they would play their functional role in the construction of the wall, discarding those that did not fit. In such a case, there was no necessity that the bricks selected on the basis on which he was picking them out, should display the patterns that they did. There is even no necessity that they should have had any distinctive colour at all – in the sense that everything would have been the same, had they all been uniformly beige, or brick-red. And yet, they displayed all the human meaning and significance which I have, above, described. Unless those characteristics in fact played a role in the selection – unless it were the case that things could not have occurred, physically, as they did, unless they were present – the result would seem to be incomprehensible. Indeed, I think that one’s obvious reaction would be to say that the account of how the walls were constructed could not have been true, if such patterns were to be found (while admitting that the explanation was fully adequate, elsewhere; i.e. in terms of the selection of materials that played their role in the construction of the wall). This, in the end, illustrates my reaction to the account that Nick offers, and why – despite what he would take to be its absurdity – I am inclined towards an interactionist pluralism rather than a physicalist pluralism. I am sure, however, that Nick will not be mollified – but, rather, further frustrated – by the degree to which, from my perspective, I will be able to make use of his arguments for a pluralistic physicalism, as arguments against the reductionistic physicalism that, today, seems to me dominant in the philosophy of mind. But I might offer to him the suggestion that, to the degree to which that research programme can be rendered less popular, it may then be possible to better engage in the much more extended argument between our different pluralistic views, that these issues really demand.

Maxwell on Free Will, Science and Determinism Mathew Iredale 1. Introduction Nicholas Maxwell sees the problem of free will as just one part of a far larger, more complex and more important problem, which he terms the human world/physical universe problem: How is it possible for the world as we experience it to exist embedded in the physical universe? How can there be sensory qualities, consciousness, freedom, science and art, friendship, love, justice – all that which gives meaning and value to life – if the world really is more or less as modern science tells us it is?1 And modern science, says Maxwell, tells us that “The world is made up entirely of only a few different sorts of things – the fundamental physical entities” and that “Precise, exceptionless laws govern the way in which these entities change.”2 Given that science tells us that we ultimately are composed of these fundamental physical entities, our behaviour – making choices, falling in love, debating a moral point – is also completely governed by these precise, exceptionless laws. And if one takes a few moments to think about it – to really think about it – it is indeed a sobering thought. For Maxwell, it is “the central, fundamental problem of modern philosophy.”3 It is central to the work of many of the major figures of modern Western philosophy and straddles both science and philosophy, many of the great problems of philosophy falling within its sphere: the 1

N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe (Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p.1. 2 N. Maxwell, “Physics and Common Sense,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16, 1966, p.295 3 N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p.1

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mind-body problem, the problem of free will and determinism, problems of perception, epistemology, metaphysics, ontology and so on. Maxwell says that it is “the immense generality of the problem, and its profound importance, both for science and for life, for our ideas about ourselves and what is of value in life, that puts it centre stage, as the fundamental problem of philosophy.4” And he goes further still, stating that as he takes the somewhat “unfashionable view” that philosophy is concerned with our most general, fundamental problems it follows “that if the human world/physical universe problem is our most fundamental philosophical problem, then it is our most fundamental problem per se.”5 Maxwell admits that he appears to be alone in arguing that the human world/physical universe problem is the fundamental problem of philosophy, other philosophical problems being aspects of this fundamental problem. Indeed, I have been able to find only one other philosopher who frames the problem in a similar way; John Searle, who states in his recent book Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power: The most important question in contemporary philosophy is this: How, and to what extent, can we reconcile a certain conception that we have of ourselves as conscious, mindful, free, social and political agents with a world that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless particles in fields of force? How, and to what extent, can we get a coherent account of the totality of the world that will reconcile what we believe about ourselves with what we know for a fact from physics, chemistry and biology.6 Elsewhere, Searle states that “the central question in philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to give an account of ourselves as apparently conscious, mindful, free, rational, speaking, social, and political agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, physical particles.”7 Maxwell would surely agree

4

Ibid, p.4 Ibid, Note 1. p17. 6 J. Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2007), p.81. 7 J. Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004), p.11. 5

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with this statement, although he might point out that he has regarded it as a central question in philosophy for a somewhat longer time.8 2. Multiaspectism Maxwell’s proposed solution to the human world/physical universe problem is what he terms ‘multiaspectism.’ He argues that the basic mistake behind many of the attempts to solve one or more aspects of the human world/physical universe problem is the assumption that a complete physical description of the material universe is a complete description. This assumption leads straight to the conclusion that since a complete physical description would say nothing about colours, sounds, and so on, as experienced by us, such qualities cannot exist in the physical world. One obvious solution to this problem is to suggest that we have a non-physical mind that takes care of everything that physics leaves out. Another solution, popular with some scientifically minded philosophers, bites the bullet and goes in the other direction, concluding that anything that seems to exist that cannot in principle be predicted, explained, and understood physically, does not exist.9 But Maxwell rejects both of these positions, instead arguing that a complete physical description of the material universe is not a complete description. Rather, he argues that the physical is only a highly selective, special aspect of all that there is. There are also personalistic aspects; aspects that have to do with the way things look, feel, sound, or smell, or to do with what things mean, or to do with how it is to have such things occur in one’s own brain. All these other aspects would be excluded even from a complete physical description, not because they do not exist, but because they are irrelevant to the basic purpose of physics. Grass really is green, the sky really is blue; human actions really do have meaning and value; brain processes really do involve inner 8

N. Maxwell, “Physics and Common Sense,” op. cit, p.295-311 and N. Maxwell, “Understanding Sensations,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 46, 1968, p.127-146. 9 As well as Cartesian dualism and eliminative or radical materialism, other proposed solutions to the human world/physical universe problem include idealism, the twoaspect theory, phenomenalism, Kantianism, neutral monism, pan-psychism, naïve realism, holism, emergentism, Popper’s Three-World-View, behaviourism, and functionalism. See N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., Chapter Four.

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Mathew Iredale experiences, consciousness, feelings, thoughts, imaginings,: physics is silent about all this, not because it does not exist, but because physics does not need to refer to it in order to describe and predict phenomena.10

As a consequence of this, we are able to describe, explain and understand things in at least two very different ways: physical explanations seek to explain phenomena in terms of the laws and entities of the physical sciences; personalistic explanations seek to explain phenomena in terms of the personal, using ideas and concepts that one might oneself have experienced, done, thought, felt, etc.11 Maxwell argues that we need to appreciate that we live in a world in which there are two clear ways in which to describe certain phenomena and that “It is the miracle of the simultaneous existence of these two kinds of patterns, superimposed on one another in the case of a living conscious person, that makes it possible to explain and understand the person in two quite different ways: as a person, and as a physical system.”12 Furthermore, it must be realised that the one type of explanation cannot be reduced to, or fully understood in terms of, the other explanation. Maxwell helps to illustrate this with the following “wonderfully lucid account” from the Phaedo: It was…as if somebody would first say that Socrates acts with reason or intelligence; and then, in trying to explain the causes of what I am doing now, should assert that I am now sitting here because my body is composed of bones and sinews;…and that the sinews, by relaxing and contracting, make me bend my limbs now, and that this is the cause of my sitting here with my legs bent…Yet the real causes of my sitting here in prison are that the Athenians have decided to condemn me, and that I have decided

10

N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p.97. For more detailed discussion of the differences between physical and personalistic explanations see N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., Chapter Five; N. Maxwell, “Physics and Common Sense,” op. cit, p.295-311; N. Maxwell, “Understanding Sensations,” op. cit, p.127-146; T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, 1974, pp.435-450; F. Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32, 1982, pp.127-136; and F. Jackson, “What Mary didn’t know,” Journal of Philosophy 3, 1986, pp.291-295. 12 N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p.105. 11

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that…it is more just if I stay here and undergo the penalty they have imposed on me.13 Maxwell’s multiaspect solution to the human world/physical universe problem allows him to develop solutions to the more subordinate problems, such as the mind-brain problem and the problem of free will.14 3. Science or Determinism? Rather than simply approaching the free will problem in the same manner as countless others over the last two millennia and asking “Is free will compatible with determinism?” Maxwell believes that the correct way to formulate the problem is by asking “Is free will compatible with what modern science tells us about the universe, and ourselves as a part of the universe?”15 (A reformulation that naturally arises from the broader human world/physical universe problem: how can the personalistic exist if the world really is more or less as modern science tells us it is?) Maxwell says that he finds it “quite extraordinary that the entire tradition of philosophical debate about free will tends to take it for granted…that the central issue is whether free will is, or is not, compatible with determinism.”16

13

Quoted in N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p.142143. 14 Regarding free will, according to Maxwell, a person acts freely if a freedomascribing personalistic explanation of that person’s actions is true – one that asserts that the person’s authentic self produces and controls the actions in question. Thus one can have a physical explanation of the person’s decisions in terms of causes and effects but also a personalistic explanation in terms of the person’s beliefs, desires, motivations, etc. In the example from the Phaedo, Socrates is acting freely if his own personalistic explanation as to why he is sitting in prison is true, namely, that he has decided that it is more just, better, and nobler, that he remains and suffers the death sentence imposed on him by the Athenians, than that he escape. For a detailed defence of Maxwell’s account of free will, see N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p.138-161 and N. Maxwell, “Science Versus Realization of Value, Not Determinism Versus Choice,” in D. Hodgson, “A Plain Person’s Free Will”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 12, Number 1, 2005, pp.54-58. 15 N. Maxwell, “Science Versus Realization of Value, Not Determinism Versus Choice,” op. cit., p.54. See also N Maxwell, , The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p.139-140. 16 N. Maxwell, “Science Versus Realization of Value, Not Determinism Versus Choice,” op. cit., p.54.

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Mathew Iredale The free will problem arises in its most serious form today because of what science seems to tell us about the world and ourselves: it is the possibility that everything can, in principle, be explained physically, there being no room for freedom-ascribing personalistic explanation, that poses the problem of how, in this case, we can be free.17

But when put like this, I am not that sure that Maxwell’s formulation of the problem is so very different to the traditional way of formulating the problem. In Maxwell’s version, if everything can be explained physically, with no need for freedom-ascribing personalistic explanations, such personalistic explanations become superfluous or even misleading. “It was my choice to pick the steak,” says the man. “Well, in actual fact,” replies the scientist, “it was the particular interaction of physical phenomena outside and inside your head that lead you to pick the steak.” Now compare this to a more traditional formulation: if everything occurs deterministically, freedom-ascribing personalistic explanations become superfluous or even misleading. “It was my choice to pick the steak,” says the man. “Well, in actual fact,” replies the determinist, “it was the sequence of determined events outside and inside your head that lead you to pick the steak.” On the other hand, Maxwell’s question “Is free will compatible with what modern science tells us about the universe?” seems to me to be a far better question to ask than “Is free will compatible with determinism?” After all, who cares if free will is compatible with determinism when surely what really matters is whether free will is compatible with reality; with the world as modern science tells us it is? If free will, however we choose to characterise it, is not compatible with the real world, then the question of whether or not it is compatible with determinism becomes irrelevant. Having said that, it may be that philosophers take it for granted that the question to be asking is whether free will is compatible with determinism because it is believed that science only contributes to the debate because of what it has to say about our being determined. Asking if free will is compatible with modern science is basically equivalent to asking if free will is compatible with determinism. Maxwell totally rejects this option. He says: “Serious philosophical issues arise because of what modern science seems to be telling us about the nature of the universe, and ourselves as a part of the universe, and not because of what determinism 17

N. Maxwell, , The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., p.140.

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might tell us, the latter neither implying, nor being implied by, the former.”18 But there are those who think otherwise. The authors of one recent discussion of the problem of free will are unequivocal in their belief that science is only of interest to the free will debate because of how it relates to determinism: If we accept that the universe isn’t deterministic there are still good reasons to think about the compatibility of free will and determinism. First, it could turn out that future physicists conclude that the universe is deterministic, contrary to the contemporary consensus about at least quantum mechanics. It is notoriously difficult to predict how future science will turn out, and it might be useful to have an answer to the question in advance of the scientific issues getting sorted out. Second, even if the universe were not fully deterministic, determinism might hold locally (either as a matter of how local spacetime is constructed, or as a matter of how the physics for non-quantum physical objects operates). Third, we could be interested in whether free will is compatible with a broadly scientific picture of the universe. Since some aspects of the universe seem deterministic and others do not, we might ask if free will is compatible with determinism as a first step to answering the more general question of whether free will is compatible with a broadly scientific picture of the universe.19 There is no doubt that research from the neurosciences, possibly the most widely discussed area of science in the free will debate, has been taken by the majority of philosophers and scientists to imply that we are determined.20 And when genetics is discussed, it is invariably in the guise 18

N. Maxwell, “Science Versus Realization of Value, Not Determinism Versus Choice,” op. cit., p.54. 19 J. M. Fisher, R Kane, D. Pereboom and M. Vargas, Four Views on Free Will (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007). 20 See, for example, T. Honderich, Mind and Brain (Oxford, Clarendon Paperbacks, 1988), p.261-304; M Tegmark, “The Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes,” Phys. Rev. E 61, 2000, pp.4194-4206; M Vargas, “Revisionism,” in J. M. Fisher, R Kane, D. Pereboom and M. Vargas, Four Views on Free Will, op. cit., pp.143-144; P. Churchland, Brain-Wise (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2002), pp.195197; C Koch and K Hepp, “Quantum mechanics in the brain,” Nature 440, 2006, p.611. But for some dissenting voices see R. Penrose, The Large, the Small and the

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of genetic determinism, even if that concept is only taken seriously by those with too wild an imagination or too poor a grasp of science.21 But what about those areas of science which are relevant to free will, but which rarely merit discussion in the literature, such as the special theory of relativity, evolution and psychological research? As Maxwell himself has noted, one of the consequences of the special theory of relativity is that “there is no universal, absolute, unambiguous distinction between past and future.”22 But certain characterisations of free will specifically require there to be a universal, absolute unambiguous distinction between past and future, in order to divide off the one past from the many alternative possible futures. J. R. Lucas clearly expresses this view when he says “The future is open, alterable, to some extent malleable by us. The past is closed, unalterable, part of the irrevocable record of history.”23 Such a view is clearly at odds with the special theory of relativity, as the physicist Paul Davies explains: “In the..[special theory of relativity]..there is no universal present, and the entire past and future of the universe are regarded as existing in an indivisible whole. The world is four dimensional (three of space, one of time), and all events are simply there: the future does not ‘happen’ or ‘unfold’.”24 What the theory of relativity shows is that events that are simultaneous for one observer are not simultaneous for another observer in a different frame of reference (that is, an observer moving at a different speed). Put more formally, there is no such thing as simultaneity between two events when viewed in different frames of reference. Given that events that are simultaneous for one observer are not simultaneous for another observer in a different frame of reference, it must follow that there is no absolute present, that there is no such thing as an absolute ‘now’. Present, future and past are all relative. Given this, all of time must exist:

Human Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) and H. P. Stapp, Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (Berlin, Springer, 1993). 21 See R. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982), p.9-29, for a sober discussion of the absurdities of genetic determinism and those who supposedly defend it. 22 N. Maxwell, “Are Probabilism and Special Relativity Incompatible?,” Philosophy of Science 52, 1985, pp.23-43. 23 J.R. Lucas, “The Open Future,” in R. Flood & M. Lockwood (eds.), The Nature of Time (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986) p.126. 24 P. C. W. Davies, God and the New Physics (London, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1983) p.137.

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Unless you are a solipsist, there is only one rational conclusion to be drawn from the relative nature of simultaneity: events in the past and future have to be every bit as real as events in the present. In fact, the very division of time into past, present and future now seems to be physically meaningless. To accommodate everybody’s nows…events and moments have to exist “all at once” across a span of time…to make sense of the notions of space and time, it is necessary to imagine that those there-an-now events are somehow really “out there,” spanning days, months, years and, by extension (you can magnify the mischief by increasing your changes in speed and the distance to “there”), all of time.25 In other words, physically the future is as closed and unalterable as the past. Which, one cannot fail to note, is also a consequence of determinism. In either case, the ability to make our own future is just not possible in the sense that Lucas describes. In which case, the theory of relativity does not appear to give the traditionalists any reason to abandon their formulation of the free will problem in terms of determinism. 4. Evolution and Rationality But what about evolution? Evolution is a non-random, cumulative process in which successive, random mutations gradually build upon the advantages which prior random mutations have established, to produce the individual which is best suited to the environment in which it lives. The point to emphasise here is that evolution is gradual, as Darwin himself explicitly stated: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”26 The brain, for example, must have evolved through numerous, successive, slight modifications. And if the brain evolved in this way, then so must the faculties that are associated with the brain, consciousness, for example, and that which is currently of particular interest to us, free will. 25

P. C. W. Davies, About Time, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (London, Penguin, 1995) p.71. 26 C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (London, Penguin Books, 1968 (original publication 1859)), p.219.

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And if free will evolved gradually with the gradual evolution of the brain then it must be something that exists by degrees. Given that our current species, or breeding population, has free will, then we must have gradually evolved from a breeding population with a lesser (but still very large) degree of free will, and this population must itself have gradually evolved from a population with a slightly lesser degree of free will, and so on, until we get back to a population with no free will at all. Just as the brains of our ancestors have gradually increased in size and complexity over millions of years until modern man appeared, so their degree of free will would have gradually increased, something which Maxwell himself has realised: It deserves to be noted that freedom, in this sense, satisfies the Darwinian requirement of being something that can be understood to have developed gradually, in small steps, during the course of evolution. It develops gradually with the gradual development of the capacity to learn, to imitate, to dream and to imagine, to be sentient and conscious, and to be able to communicate (all of which exists in chimpanzees for example).27 What can we learn from this about free will? For one thing, it would seem to give us good reason to question one traditional characterisation of free will; as an all-or-nothing ability found only in humans and in no other species. Rather, the ability to make decisions with a certain degree of free will must have been present in our recent ancestors, if not in our more distant ancestors. It may have been present in the common ancestors that we share with the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans), our closest living relatives. It is also possible, if unlikely, that those very species, the great apes, may also have a degree of free will as well; a conclusion that has profound implications for the way in which we view those species. Of course, it may also be the case that free will evolved much more recently than that, first emerging in our ancestors after we diverged from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee, our closest living relative. A further implication that can be drawn from the gradual evolution of free will is to challenge another traditional characterisation of free will; that we humans are as free as any individual could be. If free will is an ability that can be had in varying degrees how can we be certain that we 27

N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom (Oxford, Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1984), p.274.

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have the fullest degree of free will that is possible? Could it not be the case that we just have a degree of free will, albeit a very large degree, and that there are further degrees of free will that are possible? Clearly, evolution has a number of consequences for free will which are not related to determinism. Let us now consider psychological experiments into rationality. The ability to make decisions rationally is generally held to be an important part of free will, so if there are situations in which our rationality is impaired without us realising, it could have serious consequences for free will. There is no doubt that under certain circumstances, when we are extremely tired, drunk, or in the grip of a strong emotion, our decisions and thought processes can be very irrational indeed. But surely under normal circumstances, when we are not under the influence of any of these factors, our decisions are entirely rational, at least, most of the time? Not necessarily. In fact, according to one recent discussion of the rationality literature, psychological experiments going back thirty years fail to support the idea that human beings are intrinsically rational: “What these studies demonstrated is that even under quite ordinary circumstances where fatigue, drugs and strong emotions are not factors, people reason and make judgments in ways that systematically violate familiar canons of rationality on a wide array of problems.”28 A more recent review of the literature came to a similar conclusion: Decades of psychological research documented that human judgment often falls short of normative ideals. Social and cognitive psychologists discovered an ever increasing number of systematic biases and illustrated their pervasive role in judgment and decision making. Similarly, researchers in applied fields, like health and consumer behaviour, identified numerous erroneous beliefs that impair good decisions and prevent people from doing what would be in their best interest. 29

28

R. Samuels, S. Stich & P Temoulet, “Rethinking Rationality: From Bleak Implications to Darwinian Modules,” in E. Lepore & Z. Pylyshyn (eds.), What is Cognitive Science? (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999), p.74. 29 N. Schwarz, L. J. Sanna, I. Skurnik & C. Yoon “Metacognitive Experiences And The Intricacies Of Setting People Straight: Implications For Debiasing And Public Information Campaigns,” Advances In Experimental Social Psychology Vol. 39, 2007, pp.127-161.

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For example, a series of studies by the social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross demonstrated that experimenters can prompt significant shifts in the attitudes of their subjects without them realising. Subjects are induced by the experimenter to give a talk or write an essay that is inconsistent with their private beliefs. In “sufficient justification” conditions, subjects are given large monetary incentives for such behaviour and consequently attribute their compliance to the incentive rather than to any corresponding private belief. In “insufficient justification” conditions, by contrast, subjects are paid little or nothing for their counter attitudinal action, and, noting no salient external factors sufficient to account for their actions, and wrongly assuming that those actions must therefore reflect corresponding private beliefs, they change their attitudes so as to bring them in line with their behaviour. These subjects thus commit the fundamental attribution error. Had they correctly identified the situational cause of their behaviour, that is, the subtle social pressures to comply exerted by the experimenter and the experimental context, they would have had no reason to change, or even to reassess, their private beliefs.30 The consequences of such studies for free will have been discussed by Richard Double, who argues that it is unclear whether the “insufficient justification” subjects came to change their minds freely or not: On the one hand, it seems that they clearly manifested free will. What could be a better example of a free choice than one made as a result of self-conscious, elaborated reasons?...Nonetheless, it is tempting to argue for the other conclusion. Evidently, getting people to write attitude discrepant essays for small or no rewards may enable us to manipulate their views. The experimenters knew better than the subjects did that an attitude shift would occur. The case in which someone else knows better than you do what you will decide is sometimes held to be a paradigm of lack of

30

R. Nisbett & L. Ross, Human Interference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgement (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1980), p.121.

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freedom.31 In order to better illustrate the conflict involved, and that it cannot be overcome, say, by arguing that the subjects were partially free, Double suggests the following scenario: Imagine that Professor Manipulator, a respected psychologist at State U, wishes to have capital punishment made legal in the state. The good professor believes that the best way to contribute to this end is to modify the resistance on the part of as many anticapital punishment students who pass through State U as possible. To this end, everyone who takes Psychology 100, required of all first year students, is given an attitude questionnaire, and all students who indicate strong resistance to capital punishment are asked to write essays in favour of capital punishment. (We may assume that the professor adequately disguises what is being done). The result of this systematic use of attitude shift experiments is that after thirty years, a capital punishment law is enacted because it faces very little resistance from the State Ueducated people who run the state.32 The question which Double now asks is the following: if you believed that capital punishment was immoral and deserving of blame upon whom would you attach it? Upon the professor, because he clearly and deliberately manipulated his students, and was fully aware of the attitude shifts he would bring about, whilst they were completely ignorant of his designs. Or upon the students, who were not drugged, coerced, bribed, given misinformation, or otherwise beleaguered? Although the students were ignorant of the fact that they were being induced to change their views, we are all of us often ignorant of the factors behind our changes of attitude and yet we do not consider such changes to be unfree. What this and numerous other experiments show is that there are occasions when our ability to make rational judgements is seriously impaired, even though we may feel completely rational at the time. And this has serious implications for free will, implications that have nothing to do with determinism. 31

R. Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (Oxford, Oxford Unversity Press, 1991), p.102. 32 ibid, p103.

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5. The End of Determinism? The overall conclusion one can draw from these examples is that those philosophers who believe that science only contributes to the free will debate because of what it has to say about determinism are clearly mistaken and it is surely now high time to put aside the traditional formulation “Is free will compatible with determinism?” in favour of Maxwell’s formulation “Is free will compatible with what modern science tells us about the universe?”. Having said that, one should be careful not to regard science as the central issue in the free will debate. For Galen Strawson, for example, the central issue is the logical impossibility of absolute or ultimate responsibility33 and for Richard Double it is that free will is not a logically coherent concept.34 In other words, one should not abandon the traditional problem of free will and determinism in favour of a reformulation in terms of free will and science alone; due consideration must be given to those parts of the problem that are not dependent upon either determinism or science. There is no denying the central role that determinism has played in the free will debate over the last two millennia35, and the significant role that it continues to play in the great majority of discussions about free will. Given this, can one seriously expect those involved in the free will debate to simply abandon the issue of determinism and instead focus their attention towards science? The obvious response to this, quite apart from the reasons already given, is that one can only hope so: after two thousand years of debate in terms of determinism, without a clear resolution, it is surely high time that we approached the problem from a different angle. I shall leave the last word to Maxwell: Do these questions about how to formulate the free will problem really matter? They do. It may be too much to ask of philosophy that it should solve our fundamental problems, but it is not too 33

As discussed in G. Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), especially pp.28-29. Strawson’s argument is a variation on that found in P. Edwards, “Hard and Soft Determinism,” in S. Hook (ed.), Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science (New York, Collier, 1961) and P. Gomberg, “Free Will as Ultimate Responsibility,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15, 1978, pp.205-211. 34 R. Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will, op. cit. 35 See, for example, T. Honderich, The Consequences of Determinism (Oxford, Clarendon Paperbacks, 1988), p.83-104; and I Dilman, Free Will , An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London, Routledge, 1999).

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much to ask that it should at least perform the crucial preliminary step of formulating our fundamental problems correctly. The entire tradition of philosophy since Descartes has failed lamentably to perform even this first step correctly, analytic philosophy being almost the worst offender.36 Note Nicholas Maxwell was very much the inspiration for this paper. It was his insistence that the problem of free will must be couched in terms of science, and not determinism, that first lead me to consider in detail how science may affect free will.37

36

N. Maxwell, “Science Versus Realization of Value, Not Determinism,” op. cit., p.57. 37 The results of which can be seen in M. Iredale, Towards a Scientific Conception of Free Will (PhD Thesis, University College London, 1995).

Limits of Physicalism David Hodgson 1. Introduction I first became aware of the philosophy of Nicholas Maxwell when Journal of Consciousness Studies gave me the opportunity to review his book The Human World in the Physical Universe1 (henceforth HWPU). I found it a profoundly stimulating book, offering a carefully developed solution to what Maxwell called the human world/physical universe problem; that is, the problem of how is it possible for the world as we experience it, with sensory qualities, consciousness, freedom, and all the other things that give value and meaning to our lives, to exist embedded in the physical universe, having regard to what science tells us about that universe. This, Maxwell said, is the central, fundamental problem of modern philosophy, and I entirely concur. The solution he proposed has three elements: (1) that the physical sciences describe only one aspect of everything that exists, the physical aspect; (2) that this is the aspect that alone determines (perhaps probabilistically) the way events unfold; but (3) that aspects not described by the physical sciences are the basis for explanations of human experiences and conduct that are valid yet not reducible to physical explanations In my review,2 I said that Maxwell made out a strong case for these propositions, but that I was unconvinced on the second of them. I remain unconvinced, and in this article I will explain why, at greater length than was possible in my review. In particular, I will argue that there is an aspect of what exists, namely our conscious experiences, that makes a contribution to the determination of how events unfold, which is beyond that made by the physical aspect.

1

N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will, and Evolution (Landham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) (henceforth HWPU). 2 D. Hodgson, Review of HWPU, Journal of Consciousness Studies 9(2), (2002), pp. 93-94.

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2. Outline of HWPU and my Disagreement In HWPU, having discussed the questions of value and meaning in human existence that need to be accounted for in any satisfactory solution to the problem, Maxwell went on to argue that ‘science tells us, loud and clear, that we live in a world in which physicalism is true,’3 in the sense that everything that happens is determined (albeit perhaps probabilistically) by physical properties and physical laws. However, Maxwell maintained that there can be and is a life of value embedded in this physical universe. Physics, he said, is concerned only with the causally efficacious aspect of things: non-causally efficacious things, in which he included experiential and value-laden features, would receive no mention in a complete physical description, although physical correlates of these features would be included in that description. But these non-causally efficacious things were nonetheless important, in that they enabled what Maxwell called personalistic explanations of human experiences and conduct, which are fully authentic but not reducible to physical explanations – personalistic explanations being explanations of events as things one might oneself have experienced or done, and their explanatory power depends on our ability to understand events on that basis. Maxwell then went on to argue that we have free will in a worthwhile sense, even though the physical aspect of what exists determines the way that events including human actions unfold. This was because freedomascribing personalistic explanations of conduct are intellectually authentic and fundamental, can be true, and are irreducible to physical explanations. Maxwell acknowledged that it is all but miraculous, given his physicalism, that free will in this sense should actually exist. He argued that this can be explained by Darwin’s theory of evolution, reinterpreted as a theory accounting for the emergence of purposiveness in the physical world, leading in turn to the development of organisms whose conduct can be the subject of irreducible personalistic explanations. When I reviewed the book, I found myself agreeing with much of what Maxwell wrote about value and meaning in human existence, about the authenticity and irreducibility of personalistic explanations of human experiences and conduct, and about the emergence of purposiveness in the physical world. However, as mentioned earlier, I was not then convinced by his argument that the physical aspect of everything that exists is the 3

HWPU, p. 69.

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aspect that alone determines the way events unfold, and I remain unconvinced. The view I support is that the physical aspect does not exhaust what is causally efficacious in the universe. The physical aspect is of course an important aspect of the universe, and it is an aspect that is causally efficacious in that it constrains to a spectrum of possibilities the changes that can occur in the universe; but I say there is another aspect of the universe, namely that of conscious experience, which is also causally efficacious in that it can affect what actually occurs within the spectrum of possibilities left open by the physical aspect. In this article, I will outline the main argument given by Maxwell in HWPU in support of his physicalism. I will next explain why I disagree with this argument. And finally I will indicate my agreements and disagreements with his evolutionary explanation of the emergence of purposiveness in the world. 3. Maxwell’s Argument for Physicalism Maxwell argued that science has shown that that the universe is physically comprehensible, and thus that physicalism is more likely to be true than any particular scientific theory. He asserted that orthodox conceptions of science are all versions of what he called standard empiricism (SE):4 This holds that in science laws and theories are accepted impartially on the basis of experimental success and failure, no substantial thesis about the world being accepted as a permanent part of scientific knowledge independent of the evidence, and certainly not in violation of the evidence. Most, if not all, versions of SE stress that questions of simplicity, unity, and explanatory power play a valid, important role in influencing choice of theory in science in addition to considerations of empirical success … [but that] Insofar as theory choice is biased in the direction of simplicity, unity, or explanatory power, this bias must not commit science to making the permanent assumption that Nature herself is simple, unified, or explainable. He pointed out that: 4

HWPU, p. 49.

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Given any scientific theory, however well established empirically, there will always be infinitely many rival theories that fit the available evidence just as well, but that make different predictions, in an arbitrary way, for phenomena not yet observed. … Thus, if science really did take seriously the idea that evidence alone decides what theories are to be accepted and rejected, scientific knowledge would be drowned in an infinite ocean of rival theories …5 Maxwell then gave an explanation of why this does not happen in scientific practice: 6 Because in practice two considerations govern the acceptance and rejection of theories in science: (1) considerations of empirical success and failure; and (2) considerations to do with the simplicity, unity, or explanatory power of the theories in question. And he concluded (correctly in my opinion): In persistently rejecting infinitely many such empirically successful but grotesquely ad hoc theories, science in effect makes a big permanent assumption about the nature of the universe, to the effect that it is such that no grotesquely ad hoc theory is true, however empirically successful it may appear to be for a time. He pointed out that this raises the question ‘what precisely ought this assumption to be, and on what basis is it to be made?’ and contended that this is a question that should be addressed squarely. He argued that the solution is:7 To construe science as adopting, as part of scientific knowledge, a hierarchy of cosmological assumptions about the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, these assumptions asserting less and less as one ascends the hierarchy, thus being more and more likely to be true … 5

This is a point previously made in N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1965), ch. 3, as Maxwell observed; and it is one also developed with considerable power in H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), pp. 174-200. 6 HWPU, pp. 50-51. 7 HWPU, p. 51.

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He called this conception of science aim-oriented empiricism (AOE), because it postulates a combination of more specific aims and methods at lower levels of this hierarchy and more general aims and methods at higher levels, with assumptions at higher levels assisting the growth of knowledge at lower levels and the growth of knowledge at lower levels in turn contributing to the improvement of the higher-level assumptions. At the lowest level, there are empirical data or low-level experimental laws. At the next level, there are the best fundamental physical theories, currently general relativity and ‘standard model’ quantum theory. At the third level are the best current ideas as to how the universe is physically comprehensible, involving reconciliation of relativity theory and quantum theory. At the fourth level, there is the thesis that the universe is physically comprehensible in some way or other, that is, Maxwell’s version of physicalism. At the fifth level, there is the thesis that the universe is comprehensible in some way or other, not necessarily physically. There are higher levels, ultimately leading to the top-level thesis that the universe is at least partly knowable. The theses become increasingly unspecific as the hierarchy is ascended, and become increasingly likely to be true. The toplevel thesis is such that accepting it can only aid and never damage science, and Maxwell contended that we are justified in accepting it as a permanent part of scientific knowledge. Ideally, a thesis or theses at lower levels should imply the thesis or theses of the next level, and so on up the hierarchy. Maxwell pointed out that at present this breaks down between levels 2 and 3, because the currently accepted fundamental theories of physics, namely general relativity and the standard model, clash with each other, and there is no third level theory that reconciles them and follows from them. However, Maxwell contended that this is merely a sign of our ignorance, and that the basic task of theoretical physics now is to discover a level two theory ‘that (a) in principle predicts all (physically) possible level 1 phenomena and (b) implies a true level 3 thesis, which (c) exemplifies (and thus implies) the level 4 thesis of physical comprehensibility’.8 Maxwell argued that AOE thus recognises this level 4 thesis of physicalism as a central component of current theoretical knowledge in science, more firmly established than any accepted physical theory. He said this is implicitly recognised by physicists today when they concede that general relativity and the standard model cannot be correct because 8

HWPU, p. 53.

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they do not form a unified theory: in making unity a necessary condition for correctness of fundamental physical theory, they virtually acknowledge that physicalism is part of current knowledge.9 Maxwell gave the following account of the physical structure of the universe:10 [The universe] is made up of two aspects, U, a necessitating property that exists everywhere and does not change, and V, that aspect of the universe that is different, from place to place and time to time. Given U, and given V at an instant throughout the universe, all subsequent states of V are precisely determined (perhaps probabilistically). Furthermore, U is unified in the sense that, insofar as it consists of distinct parts or aspects, U1, U2, …, UN, these are unified by means of a symmetry in a way that is analogous to how electric and magnetic fields are unified by the symmetry of special relativity… Accordingly, Maxwell maintained that the universe is made up entirely of fundamental physical entities (which in their totality make up V) interacting in accordance with some unified pattern of physical law (comprehended in U); and that it is the combination of U and V that alone determines the way events unfold. 4. A Contrary Viewpoint I agree with Maxwell that underlying all scientific endeavour is an assumption that the universe is at least partly knowable. This assumption has confirmation from the practical successes of science, and to deny it would be self-defeating and would make scientific endeavour pointless. I agree that we have good reason to accept this as a permanent part of scientific knowledge. However, I say there is another assumption which is at least as fundamental to scientific endeavour, and at least as certain to be true; and I will be contending that this assumption makes Maxwell’s version of physicalism unlikely to be true. This is the assumption that human beings have the capacity to make reasonable judgments about what to believe. An assumption that the universe is partly knowable does not on its own support the scientific endeavour: it has to be combined with a 9

HWPU, p. 59. HWPU, p. 57.

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complementary assumption to the effect that there are entities capable of acquiring this knowledge. And this requires at the least that these entities can make reasonable decisions about what to believe, because knowledge involves true belief held on the basis of reasonable decisions about what to believe. So I contend that more particular theories need to conform, not merely to an assumption that the universe is at least partly knowable, but also to an assumption that human beings have the capacity to make reasonable judgments about what to believe; and I contend Maxwell does not sufficiently take account of this. I will say more about this in the next section. I also agree with Maxwell that there is good reason to accept that there are two aspects of the universe that correspond to his U and his V; that is, that there is a unified pattern of physical law that exists everywhere (and everywhen) and does not change, and a totality of fundamental physical entities that interact and change in accordance with this pattern of physical law. In saying this, I am not asserting that what we presently understand to be basic physical laws, such as the laws of quantum mechanics, necessarily exist everywhere and everywhen and are unchanging: it could be that the unchanging laws are at a higher level, and that physical laws that human beings have discovered (as being at least approximately true) are changeable expressions or results, existing at particular times and/or places, of more basic unchanging laws. I believe this much must be assumed by the scientific method, and is confirmed by the success of the scientific method. It is widely accepted that the scientific method of formulation and testing of hypotheses is the most reliable way of establishing facts about the world. The hypotheses that are thus formulated and tested either are themselves possible physical laws, or else assert regularities that depend explicitly or implicitly on the existence of such laws; and it is assumed that if a hypothesis is true at one place and time it will be true at another place and time. Thus it is assumed that, if a hypothesis is true, it will not be refuted by any experiment carried out at any place and time; and it is also assumed that falsification of it by any experiment at any place and time will show that the hypothesis is not true. However, these assumptions do not necessarily require that nothing other than the pattern of laws and the totality of the physical entities can make any independent contribution to determination of what changes occur; and it so happens that the physical theory that presently has the

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strongest support, namely quantum theory, suggests that the pattern of laws and the totality of physical entities at any time do not together uniquely determine subsequent states of the universe. Maxwell to some extent takes this into account when he says that ‘subsequent states of V are precisely determined (perhaps probabilistically)’; but he does not fully acknowledge that probabilistic determination really amounts only to limitation to a spectrum of possibilities that widens as time progresses. According to quantum theory, these possibilities are all associated with determined probabilities for their occurrence, and there is nothing else that selects which of the possibilities actually occurs: that is, according to quantum theory, what actually happens occurs at random within the probability parameters determined by the interaction of the physical entities in accordance with the pattern of physical law. But in fact there is nothing about the scientific method, or the assumptions necessary for its application, that rules out the possibility that, at least where conscious experiences are involved, there may be some other contribution to the determination of what happens within the spectrum of possibilities left open by the interaction of physical entities in accordance with pattern of physical law. In a private communication, Maxwell has suggested to me that such a theory would be objectionably ad hoc, because it would include, in its basic postulates, highly complex specifications of conscious brain states (to predict the results of different conscious decisions); and it might also clash with quantum theory, since conscious brain states could, in repeated experiments, subvert the probabilistic predictions of quantum theory. However, I suggest that such a theory would be no more complex than Maxwell’s, but merely would have the limitation that it only established spectra of possibilities, plus their respective probabilities so far as they can be determined by physical facts: any choices within this spectrum would not be explained or determined by physical facts or theory at all. And there would be no clash with quantum theory unless one took quantum theory as saying something more than that these are the probabilities on the basis of the physical facts. Otherwise there would no clash: it would just be that facts that quantum theory can't deal with (the non-physical aspect of reality) could affect what happens within the spectra of possibilities, and to that extent might skew the probabilities. For those reasons, I disagree with Maxwell’s assertion that science has made out the truth of physicalism, as explained by him. I also disagree that physicalism is more likely to be true than any currently accepted physical

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theories, except in the following limited sense. While it is highly probable that some of the currently accepted physical theories are approximately true, it is highly improbable that any of them are precisely true. So it may be said that any non-negligible probability that physicalism is true would be greater than the (extremely low) probability that any current theory is precisely true. But I think Maxwell is intending to assert more than this, namely that physicalism can safely be taken to be true unless or until some change in currently accepted theories might require it to be re-examined. 5. Reasonable Decision-making Not only do I say that science has not established the truth of physicalism. I also say there are good reasons, associated with the complementary assumption I have identified, for thinking that physicalism is false.11 The complementary assumption is that human beings have the capacity to make reasonable judgments about what to believe; and it is an important part of this assumption, which must be accepted as true if science and philosophy is to be considered possible, that human beings can engage fruitfully in plausible reasoning. Most human reasoning is not algorithmic. That is, it does not (overtly at least) proceed in accordance with rules of logic and/or mathematics and/or probability, or any other rules that could be incorporated into a computer program. Rather, it is informal plausible reasoning, in which the premises or data do not entail the conclusions by virtue of applicable rules, but rather support them as a matter of reasonable (albeit fallible) judgment. Even the scientific method depends heavily on plausible reasoning, in the formulation of hypotheses to be tested, the devising of experiments to test them, and the selection of which unrefuted hypotheses should be provisionally accepted (because while experiments can refute general hypotheses, they cannot prove them to be true). And plausible reasoning cannot be reduced to any kind of algorithmic process using discovered or invented rules for good reasoning. Arguments of Hume, Popper and others, particularly as developed by Hilary Putnam,12 show that plausible reasoning cannot be fully explained in terms of rules for good reasoning, whether they be rules of logic or mathematics or 11

The reasons that follow are substantially as set out in D. Hodgson, “Partly Free,” The Times Literary Supplement 5440, (July 6 2007), pp. 15-16. 12 H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, op. cit., pp. 174-200.

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probability or whatever. It is of course possible that plausible reasoning might be explained as an expression of unconscious computational processes that don’t have any validity on the basis of discovered or invented rules for good reasoning, but which work because they have been selected in evolution for their effectiveness in promoting survival and reproduction; but there are powerful reasons for thinking this is unlikely to be a complete explanation of plausible reasoning. To start with, it is reasonable to accept that a person’s conscious experiences (including visual and auditory experiences, thoughts and feelings) can contribute positively to plausible reasoning, for the following reasons. Our brains are capable of performing marvelous unconscious algorithmic procedures, for example in the pre-conscious processes required to achieve three-dimensional vision, and also stability of a viewed scene despite voluntary movements of one’s head and eyes. If optimal decisions on matters important for our survival and reproduction could be made without a positive contribution from conscious experiences, it could be expected that evolution would have ensured that decisions be made by using just this prodigious unconscious computing capacity, particularly when our conscious processes seem clumsy and fallible by comparison. And yet, we are so constituted that, whenever in life we are faced with a novel situation requiring some significant decision or action, our conscious minds are automatically brought to bear. Much unconscious informationprocessing seems to be finely tuned to support conscious experiences in which currently important information is presented simply and vividly, in the manner of an executive summary prepared for a decision-maker in business or government. Computer scientist Marvin Minsky once dismissed consciousness as an imperfect summary of what is going on in the brain; but he failed to recognize that there must be an evolutionary advantage in having this summary. We have feelings like pain to motivate us, when it would be absurd (even if possible) to use pain or any other feelings to motivate a computer, or any other performer of unconscious algorithms. It is true that good ideas come to us as a result of unconscious processes, but we do not adopt these ideas without conscious appraisal. And while Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and others have shown13 that our plausible reasoning is affected by unconscious biases, these biases can be 13

D. Kahnemann, P. Slovic and A. Tversky (ed.), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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addressed and their effect minimised only by careful conscious appreciation of them. So although there is no doubt that unconscious processes play an indispensable role in our decision-making, there are very strong reasons for holding that part of that role is to give rise to conscious experiences which also contribute positively to decision-making. Also, the contrary view is not supportable. If we couldn’t rely on our plausible reasoning as the conscious non-algorithmic process it seems to be, then any confidence we could have in plausible reasoning would have to depend on the belief that it is supported by computational processes whose reliability is assured by the evolutionary tests they have passed; yet this belief would itself have to depend on extensive plausible reasoning, giving rise to a vicious circle. Conscious appraisal could not then be trusted to deal with unconscious biases. And disagreements in matters of plausible reasoning could not then be addressed rationally: so long as identifiable fallacies were avoided, there could be no basis on which one process of plausible reasoning would be preferable to another. If it as accepted, as I believe it must be, that conscious experiences contribute positively to decision-making, the question arises whether this can reasonably be considered the result of physical processes unfolding as determined by physical laws. I say there are powerful reasons for thinking that, if plausible reasoning proceeded precisely as determined by laws or rules of any kind, there could in fact be no positive role for a person’s conscious experiences in that reasoning. Any conclusion that can be reached by the operation of general laws or rules on existing circumstances can be reached without consciousness: this seems obvious, and it is confirmed by Alan Turing’s arguments about computation,14 and by the existence and performance of computers. No one has suggested any plausible positive role that conscious experiences could have in determining what actually happens, if brain processes were precisely determined by rules. The closest I have found to such a suggestion is that made by Daniel Dennett15 and others to the effect that, in order for human beings to monitor and communicate some of their own mental processes, evolutionary selection has developed brains able to produce simplified ‘user-friendly’ accounts of these processes, in terms of the existence of an integrated conscious subject or self that has conscious experiences, has 14 15

A. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1958), pp. 433-460. D. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 242-55

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goals and purposes, and chooses between available alternatives. This suggestion is quite similar to that made by Maxwell in Chapter 7 of HWPU, and I will look at it further in the next section. I will argue to the effect that unless these user-friendly accounts have effects otherwise than as precisely determined by rules, this suggestion too gives no role to conscious experiences as such. On the other hand, if plausible reasoning can proceed otherwise than as precisely determined by laws or rules, I contend there can be a positive role for a person’s conscious experiences in that reasoning; namely, as I have argued elsewhere,16 by contributing to appropriate decisions through gestalt experiences to which we can respond, even though they are too feature-rich to engage as wholes with general rules. I accept that our conscious experiences correspond with physical processes of our brains, and I accept there is accordingly a sense in which any information contained in our experiences must be contained or encoded in those physical processes; but it is important that this information, as experienced consciously by us, is characteristically combined into unified wholes or gestalts. My contention is that, although these gestalts cannot, as wholes, engage with laws or rules of any kind, they may plausibly as wholes make a positive contribution to our decisions, because we can respond to them. It is characteristic of laws and rules that they apply generally over a range of circumstances, and engage with types or classes of things or features that different circumstances have in common, including variable quantities; so that while laws and rules apply to individual unique circumstances, they engage with features of these circumstances only in so far as each of these features is of a type or class, and/or is a variable quantity. Thus, the feature-rich gestalts we normally experience, such as gestalts combining many features of an observed scene, or of a unique melody, cannot as wholes engage with laws or rules, and they cannot as wholes have effects through engaging with laws or rules. I have elsewhere given the example of George Gershwin composing his melody The Man I Love. This melody has general and quantitative features in common with other melodies; and these features, being general and quantitative, can engage with general rules, so that the melody can readily be identified by application of computational rules. No doubt such an 16

D. Hodgson, “Constraint, Empowerment, and Guidance,” Philosophy 76 (2001), pp. 341-370; “Three Tricks of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 9(12), (2002), pp. 65-88; “Making Our Own Luck,” Ratio 20 (2007), pp. 278-92

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appealing melody has constituent features that can push buttons in our emotional make-up that have been established by evolution and environment. But the way this melody sounds, and even the way some 2and 4-bar chunks of it sound, is unique to this melody; and an experience of such a unique melody or chunk of melody, as a whole, is an example of what I mean by a gestalt that cannot engage with laws or rules. When Gershwin was composing the melody, possibilities for how it should proceed must have been thrown up by unconscious processes. But Gershwin must surely have consciously appraised these possibilities as he composed, in order to decide whether to adopt them or modify them or look for other possibilities; and ultimately he must have consciously appraised the melody itself, in order to decide whether to assent to it as his composition or to refine it further; and I suggest that, in appraising the possibilities and the melody, Gershwin was responding to gestalts of the possibilities and of the melody and/or chunks of it, which because of their uniqueness and feature-richness could not engage as wholes with preexisting rules of any kind. Similar comments apply with perhaps greater force to the creation of ground-breaking works that depart from existing standards, such as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; and can apply also to plausible reasoning generally, not just to aesthetic creation and appraisal. This is the kind of positive contribution that I suggest conscious experiences can make to our plausible reasoning, if that reasoning proceeds otherwise than as precisely determined by rules; and it is in this way that these experiences may be able to have effects beyond those that can be explained in terms of physical processes and laws of nature. I can’t explain how we can respond to gestalts in ways not determined by rules – this would require a far greater understanding of consciousness than is available at present – but that we can do so is supported by the very fact that we do experience whole feature-rich gestalts ‘all-at-once’, and by the other reasons I have given. Thus I say it is reasonable to believe that plausible reasoning enables us to make judgments on the basis of inconclusive reasons, that this reasoning depends in part on experiences grasped as gestalt wholes, and that these experiences can make a contribution to reasonable decision-making that is not random (it is a positive contribution) yet not wholly determined by rules. And so I say that Maxwell’s version of physicalism is probably false.

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In a private communication, Maxwell has responded to this argument by claiming he has shown how it is that there can be a positive role for a person's conscious experiences, even though everything proceeds in accordance with physical laws. Conscious experiences have a positive role in the creation of such things as theories or works of art because personalistic explanations of the creation of the theory or work of art say they have a positive role, and because there cannot be such things as theories or works of art without personalistic explanations. In that way, Maxwell says, consciousness is essential for the production of a theory or a work of art, even though an explanation of the production of a physical state of affairs corresponding to the theory written down or the physical manifestation of the work of art need only refer to the physical aspect of the conscious decisions that contributed to their creation. I accept that Maxwell has shown there can be a positive role for conscious experiences in the creation of such things as theories and works of art, even if determinism is true – but only in the sense that the existence of things that can be described as theories and works of art requires that there be personalistic explanations, and thus requires that there be conscious experiences. But this does not mean that conscious experiences make a positive contribution to determining what happens (as distinct from the availability of acceptable descriptions of what happens). I say that, on Maxwell’s view, conscious experiences can’t make a positive contribution to determining what happens, beyond that made by associated physical events. If a person is considering whether to do A or B, plausible reasoning cannot on his view make any contribution to the happening of A rather than B that is additional to that made by physical processes. It is not enough to say that, according to personalistic explanations that are valid and not reducible to physical explanations, consciousness does make a distinct positive contribution. There must be a fact of the matter, and on Maxwell’s view the fact of the matter has to be that conscious experiences cannot add anything to the determination by physical events of what happens. In that sense consciousness does not, on his view, make a positive contribution to the determination of what happens; and so I say his view remains vulnerable to my various arguments. 6. The Evolution of Purpose In Chapter 7 of HWPU, Maxwell appealed to Darwin’s theory of evolution to render intelligible the gradual emergence of purpose,

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sentience, consciousness, and free will in the physical universe, giving an account of how the purposive, and ultimately the personalistic, crept into existence. I cannot here do justice to his detailed discussion, but I will try to convey the gist of it. Maxwell argued to the effect that natural selection can operate on features of organisms that are apt to achieve purposes, and thus was able to promote the survival and reproduction of organisms that have purposes. As complexity increased, features that were apt to achieve purposes came to include the ability of an organism to direct its own activity towards purposes. This development was associated with the emergence of organisms with what Maxwell called motivational control of their behaviour, rather than the mere sequential control of behaviour that is exhibited by more primitive organisms. Maxwell did not specify precisely at what stage in evolution this development occurred, although he gave patterns of behaviour of invertebrates as examples of sequential control, and patterns of behaviour of mammals as examples of motivational control. And he associated this development with the emergence of sentience. Thus he wrote:17 Spiders do not build webs as a result of a generalised, insistent impulse to build a web; they are under precise, sequential control to execute a series of quite specific actions, which leads to the construction of a web. There is no sentience, no feeling or desire, no sensation, and no (or little) learning. Lions, on the other hand, I surmise, do feel hunger; they do experience a generalised, insistent impulse to find food. What needs to be done to obtain food, namely, hunt, has to be learned. Nature even arranges for hunting skills to be acquired during youth: cubs experience the irresistible impulse to engage in play, in mock combat. Unlike spiders, lions do have feelings and desires, and do experience sensations. In this way, Maxwell explained the emergence of sentience, which he saw, correctly in my opinion, as the most profound mystery of the evolutionary development of human consciousness. The development of full-blown human consciousness from this kind of sentience was also given an evolutionary explanation. Maxwell discussed cultural evolution, commencing when organisms facilitated their pursuit of purposes by imitating each other, and progressing as they came to be able to interpret the behaviour of other organisms as the pursuit of purposes by 17

HWPU, p.184.

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those other organisms (thus in my understanding invoking what Dennett calls the intentional stance, and linking with Dennett’s notion of userfriendly accounts of behaviour referred to earlier). In this way, there gradually emerged what Maxwell called personalistic understanding of behaviour, that is, one organism’s understanding of the behaviour of another organism in terms of experiences and purposes as it itself might have these experiences and purposes, and this itself came to be operated on by natural selection. The development of this kind of understanding of behaviour was associated with the development of communication and ultimately of language. Maxwell gave the following account of stages in this development:18 1. A acts in its own interests, for example goes rapidly into flight to avoid a predator: B takes this as behaviour as an indication of something (in this case danger) for him, and acts accordingly. 2. In addition, A does something such that the sole purpose of it is to communicate to B, even though A has no such conscious intention. Here, A might squawk as it goes into flight in a manner characteristic for that species in such circumstances; B reacts accordingly. 3. In addition, A has the purpose of signalling to B since, if A knows it is on its own it will not signal (e.g. squawk). 4. In addition, A has the purpose of communicating the message of the action to B, so that, in the case of the squawk, the bird squawks in order to warn B. If B is present but in no danger, A does not squawk. 5. B understands the meaning of the squawk. 6. A has the purpose of B understanding the message of the squawk. 7. B understands this too. 8. A intends B to understand this. In this way, personalistic understanding and communication came to reinforce each other, and to lead ultimately to the emergence of full-blown human consciousness. I find Maxwell’s account of the emergence and development of sentience and consciousness very persuasive, and I substantially agree with it. However, while I think that it fits well with my view that places limits on physicalism, I don’t think it fits so well with Maxwell’s own physicalism. 18

HWPU, p. 190.

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I think the problem for Maxwell arises particularly in relation to his explanation for the emergence of organisms that had the ability to direct their activity towards purposes, using their sentience and motivational control of their behaviour. If natural selection was to operate on that kind of aptness to achieve purposes, that kind of aptness must in truth have promoted the purposes in question; and I contend that, on Maxwell’s version of physicalism, this could never have been the case. It would always have been some kinds of physical processes, not any subjective purpose or motivation or sentience, that did in truth bring about whatever result was brought about; so it must have been aptness to produce these physical processes on which natural selection operated. Any subjective purpose or motivation or sentience must, at least initially, have only been an accompaniment to the efficacious physical processes; so at least initially it must have been aptness to produce the physical processes that was the object of natural selection; and my contention is that, consistently with Maxwell’s physicalism, at no later stage would the accompanying subjective purposes or motivation or sentience ever have displaced the efficacious physical processes, or even operated alongside them, so as to make aptness to produce these subjective purposes or motivation or sentience an object of natural selection. Since natural selection operates on what actually happens, not on acceptable descriptions or explanations of what happens, it is actual causal efficacy that counts for natural selection, not the availability of personalistic descriptions or explanations. So I say that evolution cannot, on Maxwell’s view, explain how conscious experiences can make a difference to what actually happens (as distinct from acceptable descriptions of what happens). On the other hand, if organisms could respond to information combined into unified wholes in ways that were not wholly determined by laws or rules, and thus could shape their behaviour in ways that took account, not merely of recurring constituent features of circumstances facing them, but also of particular combinations of features that could not engage with laws or rules, then the capacity to do this could have been the object of natural selection. This capacity could have developed very gradually from minimal beginnings in quite primitive organisms, involving the barest capacity to respond to this kind of information, through to the complexity of human experiences and behaviour, in the ways described by Maxwell. Thus, despite my fundamental disagreement with Maxwell’s physicalism, I found, and still find, his account of the emergence of

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purpose in evolution most valuable and enlightening; and indeed the same goes for his book HWPU as a whole.

Metaphysics and Methodology: AimOriented Empiricism Karl Rogers Nicholas Maxwell’s philosophy of science is actually an ongoing effort to develop a philosophy for science, which presupposes that the basic intellectual aim of science should be to help human beings discover and realise what is of value in life.1 He argues that this ‘philosophy of wisdom’ will improve the quality of human existence and the methods of science. The three main goals of this philosophy are to: 1. Correctly identify the progress-achieving methods of science; 2. Correctly generalise these methods to apply them to any problematical human endeavour, whatever their aims may be, rather than limiting them to knowledge-inquiry; 3. Correctly exploit these generalised progress-achieving methods with the overall aim of achieving social progress towards human enlightenment and wisdom – building a civilised world. Maxwell argues that any genuinely rigorous and rational science must formulate and subject to criticism how the universe is understood as comprehensible, with the aim of improving this understanding. Scientists should choose to explore empirically successful theories that explain phenomena and improve our knowledge. The philosophical criticism of assumptions, aims, and methods to improve how science is understood and practiced should be part of science. Instead of only comparing testable theories against observations and experimental results, scientists also need to recognise that natural philosophy is indispensable and integral to human efforts to comprehend the universe. Even the so-called ‘hard’ natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry, must incorporate metaphysics and epistemology as part of scientific inquiry, if scientists aim to articulate an intelligible account of scientific rationality, methodology, and progress. 1

N. Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (2nd Ed., London: Pentire Press, 2007); first published by Basil Blackwell in 1984.

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The rationality of science depends on the growth of knowledge, which depends on the knowledge of how to improve knowledge and scientific methods. This involves philosophical discussion about how the actual aims and methods of the natural sciences are evolving, and which metaphysical conjectures about the comprehensibility of the universe and the nature of knowledge have led to rapid growth in knowledge and improvement of methods. Of course, it is impossible in this short chapter to do justice to the breadth, details, and implications of Maxwell’s philosophy and I shall limit my discussion to Maxwell’s philosophy of science, as presented in The Comprehensibility of the Universe.2 He terms this philosophy of science as Aim-Oriented Empiricism (AOE). After describing Maxwell’s efforts to correctly identify the progress-achieving methods of science, with the caveat that his focus has largely been upon the progress-achieving methods of theoretical physics, I shall critically discuss the metaphysical presuppositions that underwrite his conception of AOE and scientific progress. 1. AOE and Maxwell’s Critique of Standard Empiricism (SE) Maxwell is critical of the epistemological doctrine of standard empiricism, which he considers to have dominated the natural and social sciences since the eighteenth century. This philosophical doctrine holds that science achieves progress by testing theories impartially in the light of evidence without making any permanent metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the universe. Maxwell argues that SE is untenable in practice because for any scientific theory there are (potentially) an infinite number of rival theories all of which agree about the same set of observed phenomena but disagree about unobserved phenomena. It would be an impossible task to explore the untested consequences of every possible theory and, therefore, the choice in favour of any empirically successful theory would be arbitrary. If the doctrine of SE was adhered to in practice, science would be either an ad hoc process of arbitrary theory testing or come to a complete standstill. In practice, scientists utilise conceptions of simplicity, unity, or explanatory power when choosing between rival theories, but these are exactly the kind of permanent metaphysical assumptions that SE prohibits. As a result of the unquestioned (but dishonest) acceptance of SE as orthodoxy by many scientists and philosophers of science alike, they have been unable to solve adequately 2

N. Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1998).

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serious philosophical problems, such as the problems of induction, simplicity, and explaining how scientific progress is possible. Without solutions to these problems, scientists cannot rationally verify any scientific theory on the basis of evidence, given that it remains logically possible that (i) any theory will be falsified in the future; and, (ii) there is a different theory that is at least as empirically successful. Following Popper, Maxwell claims that, even if a proposed theory is corroborated by evidence and testing, it is probable that it is incorrect and will be replaced by a better theory in the future, in the light of further evidence and testing. If empirical success were the only standard for theory-choice, there would not be any rational basis for applying any scientific theory to any practical or technical problem, given that it is probable that the theory is false; nor any rational basis for choosing one hypothesis or conjecture from any of the available alternatives, given that it probably will be shown to be false, if sufficiently tested. It would also be impossible to accept rationally any experimental result, given that we would be unable to justify the generalisation of any particular result to corroborate or refute any proposed physical law. Any theoretical entities described by an empirically successful theory could only be considered as useful fictions. Beyond the pedestrian, ad hoc collection of unrelated empirical facts, or describing empirical regularities of measurable variables and phenomena, it would be impossible, in terms of SE, to identify and justify rationally any scientific method or progress at all! The predictive successes of scientific theories could not be explained, their practical value would seem quite miraculous, and the explanatory value of theories would be considered irrelevant for the scientific enterprise. However, given that, in practice, theory choice is made in favour of empirically successful theories that promise to simplify and unify descriptions or explanations of otherwise disparate phenomena – attempting to explain all possible experience in terms of any underlying pattern, principle, or law – natural scientists, such as physicists, assume that both the universe and a complete scientific theory have a simple and unified nature. It is this metaphysical assumption that gives theorising an exploratory dynamic, situating theory choice and testing simultaneously it in contexts of justification and discovery (without requiring any sharp distinction between the two), and, thereby, providing science with a progress-achieving methodology. The advocates of SE have failed to develop an adequate philosophy of science, which would show how metaphysical assumptions about knowledge and comprehensibility are built into the aims of science. As a result, Maxwell

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argues that not only does SE fail to provide a rational foundation for science, but it is an obstacle to developing conceptual clarity about the role of “simplicity” and “unification” within scientific theory choice. It might be suggested that Maxwell has simply rediscovered the principle of parsimony – or Occam’s razor – in science, but Maxwell’s argument implies much more than this. When scientists choose simpler and more unified theories over more complex and limited rivals, they are not simply choosing theories easier to work with or more readily testable, but are assuming that, ceteris paribus, a simple and unified general theory is more likely to be true than a complex or special theory with a limited range of applicability. A theory is considered to be unified and simplified when it has invariant content, form, and terminology across the whole range of phenomena to which it is applied as an explanatory theory. This requires assumptions about the fundamental nature of the universe and how we should develop and refine the scientific methodology. There are not any empirical tests for these kinds of assumptions and, if they are persistently used by scientists to choose between equally empirically adequate rival theories, SE misrepresents the basic intellectual aim and methodology of scientists. If scientists do not seek the accumulation of empirical facts or descriptions of empirical regularities, for their own sake, but, instead, seek to explain all phenomena in terms of the same fundamental principles or laws, then science is explanatory – offering causal accounts to explain phenomena – rather than aiming at merely providing accurate descriptions of natural laws and testing these by comparing predictions with experience. Maxwell’s argument would certainly explain why complex natural phenomena, such as weather patterns or the path of lightning, are considered by scientists to be scientifically understood in terms of basic physical laws and mechanisms, even when they cannot be accurately modelled or predicted. Natural sciences, such as physics, are only intelligible qua sciences, if we reject SE and critically examine the metaphysical assumptions that are required for theories to be comprehensible and lead to a growth in knowledge. Scientists need to make assumptions about the ultimate nature of the universe from a position of complete ignorance in order to begin the inquiry into the ultimate nature of the universe and choose between empirically successful theories. Maxwell argues it is essential that the philosophy of science reveals these assumptions because if metaphysics determines methodology then bad metaphysical conjectures will lead to inappropriate methods. Different metaphysical conjectures about the

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underlying nature of the universe lead to alternative cosmologies, which lead to rival methodologies and theories. These can be compared by examining which methodology and theory better leads to a growth of knowledge and more clearly articulated assumptions about the comprehensibility of the universe. If untestable metaphysical conjectures about the universe are fundamental for deciding between theories and methods, then it is essential that these conjectures are themselves articulated and criticised as a part of science itself. To this end, Maxwell proposed a ten level hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility of the universe, wherein the assumptions become increasing unproblematical and less assertive as one moves up the hierarchy. Level 1: Evidence. Empirical data taken from observations and experiments; Level 2: Fundamental theories. All accepted empirically successful theories that explain phenomena in general. Level 3: Best blueprint. The best available metaphysical interpretation of how the universe is physically comprehensible, such as Newton’s corpuscle theory of light and matter or Everett’s Many-World view, wherein all phenomena and change are explicable in terms of some fundamental principles and unobservable entities; Level 4: Physical comprehensibility. The thesis that all phenomenal change and diversity can be explained in terms of one kind of physical entity; Level 5: Comprehensibility: The thesis that all phenomenal change and diversity can be explain in terms of one kind of entity, which is not necessarily a physical entity; Level 6: Near comprehensibility. This thesis is that even if the universe is not comprehensible it is nearly comprehensible to the extent that the assumption of complete (or perfect) comprehensibility leads to a better growth in knowledge than defeatism or making ad hoc experiments and observations; Level 7: Rough comprehensibility. The thesis is that the assumption of approximate comprehensibility leads to a better growth of knowledge than defeatism or making ad hoc experiments and observations; Level 8: Meta-knowability. The assumption that the universe is metaknowable in the sense that it is possible to rationally discover assumptions about the nature of the universe that lead to improved methods for the improvement of knowledge;

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Level 9: Epistemological Non-maliciousness. The assumption that it is possible to discover the general nature of the universe by developing knowledge acquired in our immediate environment, even if the universe does not exhibit comprehensibility or meta-knowability in our immediate environment; Level 10: Partial knowability. This thesis is that the universe is such that it is possible to acquire and possess knowledge of our immediate environment as a basis for action. As we ascend this hierarchy, from level 3 to 10, each thesis or assumption is increasingly vague and devoid of content, which makes it less likely of being false. Corresponding to each level r (from levels 3 to 9) there is a methodological rule that requires that we accept the level r-1 assumption that best exemplifies the level r thesis and leads to (or promises) a growth in knowledge. This allows us to understand the assumptions implicit in current scientific methodology, each made explicit and increasingly simplified, and how these assumptions and their associated methods can be refined or changed as scientific knowledge is refined or changed. Maxwell argues that this system allows us to identify and explicate how scientists comprehend the universe and how this comprehension evolves as science makes new discoveries, acquires knowledge, refines its aims and methods, and improves how scientific discoveries, knowledge, aims, and methods are understood. He considered AOE as the only philosophically adequate basis for correctly identifying the progress-achieving methods of science and for understanding science as a rational means of inquiry. According to AOE, any accepted physical theory that does not explain the fundamental principles of all phenomena, change, and limits, must be false, even if it is empirically successful. For example, while general relativity plus the standard model of elementary particle interactions may well have huge explanatory success and predictive power, they are not unified and according to AOE must be false. This explains the motivation for the search for a “deeper” unified theory from which general relativity and the standard model could be derived as special cases. This motivation could not be considered to be rational in terms of SE, given the empirical success of general relativity and the standard model within their different fields of applicability. This example shows how AOE provides a better philosophical justification for scientific rationality and progress than does SE. Hence, Maxwell argues that science has only been able to progress

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rationally when scientists have ignored SE, even when they pay lip service to it, and have put AOE in practice, even if unconsciously. By dissociating philosophical inquiry from the aims and methods of science from science, SE has undermined the rationality of science, while AOE, according to Maxwell, promises a rigorous and fruitful conception of science that improves our understanding and practice of science, which has “fruitful implications not just for science, but for all inquiry and, in a sense, for all of life.”3 2. SE and Criticisms of Maxwell’s AOE From the outset, Maxwell assumed that science is empirically successful “in increasing our knowledge and understanding of the natural world” and has “made progress at an ever-accelerating rate.”4 Maxwell assumed that there is an existing body of empirical knowledge and methods for improving knowledge implicit in current scientific practice.5 Consequently, for Maxwell, it is essential for philosophers of science to explain how this success is possible. He considers how we understand the ongoing development and refinement of scientific methodology to be the philosophical key to explain “scientific success and progress”. Once we have recognised the inadequacy of SE for this philosophical task, we can question how the metaphysical assumptions made about the nature of the universe correspond to the development and refinement of methodological rules that, together with “empirical considerations”, are involved in the acceptance or rejection of any proposed theories. However, Maxwell’s uncritical acceptance of “the empirical success” of science shows that, even though his criticisms of SE are directed towards its philosophical inadequacy for understanding how scientific theory choice and interpretation occur in practice, he has presumed the doctrine of SE in his interpretation of how theories should be tested, how scientific observations should be made, and what qualifies as “corresponding to experience”. This assumption allowed him to start with “evidence” as the first level of his hierarchical system. While his system is based on concepts of simplicity, unity, and comprehensibility, explicating the speculative metaphysical assumptions used to interpret “evidence”, he does not provide us with an account of how “evidence” is selected and produced qua evidence. The 3

Ibid., p.2. Ibid., p. 1. 5 Ibid., p. 11. 4

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assumption of SE in his interpretation of the nature of “the empirical” – the character of scientific evidence, observation, and experience – has profound implications for Maxwell’s conception of “the physical”. This can be seen in his later writings, within which he reduces his ten-level system to a “simpler” seven-level system by assuming “cosmological physicalism”.6 This underwrites his (Galilean) assertion that there are only physical (objective, quantitative) and personal (subjective, qualitative) explanations. This has profound implications for and limits his understanding of “physical explanations” of evolution and conceptions of free will, meaning, value, experience, and consciousness, even though he maintains that these are all compatible with “cosmological physicalism”.7 By assuming SE in his understanding of “the empirical” – asserting that science has shown clear “empirical success” and the task of the philosophy of science is to explain that success – he precludes any possibility of criticism of the nature of “the empirical” and the criteria for “empirical success”. This prevents the possibility of genuinely alternative developments of “scientific methodology” (phenomenology or hermeneutics, for example) based on broader conceptions of “the empirical”, “the physical”, and “science”. Maxwell is aware that interpretations of “evidence” are highly theoretical in character and that this creates insurmountable problems for SE.8 In agreement with Duhem and Popper, Maxwell holds that theory is built into observations, and experiments are performed in the light of theory.9 Not only do observations actively occur within theoretical frameworks or paradigms, using concepts, visualisations, and representations, but also theoretical accounts are implicit in the design, construction, operation, and interpretation of the instruments and apparatus used to make those observations. An intelligible account of any experiment must provide a causal explanation, in terms of theoretical entities and mechanisms, of how this experiment is physically possible and performed. Studies of the majority of the phenomena investigated within the fields of mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, radioactivity, solid-state physics, and quantum physics involve the interpretation of the 6

N. Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic? (London: Imperial College Press, 2004). N. Maxwell, The Human World in the Physical Universe (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). 8 N. Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op cit., pp. 68-69. 9 P. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton University Press, 1954), chapter IV; K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2nd Ed., London: Hutchinson, 1959, first published in 1934), pp. 423-424. 7

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performances of machines and instruments to test theories, provide measurements, make observations, and provide “evidence”. Most experiments and observations are not based on direct sensory experiences at all! Physicists need a technical education before they can make sense – interpret – their direct sensory experiences of instruments in terms of underlying physical processes, variables, and constants. Each instrument is designed, built, operated, and calibrated using descriptions and explanations that utilise technical and theoretical abstractions (such as potential difference, time-signals, inductance, capacitance, thermal capacity, electrical resistance, phase, frequency, mass, magnetic field strength, force, electric charge, power, etc.), each quantified in terms of arbitrary SI units and mathematical functions. These are meaningless outside of the historically developed theoretical and technological frameworks in which they are used, and, the student, by learning to become a physicist, embodies these frameworks in scientific practice. By claiming that measurement using such instruments provides direct experience, as confirmation or refutation of theory, advocates of SE have uncritically accepted the stable results of the historical development of technological and theoretical efforts, and the current state of instrumentation, education, and interpretation as givens. While Maxwell rejects SE in so far as it is philosophically inadequate for understanding relations between theory and experiment, he uncritically accepts that the mathematical and experimental methods of physics inform us about natural laws and, thereby, that physics has demonstrated “empirical success” as a natural science and has lead to a growth of knowledge about the natural world. How is Maxwell able to do this while so thoroughly rejecting SE as a constraint on theory choice and the theoretical interpretation of experience? As I have argued elsewhere, Maxwell’s hierarchical system presupposes mechanical realism as its underlying operational metaphysics.10 Mechanical realism makes experimental physics conceptually and culturally possible as a mathematical and technological means to obtain knowledge about natural mechanisms and laws. This metaphysics provides a unifying conception of “the physical” – understood in terms of those aspects of natural entities that are amenable to quantification and technological manipulation – and this underwrites the foundational principles and assumptions justifying the epistemological legitimacy of experimentation as the means provide 10

K. Rogers, On the Metaphysics of Experimental Physics (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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“evidence” – “the empirical” – within natural science. It is premised upon the following set of operational precepts that provide principles of action and function as a heuristic for the conceptual establishment of a scientific methodology to explore Nature: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) (vii)

Natural and technological phenomena both share a unitary origin; Both natural processes and machine performances come into being by the same causal principles; There is a unique, eternal, and universal cause for every effect (or set of effects); The connections between causes and effects are the fundamental mechanisms of Nature; The realisation of any mechanism is governed by a natural law and, consequently, the performance of any machine is governed by natural laws; The mathematical descriptions of the motions of mechanical devices, and machines, are mathematical descriptions of natural law; and, The only distinction between natural phenomena and machine performances is that the latter require human intervention to come into being whilst the former do not.

This operational metaphysics is distinct from speculative metaphysics, such as Gassendi’s seventeenth century atomic theory of matter, Newtonian absolute space and time, or Everett’s many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, which were proposed to make particular experiments and observations intelligible in terms of particular conceptions and interpretations of Nature. As Maxwell states, these metaphysical blueprints are replaceable and contingent within experimental physics. However, since Galileo, the whole project of using machines and instruments to explore natural mechanisms and laws universally presupposes mechanical realism and it is a requirement for experimentation to be a means of ontological access and epistemological warrant.11 It provides physics with an enduring scientific methodology and Maxwell’s conceptions of “the empirical” and “the physical” presuppose it. Even if we agree with Maxwell’s argument that AOE better describes the current scientific methodology, once we take into account his presupposition of mechanical realism then we can see how the permissible content of “empirical considerations” and “the physical” have been 11

Ibid., chapter 3.

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predetermined and constrained in accordance with SE orthodoxy, which has also predetermined the possible structure and content of scientific theories and knowledge in terms that are amenable to technological modes of inquiry and testing, such as repeatable measurement and manipulation. If the underlying pattern of the universe and “the empirical” means to discover it are both only understood in technological terms, only those aspects of the natural world amenable to measurement and experimentation can be considered as “the physical” , as Maxwell asserts.12 This a priori assumption rejects natural religious or magical rituals, such the consultation of oracles, dreams, chicken entrails, meditation, or dancing naked around Stonehenge, as having any intellectual value as means of improving knowledge or exploring any underlying principles of Nature. It also rejects reasoning and intuitions about ordinary experiences and perceptions. The subsequent “empirical success” of physics has been dominated by its success in developing and explaining technological innovation in terms of basic mechanisms and mathematical laws, which have been metaphorically projected as a success in explaining experience of the natural world in terms of fundamental mechanisms for physical change and persistence, while its predictive success has been largely limited to the closed conditions of the laboratory and machine performances. The predictive successes of astronomy and geophysics are notoriously limited, wherein the models and laws utilised are incapable of dealing with complex phenomena, largely resulting in an ongoing process of the discovery of anomalies and subsequent falsification of theories, rife with controversy, but, in the laboratory, dealing with the construction and performance of machines, the predictive successes in the fields of mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, solid state physics, and quantum mechanics are astounding, and those machines are considered to be theoretically understood. Once we take into account the role of technological activity as being essential to the methodology of science, wherein theories are closely related to the ongoing technological innovation of prototypes and techniques, then we can see that this involves a special kind of physicalism, which distinguishes it from its predecessors. This has radically changed the kind of properties and powers than can be ascribed to physical entities, how natural law and change can be understood, and how experience should be disciplined and selected in order to qualify as “empirical”. This also explains the persistent disunity that exists between theories developed in the laboratory (e.g. Quantum Theory) 12

N. Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op cit., p. 101.

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using increasingly sophisticated machines, and, those developed outside the laboratory (e.g. General Relativity) which largely involve the increased mathematical generalisation of conceptions of space and time alongside the hit and miss discovery of astronomical events and objects. Of course, Maxwell is aware that technological innovation has shaped and empowered scientific research and methods, but, he treats technology as a neutral means and neglects to attend to the way that technology appropriates and transforms natural phenomena investigated by physicists, which allows them to explore and explain those aspects of phenomena that are amenable to manipulation and measurement. However, by recognising the role of mechanical realism in connecting the artificial activities of experimentation, via the concept of “natural mechanism”, with mathematics and natural philosophy, via the concept of “natural law”, we can see how the assertion of physicalism (level 4) corresponds to “empirical success”, as Maxwell presupposes13, and we can also recognise how the limits of that “empirical success” correspond to the limits of the context within which “the physical” is revealed by mathematically modelling sets of machine performances. Mechanical realism conceptually allowed Maxwell’s underlying connection “at the metamethodological level, selection of metaphysics plus associated methods” with representations of the natural world, given in technologically amenable terms, as a total system or grand machine comprised of interconnected systems and machines, alongside the representation of the technological innovation of new machines and techniques, each allowing new powers and experiences, represented in terms of the discovery and implementation of natural mechanisms, realised and exercised in accordance with natural law. The universe is explored and understood through technological activity, while mathematical theories are selected on the basis of their amenability of technological testing and utility. The acceptance of mechanical realism allowed the identification of the empirical success of the experimental sciences in terms of a posteriori evaluations of the practical value of postulated mechanisms for the technological innovation of new experiments, while the “empirical test” of mathematical theories is understood in terms of the utility for this ongoing process of technological innovation, regardless of the limited success in predicting phenomena outside the laboratory. The concept of “natural mechanism” allowed Nature to be explained in terms of the mechanical and for machines to be explained in terms of the natural, projecting these 13

Ibid., pp. 17, 117-20.

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theoretical representations over natural phenomena, while testing theories in the context of ongoing technological innovation. Consequently, when a physicist explains how a bird flies, s/he explains how s/he would build an aeroplane; when a physicist explains how the shine shines, s/he explains how s/he would build a fusion bomb. In Maxwell’s system, the presumption of mechanical realism is necessary for the use of apparatus in the artificial conditions of the laboratory to be represented as providing the “empirical facts” about the natural world outside of the laboratory – disclosing a level one of “evidence” – which are represented as the consequence of “natural mechanisms” that exist independently of the experiment but were realised and exercised during the experiment. It is an implicit “level zero” which provides the rationale for performing the experiment in the first place. It is required for Maxwell’s presumption of an existing body of empirical knowledge (levels 1 and 2) and methods for improving knowledge implicit in current scientific practice; defining what counts as “empirical evidence” (level 1) by placing measurability and manipulability conditions upon what can qualify as an acceptable physical theory (level 2) and the best blue print (level 3). As the history of science shows, modifying or changing the best blueprint modifies or changes what can be considered as an acceptable theory or empirical evidence, but, mechanical realism placed strict conditions on how scientists can decide the content of these blueprints, which are determined in terms of a posteriori evaluations of the best way to exploit the technological potential of any research programme for the further development of research. This predefines physical comprehensibility (level 4) in accordance with the ability to explain technological innovation in terms of “natural mechanisms” realised and exercised in accordance with “natural law”, and places strict limits on the possibilities for comprehensibility in general (levels 5, 6, and 7), rejecting as an a priori any non-physical explanation, even allowing that the universe can only be known approximately, leading to a constrained form of “cosmological physicalism”. There are strict limits placed on the metaknowability of the universe (level 8) and it is an a priori that any methods of developing theories or observation that cannot be tested and further developed technologically are rejected or shelved. The experimental apparatus is predefined as the only legitimate locality for testing (suitably shielded from the complex and messy wider world) and, thereby, places strict limits on how epistemological non-maliciousness (level 9) and partial knowability (level 10) can be understood. Mechanical realism

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predetermines how simplicity, unity, and the growth of knowledge are to be represented, understood, and further developed, which provides the meta-rules by which Maxwell can apply his methodological rules to determine which level r-1 assumption best exemplifies the level r thesis and leads to (or promises) a growth in knowledge. By predetermining what can count as a scientific experience of “the physical”, the permissible content of theories, and how tests should be performed, the presumption of mechanical realism permanently conceals the technological ontology that underwrites the special kind of “cosmological physicalism” that Maxwell considers as the only realistic and rational basis for the philosophical evaluation of scientific methodology and the directions of the growth of scientific knowledge. On this account, “scientific progress” should be a quite unsurprising consequence of the (level 10) assumption of partial knowability. 3. Conclusion Experimental science inherently involves the development of technological activities that transform natural entities into sets of properties that are capable of being manipulated and measured. The SE doctrine excludes from scientific inquiry aspects that are incapable of being treated this way. Maxwell’s reduction of “the empirical” in accordance with SE – to the results of mathematical and experimental methods – and corresponding reductive conception of “the physical” – to those aspects accessible to mathematical and experimental methods – have conditioned and limited his philosophical understanding of how scientific methodology could develop if we overcame the domination of SE over the philosophy of science. If we reject this reductionism, we can philosophically question and criticise interpretations and explanations of how we technologically interact (select, measure, manipulate) with particular aspects of the natural world, and, how the “empirical tests” of theories are intimately bound-up with contingent estimations of their “the practical value” for the public advancement of particular directions of research and innovation. While Maxwell has shown that SE is an obstacle to the philosophical understanding of theory-choice, his presumption of SE in his understanding of “the empirical” is an obstacle to the critical evaluation of “the empirical success” of science in general. However, once we reject the constraints of SE upon the general concept of “the empirical”, we can develop more general conceptions of science and phenomena, as disclosed

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through broader descriptions and explanations of experience and practice, while satisfying the level 4 open-endedness that Maxwell claims AOE requires in general14, but this implies recognising incommensurable standards and aims between different sciences, especially between natural and social sciences. Maxwell accepts that different sciences have different aims, involving different developments of AOE, but he also should recognise that different sciences should have different conceptions of “the empirical” and, correspondingly, explore different phenomena in accordance with different conceptions of theory and practice. Maxwell should recognise that social sciences have developed distinct methodologies, often independently of those of the natural sciences, including historical descriptions and explanations, with their phenomenological, sociological, and hermeneutic dimensions. Even in the natural sciences there are differing presuppositions about the nature of “the physical” and “the empirical” and we should not uncritically presume that science has been empirically successful in a way that ignores these fundamental differences. The “empirical successes” of the experimental sciences are largely limited to specific practices and methods in physics, chemistry, and biology, with different standards of success, which cannot be generalised beyond the technological contexts within which they occur and are developed. Consequently, the progress-achieving methods of these sciences only have limited applicability to the wider philosophical problem of the identification of the progress-achieving methods of science in general. The differences between the sciences and the corresponding different standards by which “empirical” and “explanatory” successes can be evaluated shows that it is quite unlikely that we can develop a plausible unified philosophy of science and, in the absence of such a philosophy, we should not presuppose that all phenomena can be comprehended in terms of the same principles, laws, or entities. This implies that scientific inquiry involves a level of scientific pluralism that not only requires level 5 of AOE to be open-ended in a way that problematises attempts to unify science, but it also shows that science is subordinate to value-pluralism, at a societal level, which socially conditions how different sciences are applied, developed, and specialised. Incommensurable standards between different specialisations of natural or social sciences, as well as between the natural and social sciences in general, cause serious problems for the task of identifying any general progress-achieving methods of science in 14

Ibid., p. 122.

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such a way as to allow moving from the first stage to second stage within Maxwell’s ‘philosophy of wisdom’, given that, at all stages, contingent societal values are required for the social organisation of different sciences, which means that scientific activities are conditioned by and contingent upon non-scientific criteria. This means that scientific activities, whether scientists like it or not, are inherently bound-up with cultural, political, and economic questions of how society should be organised and developed, and we would need universally to understand and answer these questions before we could rationally move from stage 2 to stage 3. It is not likely that any such universal understanding is possible in the absence of universal agreement on how to resolve questions of value. Without this agreement, the awareness of value-pluralism and the contestability of scientific rationality and progress must be incorporated into the social organisation of science. Otherwise the sciences are likely to aid the construction of a totalitarian and irrational society in ways that will be disastrous for the natural world and human existence.15 Once we become aware that the notions of progress and rationality are contested and at stake in a pluralistic and diverse society, wherein there is an absence of any universal agreement about the epistemological and moral standards required for the reasoned and democratic deliberation of how to develop and implement scientific research, we need to subject different conceptions of scientific rationality and progress to public scrutiny in a way that publicly incorporates and satisfies value-pluralism and uncertainty in an openended, complex, and changing world that does not always conform to human intentionality.16 This means that, before the sciences can help us discover and realise what is of value in life, we must collectively recognise that we do not have any universally agreed understanding of how human beings should live, even if we agree upon the material conditions for human survival, and recognise that moral and political decisions about how to resolve conflicts and respect differences are at stake.

15

K. Rogers, Modern Science and the Capriciousness of Nature (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 16 K. Rogers, Participatory Democracy, Science and Technology (Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Popper and Maxwell on Scientific Progress Leemon McHenry 1. Introduction Science is the supreme achievement of rationality, but does it make progress in a way in which other human endeavors do not? In spite of its fallible and self-correcting nature, few would dispute the advances in our understanding of the cosmos, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the mapping of the human genome. Yet some contend that this is naïve.1 Science changes and develops, but it does not progress in the sense that it achieves truth or approximates truth. In this regard, the detractors argue, science is just another ideology or social construction and not significantly different from art, morality, politics and religion. The real question then is how does science make progress if indeed it does? The whole enterprise of attempting to defend the idea of scientific advance involves us in theories of scientific progress, of which both Karl Popper and Nicholas Maxwell have made important contributions. At the beginning of Maxwell’s The Comprehensibility of the Universe, he describes the success of modern science beginning with Galileo and Kepler as “astonishing” and asks: “What is the methodological key to the unprecedented progressive success of modern science?”2 His answer challenges what he calls “standard empiricism,” i.e., the orthodox conception that scientific theories are accepted or rejected solely with respect to the justice they do to the evidence, but not in a manner that explicitly recognizes any substantial thesis about the world as part of scientific knowledge. Science does make progress, according to Maxwell, but it is not by the widely-accepted view of standard empiricism. What is required, he argues, is a commitment to metaphysical principles underlying our notion that the universe is comprehensible. But in addition to this criticism, Maxwell has devoted a great deal of his work to recognizing that 1

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975). Nicholas Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 1. 2

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science has the power to do as much harm as good, hence the theme of his life’s work – from knowledge to wisdom. This raises a much larger question about progress when the consequences of a singled-minded quest for knowledge are not guided by the wisdom of sound judgment. While my primary concern in this essay is the first question of how science makes progress, I shall also touch upon this second question raised by Maxwell’s work. In particular, I wish to examine his critique of his philosophical mentor. As Maxwell says in his Autobiographical Remarks, it was Karl Popper who opened a path in the philosophy of science and from this conceptual framework he developed his own critical evaluation.3 Both Popper and Maxwell agree that science makes progress. The question of scientific progress, however, requires an examination of how they view the aims of science, for the very notion of scientific progress depends upon a view of the aims of science. 2. Popper’s Falsification and Explanation In Objective Knowledge, Popper says that the aim of science is satisfactory explanations, i.e., explanations advanced in terms of testable and falsifiable universal laws and initial conditions. As he says: the conjecture that it is the aim of science to find satisfactory explanations leads us further to the idea of improving the degree of satisfactoriness of the explanations by improving their degree of testability, that is to say, by proceeding to theories of ever richer content, of a higher degree of universality, and of higher degree of precision.4 Popper came to this view via his central problem of demarcation, namely, the problem of distinguishing between science and non-science. In his classic work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he rejected the inductivist view of the growth of scientific knowledge and landed upon the one fundamental idea around which his philosophy is based. Science progresses not by the accumulation of truths whereby later theories absorb

3

Nicholas Maxwell, “How Can Life of Value Best Flourish in the Real World” Chapter 1. 4 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 193.

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what was correct in earlier ones,5 but rather by a curiously negative path of proving theories false, for the falsification of a theory is a decisive step forward in the sense that we have eliminated falsehood and can now substitute the old theory with a new one that has greater explanatory and predicative power. This, Popper contends, is the great achievement of science that distinguishes its method from those of non-science, metaphysics, ideology, etc. Rigor is achieved in science by proposing bold conjectures and then actively seeking out severely critical and risky empirical testing that can potentially refute the conjectures. In other fields of human endeavor we have mere change, but rarely anything that approaches progress in science (and, of course, mathematics) by a clear method of detecting error. Science is guesswork, doxa rather than episteme. In place of the old ideal (or rather idol) of science as the search for absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge, Popper argues that the “demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.”6 Verification of scientific knowledge is replaced by falsification. Accumulation of irrefutable facts is replaced by conjecture and refutation. Popper’s view of science as conjectural challenges the idea that the empirical base of science is an unchangeable and stable foundation from which we can measure progress. As he says: The empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing ‘absolute’ about it. Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.7

5

Thomas Kuhn described this traditional view as ‘incrementalism.” Popper’s falsificationism shares with Kuhn an anti-incrementalism in that both espoused a view in which a change in scientific theory is not cumulative or continuous. 6 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 280. 7 Ibid., p. 111.

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Strictly speaking, the truth value of any scientific theory must be regarded as false. If it has been falsified, it is false; if not, then it will at some future point be demonstrated false. A theory is corroborated if it has withstood genuine attempts at falsification, but it is never anything more than a working hypothesis, never demonstrated true. This is born out according to the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification. While it is impossible to verify a universal law by reference to some putative confirming experience, a single counter-instance to the universal law conclusively refutes it. We pursue truth, but at best, we can only have the expectation of finding out where our theories are mistaken and replacing them with better ones. A good scientific theory, for Popper, is one that puts itself at a genuine risk of being proved false due to its high informative content. This has a rather paradoxical result especially if we are inclined to think that the more probable a theory, the better it is.8 For Popper, we should not assume uncritically that high probability is an aim of science. The more improbable a theory, the better it is as a scientific theory because probability and informative content vary inversely. The higher the informative content of a theory, the lower the probability the theory will have. This will be clear since the higher informative content means that scientists will have a better chance of demonstrating that the theory can be falsified. The aim of science then is not high probability of theory turning out to be true, but rather high informative content leading to the demonstration of its falsehood. Still this may appear insufficient to describe the progress of science. Does knowing what is false give us progress? Popper seems to have recognized this point. He writes: …this picture of science – as a procedure whose rationality consists in the fact that we learn from our mistakes – is not quite good enough. It may still suggest that science progresses from theory to theory and that it consists of a sequence of better and better deductive systems. Yet what I really wish to suggest is that science should be visualized as progressing from problems to problems—to problems of ever increasing depth.9 8

Ibid., p. 218. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 222. 9

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Popper viewed problem-solving as the hallmark of science but to account for a sequence of better and better deductive systems, he required an idea of truth. He argued that the very idea of truth allows us to recognize mistakes and engage in the rational pursuit of eliminating mistakes. The standard of an objective truth about the world, of which our empirical testing gives results, is the basis for the very idea of error. What is needed for progress, however, is some explanation of how the succession of false theories constitutes progress. The answer came in part with Popper’s attempt at the theory of verisimilitude – that later theories have a higher degree of verisimilitude or truth-likeness because though all are false, they get progressively closer to the truth. That is, the truthcontent is higher and the falsity-content is lower as we move from earlier to later theories. In spite of the fact that Popper’s formal definitions of verisimilitude were demonstrated to be problematic,10 he maintained that the common sense notion that “science aims at truth in the sense of correspondence to the facts or to reality” remained a valuable heuristic device. A well-corroborated successor to a falsified theory is a better approximation to truth provided that it has also met some new predicative success.11 So, for Popper, scientific progress is understood in terms of how theories replace others via the severely critical process of falsification. A theory that has replaced a predecessor has a higher degree of testability and universality, richer content, greater precision and predicative power and deals with problems of ever-increasing depth that result in more satisfactory explanations. Moreover, the idea of progress from theory to theory requires increasing fertility in that new conjectures will provide guidance in research to further problems and solutions. As Popper generalized his falsification theory to apply more broadly to problem solving in other areas of non-scientific inquiry, he extended his critical rationalism such that progress in metaphysics, politics and morality is achieved by the degree to which a discipline engages in rational

10

For criticisms of Popper’s verisimilitude, see David Miller, “Popper’s Qualitative Theory of Verisimilitude,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 25 (1974), pp. 166-177 and P. Tichý, “On Popper’s Definition of Verisimilitude,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 25 (1974), pp. 155-160. 11 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, op. cit., p. 59.

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discourse in advancing and criticizing theories.12 The new criterion of demarcation is not between science and non-science, but rather between systems devoid of rational value and systems that are engaged in solving serious and interesting problems. The boundary between science and metaphysics, or science and politics remains sharply drawn on the basis of falsifiability, but this does not mean metaphysics or politics is meaningless discourse as long as ideas are subjected to rigorous criticism and stand only as tentative and fallible solutions to problems. Popper even recognizes that metaphysics is an inevitable precursor to science, as a sort of embryo in the development of scientific hypotheses.13 The main obstacle to progress in these disciplines is not that they fail to be scientific but rather that they embrace dogma, i.e., ideological intolerance or simply become subject to intellectual fashion. 3. Maxwell’s Critique: Aim Oriented Empiricism Maxwell sees the aim of science quite differently. In place of Popper’s emphasis on satisfactory explanations, he first of all argues that science seeks explanatory truth in the sense that truth is presupposed to be explanatory by a substantial thesis about the world, and secondly that science aims at valuable truth. With regard to the latter, Maxwell sees a larger social context in which science contributes, or should contribute, to the quality of human life. The progress of science very broadly depends on what is of cultural and intellectual value. Maxwell thus recognizes a broader telos in science. The aim is not just bare Truth as an abstract ideal of scientific objectivity but rather valuable truth that is put to concrete action. In other words, Maxwell sees the very idea of progress is a normative or axiological concept. Popper’s view, Maxwell argues, is a primary example of standard empiricism or at least the view he held early in his career. But the fact is that science does not practice this hard-nosed conception of its method; for if it did, he contends, science would come to a standstill. This is an essential thesis of The Comprehensibility of the Universe – that the official, orthodox view of science as advancing by strict adherence to the 12

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 volumes (London: Routledge, 1945). 13 Karl Popper, The Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, volume 3: Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (London: Routledge, 1992), especially pp. 199-211.

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evidence is untenable and makes it impossible to understand how science makes progress. Maxwell cites Popper: “in science, only observation and experiment may decide upon the acceptance and rejection of scientific statements, including laws and theories.”14 Given the existence of a number of competing hypotheses all empirically equivalent, there is no criterion for selection. To make the point more strongly, Maxwell argues that there will be an infinite number of grossly ad hoc but equally (or even more) empirically successful rivals to a theory, yet if empirical considerations alone are supposed to justify the theory currently upheld, then there are no rational grounds for rejecting the infinitely many rivals to the theory.15 So, in Popper’s terms, given a number of theories, all of which are equally falsifiable, it becomes difficult to understand which one becomes the accepted physical theory that provides guidance to a number of research programs. Even the ones that are grossly ad hoc will satisfy Popper’s requirements for being superior theories to the ones currently accepted. If falsification based on high empirical content alone is the criterion for the scientific status of a theory, the grossly ad hoc and even crackpot theories will have to be taken seriously as the best scientific theories because they will be immediately falsifiable. Clearly this is not what actually happens in science. Maxwell calls Popper’s early falsification theory of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, “bare falsificationism,” that is, only empirical considerations and degrees of falsifiability determine what is to be accepted and rejected in science. But he contends as Popper developed his view, he devised a modification that Maxwell calls “dressed falsificationism.” According to the dressed version contained within a discussion of scientific progress in Conjectures and Refutations, simplicity is acknowledged as a meta-scientific criterion in addition to falsifiability for rational choice between theories. Popper here recognized that a scientist seeking a new theory capable of explaining certain experimental facts must consider the requirement that the “new theory should proceed from some simple, new, and powerful, unifying idea about some connection or relation … between hitherto unconnected things or facts … or new theoretical entities.”16 14

Nicholas Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., p. 3; Popper cited from Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 54. 15 Ibid., p. 3; also see Nicholas Maxwell, “Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism,” Philosophia 32/1-4, (2005), pp. 192-93. 16 Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, op. cit., p. 241.

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If Maxwell is correct in this interpretation, then Popper himself recognized that falsification remained the successful demarcation between science and non-science, but that falsification alone was inadequate to describe a good scientific theory and account for scientific progress. According to dressed falsification then, falsification is a necessary but not sufficient condition for identifying progress in science. A new theory could not simply be any theory, wildly speculative, ad hoc, or whatever taken out of the blue that is easily refuted; rather it has to have some connection or relation to its predecessors such that its success involves unification of previously disparate phenomena as well as greater explanatory and predicative power. Maxwell has extended his argument against standard empiricism to make the radical claim that science so-conceived is guilty of, or suffers from, a “rationalistic neurosis,” for the claim of standard empiricism is that science aims at factual truths via adherence to the evidence whereas in reality science aims at improving our knowledge of the universe as unified and physically comprehensible.17 This means that science must proceed with an assumption that the universe has an underlying unity that forbids consideration of grotesquely disunified theories, and the sharp boundary between metaphysics and science is eliminated. For Maxwell, the scientist must be engaged in natural philosophy in the sense that untestable, substantial theses about the world are accepted as part of scientific knowledge. Here we see a major difference from Popper’s theory, bare or dressed, since there was an element of positivism that lingered in Popper’s thought: metaphysical theses could not be admitted into the framework of scientific knowledge. Admitting that science cannot proceed without some basic assumption about the universe as comprehensible, the question is not whether science adopts a metaphysics but rather which metaphysics best suits our currently accepted fundamental physical theories, or does the best justice to the longterm development of physics. This also opens the door to discussions about fundamental aims and methods. Maxwell argues that the neurosis of science does not just involve the “repression” of problematic metaphysical assumptions about the comprehensibility of the universe; it also involves the repression of problematic assumptions concerning values and politics. And more generally, academic inquiry as a whole represses problematic assumptions about what our aims ought to be in seeking social progress 17

Nicholas Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic? (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), pp. 4-17.

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and civilization. What is needed most is a science, and a kind of rational inquiry more generally, that is devoted to articulating and helping to solve the real problems of humanity rather than merely adding to our stock of scientific facts. We have made extraordinary strides in solutions to what Maxwell calls the “first great problem of learning,” namely, the acquisition of reliable knowledge of the world, but we have utterly failed to solve the second problem of global wisdom and civilization.18 The dogma of standard empiricism coupled with specialization instilled throughout the natural and social sciences and in our institutions of academic inquiry has the effect of preventing us from developing our aims and methods of problem-solving in such a way that humanity realizes that which is of fundamental importance. Maxwell suggests that the idea of the scientist as a dispassionate, disinterested, unbiased inquirer into objective truth is a myth, and once we own up to this fact by accepting the argument against standard empiricism, the fact/value distinction that separates science from the humanities must also be abandoned. This is not to say that there isn’t a distinction between facts and values, but rather that science as a value-neutral inquiry simply does not exist and we can no longer excuse science from the failure to make positive contributions to the goal of civilization by appealing to the myth. As Maxwell argues: …values, of one kind or another, are inevitably, entirely properly and desirably, built into the scientific enterprise in influencing choice of research aims, in influencing what scientists seek to develop knowledge about…. I do not, then, argue against the value neutrality of science, for there is no such thing; what I do argue against, again, is the official philosophy of science of standard empiricism which, falsely and damagingly, denies that values do play any legitimate role within science.19 Just as Popper developed a philosophy of critical rationalism from his falsification theory, moving from philosophy of science to social and political theory, Maxwell likewise developed his aim-oriented rationalism 18

Nicholas Maxwell, “Can Humanity Learn to Become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 17/1, 2000, pp. 29-44. 19 Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for the Sciences and the Humanities, Second Edition (London: Pentire Press, 2007), p. 345.

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as a generalization from aim-oriented empiricism. Aim-oriented rationalism unlike critical rationalism, however, involves the idea of critically assessing our aims and methods in the attempt to contribute to the quality of human life. The difference with Popper is clear for he is primarily concerned with problems of knowledge, whereas Maxwell shifts attention to problems of living. Popper attempted to improve upon the Enlightenment ideal of learning from scientific progress how to make similar progress in the social sciences by focusing upon the rational, free and open society, but he conceived of progress entirely by way of the methods of social science imitating those of the natural sciences. Maxwell instead focuses upon social inquiry in establishing and criticizing goals. Social inquiry is not social science with a methodology similar to natural science. Rather it gives priority to the needs of humanity, the goal of which is progress toward a sustainable, enlightened and civilized world. Scientific progress falls under the purview of wisdom-inquiry rather than the more restricted knowledge-inquiry. Aim-oriented rationalism embracing the former rather than the latter becomes a peoples’ civil service.20 4. Evaluation Maxwell contends that Popper’s view must result in the consequence that science is an infinite chain of false theories and caricatures the theory of falsification as a sort of blind mechanism whereby science staggers from one false theory to another.21 As he explains: “When a theory is falsified, scientists must think up an even more falsifiable conjecture, which predicts everything its predecessor predicts, is not falsified by the experiment that falsified its predecessor, and predicts additional phenomena as well. As a result of proceeding in this way, science is able to make progress because falsehood is constantly being detected and eliminated by this process of conjecture and refutation.”22 However, he charges: “Not only does falsificationism fail to specify properly the methods that science makes 20

Nicholas Maxwell, “The Enlightenment Programme and Karl Popper”, in I. Jarvie, K. Milford and D. Miller, (eds.) Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment. Volume 1: Life and Times, Values in a World of Facts, (London: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 177-90. 21 Nicholas Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., p. 24; also see From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., p. 393. 22 Nicholas Maxwell, “The Enlightenment, Popper and Einstein,” in Y. Shi et al (eds.) Advances in Multiple Criteria Decision Making and Human Systems Management (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2007), p. 136.

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progress in theoretical physics possible; it fails even to say what progress in theoretical physics means.”23 Let us take an example from physics in order to examine Maxwell’s position more carefully. Alan Guth in his The Inflationary Universe says: “With the advent of the 1970s, . . . , particle physics went through a period of extraordinary progress, culminating in a theory that has come to be known as the standard model of particle physics.”24 Guth goes on to say that while this theory is not the ultimate theory, it is nonetheless the most successful theory that physicists have ever advanced, for here we have a theory that is well tested and has gone through a sequence of modifications in the unification of weak, electromagnetic, and strong interactions. I take it both Popper and Maxwell would agree that the standard model of particle physics is an example of scientific progress, and according to the modified or “dressed” theory of Conjectures and Refutations, here we have a good theory in the sense that it has extraordinary explanatory power, has stood up against genuine testing, has unified into a simple theory what was previously disunified or fragmentary theories and has provided guidance to further research, theoretical and practical, however imperfect. There still remains, of course, the question of ultimate unification sought in contemporary physics, the stumbling block with general relativity, and the potential refutation if string theory or some other grand hypothesis replaces the standard model in a scientific revolution, but here we have probably the best example of what progress is. Maxwell’s admits that dressed falsificationism does better justice to scientific practice, but his main objection is that without an explicit, substantial metaphysical thesis that the universe is comprehensible and not-ad hoc corresponding to the assumption behind the simplicity thesis, Popper’s theory still fails. In this case, adding simplicity to falsifability as a new criterion presents the difficulty that this presupposes that the universe is not grotesquely complex and disunified, which will clash with the requirement that this needs to be testable and potentially falsifable. So, without admitting metaphysics into the framework of scientific knowledge, Popper allegedly violates his own requirement that substantial, influential, problematic assumptions need to be make explicit so that they can be subjected to criticism within science, yet these very metaphysical 23

Nicholas Maxwell, “Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism,” op. cit., p. 213. 24 Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe (Reading, Mass: Helix Books, 1997), p. 119.

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principles cannot be part of science because they are in principle irrefutable.25 I think Maxwell is correct in his assessment of the tension in Popper’s late theory, but this alone does not mean that he has failed to say what progress is or means, unless Maxwell has in mind Popper’s “bare” theory, i.e., falsifiability alone is insufficient to give a complete account of scientific progress, but even Popper recognized this. For it seems that the real difference between Popper and Maxwell hangs on the status of metaphysics; Maxwell admits metaphysics into the framework of scientific knowledge while Popper rejected such a notion even in his very late work. What role then did metaphysics play in the development of the standard model? Surely Maxwell is right that the theory presupposes that the universe is comprehensible, simple and unified, that physicalism is always a premise in the most basic thinking and that some sort of ontology of the energy field as a unifying concept was crucial in the early development of the theory. For Popper, however, all of this is important, “held unconsciously” in the minds of scientists and implicit in the theories they advance, but still not part of science per se. As indicated above, the element of positivism that lingered in Popper’s thought prevented him from acknowledging metaphysical principles as part of science, for he could not retain the central importance of falsification and admit that metaphysics plays a role in the selection of theories. Even when he considers simplicity and unity as part of the criteria, he does not spell out what this amounts to. Maxwell, on the other hand, escapes Popper’s problem by proposing a hierarchy of ten levels introduced as central to his aim-oriented empiricism.26 Falsification functions at levels one and two in terms of the relationship between theory and evidence. And as one ascends the levels in his hierarchy, we find increasingly general metaphysical and epistemological principles, e.g., physicalism, comprehensibility, epistemological non-maliciousness, partial knowability. This is, as he puts it, “some permanent assumption about the nature of the universe being made independently of empirical considerations.27 Steven Weinberg, who made a significant contribution to the standard model with his unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces in the electroweak force, seems to agree with Maxwell. While expressing doubts 25

Nicholas Maxwell, “Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism,” op. cit., pp. 191-195. 26 Nicholas Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., p. 8. 27 Ibid., p. 4.

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about the positive influence of philosophy in science, he nonetheless claims that physics is not done without preconceptions, for without them “one could do nothing at all.”28 Weinberg admits a rough-and-ready realism and a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our theories corresponding roughly to Maxwell’s notions of physicalism and comprehensibility presupposed in physical theory. And as he expounds on the developments in twentieth century physics, particularly with regard to unification and simplicity in the quest for beautiful theories, it becomes clear that physics is not done without some basic commitment to ontology—an ontology that is developed by physicists in their experimental research rather than by following the lead of philosophy or thinking in traditional philosophical categories.29 Principles of symmetry, for example, are instances of simplicity in physical theories or laws of nature found in both the standard model and general relativity. If I have understood Weinberg properly, he is arguing that these principles have a build-in assumption that the universe itself is so ordered or that they correspond to the intrinsic nature of the particles.30 The failure to recognize the role of metaphysics as a part of science has produced some bizarre results, most notably, positivism’s influence on quantum theory and the resulting failure to solve fundamental problems of wave/particle duality and measurement. The view that I have argued for, “naturalized metaphysics,” recognizes Maxwell’s point that a substantial commitment to metaphysical principles is essential to explaining how science works and also Weinberg’s concern about philosophy. Instead of imposing philosophical categories onto science, metaphysics is the most abstract end of a continuum that develops out of scientific practice. Metaphysics is ‘naturalized’ in the sense that our attempt to discover what there is does not arise above our scientific theories.31 What is less clear is how Maxwell’s proposal for metaphysical foundations is connected to his more general philosophy of wisdom. How is it, in his view, that theories in physics or any other branch of scientific investigation are connected to the goals of serving humanity? Aim28

Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 167. See also, Michael Redhead, From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 29 Interestingly enough, Weinberg’s very point is addressed in Maxwell’s What is Wrong with Science? (London: Brian’s Head Books, 1976), pp. 70-71. 30 Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, op. cit., pp. 136, 138, 145. 31 Leemon McHenry, “Quine and Whitehead: Ontology and Methodology,” Process Studies, 26/1-2, 1997, pp. 2-12.

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oriented empiricism, he claims, accounts for scientific progress where standard empiricism fails. The great scientists such as Einstein have been practicing aim-oriented empiricism or natural philosophy more generally all along. So progress has been achieved in general relativity or the standard model despite the uncritical espousal of standard empiricism by the rank and file. But aside from the sheer intellectual value of these developments, including the potential goal of complete unification, it remains unclear how Maxwell sees such theoretical success as contributing to the more general goal of solving problems of living or the achievement of global wisdom. Would aim-oriented rationalism put into effect have altered the course of physics in the twentieth century such that our current theories would look entirely different and serve humanity in a way in which they are irrelevant at present? Maxwell has praised the standard model for its ability to account for all phenomena not associated with gravity, but has identified problems with the unification of forces and particles that are not determined by the theory itself.32 Moreover, he spent a considerable part of his academic career attempting to demonstrate why orthodox quantum theory (following the Copenhagen interpretation) has failed to provide a complete theoretical framework.33 These criticisms demonstrate why the theories fall short of the requirements of aim-oriented empiricism, but not his aim-oriented rationalism. Aim-oriented empiricism, after all, cannot be just another version of what Maxwell calls “the philosophy of knowledge.” 5. Conclusion Popper is widely acknowledged by scientists in a diversity of fields from physics to epidemiology as the champion of rigorous scientific method. Genuine science is achieved not by seeking confirmation of the scientist’s cherished hypothesis, but rather by seeking to disprove the conjecture in a risky experiment. Maxwell agrees citing Popper as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century whose books “attack fundamental

32

Nicholas Maxwell, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., p. 139. Nicholas Maxwell, “Particle Creation as the Quantum Condition for Probabilistic Events to Occur,” Physics Letters A, 187, 1994, pp. 351-355; “Quantum Propensiton Theory: A Testable Resolution of the Wave/Particle Dilemma,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 39, 1988, pp. 1-50. 33

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problems with ferocious integrity, clarity, simplicity, and originality.”34 But Maxwell has also shown a major inconsistency in Popper’s philosophy of science. Falsification alone cannot account for the progress of science. The comprehensibility of the universe requires metaphysical principles as essential to scientific theory and practice. Maxwell has thus offered an improvement on Popper by seeing falsification function within a larger structure of science, but as I have indicated above there is some question about the degree to which Maxwell’s proposed corrective to Popper would alter the course of science such that wisdom rather than knowledge becomes the primary goal. Both Popper and Maxwell rejected the conception of philosophy dominant in the twentieth century that treated problems as self-contained intellectual puzzles. They instead produced philosophical systems that are concerned with genuine scientific, social and political problems. Their concern with defending the idea of scientific progress against detractors and offering clarification about its nature ranks amongst the most important of these problems. Note I wish to thank Nicholas Maxwell for valuable criticism of an earlier draft of this paper, which is not to say that he would approve of any of its present contents. I am also grateful to Donald Gillies for his peer review.

34

Nicholas Maxwell, “Karl Popper,” in P. B. Dematteis, P. S. Fosl and L. B. McHenry (eds.) British Philosophers, 1800-2000 (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2002), p. 177.

Replies and Reflections Nicholas Maxwell I am absolutely delighted by the contributions to this volume. The variety of topics discussed is astonishing. I am immensely grateful to all the contributors for having taken the trouble to write these fascinating and challenging essays. I am enormously grateful to Leemon McHenry for all the work he has put into editing the book, and grateful too to Michael Krausz for having suggested the book in the first place, and initiated the project to produce it. The philosophical problem which first came to haunt me was the problem of how we can understand our human world embedded in the physical universe, aspects of which are discussed by Jeremy Shearmur, Mat Iredale and David Hodgson in Part II. Then I became embroiled in trying to understand how we could make rational sense of science, the topic of essays by Karl Rogers and Leemon McHenry in Part III. Once I had arrived at the idea that, because the basic aims of science are profoundly problematic, science needs to try to improve its aims and methods as it proceeds, I was led to generalize this idea to all of academic inquiry and, in a way, to all of life. Thus did I stumble across my “from knowledge to wisdom” argument, which is discussed in diverse ways by Copthorne Macdonald, Steve Fuller, John Stewart, Joseph Agassi, Margaret Boden and Donald Gillies in Part I. I propose to discuss the essays in this order, as it seems to be a reasonably coherent way of unfolding the themes under scrutiny. But first I want to pay tribute to Alan Nordstrom’s marvellous sonnets on wisdom. How extraordinary to find what I have been labouring to say in tome after tome expressed here so lucidly and succinctly, and with such eloquence. I am reminded of the poetry of George Herbert. Nordstrom writes with absolute seriousness from the heart: he is one of a handful of people scattered across the world who actively strive to put what I would call “wisdom-inquiry” into practice in their teaching, as far as bureaucracies and current orthodoxies permit. He has even, heroically, attempted to get his university to devote itself to wisdom.

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The Human World in the Physical Universe Jeremy Shearmur I am enormously grateful to Jeremy Shearmur for the very generous things he has to say about my work. I too remember vividly those wonderful times we spent together with Larry Briskman in the late 60s, arguing fiercely and roaring with laughter. We thought, in those far off days that, in the fullness of time we would come together to create a university department which would do philosophy as it ought to be done: serious concern with fundamental problems at the outset; physics, cosmology, biology, economics and politics on the curriculum as well as “philosophy” as it is mostly understood these days; imaginative speculation and fierce criticism; concern for problems of living, for global problems; and lots of laughter. It never happened. Shearmur criticizes my approach to the human world/physical universe problem, and argues in support of Popper’s “three-worlds” view. Shearmur makes it all sound very reasonable. He writes: “we should initially be as metaphysically expansive as seems adequate to us to do justice to the phenomena with which we are dealing. We then attempt scientific reductions.” We do not presuppose, in other words, that the mind can be reduced to the brain, biology to chemistry and chemistry to physics. We attempt to explain the mind in terms of the brain, biology in terms of chemistry, and chemistry in terms of physics, and when we are successful it is a great scientific triumph – but we don’t prejudge the matter. The proper scientific attitude is not to pretend to success that has not been achieved. Actually, as Shearmur recognizes, the issue between Popper and me does not concern reductionism. I am as much an anti-reductionist (even in principle) of the experiential to the physical as Popper is. What is at issue, rather, is that I reject Popper’s interactionist, quasi-Platonic, threewords view, and the chief argument which Popper deploys in support of it. Popper holds that there are three worlds: the physical universe; the psychological world of conscious minds; and a quasi-Platonic world of the content of theories, problems, arguments, ideas, and works of art. This last world 3 interacts with world 1 (the physical universe) via world

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2 (the psychological world).1 And in support of the existence, the reality, of this interaction, Popper argues that a world 1 event, such as the atomic explosion over Nagasaki on the 9th August 1945, cannot be explained and understood without reference to scientific theories, in particular theories of nuclear physics. The explosion would not have occurred if certain theories in nuclear physics had not been previously discovered. Here, it seems, is a decisive case of a world 3 idea influencing a world 1 event via world 2. In order to explain the explosion, it will be necessary to refer to world 3 entities – theories of nuclear physics – which means no purely physical explanation, referring to the physical universe only, could conceivably, even in principle, suffice.2 But this is not quite the knock-down argument that Popper takes it to be. Instead of refuting, it just ignores an alternative account which makes no reference whatsoever to quasi-Platonic “ideas” which, supposedly, interact with the minds of people. We may adopt experiential physicalism, the anti-reductionist view I have expounded in section 6 of chapter one, and have argued for in some detail elsewhere.3 Having adopted experiential physicalism, we may take the view that two quite different kinds of explanation of the Nagasaki explosion are (in principle) possible. On the one hand there is the physical explanation: the true theory of everything, T, plus a precise specification of the 1

See K. Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), chs. 3 and 4; K. Popper and J. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (London: Springer, 1977), Part I, chs. P2 and P3. 2 I heard Popper spell out this specific version of the argument in a lecture he gave at Imperial College London. Other versions of the argument can be found in the works cited in note 1. The atomic bomb is mentioned in this context in K. Popper and J Eccles, The Self and Its Brain, op. cit., p. 47. 3 Experiential physicalism was expounded in my first three published papers, “Physics and Common Sense”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16 (1966), pp. 295-311; “Can there be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19 (1968), pp. 1-25; and “Understanding Sensations”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1968), pp. 127-146. It was further developed in my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp, 181-189, 201-205 and ch. 10; 2nd ed. (London: Pentire Press, 2007), pp. 205-213, 224-227 and ch. 10. See also my The Human World in the Physical Universe ((Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 88-89 and chs. 5-8; and especially my “Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy”, in J. Shearmur and G. Stokes (eds.) Cambridge Companion to Popper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), section 7.

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physical state of the earth and its environment at some time prior to the explosion, together entail a specification of the Nagasaki explosion and, in this way, explain the explosion. This provides a comprehensive, detailed explanation of all the physical phenomena associated with the explosion, but leaves everything experiential and human associated with these phenomena undescribed and unexplained (except as physical processes going on in conscious brains). For this we need to resort to personalistic descriptions and explanations, couched in terms of intentions, plans, desires, ideas, perceptions, feelings and actions of people. A personalistic explanation enables one to know what it would be like to be the other person, seeing, experiencing, thinking, feeling what the other person sees, experiences, etc. The historical account of the exploding of the bomb – discovery of the nuclear chain reaction, the Manhattan Project, the war, the political decision to drop the bomb – would be made up of, and would presuppose, a multitude of personalistic explanations. It would render intelligible the dropping of the bomb (in so far as it can be rendered intelligible) in human terms, in terms of the plans, motives and actions of people, in a way in which the purely physical explanation, however complete in its own terms, could not. This historical, personalistic account would refer to apparent world 3 entities, such as theories, propositions, and arguments, but would not require anything to exist other than what can be accommodated within experiential physicalism.4 There are, in other words, on this view, no Popperian world 3 entities that interact with world 1 via world 2. The crucial feature of this view is that personalistic explanations are intellectually genuine, and compatible with, but irreducible to, even in principle, physical explanations. They are irreducible to physical explanations, not because they explain physical events that cannot be (fully) explained physically, but because they explain, or render comprehensible in a way different from the way physical explanations explain. Popper argues that, in order to make sense of world 1 events, such as explosions of atomic bombs, we have to acknowledge that world 3 entities – physical theories – interact with world 1 via world 2. The physical universe is, in other words, “causally open” as Popper and Shearmur put it. What this argument ignores is that the physical universe may be closed causally but open explanatorily. Granted experiential physicalism, physical explanations explain everything in 4

See my “Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy”, op. cit., section 7.

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only a highly restricted, specific kind of way. In particular, no physical explanation of the Nagasaki explosion, however complete, could even in principle render this horrific event intelligible in human or personalistic terms. But this does not mean, as Popper supposes, that world 3 entities exist and interact with world 1 via world 2. At one point Shearmur asserts that, according to my view “what happens in the physical world is … to be understood purely in physical terms”. No. Physical events caused in part by human intervention could be explained in only a restricted kind of way by physical theory; in order to make human sense of such events, personalistic explanations are required, which are compatible with but not reducible to physical explanation. It is important to note that, in order to demolish Popper’s argument, all that is needed is the counter example of experiential physicalism as a possibility. It is not required to establish that experiential physicalism is true. We have before us, then, two rival views.5 Both face problems. As Shearmur points out, experiential physicalism faces the problem: How can there be authentic free will if everything occurs in accordance with physical law? Popper’s view faces the severe problem: How can Darwinian evolution result in (a) the creation of a whole new realm of world 3 entities, quite distinct from the physical universe, which (b) interact with the physical universe via conscious minds? Interactionism amounts to postulating poltergeistic events in the brain, more discreet than those which hurl furniture about in horror films, but otherwise not different in kind, and just as implausible when viewed from the standpoint of modern science. Shearmur rather glosses over the very severe difficulties that Popper’s view faces, but pounces on the chief difficulty faced by my view. He says, for example “as for ourselves and our activities, and the impact that we make on the physical world, everything would have been the same, had we been zombies”. My reply is that unconscious zombies that imitate human actions are, perhaps, a logical possibility, but they are not possible in fact in our world. Any beings with brains sufficiently sophisticated to create, not just atomic bombs, but the marvels that we create – great works of art, science, loving relationships, liberal democracies – must be, in our world, conscious. Purely physical 5

I ignore, in the present context, all the other rival possible views. These are critically assessed in my The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., ch. 4.

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explanations of these things will refer to human intentions, plans, imaginings, but only as physical phenomena, the physical aspects of mental or brain processes. However, I defer responding properly to Shearmur’s charge that experiential physicalism cannot do justice to free will till I come to discuss free will in some detail in connection with David Hodgson’s contribution below. My response to Hodgson will also be my response to Shearmur. Despite Shearmur’s critique, experiential physicalism still seems to me to be overwhelmingly superior to Popper’s three worlds view. But what are we to make of Shearmur’s apparently modest proposal that we should, initially, be as metaphysically expansive as we seem to need to be, to do justice to the phenomena, and then attempt scientific reductions (thus not presupposing such reductions will succeed)? Is not this open-minded attitude eminently reasonable? I have two comments to make. First, much depends on whether one adopts standard empiricism (SE) or aim-oriented empiricism (AOE). AOE implies that physicalism is a relatively secure part of current theoretical (conjectural) scientific knowledge. AOE thus implies that we have good theoretical scientific grounds for not being metaphysically, or ontologically, expansive (except in the realm of physical entities perhaps). There are, according to AOE and physicalism, no non-physical entities knocking about in the universe interacting with the physical world. SE, on the other hand, implies that physicalism is not a part of current scientific knowledge (since it is a metaphysical thesis that is incompatible with current accepted physical theory). Accept SE, and science becomes much more tolerant about the kinds of entity that may exist in the world. Second, whatever scientific theory tells us, we must, of course, continue to be highly critical of it. The falsifiable, and the metaphysical (i.e. unfalsifiable) accepted theories of science must be subjected to sustained attempted criticism and falsification. This may well involve entertaining the possibility that entities exist that are prohibited by current theory. In other words, a healthy Popperian critical attitude can do full justice to Shearmur’s – and Popper’s – plea for metaphysical expansiveness, and lack of prejudgement. (This is to use Popper to refute Popper.)

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Mathew Iredale Mathew Iredale begins his lucid essay by attributing to me two points that I do indeed hold: first, that we should see philosophical problems concerning free will as a central part of the more general and complex problem of understanding how our human world, imbued with consciousness, free will, meaning and value, can be embedded in the physical universe; and second, that this latter “human world/physical universe” problem is perhaps the fundamental problem of philosophy, even our fundamental problem per se. He then expresses one or two doubts as to whether my proposed reformulation is so very different from the traditional free will/determinism problem, but goes on to consider implications that special relativity6, evolution, neuroscience, genetics, psychological studies of rationality and manipulation (all aspects of science) have for our ideas about free will. A few comments. In chapter 1 of this volume I suggest that our fundamental problem – philosophical, theoretical, and practical – might be put like this: How can life of value best flourish in the real world? I intend this to encompass both the practical problem “How can I, or we, realize what is of most value, potentially, in the circumstances of my, or our, life?”, and the philosophical and theoretical problem of knowledge and understanding “How does our human world fit into the physical universe?”. The latter is, perhaps, our fundamental problem of knowledge and understanding, but not quite our fundamental problem per se.7 6

Iredale says that “relativity does not appear to give the traditionalists any reason to abandon their formulation of the free will problem in terms of determinism”. I would have thought one should draw exactly the opposite conclusion, for two reasons. First, in so far as relativity creates a problem for free will, this is an example of science creating a problem, relativity being a scientific theory. Second, relativity, in so far as it implies a space-time, “block universe” view, can be taken to imply that the future is fixed and determined; but this is what might be called “ontological determinism”, quite different from the “predictive determinism” of orthodox discussions of the free will problem. Special relativity and ontological determinism are entirely compatible with the basic laws of the universe being probabilistic, predictive determinism being false. 7 Iredale is quite right to quote me as saying, in a note, that the human world/physical universe problem is our fundamental problem. However, in the same note, I do say that it is our “fundamental problem of understanding”: see my The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will and Evolution, op. cit., p. 17, note 1.

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In this age of almost lunatic specialization, it seems to me vital that philosophers – and indeed all of us – should persistently remind specialized academics that there are profoundly important general, fundamental problems that cut across conventional disciplinary boundaries, rationality requiring that there be a persistent interplay between specialized and fundamental problem-solving.8 The primary task of philosophy is to keep alive an awareness of the existence of these fundamental problems – an awareness of the point that we cannot help but give answers to them, implicitly or explicitly, in our science and the way we think, in our institutions, our values and the way we live, our answers all being more or less inadequate and, as a result affecting adversely our thought and lives. If philosophers can also encourage imaginative and critical attempts to improve answers to our fundamental problems, so much the better. Philosophy betrays its central task – betrays reason and humanity – if it becomes, what it mostly is these days, yet another specialized discipline alongside other such disciplines. A part of the reason for formulating the free will problem in such a way that it becomes an important component of the more general “human world/physical universe” problem is that this clarifies the nature of the problem, brings to the fore aspects of the problem that may otherwise be neglected, and may even be required as a first step towards solving the problem. Iredale, as we have seen, indicates a number of ways in which science has implications for our ideas about free will which have nothing to do with determinism – implications which may be missed if attention is restricted to determinism. But there are additional points to be made. The two formulations we are concerned with are: The determinism formulation: How can we have free will if determinism is true? The science formulation: How can we have free will – a vital aspect of life of value – if what science tells us about the world is true? Given the science formulation it is at once clear that a major part of the problem is to decide what we should take science to be telling us about the world. This will depend, in part, on what philosophy of science we accept. Given standard empiricism, it is not clear what science does tell us about the ultimate nature of physical reality. 8

This is the message of my “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Criticism of Specialism”, Inquiry 23 (1980), pp. 19-81.

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Granted aim-oriented empiricism,9 however, science tells us that we live in a physicalistic universe – physicalism being a rather secure part of scientific knowledge.10 The free will problem becomes all the more severe – physicalism placing harsh constraints on the possibility of free will. Again, given the science formulation, it is clear that a major part of the problem is to understand how there can be free will if the real explanation for all our thoughts, decisions and actions is a purely scientific one, indeed a purely physical explanation. If we are to have free will, surely rationalistic or personalistic explanations of what we decide and do must be true, must be couched in terms of our desires, thoughts, decisions, reasons for action, and must make these responsible for our actions in the kind of way required for free will. But how could such rationalistic, freedom-ascribing explanations of human actions be true if purely physical explanations suffice to predict and explain, in principle, everything that goes on? Could both kinds of explanation be true simultaneously? These issues concerning explanation become crucial to the free will problem. Putting the free will problem into the context of the “human world/physical universe” problem brings two other matters to the fore. The first of these is that the free will problem cannot sensibly be tackled independently of the mind/body problem. The way the problem is formulated and the kind of answers to be sought will differ profoundly depending on whether some kind of dualist position is adopted, or a view which identifies the mind with the brain. The second point is that ideas about free will cannot be separated from ideas about what is of value. In part this is because free will is something we, correctly, judge to be inherently of value. Free will may be given a range of meanings, some perhaps more obviously compatible with determinism or physicalism than others. The question that really matters is this: In how valuable a sense of free will do we, or can we, have it given determinism, or physicalism? Values also arise in connection with 9

For characterizations of standard and aim-oriented empiricism, see this volume, chapter 1, section 4. 10 Physicalism, as understood here and in what follows, is the thesis that the universe is physically comprehensible, it being such that the yet-to-be-discovered true physical “theory of everything” is unified. Physicalism is of course a conjecture, like all items of theory in physics; it is, however, according to aimoriented empiricism, more secure than even our best physical theories – quantum theory or general relativity.

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questions about the authentic self. One way in which one’s free will can be diminished is to have one’s authentic self taken over by a false self as a result of brainwashing, indoctrination, or becoming in thrall to another. But how is the authentic self to be distinguished from a false self? At some point value judgements must be brought in to answer this question. A person is his real, authentic, true self if what is best, of most value, in this person’s character, is in command. Formulating the free will problem as a part of the “human world/physical universe” problem rather naturally brings these value aspect to the fore, as this latter problem is centrally concerned with questions about how what is of value can exist (and flourish) embedded in the physical universe. There is a further point. So far reasons have been given for reformulating the traditional free will/determinism problem so that “determinism” is replaced with “physicalism”. But grounds can also be given for replacing “free will” with “wisdom” – conceived of as the capacity and active desire to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others. This yields a stronger, more fundamental version of the problem, as long as we hold free will to be a necessary component of wisdom. It could of course be argued that what is of value may be achieved by someone acting compulsively, and thus without free will. A person might be a compulsive philanthropist, perhaps, or a compulsive creator of great art or science. But let us demand, by fiat as it were that, for wisdom, realization of value must be done freely. In this case, the wisdom/physicalism problem encompasses the free will/physicalism problem, in that solving the former solves the latter as well, but not vice versa. It is of course true that we may act freely but not wisely; nevertheless, if we can solve the problem of how wise acting is possible given physicalism, we can almost certainly solve the problem of how free, unwise acting is possible.11 This wisdom reformulation is rather natural to adopt granted that one takes the “human world/physical universe” problem as fundamental. The point is now this. Formulate the free will problem as an integral part of the more fundamental “human world/physical universe” problem, 11

It might be objected that the free will/physicalism problem is already hard enough; why should we embed it in the even more difficult, severe problem of how wise acting is possible given physicalism? The answer is that we need to be clear about the problems that confront us, and sometimes embedding a problem in a more fundamental one, in this way, provides the key to solving the problem. I believe this is the case here.

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and it is more or less obvious that the above considerations, having to do with the philosophy of science, the conflict between different explanations, the mind-body problem, values, and wisdom are all highly relevant to solving the problem. Formulate the problem as a question about free will and determinism however, and it is not clear that any of the above considerations are relevant. Iredale makes the excellent point that a Darwinian perspective on free will implies that what free will we have today must have evolved gradually, its early manifestations existing, no doubt, in pre-human mammalian life. This Darwinian viewpoint speaks strongly on behalf of compatibilism. It is difficult to see how incompatibilist free will could have emerged gradually. The view would have to be, presumably, that early life was devoid of any hint of incompatibilist free will until, abruptly, at some instant, incompatibilist free will burst upon the scene – something of a miracle for ordinary Darwinian mechanisms of evolution to engineer! Iredale also stresses that this gradualist Darwinian view implies that we possess only a certain amount of free will, it being possible, no doubt, for us to increase the degree that we possess. A fundamental problem may be that of discovering how we can learn to increase our free will. I would only add that there is here, in my view, an additional reason for concentrating on wisdom rather than free will. Enhancing wisdom increases – by definition – our capacity to realize what is of value, whereas enhancing free will does not. (What I take to be a really urgent and fundamental problem “How can humanity learn a bit more wisdom?” turns out to be much more closely related to the free will problem than one might at first sight realize.) David Hodgson I am immensely grateful to David Hodgson for the generous things he says about my book The Human World in the Physical Universe. Hodgson and I agree about much. But there is one fundamental point of disagreement: unlike me, Hodgson holds that free will and (experiential) physicalism are incompatible. Hodgson produces some searching criticisms of my compatibilist views which I shall do my best to rebut. Hodgson argues that I have not shown that science has established the truth of physicalism. I agree. All theoretical knowledge in physics is conjectural. What I do claim to have shown is that physicalism is a basic tenet of scientific knowledge, more secure than any physical

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theory (but still a conjecture). The grounds for accepting physicalism, in essence are, first, that persistent preference given to unified physical theories means that physics makes a persistent metaphysical assumption concerning unity and, second, given that some such assumption must be made, the best one to adopt is the one (a) which accords best with the thesis that the universe is perfectly comprehensible in some way or other, and (b) which is the most empirically fruitful, in the sense that it promises to support the most empirically progressive research programme, and has actually supported the most empirically progressive research programme.12 I argue that the thesis which best satisfies (a) and (b) is physicalism.13 Hodgson supports a rival dualist, interactionist metaphysical thesis which might be called physicalism(H). Hodgson argues that physicalism(H) accords just as well with modern science as physicalism does, the former differing from the latter only in asserting that some physical processes occurring in conscious brains are influenced by “the non-physical aspect of reality”. But physicalism(H) fails quite drastically to satisfy requirement (a) for acceptability. Any “theory of everything”, T(H), compatible with physicalism(H), must be vastly more complex, disunified, and thus nonexplanatory, than any “theory of everything”, T, compatible with physicalism. For, unlike T, T(H) will have to specify extraordinarily complex physical states of affairs – states of conscious brains – that constitute the conditions under which the non-physical interacts with the physical. Or, put another way, in order to specify physical conditions under which that part of T(H) that constitutes a purely physical theory fails to yield correct predictions (because of non-physical interactions), extraordinarily complex physical states of affairs will have to be specified. This means that T(H) must be vastly less explanatory than T, and thus horribly at odds with the thesis that the universe is perfectly comprehensible in some way or other. Whereas T asserts that the same laws govern all phenomena everywhere, the physical part of T(H) asserts 12

For a more detailed explication of empirical fruitfulness along these lines see my The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 178-179; and my Is Science Neurotic? (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), p. 156. 13 See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 218230; 2nd ed. (London: Pentire Press, 2007), pp. 241-253, 358-360 and 400-430. See also my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., chs.3-5; and Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., appendix, section 6.

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that the same laws govern all phenomena everywhere except for some extremely complex phenomena occurring in conscious brains. It seems to me doubtful, too, that physicalism(H) satisfies (b) as well as physicalism does. Were we to allow that it does, we would have to allow, too, it would seem, that endlessly many other theses analogous to physicalism(H) satisfy (b) as well as physicalism does – theses which postulate that, in addition to the physical world, there is a non-physical one which interacts with physical states of affairs but in a way which has not yet been observed. This would include theses which postulate that such interactions occur in the future, and are so powerful that tables and chairs are pushed around, even mountains, planets and stars. Once we allow that views such as these are as empirically fruitful as physicalism (in the sense indicated above), the whole idea of any version of physicalism being empirically fruitful seems to disappear. This point can be made in a slightly different way as follows. Once it is regarded as scientifically acceptable to hold that there is a nonphysical world interacting with the physical one then, whenever physical phenomena are discovered that are inexplicable on the basis of current physical theory, it would always be scientifically acceptable to hold that, here, the non-physical world is interacting with the physical world. This would stultify the search for physical explanations for the recalcitrant phenomena. What this shows, decisively in my view, is that Hodgson’s view – physicalism(H) – is not as scientifically acceptable as physicalism. Far from being scientifically fruitful, if accepted it would render equally acceptable analogous views which would stultify scientific progress. (A number of views analogous to physicalism(H) – such as versions of vitalism – have been put forward at various times: none have proved empirically fruitful.) I might add that if physicalism is true, then all dynamical theories which apply only to restricted ranges of phenomena must be false. It follows at once that if physics proceeds by developing a succession of theories, each of which applies to a greater range of phenomena than its predecessors, but none of which applies to all phenomena, then physics will proceed from one false theory to another. That physics has developed in this way does not in any way undermine the idea that physicalism may be true (as Hodgson seems to suggest at one point). On the contrary, this is just the way physics ought to make progress, if physicalism is true.

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Hodgson goes on to argue that there are grounds for holding that physicalism is false. His argument, if I have understood it, might be boiled down to this. Reasoning involved in doing physics is not algorithmic. But if physicalism is true,14 it must be algorithmic, since thought processes involved in developing a new physical theory would all occur in accordance with precise physical law. Hence physicalism is false. What is wrong with this argument is the idea that if physics is done in a physicalistic universe then all reasoning involved must be algorithmic. Consider Einstein pondering the problems that led him to formulate special relativity. We might simplify things drastically, and assume it took him two hours to work it out (actually he pondered the issues for some ten years). And again to simplify things, let us assume deterministic physicalism. Then, given a precise specification of the relevant initial conditions, IC, plus the true deterministic physical “theory of everything”, T, a physical specification of the marks on paper produced when Einstein wrote down the special relativity follow logically. Does this mean that the discovery of special relativity can be specified by means of an algorithm? Not at all. This predictive task would, in practice, be utterly impossible to perform. First, it would be quite impossible to obtain IC – which would have to include a specification of the physical state of Einstein’s brain and body, and his environment (strictly speaking including a region of two light hours distance). IC would have to be obtained with absolute precision; the slightest inaccuracy in the specification of the state of a molecule in Einstein’s brain would be liable to throw the whole prediction out. The instantaneous states of even the simplest physical systems cannot be known with absolute precision. Specifying the state of Einstein’s brain is entirely out of the question. Secondly, solving the equations of T for such a system is forever out of the question. It is very likely that, if ever we do discover the true theory of everything, we will only be able to arrive at approximate solutions to the equations for even the simplest of 14

Hodgson argues that if physicalism is true there can be no free will. Elsewhere I have argued almost the opposite: if physicalism is true, we have strong grounds for holding we do have free will. For if physicalism is true, then the highly worthwhile project of theoretical physics has met with great success. But we should think of free will as the capacity to achieve what is of value. But if physicalism is true, we have achieved something of great value, what has been achieved in physics: hence we must have free will. See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 273-274; 2nd ed., pp. 294-295.

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systems. As someone wittily observed, given Newtonian theory there is no general solution to the three body problem, given classical electrodynamics the one body problem poses problems, and for quantum electrodynamics even the zero body problem cannot be precisely solved. As physical theories have encompassed broader and broader ranges of phenomena, their equations have become ever more nearly impossible to solve. An algorithm is a mechanical procedure for solving a problem. And a mechanical procedure is something which “can be given in a finite set of instructions which are executed in a stepwise manner, without appeal to random processes or ingenuity”.15 Not by the remotest stretch of the imagination could processes involved in predicting Einstein creating special relativity be regarded as algorithmic. No finite set of instructions are possible which would suffice to perform the predictive task. Endless infinities would be involved in obtaining the precise state of a molecule, let alone the state of a neuron, or of Einstein’s brain. Endless infinities would be involved, too, in solving the relevant equations. Any attempt to get information about the state of Einstein’s brain would disrupt and damage what was being sought. And in addition, the physical prediction, if it could be made, would predict the marks made by Einstein on paper, but not what these marks can be interpreted to assert, namely special relativity. There are, in short, endless reasons for holding that predicting Einstein discovering special relativity, given deterministic physicalism, is not algorithmic. Hodgson does, however, have another argument. Doing physics requires consciousness. But if physicalism is true, “conscious experiences can’t make a positive contribution to determining what happens, beyond that made by associated physical events”. Hence physicalism must be false. But what this argument fails to take into account is that (according to the view I uphold) relevant physical processes going on in Einstein’s brain are (contingently identical to) Einstein’s conscious experiences.16 Special relativity requires consciousness for its production (let us assume). Some of the physical processes that lead to marks on paper 15

T. Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 21. 16 See my The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., appendix 2, for a refutation of Saul Kripke’s claim that such a contingent identity (with rigid designators) is not possible.

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that can be correctly interpreted to constitute the formulation and discovery of special relativity are conscious experiences, and if they were not, special relativity would not have resulted. But – Hodgson may protest – if it is the physical processes that result in the writing down of special relativity, what possible role can consciousness have? Consciousness can add nothing to the physics! To this I reply: but the physics, structured and functioning in the way that it is in Einstein’s brain, is consciousness. Hodgson’s objection may well be lethal when directed against epiphenomenalism, since that view distinguishes brain processes and conscious experiences and gives no causal role to the latter. But that is not my view. I defend a version of the brain process theory according to which conscious experiences are (contingently identical to) brain processes, and not something distinct from them. What we are aware of, when we are aware of our inner experiences, is what might be termed the control aspect of processes going on in our brains – the role these processes have in controlling, or guiding, our actions. The control aspect operates by means of the physical or causal properties of these processes, and the causal and structural properties of the brain in which they occur. Einstein’s perceptions, thoughts, desires, intentions, beliefs, decisions to act, are all brain processes – ultimately physical processes: what he is aware of is the control aspect of these processes – the capacity of these processes to produce his actions. Thus Einstein’s conscious experiences, being physical processes, have a direct, causal role in producing special relativity, and Einstein is, in a sense, aware of this causal role, in a somewhat opaque way, in being aware of the control aspect of the relevant brain processes.17 Finally, Hodgson argues that experiential physicalism (the view I defend) faces a fatal difficulty when it comes to evolution – a difficulty his interactionist view effortlessly overcomes. Actually, I think the matter is all the other way round. It is Hodgson’s view, not mine, that faces a severe problem when confronted by evolution. Natural selection operates on the capacity to survive and reproduce. This capacity, as far as animals are concerned, has a lot to do with the way animals act in their given environment. But if physicalism is correct, action is produced by physical processes occurring in the brain. It is this that natural selection would operate on, not any subjective sensations, desires or feelings that may accompany these physical 17

See ibid., chs. 5, 6 and 8. See also my Cutting God in Half (forthcoming), ch. 7.

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processes. Hence there can be no Darwinian explanation for the evolution of sentience and consciousness. From my point of view, this argument fails for the same reason that Hodgson’s argument above fails. It might be successful against epiphenomenalism, but it does not work against the version of the brain process theory I wish to defend. Natural selection operates on the control aspects of the brain: this is what matters, in that it is this which produces and guides action. But sentient and conscious aspects of brain processes are control aspects. They are control aspects that have acquired these amazing features of sentience and consciousness – but in becoming sentient and conscious they do not in any way whatsoever lose their control status or character. Thus natural selection, in operating on control aspects of brain processes operates too on those control aspects that happen to be sentient and conscious. Once one appreciates that conscious inner experiences are (contingently identical to) brain processes, the difficulty Hodgson sees disappears. I must add, however that, in my view, something like a Darwinian explanation of the evolution of sentience and consciousness is only possible if Darwinian theory is modified to include the evolution of the mechanisms of evolution, so that, as evolution proceeds, purposiveness is gradually incorporated into these mechanisms.18 The interactionist view that Hodgson upholds does, however, in my view, face a serious problem in connection with evolution – as I have already indicated in my response to Iredale’s essay. I want to conclude my discussion of Hodgson’s contribution by emphasizing again that, despite our sharp disagreement about free will, there is much that we agree about, over a wide range of issues. I am highly appreciative of the clarity and generosity of his exposition of my views, and the cogency of his criticisms, which have forced me to think again about how free will is possible if physicalism is true. Philosophy of Science Karl Rogers Karl Rogers gives a terrific brief account of my “philosophy for science”, as he puts it, but then makes a number of remarks that I find puzzling. 18

See ibid., ch. 7.

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At one point he suggests that, for me, the task of philosophy of science is to explain “scientific success and progress”. This is too strong. Rather, I take the task to be – as Rogers also reports – to explain how scientific progress is possible. (It seems impossible either because we demand the impossible of science – such as that it delivers verified knowledge – or because we assume unworkable methods for science – such as that theories be judged solely on the basis of empirical success and failure.) In my first work on scientific method (published long ago in 1972), I formulated the task of the methodologist like this. He must “specify (a) a fundamental aim, or group of aims, for science, and (b) a set of methodological rules …[and] then assert:(1) The specified aim is the most worthwhile aim for science that is, as far as we know, in principle realizable. (2) The specified methodological rules give us the best hope of realizing the specified aim.”19 This could be improved but is on the right lines. Even if aims and methods are specified that lead to acceptable propositions (1) and (2), this falls short of explaining “scientific success and progress”. Rogers goes on to refer to my “uncritical acceptance of ‘the empirical success’ of science”. I balk a little at “uncritical”, having launched, over the years, a number of criticisms of science, from neuroscience,20 aspects of the whole endeavour21, to orthodox quantum theory.22 The latter, I have argued, is not just false; it is unacceptable as a theory, because of its severe disunity. I have argued that we have good grounds for holding all fundamental physical theories are false (as I have already indicated in 19

N. Maxwell, “A Critique of Popper’s Views on Scientific Method”, Philosophy of Science 39 (1972), p. 133. For an improved formulation see my “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery”, Philosophy of Science 41 (1974), pp. 139-140. 20 See my “Methodological Problems of Neuroscience”, in D. Rose and V.G. Dobson (eds.), Models of the Visual Cortex (Chichester: Wiley and Sons, 1985), pp. 11-21. 21 See my What's Wrong With Science? (Frome: Bran's Head Books, 1976); From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit.; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit. 22 Papers of mine that criticize orthodox quantum theory (and seek to develop a better version of the theory that differs empirically from the orthodox version) stretch over 36 years, from the first, “A New Look at the Quantum Mechanical Problem of Measurement”, American Journal of Physics 40, 1972, pp. 1431-1435, to the most recent, “Is the Quantum World Composed of Propensitons?”, in M. Suárez (ed.) Probabilities, Causes and Propensities in Physics, (Boston: Synthese Library, 2008).

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my response to Hodgson). I hold that all scientific knowledge is irredeemably conjectural in character. And I have been highly critical of what “the empirical” should mean, at the most fundamental level, in social science, in that I hold social inquiry should take human experience, what we enjoy and suffer, as basic in assessing proposals for action. So I don't think it is quite right to say I accept that science is empirically successful uncritically, or that I “preclude any possibility of criticism of the nature of ‘the empirical’ and the criteria for ‘empirical success’”. I am puzzled, too, by Rogers’ assertion that I assume standard empiricism in my “interpretation of the nature of ‘the empirical’”. Quite to the contrary, I have made it abundantly clear, in a number of places that, in my view, metaphysical assumptions are implicit in empirical assertions of science (which contradicts standard empiricism). For example, the point is stated quite clearly on pages 209-210, and on page 270, note 8, of my The Comprehensibility of the Universe. Elsewhere I declare “Even humble particular statements about our immediate surroundings contain presuppositions about the entire cosmos”.23 These misunderstandings vitiate Rogers’ subsequent criticisms of my views. Rogers correctly says that I agree with Duhem and Popper in holding that laws and theory are implicit in the interpretation of observational and experimental results. What he does not say, however, is that I have also criticized Popper on just this point.24 It is important to appreciate that we always have the option of weakening the theoretical or metaphysical assumptions implicit in empirical assertions. “This is copper wire” presupposes that this object has certain dispositional properties (being a good conductor or electricity, etc.) but does not necessarily have to assume universal laws to the effect that all pieces of copper everywhere, at all times, have these properties. In testing laws and theories it is important that we can weaken theoretical, metaphysical 23

See my Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., p. 217. I there declare “‘I can walk across a room’ presupposes that nowhere in the entire universe is an explosion even now occurring of unprecedented force which will spread with nearly infinite speed to engulf the room before I can take a step”. I point out that similar considerations apply to the assertion “This piece of copper wire will continue to behave as copper wire for the next few minutes”, the kind of assertion all scientific experiments have to assume to be true. 24 See my “A Critique of Popper’s Views on Scientific Method”, op. cit., pp. 143145;

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and cosmological presuppositions of empirical assertions, so that we do not presuppose the very law or theory we are seeking to test, or more than is necessary. Rogers argues that experimentation in physics presupposes the seven points of what he calls “mechanical realism”. This strikes me as unacceptability substantial, and indeed close to physicalism. (I am not sure how physicalism could be false but mechanical realism true.) A quite basic idea behind aim-oriented empiricism is that it is important that we have available increasingly insubstantial presuppositions, so that more substantial ones can be critically assessed, and not just dogmatically presupposed. This is important because our more specific presuppositions are quite likely to be false, and in need of modification. Experimental physics becomes somewhat irrational and dogmatic if it must presuppose, and cannot question, mechanical realism. Rogers is probably correct in holding that much physical theory, such as nuclear physics, is most severely tested in the laboratory, but it is important to appreciate that even nuclear physics can be tested by, for example, astronomical observation. A recent example was the observation that the sun seemed to be emitting too few neutrinos, which led some physicists to question whether the relevant physics is correct, but which was eventually resolved by the discovery that neutrinos have mass.25 But even if most physical theory is primarily tested and corroborated in the laboratory, this does not mean that special assumptions, such as mechanical realism, are required to apply physical theory to phenomena beyond the laboratory – in addition, that is, to the hierarchy of assumptions of aim-oriented empiricism involved in the rejection of empirically successful, ad hoc variants of the theories we accept. Rogers goes on to declare that I “should recognise that different sciences should have different conceptions of ‘the empirical’ and, correspondingly, explore different phenomena in accordance with different conceptions of theory and practice. [I] should recognise that social sciences have developed distinct methodologies, often independently of those of the natural sciences, including historical descriptions and explanations, with their phenomenological, sociological, and hermeneutic dimensions. Even in the natural sciences 25

Because they have mass, neutrinos, on their way to earth from the sun, oscillate from one type to another, unobservable type: hence the low observed flow of neutrinos from the sun.

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there are differing presuppositions about the nature of ‘the physical’ and ‘the empirical’”. I cannot help but think that I do recognize these things, and have said them in my publications. Thus, in Is Science Neurotic? I stress that different branches of the natural sciences have different, problematic aims, assumptions and methods, and thus diverse characters, all of which can, however, be encompassed within the broad framework of aim-oriented empiricism: see pages 41-47. I have long argued that the social sciences urgently need to be transformed so that they cease to be, primarily, sciences or disciplines seeking knowledge, and become instead, with the humanities, that branch of inquiry concerned to help humanity tackle its problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. This would involve, too, as a long-term project, helping humanity build aim-oriented rationality into our social world, into institutions other than science. The pursuit of knowledge within social inquiry would become a secondary matter. All this would involve a dramatic change in the nature of social inquiry – and a change, too, in what “experience”, or the “empirical” means, as I have already mentioned. Social inquiry, instead of being, primarily, science, or the pursuit of knowledge, would become social methodology, or social philosophy (although this would, of course, include acquisition of relevant knowledge and understanding). In the last paragraph of his essay, Rogers casts doubts on the possibility of there being a unified conception of inquiry, in view of “incommensurable standards between different specialisations of natural or social sciences” and “in the absence of universal agreement on how to resolve questions of value”. But here, in my view, Rogers seriously underestimates the capacity of the meta-methodological framework of aim-oriented rationality and wisdom-inquiry to accommodate, and help resolve conflicts between, rival views about aims and methods, facts, values, philosophies of life. The whole idea of aim-oriented rationality is to create a framework of relatively unspecific, unproblematic aims and methods within which rival, much more specific, problematic aims and methods may be assessed and improved, as we act and live. Far from being “totalitarian”, as Rogers suggests, on the contrary aim-oriented rationality provides us with the best hope of resolving our conflicts in just and cooperative ways.26 26

For discussion of the vital role wisdom-inquiry might have in helping to resolve conflicts in just and cooperative ways see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit.,

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Leemon McHenry Leemon McHenry, in his interesting and provocative essay, sets out to assess the relative merits of Popper’s philosophy of science, and mine. He argues that the difference between Popper’s falsificationism, and my aim-oriented empiricism is that, whereas Popper holds that metaphysical assumptions are “held unconsciously” in the minds of scientists, I hold they form an important part of scientific knowledge. McHenry says that I am “correct in [my] assessment of the tension in Popper’s late theory, but this alone does not mean that [Popper] has failed to say what progress is or means”. McHenry acknowledges that, unlike Popper, I go on to argue that values play a role in science, and science should contribute to rational inquiry devoted to promoting wisdom, but then wonders how these further aspects of my views are related to my philosophy of science of aim-oriented empiricism (AOE). I take these points in turn. I am not altogether happy with the way McHenry draws the distinction between Popper’s philosophy of science and mine. Much that he says is correct, but he does not pin down the exact point where Popper and I part company, and he does not spell out adequately all the differences that arise as a result, between Popper’s view and mine. McHenry quotes Popper as holding that “the aim of science [is] to find satisfactory explanations”. One might think that this makes Popper’s view rather close to mine, in that I too hold that science seeks explanatory truth. But there is, here, a fundamental difference.27 Whereas I hold that, if we are honest, we have to see science as seeking truth presupposed to be (more or less) explanatory, there being a substantial, highly problematic metaphysical thesis concerning the 1st ed., pp. 81-91, 109-110 and 189-199; 2nd ed., pp. 95-104, 121-122, 149-153, and 213-222. 27 It is vital to appreciate that “aims of science” is highly ambiguous. It may refer to aims in the context of discovery, or to aims in the (so-called) context of justification – the context in which decisions are reached as to what does, and does not, constitute scientific knowledge. In what follows it is always “aims in the context of justification” that is being discussed – although when Popper declares “explanation” to be the aim of science it is not quite clear which context he has in mind. An assumption made in the context of discovery is not a part of scientific knowledge, whereas one made in the context of justification is. The distinction between the two contexts is usually attributed to Reichenbach, although Popper made the distinction before him: see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 22-23; 2nd ed., pp. 33-34

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comprehensibility of the universe implicit in this basic aim of science, Popper would reject this entirely. There can be, for Popper, no metaphysical assumptions, implicit or explicit, in the aims of science. Right to the end of his life, Popper held onto his “principle of demarcation” which excludes metaphysics28 from science. Popper always held, as I do, that two considerations govern choice of theory in science, having to do with (1) empirical success or failure, and (2) simplicity. In chapter VII of The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper identifies simplicity with falsifiability. If this identification was valid then, in persistently accepting simple, or explanatory, theories scientists would merely be accepting theories of high falsifiability. In this case, the aim of seeking explanatory truth makes no presuppositions at all; the aim reduces to that of seeking highly falsifiable truth or truth per se. But simplicity cannot be identified with falsifiability. One can easily increase the falsifiability of a theory by adding on independently testable hypotheses otherwise unrelated to the theory, in this way drastically decreasing the unity, the simplicity, of the overall theory. Subsequently, and perhaps because he realized his earlier view is untenable, Popper made a substantial addition to this account of simplicity. As McHenry points out, Popper proposed that, in addition to being highly falsifiable, a “new theory should proceed from some simple, new, and powerful, unifying idea about some connection or relation … between hitherto unconnected things or facts … or new theoretical entities”. As I shall explain in a moment, my view is that, in only accepting theories that satisfy this “requirement of simplicity” (as Popper calls it), even though endlessly many rival theories can always be concocted which satisfy purely empirical considerations much better, but which fail to satisfy this requirement of simplicity, scientists in effect make a big, implicit (metaphysical) assumption about the nature of the universe. But Popper does not draw this conclusion. And nor can he without destroying his whole philosophy of science, founded as it is on the principle of demarcation. Thus even after enunciating the new “principle of simplicity”, Popper continues to hold that science seeks truth without making any presupposition. Seeking “satisfactory explanations” does not mean, for Popper, that science presupposes that explanations exist to be found. Adopting the new “principle of simplicity” as a methodological principle, and yet denying that this 28

Here, as elsewhere, I follow Popper in taking “metaphysical” to mean “empirically unfalsifiable”.

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means science makes some kind of presupposition concerning the simplicity of nature, is the “tension” that McHenry says I have disclosed in Popper’s later work. McHenry declares in the second paragraph of his essay that I hold that we need to see science as making “a commitment to metaphysical principles underlying our notion that the universe is comprehensible”. But this rather puts the cart before the horse. What is crucial, for me, is the argument, alluded to above, in support of this contention. If physics only accepts theories that are unified, even though endlessly many empirically more successful disunified rivals can always be concocted, then physics must be making a persistent, substantial assumption, at least to the effect that the universe is such that all disunified theories are false. Physics must be assuming, implicitly, that there is some kind of underlying unity in nature. What McHenry never quite gets round to saying is that it is this argument29 which, fundamentally, divides me from Popper. I accept the argument as valid; Popper never did. One immediate implication of taking the argument to be valid is that Popper’s demarcation requirement must be abandoned. Metaphysics is an integral, central, fundamental part of scientific knowledge. McHenry is quite clear on this point. What he does not mention, however, is that there are important further implications, for the philosophy of science, and for science itself. What emerges differs from Popper in at least the following sixteen respects.30 (1) A basic aim of science is transformed, and becomes deeply problematic. Instead of seeking truth per se, in the so-called “context of justification”, science seeks truth presupposed to be explanatory. A metaphysical thesis asserting that the universe is (more or less) comprehensible, in some way or other, is implicit in this aim. But this 29

The argument was first spelled out by me in 1974 in my “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery: Part I”, Philosophy of Science 41 (1974) pp. 127-136. It has been reformulated and amplified many times since: see ref. 30. 30 These 16 features of AOE have been spelled out by me in a number of publications over the years: see my “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery: Parts I and II”, Philosophy of Science 41 (1974), pp. 123-153 and 247-295; What’s Wrong With Science? (Hayes: Bran’s Head Books, 1976); From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., chs. 5 and 9; 2nd ed., chs. 5, 9 and 14; “Induction and Scientific Realism”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44, 1993, pp. 61-79, 81-101 and 275-305; The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit.; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit. chs. 1 and 2, and appendix.

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thesis is almost bound to be false. It is vital (for good Popperian reasons) that the thesis is made explicit within the context of science so that it can be criticized, so that alternatives can be developed and assessed, in the hope of improving the thesis. We may hope that this basic aim, being problematic, will be improved, as science proceeds. (For Popper, the basic aim is fixed, and does not evolve.) (2) As the aim, and associated metaphysical assumption, is improved, so associated methods (specifying non-empirical simplicity and unity considerations) improve as well. The aims and methods of science evolve with evolving knowledge. (For Popper, aims and methods are fixed.31) (3) There is a two-way interplay between improving scientific knowledge, and improving aims and methods. The task of improving aims and methods becomes an integral part of science itself. (For Popper, ideas about aims and methods are not falsifiable, and thus not a part of science. They do not interact and evolve with science.) (4) Philosophy of science, in so far as it is about aims and methods, is an integral, influential part of science itself. (For Popper, philosophy of science, not being falsifiable, is not a part of science.) (5) Not only do the methods of science evolve over time with evolving aims, and evolving assumptions implicit in these aims. Furthermore, according to AOE, different natural sciences, having different specific aims and assumptions at any given time, quite properly and rationally have different specific methods, within the overall framework of AOE. (For Popper, because basic aims are fixed, methods remain unchanged through time and across scientific disciplines.) (6) Science, as a result of including metaphysics, aims and methods and philosophy of science, becomes rather more like natural philosophy, as in the time of Newton, rather than science today. (Despite enthusiastically supporting natural philosophy, Popper’s main 31

But is this correct? In his contribution to this volume, Shearmur quotes Popper as writing, in the Preface to the 2nd edition of his Conjectures and Refutations, that “our system of aims not only changes, but it can also grow in a way closely similar to the way in which our knowledge grows”. I possess only a very battered first edition of the book. Intrigued, I rushed out to check. Popper is here speaking of aims in general, not specifically of scientific aims. He could not acknowledge that the aims of science (in the context of “justification”) change in the way specified by AOE because that would involve acknowledging that scientific knowledge includes metaphysical theses, which in turn demands the abandonment of Popper’s demarcation criterion – something Popper was never prepared to do.

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contribution, his demarcation requirement, splits off science from metaphysics, etc., and thus serves to sabotage natural philosophy, and turn it into science.32) (7) As scientific knowledge improves, our knowledge about how to improve knowledge (our view about aims and methods) improves as well. There is something like positive feedback between improving knowledge and improving knowledge about how to improve knowledge – something which helps to account for the explosive growth in scientific knowledge. This positive feedback feature may well be regarded as constituting the nub of scientific rationality. (For Popper, there is no such positive feedback: scientific rationality is understood in terms of the Popperian principles of conjecture and refutation.) (8) Scientific knowledge and discussion takes place at least three levels: (i) the empirical, (ii) theory and (iii) aims and metaphysical assumptions. (For Popper, there are only the two levels, (i) and (ii).) (9) In order to facilitate criticism and improvement of metaphysical theses, they can be represented in the form of a hierarchy, theses becoming less and less substantial, and more nearly such as to be required to be true if science, or the pursuit of knowledge, is to be possible at all, as one goes up the hierarchy. In this way one creates a framework of relatively unproblematic aims and methods, assumptions and methods, not likely to need revision, within which much more problematic aims and methods, much more substantial assumptions and methods, can be criticized and improved, as science proceeds. The methods of science evolve with evolving aims, assumptions, and knowledge, but what may be termed the meta-methods of science, associated with higher level, relatively unproblematic and fixed aims and methods, and required to assess methods, do not change.33 This hierarchical structure of AOE is depicted in diagram 2 of chapter 1. (Nothing like this aim-oriented empiricist picture of science – or natural philosophy – exists for Popper. This is true even of his conception of “metaphysical research programmes”.) (10) There is a (fallible) method of discovery of new theories, even in physics. This involves modifying existing theoretical and metaphysical 32

For a sustained discussion of this point see my “Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy” in J. Shearmur and G. Stokes (eds.) Cambridge Companion to Popper, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 33 This hierarchical structure of AOE effortlessly solves the problem of reconciling naturalist and normative conceptions of methodology and epistemology.

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ideas in order to resolve conflicts between levels indicated in (8). (For Popper, there is no rational method of discovery.) (11) AOE implies that there is a great deal of continuity of theory across scientific revolutions. Metaphysical theses at and above level 4 in the hierarchy of theses of AOE are likely to persist through revolutions, even if theories and theses at levels 2 and 3 change quite dramatically. (Such continuity is even more dependable above level 4.) This allimportant theoretical continuity across revolutions is what makes rational discovery possible. (For Popper, like Kuhn, there is no basis for holding that theoretical ideas will persist across revolutions.) (12) As a result of acknowledging and making explicit the metaphysical dimension of science there is a very considerable increase in the scope of scientific knowledge. Conjectural scientific knowledge includes a thesis about the ultimate nature of the physical universe, namely physicalism at level 4 of AOE. (For Popper, there is no such thesis in science.) (13) AOE predicts that physics, if it is making genuine progress, will advance from one false theory to another – until, perhaps, a theory of everything is formulated. For AOE includes physicalism at level 4, and if physicalism is true, all dynamical physical theories about a restricted range of phenomena only (which cannot immediately be generalized to apply to all phenomena) are false. That physics has advanced in this way, from one false theory to another, is thus good news. It is just the way physics would advance were it to be making progress towards capturing physicalism in the form of the true theory of everything. (Nothing comparable holds granted Popper’s philosophy of science, or standard empiricism more generally. Advancing from one false theory to another can only be bad news, from the standpoint of scientific progress. It has led some to speak of “the pessimistic induction”.) 34 (14) That physics advances from one false theory to another poses the problem: In that case, what does scientific progress mean? The problem

34

McHenry asserts at one point that “the truth value of any scientific theory must be regarded as false”. This represents a characteristic Popperian or standard empiricist attitude, and is too strong. Granted AOE, it is in physics that we should expect all dynamical theories to be false (until we formulate a theory of everything). Elsewhere in natural science mistakes may be made, but this does not mean we should expect all well corroborated theories to turn out to be false. For example, it is reasonable to hold that Harvey’s theory concerning the heart is, quite straightforwardly, true.

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is readily solved within the framework of AOE.35 (It is much to Popper’s credit that he first formulated this “problem of verisimilitude”. But, as McHenry indicates, Popper’s attempted solution is untenable. Furthermore, the solution to the problem makes clear that it cannot be solved if standard empiricism is presupposed. This is because, in order to solve the problem, one needs to refer to the true theory of everything – which may, or may not, be unified. This is hardly within the spirit of standard empiricism.) (15) The notorious problem of what it is for a physical theory to be simple or unified has been solved within the framework of AOE.36 (Popper failed to solve this problem. His attempt at solving the problem in The Logic of Scientific Discovery fails, for reasons I have already indicated, and his later, additional “requirement of simplicity” does not succeed either, as Popper himself acknowledges.) (16) AOE solves the three parts of the problem of induction – an enormous success for the view which, so far, has received no comment whatsoever.37 (Popper claimed to solve the problem of induction but failed to solve even the methodological part of the problem – the problem of specifying methodological rules governing acceptance and rejection of theories in science.) McHenry says at one point that Popper has not “failed to say what progress is or means”. But in order to do this one needs to specify correctly what the progress-achieving methods of natural science are, and one needs to solve the problems of verisimilitude, simplicity and induction. Popper, having failed on all these points, cannot in my view be held to say – in detail at least – what scientific progress is or means. McHenry is led to hold there is no difference between Popper and me in this respect because he ignores most of the differences between our two views, spelled out in (1) to (16) above. There is an important additional point about scientific progress which Popper failed to make, as far as I know. What scientific progress means, and how successful we judge science to be in achieving it, may well 35

See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 2nd edition, op. cit., pp. 393-400 and 430433. This improves on an earlier attempt at solving the problem to be found in The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., pp. 211-217. 36 See my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., chs. 3 and 4; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., pp. 160-174; From Knowledge to Wisdom, 2nd edition, op. cit., pp. 373-386. 37 See ibid, pp. 400-430. See also my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., ch. 5; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., appendix, section 6.

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depend on what we take the aim of science to be. If we take the aim to be to increase human knowledge, and by “human knowledge” we mean “knowledge of experts”, there can be little doubt that modern science has been astonishingly successful. But if “human knowledge” is interpreted to mean “scientific knowledge and understanding of the 6 billion people alive today”, modern science must be judged to be very much less successful, given widespread ignorance of even the overall scientific picture of the world. If we take the aim of science to be “to help promote human welfare by scientific and technological means”, the success of science must be judged to be mixed. Many have benefited immensely, but many others (the billion or so poor of the planet) have not. And there are the global problems science has made possible which serve to undermine human welfare: modern armaments and the lethal character of modern war; population explosion; destruction of natural habitats and extinction of species; pollution of land, sea and air; global warming.38 A few further remarks, now, about the different attitudes Popper and I hold towards metaphysics. We both hold some metaphysical ideas to be of great importance to science in the context of discovery. Popper denies that metaphysics is a part of scientific knowledge, in the (socalled) context of justification, whereas I hold that metaphysical theses asserting the knowability and comprehensibility of the universe are a central and fundamental component of scientific knowledge. For Popper, metaphysical ideas are “indispensable for science”, and “give science its problems, its purposes, and its inspiration”, but nevertheless are “more of the nature of myths, or of dreams, than of science”.39 Popper argues that some metaphysical theses – for example the thesis that nature is uniform – should be turned into methodological rules.40 I hold almost the opposite. I argue that corresponding to methodological rules concerning unity or simplicity there are metaphysical theses which need to be made explicit within science, so that they can be critically assessed and improved, this leading to the improvement of the 38

See my “Can Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 17 (2000), pp. 29-44; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., pp. 68-71. 39 K. Popper, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 165 40 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), pp. 252-253.

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corresponding methodological rules. There is, in Popper, nothing like the hierarchy of metaphysical theses (and associated metamethodological rules) that is such an important feature of AOE, facilitating, as it does, the critical assessment and improvement of metaphysical theses, and corresponding methods.41 The really big differences between Popper’s views and mine arise, not so much in connection with natural science, as with the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and academic inquiry as a whole, matters to which I now turn.42 Towards the end of his essay, McHenry asks what relevance AOE has for science devoted to the promotion of human welfare, or for wisdominquiry – the kind of inquiry I argue for, devoted to seeking and promoting wisdom. How, he asks, does AOE contribute “to the more general goal of solving problems of living or the achievement of global wisdom”? AOE “cannot be just another version of what” I call “the philosophy of knowledge”. To take the last point first, AOE might well be a part of knowledgeinquiry (as I tend to call “the philosophy of knowledge” these days). But this would miss the full import of AOE. The basic idea of AOE is that the aim for science of explanatory truth (truth presupposed to be explanatory) is deeply problematic: physics must accept some assumption about how the universe is comprehensible, but this assumption is almost bound to be false. It is vital, therefore, that science seeks to improve this assumption and associated methods, its aim and methods, as it proceeds, as an integral part of scientific inquiry.

41

For further details concerning differences between Popper’s and my views concerning natural science, its methods and philosophy, and the role of metaphysics, see my “Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism”, Philosophia 32/1-4, 2005, pp. 181-239; and my “Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy”, op. cit. 42 For discussion of these points see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 189-198; 2nd ed., op. cit., pp. 213-220; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., pp. 7199; “The Enlightenment Programme and Karl Popper”, in . I. Jarvie, K. Milford and D. Miller (eds.) Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment. Volume 1: Life and Times, Values in a World of Facts, (London: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 177-90; “The Enlightenment, Popper and Einstein”, in Y. Shi et al. (eds.) Knowledge and Wisdom: Advances in Multiple Criteria Decision Making and Human Systems Management (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2007), pp. 131-148.

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This elementary idea of AOE that science needs to try to improve its problematic aim and methods as it proceeds can be generalized in three ways. (1) It can be generalized to apply to other aspects of science that have problematic aims. (2) It can be generalized so as to apply to other branches of academic inquiry, and indeed to academic inquiry as a whole, in so far as they have problematic aims. (3) It can be generalized so as to apply to all worthwhile human endeavours, personal, social, institutional and global, in so far as they have problematic aims. Let me take these points, briefly, in turn. (1) In my view (as McHenry acknowledges), the aim of seeking explanatory truth, is a special case of the more general scientific aim of seeking valuable truth. This latter aim is, if anything, even more problematic. Of value to whom? In what way? When? The argument for AOE is that science is more rigorous and objective, and likely to be more successful, if problematic metaphysical assumptions inherent in the aim of science are made explicit, so they can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. Essentially the same argument applies to science taken to seek valuable truth. Science is more rigorous and objective, and likely to be more successful, if problematic value assumptions inherent in the aims of science are made explicit, so they can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. The aim of seeking knowledge of valuable truth is, however, a means to such knowledge being used by people in life, culturally or practically, to achieve diverse human goals deemed to be of value. There is, in short, a social, humanitarian or political dimension to science. This is, if anything, even more problematic. But, as before, science is more rigorous and objective, and likely to be more successful, if problematic social or political assumptions inherent in the aims of science are made explicit, so they can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. AOE, I have argued, needs to be generalized, to become “humane AOE”, and “person-centred science” in turn, in recognition of these broader, highly problematic scientific aims. (2) But it is not just science that has problematic aims. Other, nonscientific branches of inquiry have problematic aims. Indeed, inquiry as a whole – in so far as it seeks to produce that which is of value to humanity – has a profoundly problematic aim.

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(3) Furthermore, many of our individual, social, institutional and global endeavours have profoundly problematic aims. Almost all our current global problems – from global warming, population growth, the lethal character of modern warfare, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, to impending shortage of food, water and oil, and even the AIDS epidemic (aids being spread by modern methods of travel) – are consequences of economic and industrial progress made possible by modern science and technology. They are the unforeseen consequences of the social goals we have pursued. In personal, social, institutional and global life we need, whenever aims are problematic (as they mostly are) to make implicit implications of our aims and actions explicit, so that we can criticize and try to improve them. AOE needs to be generalize to become aim-oriented rationality (AOR), potentially fruitful, and in many cases absolutely vital, whenever our aims our problematic, whatever we may be doing. Social inquiry and the humanities, I have argued, ought to take, as a basic task, to help humanity build into the fabric of social, institutional and global life the hierarchical structure of AOR, copied from AOE, so that we may, in life, improve our aims and methods as we live, somewhat as physicists would do were they to implement AOE explicitly in doing physics. Social inquiry, on this view, is not primarily social science, or the pursuit of knowledge. Rather it is social methodology or social philosophy.43 What the philosophy of science is to science, according to AOE, so social inquiry ought to be to the social world. In particular, on this view, that fragment of social inquiry concerned with the institutional endeavour of science, namely the sociology of science, ought to be identical to the philosophy of science. McHenry asks “Would aim-oriented rationalism put into effect have altered the course of physics in the twentieth century such that our current theories would look entirely different and serve humanity in a way in which they are irrelevant at present?”. There would certainly be differences for physics,44 but these would not be such as to make physics 43

This differs dramatically from Popper’s conception of social science as spelled out, for example, in his The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1961). Wisdom-inquiry, again, differs radically from the version of knowledge-inquiry advocated by Popper. 44 I have argued in some detail that if physicists ceased to pay lip service to standard empiricism and put AOE explicitly into scientific practice instead, this would have widespread implications for physics itself: see my The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit., pp. 23-33 and ch. 7; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., ch. 3; “Do We

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more relevant to practical problems of living than it is at present. It is not the physics of AOE or AOR that has wide import (as McHenry provocatively suggests) but the methodology. It is adoption of AOR throughout academia, so that academia may come to help humanity adopt AOR in personal, social and global life, that is so urgently needed. If we are to have a future we need to develop the capacity to modify, to improve, our aims when we see, as we do at present, that we are heading towards catastrophe. We have known about global warming for a long time, but have so far been unable to do what needs to be done to avert the worst possible futures unfolding for humanity. If AOR and wisdominquiry had been put into academic practice 50 years ago, so that problems of living, and the task of improving problematic aims and methods in life, had been given the importance that they deserve, we would now, in my view, be taking effective action to deal with the crisis of global warming. Bringing about the revolution from knowledge to wisdom is not just an academic matter: the future of civilization may depend on it. From Knowledge to Wisdom Copthorne Macdonald In his wonderfully lucid and optimistic essay, Copthorne Macdonald describes recent initiatives in universities and education that can indeed be regarded as steps towards the implementation of what I have called wisdom-inquiry – inquiry rationally devoted to helping people realize what is of value in life. There are programmes of education and research devoted to environmental problems, elimination of poverty, conflict resolution, a more equable relationship between men and women. There is a flowering, in recent decades, of research into wisdom, and education devoted to promoting wisdom in schools and universities. Macdonald concludes that the transformation I have argued for, from knowledgeinquiry to wisdom-inquiry, is quietly underway, in a multiplicity of respects, even if we still have some way to go before universities fully devote themselves to the rational pursuit of wisdom. With reservations, I am inclined to agree. In the second edition of From Knowledge to Wisdom I described a number of changes that have been made in recent years to aspects of science, and of academic inquiry Need a Scientific Revolution?”, Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry 8/3, (2008).

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more generally which, I said, amount to first steps towards putting wisdom-inquiry into practice.45 What is remarkable is that Macdonald and I refer to the same broad trends – environment, policy, peace studies, wisdom research and education – and then go on to give different specific examples of initiatives exemplifying these trends (apart from a few we both mention).46 Without doubt, changes are underway which can be regarded as first steps towards wisdom-inquiry. Why, then, do I have reservations? Why do I lack Macdonald’s optimism? It could be that this is a purely personal matter. Here I have been, for over 30 years, shouting at the top of my voice “We urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia so that it comes to help humanity learn how to create a better world!” and my cries have been ignored. Even my immediate academic colleagues, my fellow philosophers and philosophers of science – or rather, especially my immediate colleagues – have ignored what I have been shouting all these years (apart from those few who have tirelessly supported my apparently hopeless campaign). Now I discover that, entirely independently of me, some aspects of what I have been shouting about all these years are beginning to be put into practice. But it all seems to be so slow, so piecemeal, and in some respects, in connection with global warming especially, so late in the day as to be almost too late. It could be, however, that my sense of frustration and despair comes simply from hurt vanity: I am disappointed that my work has turned out to be so little known, so 45

See From Knowledge to Wisdom, 2nd ed., op. cit., pp. 311-315 and 321-325. Even in the first edition, I indicated then recent publications that could be regarded as pointing towards wisdom-inquiry, in the last chapter entitled, optimistically, “The Revolution is Under Way”. See also M. Iredale, “From knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry: is the revolution underway?”, London Review of Education, 5/2, 2007, pp. 117-129, reprinted in R. Barnett and N. Maxwell (eds.) Wisdom in the University (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 22-33. 46 I think the most important factor that has led scientists and others in recent years to see that academia needs to change is global warming. There is a growing appreciation of the need for multi-disciplinary approaches to problems, and for scientists to interact with government, industry, the media, and the public. I should add that my own university – University College London – is at present introducing changes designed to promote contact between disciplines, and enhance research devoted to helping solve global problems. It is as if the university is now putting into practice that first step towards wisdom-inquiry I argued for in “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism”, Inquiry 23 (1980), pp. 19-81.

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ineffective, so unavailable in practice, so unused. It could be that I am not the right person to make an objective judgement of the significance of what is going on. Without denying this as a possibility, let me, nevertheless, attempt an objective appraisal – one which, it will turn out, is not quite as optimistic as Macdonald’s. There are, to begin with, rather obvious developments in academia that have taken place since 1976 (when I first spelled out the case for the revolution in What’s Wrong With Science?) which, if anything, amount to steps away from wisdom-inquiry, or which make it that much more difficult to put it into practice. In the UK at least, the whole question of funds has become far more important. In the old days what mattered was the quality of your research; now what matters is the amount of money you bring in to your university. The bureaucracy has become much more powerful and intrusive: instead of serving teaching and research, it tends now to run the show and make all the important decisions. Every academic complains bitterly about the amount of time that goes into administration. Careerism seems even more rampant than it used to be. The research assessment exercise (discussed by Donald Gillies in chapter 8) has the effect of repressing slow-developing, really original and fundamental research, and makes discussion and implementation of wisdom-inquiry much more difficult. These institutional changes have all but destroyed the liberal university, based on the idea that people are employed who are as good as can be at teaching and research, and then are given as much freedom and independence as possible, in the hope that what they choose to do will be worthwhile. Finally, the flourishing of various anti-rationalist doctrines and movements in universities, satirized and lambasted by Alan Sokal and others,47 has all but drowned the idea that the fault with the status quo might be not an excess of reason, but quite the opposite, not enough. Both sides in the so-called Science Wars missed the point; and the battle 47

See A. Sokal and J.Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile Books, 1998); A. Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); N. Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); P. Gross and N. Levitt (1994) Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994); P. Gross, N. Levitt and M. Lewis, eds., (1996) The Flight from Science and Reason (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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served to obscure it. (Some of the positive trends Macdonald describes have been infected and subverted by these anti-rationalist views.) These negative developments are important, but are not, perhaps, my main reason for being pessimistic. My fear is that what I call knowledge-inquiry is deeply rooted into the institutional structure of academia, and deeply rooted into the psyches of many academics. It is at present, in one or other of its forms, the only widely known idea as to what constitutes rational inquiry. Very powerful forces, having to do with ambition, careers, prizes, status, ingrained habits of thought and practice, keep it in place. As long as it continues to be, in academia, the dominant ideology (as it might be called), it will restrict and frustrate attempts to develop a more rational and humanly valuable kind of inquiry, devoted explicitly to helping us create a better world. Knowledge-inquiry is a multifaceted and quite flexible beast. It does not restrict what one seeks to acquire knowledge about. Wisdom, peace, conflict, gender, development, poverty, environmental degradation, climate change, world health, extinction of species, inequality, population growth, well being: it readily permits all these to be studied. Knowledge-inquiry positively encourages and promotes the application of knowledge to the task of solving social problems. It even permits policy studies. And of course in academic practice, much goes on at the fringes, as it were, which violates the edicts of knowledge-inquiry – which rejects and mocks it. I have in mind anti-rationalist movements briefly referred to above, movements such as deconstructionism, postmodernism, social constructivism, and the so-called “strong programme” in the sociology of science. The positive developments to which Macdonald refers can all be regarded as developments within the general framework of knowledgeinquiry, and not as developments which seriously challenge or threaten it.48 That is the reason for my reservations, my pessimism. I am not sure that the positive developments Macdonald describes really go the heart of the matter – namely the overthrow of knowledge-inquiry and its 48

This is not quite true of those trends which are explicitly and stridently antirationalist; but these merely provoke a backlash from self-styled “rationalists” who take knowledge-inquiry for granted, and the net result is that wisdom-inquiry is not advanced, and it becomes, if anything, even more difficult to get a hearing for the view. The all-important point that is invariably overlooked by critics of the status quo (and its supporters of course) is that knowledge-inquiry is defective, not because it has too much reason, but because it does not have enough.

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replacement with something more like wisdom-inquiry. My complaint is not simply that the changes are taking place too slowly, and in too piecemeal a fashion (although that is a part of it). Rather, my fear is that all the changes we have seen so far can be accommodated within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, and thus do not serve to undermine that framework at all. And as long as the beast of knowledge-inquiry continues to sit astride our institutions of learning and dominate them, we will not be able to make the changes that we so urgently need to make. So much will be permitted; and then we will slam into a brick wall. What we urgently need is a kind of academic inquiry which takes its first priority to be to help humanity come to understand what our problems of living are – personal, social and global – and what we need to do about them. Academics need to speak with the public, and not just with each other. The primary task is public education – education about what our problems are, and what we need to do (or stop doing) in order to solve them. This public education must, of course, go in both directions. Ideas, arguments, experiences, proposals, solutions must both flow into and out of academia. Public engagement, not instruction, is what is needed. Academics have, of course, much to learn from nonacademics. We must get away from the idea that you must have a PhD before you can be permitted to contribute to academic thought. The thinking that really matters – wisdom-inquiry thought at its most fundamental and important – is the thinking we do as we live, informing and guiding our actions. A basic task of academia must be to hoover up the best ideas, discoveries, solutions, wherever they are to be found in the social world, and make them available to everyone. Academia has the task of sifting out and developing the best ideas that there are. And the central, fundamental task is to come up with ideas as to what we should do, how we should live. It is to create imaginatively, and assess critically, policies, political programmes, ways of living, philosophies of life. These intellectually fundamental tasks are to be undertaken by social inquiry and the humanities. The less intellectually fundamental scientific pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how emerges out of, and feeds back into, thinking about problems of living. On this view (as I have already said), social inquiry is social philosophy, or social methodology not, primarily, social science or the pursuit of knowledge: it seeks to promote imaginative and critical cooperatively rational resolving of conflicts and problems of living in the world and, as

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a long-term task, build aim-oriented rationality into the fabric of social reality. If we do not discover soon how to resolve our problems and conflicts in rather more cooperatively rational ways than we have managed to do so far, we face catastrophe. We are very unlikely to learn how to do this if our institutions of learning haven’t discovered how to make this their basic priority. But this requires the wholesale replacement of knowledge-inquiry by something resembling wisdom-inquiry. The changes that need to be made to academia, as I have tried to indicate in the paragraph above, are far more radical, wholesale and structural than the piecemeal changes Macdonald has described. Changes that take place within the general framework of knowledge-inquiry are not enough. Furthermore, piecemeal changes of the kind we have witnessed so far seem to me not enough to whittle away, even gradually, the knowledge-inquiry beast. I cannot help but believe that what is required is a general recognition of the damaging structural irrationality of knowledge-inquiry, and a general appreciation of the vital need to create and pursue academia along the lines of wisdom-inquiry. Above all, there needs to be recognition of the fundamental importance of improving problematic aims as we act, as we live. Our only hope is to tackle our problems democratically. But, if this is to be done well, it requires electorates to have a good understanding of what our problems are and what we need to do about them. We cannot expect democratic governments to be much more enlightened than their electorates. There is at present a lamentable lack of understanding of what our problems are and what we need to do about them: one only has to think of the USA re-electing Bush after the Iraq war, after his disastrous “war against terrorism”, and after his denial of the realities of global warming. (The UK does not fare much better, re-electing Blair.) As I write, it even seems possible that the Republicans will be re-elected yet again, with a vice President who thinks we are not causing global warming. It is now a matter of desperate urgency that we transform our big, public institutions of learning; what we have done so far is in the right direction, but does not begin to bring about the overall changes that are needed. We suffer from a philosophical blunder. Our problem is, in part, that no one thinks that it is remotely possible that we could be suffering from a philosophical blunder – a blunder in wholesale aims and methods, in

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the philosophy – of inquiry, that is, of how we think. Academic philosophers have reduced philosophy to just another specialized discipline alongside others – and an especially sterile one at that. Even academia is seen as irrelevant, “academic” being another word for “beside the point”. Rampant specialism within academia has resulted in a state of affairs where few attempt to take responsibility for the whole enterprise.49 There are individuals out there in the world who feel some responsibility for the state of the world, and where it is going, but all too few academics who take responsibility for academia as a whole, and for its responsibility towards the state of the world. We urgently need a new Enlightenment. We need a rather general recognition of the following elementary philosophical points. There are two rival philosophies of inquiry that need serious consideration: knowledge-inquiry and wisdom-inquiry. The first dominates science, and academic inquiry more generally, but is damagingly irrational. The second is vastly superior to the first and, if implemented, would (other things being equal) result in a kind of inquiry superior to what we have at present both intellectually and practically. It would help us make progress towards a good world. The course of our civilization – even perhaps its very survival – may depend on replacing knowledge-inquiry with wisdom-inquiry. I think I should conclude my response to Macdonald’s essay by saying that, although I have declared myself to be more pessimistic than he is, nevertheless, as I always used to say to my students, our situation is too desperate for us to be able to afford the luxury of pessimism. Steve Fuller In his delightfully witty and erudite essay, touching on themes from Kant, Bentham, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Hegel, Gibbon, Hume, Plato, Hayek, Kuhn, Freud, Spengler, Edward Said, von Humboldt, Daniel Dennett and Habermas, Steve Fuller first expresses reservations about traditional conceptions of wisdom, and then goes on to point out that the Western tradition has long downgraded or abandoned the very notion. Fuller contrasts different attitudes to wisdom to be found in the East and West. Western religions put all the emphasis on prophecy, on aspirations for the future, on progress; Eastern religions by contrast emphasize wisdom, learning to endure what will be, restricting 49

See my “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism”, op. cit.

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expectations to one’s circumstances, and perhaps becoming at one with reality. Fuller then wonders where I fit in. In some respects I clearly belong to the Western tradition of progress, but in others I have something in common, perhaps, with Eastern attitudes. I must confess, immediately, that what I wish to stress about my work is not concern for wisdom, but rather the argument that there is an urgent need to transform the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry. Having developed the argument, I required a word to stand for the new aim of the new kind of inquiry my argument had led me to uphold, and “wisdom” seemed to me the best available. However, when I first spelled the argument out in print in my first book, What’s Wrong With Science?, I did not employ “wisdom” at all.50 Instead, I spoke of a “people’s rational science of delight and compassion” (taken from the subtitle), the idea being that delight and compassion speak to the two aspirations of science at its best, on the one hand intellectual exploration, the endeavour to see, to know, and to understand for their own sake, and on the other hand science used to help relieve human suffering. Only when I came to write From Knowledge to Wisdom did it occur to me that I might employ “wisdom” to stand for delight and compassion – for the aim of the new kind of inquiry I was arguing for. In declaring what I take wisdom to be (on page 66 in the first edition, and on page 79 in the second edition),51 I am not so much specifying how I think wisdom should be defined as indicating how I think the fundamental aim of rational inquiry should be characterized – an aim that may conveniently be labelled as “wisdom”. But even this is not quite right, for wisdom, understood in this way, is merely a means to the end of realizing what is of value, apprehending, experiencing, sustaining and creating what is of value, living a life of value. That is what inquiry is ultimately for, in my view. I share some of Fuller’s suspicion of traditional ideas about wisdom – its association with religion, prophets, gurus; its anti-rationalist connotations; its tendency, in some cases, to act as a smokescreen for the 50

Before that the argument was developed in a manuscript, written in 1972, which never saw the light of day, called The Aims of Science. 51 This says in part “wisdom being understood here to be the desire, the active endeavour, and the capacity to discover and achieve what is desirable and of value in life, both for oneself and others”, and I go on to say that wisdom includes knowledge and understanding, and can be understood in institutional and social as well as personal terms.

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manipulation and exploitation of the gullible and vulnerable. On the other hand, in declaring the aim of rational inquiry to be to seek and promote wisdom I cannot altogether dissociate myself from traditional notions. Instead, I should perhaps confess that I am attempting to improve both science and traditional ideas about wisdom. What of the idea that wisdom-inquiry might be a synthesis of West and East? I do certainly argue that wisdom-inquiry is a synthesis of, and a great improvement over, traditional Rationalism and Romanticism: see chapter 1, section 4.52 But that debate lies wholly within the Western tradition. Fuller suggests that the difference between West and East is that, whereas the West seeks to change the environment so that it comes to satisfy our needs and desires, the East seeks to change the self so that its needs and desires can be satisfied in the given environment. Given this characterization of the difference, it is little more than common sense to hold that we need an appropriate admixture of both. Wisdominquiry, with its emphasis on science and technology, and on tackling problems of living, all within the framework of improving problematic aims, clearly provides the means to do justice to both West and East, when construed in such terms.53 One may, of course, doubt that this way of contrasting West and East has much to do with realities, as Fuller hints when he mentions Edward Said. Modern China does not exactly seem to embody the spirit of the East, as just characterized. At one point Fuller remarks that, for me, “the main problem with science is that it is not consistently put to humanly beneficial ends”. This is a problem, but not, for me, the main one, which is rather that natural science suffers from a damaging, irrational, untenable philosophy of science of standard empiricism. This seriously misrepresents the highly problematic aims of science, and prevents explicit discussion and attempted improvement of aims as an integral part of science itself. All the defects of modern science that I discuss – intellectual, educational, moral, social, cultural – stem from acceptance and attempted implementation of standard empiricism.54 I also argue that natural 52

See my What’s Wrong With Science?, op. cit., pp. 173-196; From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., chs. 5 and 7; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., chs. 3 and 4. 53 I am reminded in this context of Schumacher’s call for “Buddhist economics”: see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (London: Blond and Briggs, 1973), Part I, Ch. 4. 54 This theme is to be found in all my books, and a number of my papers. For the most recent expression of the argument see my “Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?”, op. cit.

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science needs to become a part of wisdom-inquiry if it is to develop its full potential. And I also argue that the real intellectual and moral disaster in academia lies, not with natural science but with social inquiry and the humanities. Social science is fundamentally misconceived. It ought not to be, fundamentally, science or the pursuit of knowledge, in the first instance, at all. Rather, its proper task is to promote cooperatively rational tackling of conflicts and problems of living in the real world. Fuller remarks that I hold that academia should be “turned into a civil service dedicated to researching and applying science to solve the public’s needs”. That is not what I have in mind. What I have argued for (again and again, I am afraid) is that we need to put problems of living at the heart of academia, the proper basic task being to articulate, and try to improve the articulation of, problems of living, and propose and critically assess possible solutions – possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life. On a more long term basis, a basic task of social inquiry is to help us build aim-oriented rationality into the fabric of social life. This is very different from “researching and applying science to solve the public needs”. Fuller goes on to say that in my view “there is a relatively sharp division of labour between the public (who supplies the ends) and the scientists (who supply the means)”. This has no resemblance to what I have written whatsoever. In my early romantic phase I put the matter, at one point, like this:With humane aim-oriented empiricism and aim-oriented rationalism before us … it becomes crystal clear that we can no longer conceive of science as something primarily pursued by experts, owned by experts, a product of the expert dissociated intellect or mind. Properly conceived, science is much too central and important a part of our lives to be thought of, and practiced, in such a way. In essence, science is our activity, our creation, the outcome of our concern. It is the outcome of our sharing of our concern for our world and for each other. It is a part of the expression of, and at the same the outcome of, our concern to improve our relationships with the world and each other. The essential things, one might say, are me, you, and cosmos: science is the adjusting of relationships between you, me, and cosmos, so that these relationships become less painful, less frustrating, less restricting, more knowledgeable, more

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understanding, more appreciative, freer, more sensitive, more honest, more harmonious, more enjoyable, more trusting and loving. Obviously experts are important: some technical matters need to be delegated to experts, who may be permitted to pursue there matters under our kindly, watchful gaze, and with our help. But the essential thing is far too important, for too intimately associated with the very stuff of our lives, and the very stuff of our personal identity, to be left to experts to decide upon. Science would not be helping us if expert science deprived us utterly of all free will, and was given a free hand to determine the very stuff, the very fabric, of our lives. There is no choice: we must say this: The centre of gravity of science … lies within our own hearts.55 Many other passages in What’s Wrong With Science? spell out the theme of science created by and for people, from children onwards, with some delegation to experts under our watchful, non-expert gaze. The whole text seeks to move “towards a people’s rational science of delight and compassion” (the subtitle of the book). Eight years later, in my more sober, rationalist phase, I put the matter more soberly, for example in a passage like the following:Far from serious, prestigious inquiry being primarily scientific or academic, it is according to the philosophy of wisdom, if anything, all the other way round: for each one of us the most important and fundamental inquiry is the thinking that we personally engage in (on our own or with others) in seeking to discover what is desirable in the circumstances of our life, and how it is to be realized. Institutionalized inquiry is simply a development of our personal and social thinking, having as its basic task to help us rationally develop our own personal and social thinking and problem-solving, so we may all the better realize what is of value to us in our personal and social lives. Whereas for the philosophy of knowledge the fundamental kind of rational learning is acquiring knowledge, for the philosophy of wisdom the fundamental kind of rational learning is learning how to live, learning how to see, to experience, to participate in and create what is of value in existence.56 55 56

What’s Wrong With Science?, op. cit., p. 67. From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., p. 66; 2nd ed., p. 79.

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Aspects of this theme, again, are further developed in From Knowledge to Wisdom, and in any number of my other publications.57 Fuller concludes by remarking that my proposal, like others, does not “pay sufficient attention to the prospect that scientific inquiry may generate findings that provide grounds for the public to radically reorient its aims. (Global climate change is an obvious candidate example.)”. I am bemused. Not only have I, almost ad nauseam, stressed the seriousness of the impending crisis of global warming; central to my work is the theme that our aims in both science and life are likely to be profoundly problematic, in part because of unintended consequences of what we do, it being of fundamental importance to scrutinize our aims, possible unintended consequences of our actions. Science, of course, can have a vital role in alerting us to the need “to radically re-orient” our aims. I invariably emphasize that there needs to be a two-way interaction between science and attempts at solving problems of living. Equally, our long-standing failure to implement wisdom-inquiry – which gives intellectual priority to our problems of living – has much to do with our current inability to respond adequately to the discovery that if we continue as we are we will plunge into catastrophe – a point I have made explicitly.58 John Stewart 57

See, for example, “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism”, op. cit.; Is Science Neurotic?, op. cit., chs. 3 and 4; “Philosophy Seminars for Five-Year-Olds”, Learning for Democracy, 1/2 (2005), pp. 71-77 [reprinted in Gifted Education International, 22/2-3 (2007), pp. 122-127]; “Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy”, op. cit., especially sections 1 and 8. I also emphasize the need for wisdom-inquiry academia to take up, as a basic task, to educate the public about what our global problems are, and what we need to do about them – education going in both directions in the form of arguments, ideas, information, experiences: see for example “Can Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization”, op. cit.: “The Disastrous War against Terrorism: Violence versus Enlightenment”, in A. W. Merkidze (ed.) Terrorism Issues (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007). 58 See my “Are Philosophers Responsible for Global Warming?”, Philosophy Now, issue 65, (January/ February 2008), pp. 12-13.

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After giving a lucid summary of my argument,59 John Stewart goes on to ask “why is it so hard to move from knowledge to wisdom?”. It is hard, in part because of vested interests, in part because pursuing wisdom is a social matter. It cannot be done by an individual alone. Stewart then considers what opposes wisdom-inquiry in the world, and takes us on a fascinating journey which includes: an account of Etienne de la Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude published 1553 (of which I had never heard): Max Weber’s views on capitalism and its links with Calvinism; the way capitalism compels the business world to narrow its aims to nothing more than a demented pursuit of profit; Karl Marx’s view that competition drives profit down, which in turn leads to an almost lunatic striving for innovation in an attempt to boost profits; J. Schumpeter’s account of social havoc produced by such capitalist innovation; the Club of Rome’s thesis that unrestrained economic development must lead to ecological disaster – a disaster that now stares us in the face in the form of global warming and other impending environmental crises. What opposes wisdom-inquiry in the world is the capitalist system, with its reckless, blind pursuit of profit – just that which threatens us with impending disaster. What we need to change is what prevents change. Stewart concludes by alluding to the possibility of the complete collapse of all our social institutions, but hopes we might find the means to avoid this disaster. I agree with Stewart’s assessment of the gravity of our situation. On the day I write these words in the autumn of 2008, it was announced on the BBC news that, despite all the efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, global CO2 emissions are increasing at a rate that is four times the rate in 1990. As Stewart clearly realizes (even though he does not make the point explicitly), those who back wisdom-inquiry face three tasks: (1) Getting a hearing for the argument that we urgently need to transform our institutions of learning so that they put wisdom-inquiry into practice. 59

One minor caveat. Stewart asserts at one point: “It is therefore an elementary requisite for rationality to give overriding priority to correctly identifying the aims to be achieved”. I tend to emphasize the importance, for rationality, of trying to improve our aims as we proceed (it being quite likely we will fail to identify what is best in a problematic aim at our first attempt). It is certainly a mistake to hold that, for rationality, we must first identify our aim correctly before we proceed (not, incidentally, quite what Stewart asserts).

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(2) Transforming academia so that it puts wisdom-inquiry into practice. (3) Transforming our social world so that it puts aim-oriented rationality (the methodological key to wisdom-inquiry) into practice. What really matters is (3). (2) is important to help bring (3) about, and (1) is important to help bring (2) about. I have devoted over 30 years of my working life to step (1) – so far, without much success. I used to think that (1) was a necessary first step to bringing (2) about, and (2) a necessary first step to bringing (3) about. Now I am not so sure. Despite my reservations, I agree with Copthorne Macdonald that changes are underway in academia which can be regarded as piecemeal steps towards wisdom-inquiry (without any awareness of my work): see above and chapter 3. And the dire threat of catastrophic runaway climate change is now prompting many to do what they can to contribute to a reduction in energy consumption and an increase in energy production by renewable methods (which do not in turn do more harm than good) – at the same time doing what they can to spread awareness of the urgent need to do these things. Many people are battling away, in different contexts and in different ways, to bring about changes, in the social world, and in academia, which can be regarded as steps towards (3) and (2). However, even if (1) is not necessary for (2), and (2) for (3), it is undoubtedly the case that (1) would help with (2), and (2) would help with (3). Is Stewart correct in holding that the key factor which blocks steps (1), (2) and (3) is the capitalist system and the demented, destructive drive towards profit? Undoubtedly, it is a factor. As I write these words, in the autumn of 2008, the world’s financial system is in crisis – a crisis brought about by banks pursuing profit in an insane fashion, with no thought for the future. Blinkered pursuit of profit is clearly a part of the problem. But is it the key factor, the only factor? My answer is “No”. To begin with, different factors block steps (1), (2) and (3). It has not been capitalism which has blocked (1), but rather, as Stewart and I agree, vested interests and ingrained habits of thought of senior academics, the deplorable state of academic philosophy, social constructivism and anti rationalism among historians and sociologists of

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science, and the distraction of the Science Wars.60 There is also what I have called “the lobster pot effect” of standard empiricism and knowledge-inquiry: once these doctrines are accepted and institutionalised, they shield themselves from effective criticism. Thus standard empiricism demands of a potential contribution to science that, in order to enter the intellectual domain of science, it must be empirically testable. The demonstration that standard empiricism is untenable fails to satisfy this requirement, and is thus excluded from science. In a similar way, the argument that knowledge-inquiry is irrational is not exactly a contribution to knowledge, and so is excluded, by knowledge-inquiry, from the intellectual domain of academic inquiry. In addition, in order to publish in scientific or academic journals, you are obliged to cast your paper in a form which conforms to the edicts of these doctrines (even if, privately, you reject them). Thus what is published seems to bear out the truth of the doctrines; this serves to convince students and fledgling academics of the truth of the doctrines, and makes it seem all the more absurd to question their validity. In line with all this, I have found it extraordinarily difficult, over the years, to get my work published in academic journals, let alone in scientific journals – although, before I stumbled across this “knowledge to wisdom” argument, I had no difficulty whatsoever. I admit there may be other reasons for difficulty in getting my work published. I also acknowledge that it may be easier these days to publish an article in a scientific journal calling current aims and methods of science into question than it was ten or twenty years ago. These are some of the factors which have blocked step (1), none of which have much to do with capitalism. When it comes to step (2), much depends on the battle for step (1) having been won. But it has not been, which provides sufficient grounds for the failure so far to win the battle for (2) as well. But if step (1) had been achieved, I am quite sure that there would still be resistance to (2) in scientific and scholarly quarters, for the sorts of reasons I have indicated, and for reasons famously discussed by Kuhn.61 If the academic community began to be serious in seeking to implement wisdom-inquiry, opposition might well 60

This has led rationalists into combating anti-rationalists, and has distracted them from considering the damaging structural irrationality of what they take for granted, standard empiricism and knowledge-inquiry. 61 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), ch. XII.

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come, even in liberal democracies, from government, industry, the military, the media, and the public. The capitalist system might play a role in opposing a switch in funding of scientific and technological research away from the needs of domestic industry and towards the needs of the world’s poor. But this would be just one factor amongst others. What of step (3), the one that really matters? We need to distinguish two very different questions. Is the capitalist drive towards profit primarily what needs to be changed? Is it this which primarily prevents aim-oriented rationality from being implemented in the social world? The capitalist pursuit of profit would be a factor in preventing the implementation of aim-oriented rationalism in the social world – supposing steps (1) and (2) had already been achieved – but not the only one. There are other institutions and aspects of life resistant to imaginative and critical exploration of problematic aims as well: government, the military, religion, the law, public opinion. Those who possess inordinate wealth, power or status are likely to resist serious scrutiny of aims of relevant institutions and social endeavours. Quite generally, whenever aims are seriously problematic, there is a tendency to misrepresent aims, and a reluctance to reconsider and scrutinize aims officially acknowledged. I am inclined to think that there is an even deeper reason for our ineptitude when it comes to acknowledging, critically examining and revising problematic aims. This has its roots in our evolutionary past. At the end of chapter 1, in section 6, I indicated five reasons why our evolutionary past may well make it especially difficult for us to put aimoriented rationality into practice in personal and social life – it being, as a result, all the more important that we strive to do just that. Even if capitalism is not exclusively – or even primarily – what prevents change, it might still be what primarily needs to be changed. Is this the case? I am in favour of speaking of “the free market system” rather than capitalism, to emphasize both that there is something good about the system, and that greedy capitalists are not alone responsible for what is bad about it. What is good about the system is that it is responsive to the needs and desires of people. This in turn ensures that consumers share responsibility for what is bad about the market system along with greedy capitalists – and with incompetent governments, one might add. There is an additional point to speaking of the free market rather than

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capitalism: it is a broader concept. A system that required all firms to be cooperatives, shares being owned only by those who worked for the firm in question, could be a free market, but would not, presumably, constitute capitalism. The responsiveness of the free market to the needs and desires of people has its limitations, of course: advertising can create artificial markets; those with minority interests, and the poor may find it difficult to get the market to respond to their needs. The market only responds to need if backed up by sufficient wealth – and if wealth is unjustly distributed, the marked will be unjust as well. The desires of many have more impact on the market than what is genuinely of value, desired by few (unless the few are especially wealthy, of course): desires, however mundane, take precedence over what is genuinely of value. The market, responding to demand, may develop in ways which are, in some respects, undesirable for many – as when supermarkets cause small shops to close. If the market is to operate in ways which are, as far as possible, genuinely beneficial to all of us, it needs to be restricted in scope, encouraged and controlled by appropriate regulations, and developed in desirable directions by the purchases of enlightened consumers. All this in turn, in my view, requires a kind of academia that puts wisdom-inquiry into practice. Is it the free market system, as it exists and operates at present, that needs primarily to be changed in order to develop a wiser world? An overwhelming need at present is to reduce dramatically and rapidly emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Modern methods of energy production, industry, travel and agriculture, conjoined to explosive population growth are what have led us to the present impending crisis. It does not make any difference whether these modern methods of energy production, industry, etc., develop in a world dominated by capitalism or communism: if CO2 is emitted at the same rate, global warming will proceed at the same rate. Nature knows nothing of political or economic systems. The old Soviet Union was even worse at polluting the environment than the capitalist “West”. If the world was dominated by communism we would be today in an even worse predicament, in part because it would be even more difficult, in such a world, to get a hearing for the unwelcome news of global warming. Can CO2 emissions be reduced rapidly without the destruction of the capitalist system, as it exists and operates at present? Consumers,

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governments and scientists could conspire to make offers to the capitalist system which it could not refuse. A combination of legislation, incentives, penalties, and consumer choices could redirect energy production and use, industry, travel and agriculture so that CO2 emissions are rapidly reduced. In my view, this would require the redirection but not the destruction of capitalism.62 And even if it did, we should still direct our attention towards what needs to be done: reduction of CO2 emission. Turning our attention away to the attempted destruction of capitalism would be a strategic disaster. Leaving global warming on one side, is capitalism what primarily needs to be changed to create a wiser world? It is a part of the problem. In From Knowledge to Wisdom I argued for a cooperative free market system. But it is only a part of our current clutch of global problems. There is our current tendency to resort to war, and the lethal character of modern war. There is the stockpiling of armaments. There are the countries lacking democracy, civil rights, free media. There is the rapid increase in world population, and pollution of land, sea and air. Capitalism is not required to generate these problems. Pollution in the Soviet block was as bad as, if not worse than, anything produced in the capitalist “West”. And the Soviet Union was not exactly renowned for democracy, civil rights and free media. Pursuing an aim energetically and enthusiastically which one, at the same time, doubts and subjects to sustained criticism – which is what is required for aim-oriented rationalistic action – is inherently difficult, at both personal and institutional levels. We do not need to invoke capitalist greed to explain why it is so hard to put aim-oriented rationality into practice in our personal and social lives. Joseph Agassi Joseph Agassi sets out to explore the fundamental problem: How ought we to set agendas, for scientific research, for philosophy, for academic inquiry more generally, and for the public arena, for politics? During the course of his exploration, Agassi takes us on a whirlwind tour of such matters as: the impact of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Arne Naess, Russell and Popper, the idea that knowledge is morally neutral, Popper’s battle against inductivism, the question of 62

I am inclined to think that the view that the free market system should be abolished, and the view it should be entirely unregulated, are two sides of the same coin. Everything of interest lies between these two extremes

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whether we should attempt to engage irrationalists in rational debate, Kant and Kuhn, the failure of philosophers to discuss the problem of agenda setting apart from Francis Bacon and Polanyi who, however, have nothing useful to say. Boyle, Whewell, Schrödinger, Born, Peirce, Carnap and Wittgenstein are, amongst others, briefly visited during our whirlwind tour. Agassi tellingly remarks that the problem of agendas is judged by philosophers not to be on the agenda. In politics, Agassi declares, he who sets the agenda holds power. Tyrannies can create a semblance of democracy by determining the agenda of parliaments. Democracies set out to improve conditions by critical discussion and legislation, but there is a general preference for muddling through rather than adopting radical solutions. Agassi concludes by pointing out that our situation is fraught with peril. Pollution, population growth, CO2 emissions, nuclear war all threaten humanity. We urgently need a new radical global plan to tackle our global problems, but politics concerns itself only with local matters of party and nation, and philosophers discuss these matters not at all. Science cannot be relied upon for, as Churchill once remarked: “the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science”. Global survival ought to be on all our agendas. Agassi fails to solve the problem he has raised concerning agendas, as he himself admits. What is odd is that he seems not to have noticed that my own work amounts to a proposal as to how to solve at least the methodological part of the problem.63 Standard empiricism (SE) – including Popper’s version – leaves the whole issue of choice of research aims or agendas beyond the domain of the scientific.64 But SE is untenable. The widespread attempt to put SE into scientific practice damages science, in part precisely because it does place aims or agendas beyond science. SE is untenable because, in physics (the fundamental natural science) theories are selected on the basis of compatibility with (1) evidence, and (2) the best available metaphysical conjecture as to 63

I am puzzled too by Agassi’s suggestion that I hold that our most urgent global problem is the pressure of migration from poor countries to rich ones. I do not hold this, and have never said that I do. 64 It so happens that Agassi declares questions concerning agendas to be “inherently unscientific”. This suggests to me that he upholds some version of SE. As I explain in the text, once it is recognized that SE is untenable, it becomes clear that the rationality of science requires that questions concerning scientific aims or agendas be included within the rational, scientific domain. Just this would be done by AOE science – or science pursued within the context of wisdom-inquiry.

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how the universe is physically comprehensible. The rationality of science requires that its metaphysical assumptions be rationally chosen, and aim-oriented empiricism (AOE) provides a meta-methodology for doing just that. AOE specifies how the agenda of theoretical physics can be progressively improved as science proceeds. And I go on to argue that, having acknowledged that science has the problematic aim of seeking explanatory truth, we need to take into account that science, more generally, seeks valuable truth, and seeks to make this available for the use and enrichment of humanity – these further scientific aims involving values and politics, if anything even more inherently problematic than metaphysics, and thus requiring sustained imaginative and critical discussion, as an integral part of science itself. But in order to accommodate this vital dimension of agenda discussion and improvement, the institutions of science need to be changed – especially as value and political aspects of scientific aims need the involvement of the public. We urgently need, in short, a new kind of science which acknowledges the need for sustained discussion at three levels: (1) empirical (2) theoretical and (3) aims or agendas. All this, I go on to argue, has a profound significance for the rest of academia, and for the rest of life – especially our political life and our efforts to come to grips with our menacing global problems. Treading a path parallel to Popper, I have generalized AOE to form aim-oriented rationality (AOR), designed especially to help us improve problematic aims as we proceed, as we live. AOR is especially relevant when it comes to tackling our immense global problems – when it comes to attempting to make progress towards as good a world as possible. But a world that puts AOR into practice is hardly conceivable without wisdom-inquiry being put into practice in our universities and schools instead of what we by and large have at present, knowledge-inquiry. As a first step, we urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia. Not a whisper of this argument is to be found in Agassi’s contribution. He does say that I am “one of the few who have raised the alarm”, but seems not to have noticed that I have had something to say about how we should deal with what is so alarming – how we should set about tackling our immense, intractable, threatening global problems. Margaret Boden In her outstanding contribution, packed with fascinating information about the birth and early development of cognitive science, Margaret

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Boden argues that cognitive science could not have developed without computers, and computers would not have been developed without the military. In short, “Cognitive science as we know it today simply couldn't have existed without the military.” Good science may have to depend on bad sources for funding. There are, Boden concludes, no easy answers. Boden appreciates that her argument does not tell against wisdominquiry (or, more specifically, humane aim-oriented empiricism as I have called the doctrine that holds that a proper basic intellectual aim of science is to seek knowledge of valuable truth and make it available to humanity to help enrich human life65). Central to my whole argument is the point that the real aims of science are profoundly problematic. Boden’s claim concerning military funding of science reinforces this point. Nevertheless, Boden does raise awkward questions for wisdominquiry – and for anyone who supports the whole idea of science being for humanity. But before I discuss her main argument in more detail, I must first try to clear up what seems to me to be a rather serious misunderstanding of my work. Towards the end of her contribution, Boden says that in “insisting that social enquiry must precede science” I hold “not merely that social concerns should guide science's research agenda” but “also that the philosophy of the conscious human subject/society must underlie the epistemology of science itself” which, Boden remarks, comes “perilously close” to the irrationalism of Heidegger, Roszak, the strong programme, and views of Harré and Bruner. I am horrified that I should have been so misunderstood. What I argue for is diametrically opposed to irrationalism, social constructivism and anti-realism.66 As I have repeatedly said, my concern is to strengthen the objectivity, rationality and realism of science, not undermine these things.67 In arguing for wisdom-inquiry I do, it is true, argue that problems of living, of action, are intellectually more fundamental than problems of 65

See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 95 and 100-110; 2nd ed., pp. 108 and 113-122. 66 Furthermore, I have repeatedly argued against irrationalism, anti-realism, social constructivism and the strong programme: see for example, my work on quantum theory (note 3 of chapter one), my “Induction and Scientific Realism: Einstein versus van Fraassen”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44, 1993, pp. 61-79, 81-101 and 275-305, and my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 2nd ed., pp. 7-9. 67 See, for example, my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., chs. 3-5.

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knowledge, social inquiry is more fundamental than natural science, and action is, in a certain sense, more fundamental than knowledge (in that written statements of knowledge become mere marks on paper if not related to and understood by conscious beings acting in the world). I also argue that what I have called “person-to-person understanding”68 is, in a certain sense, more fundamental than scientific understanding, in that the latter presupposes the former (although I also remark that “the two kinds of understanding dovetail together, being interdependent”69).70 But far from any of this coming “perilously close” to irrationality, quite to the contrary, science pursued in accordance with aim-oriented empiricism (AOE), and wisdom-inquiry is, I argue, both more rigorous and likely to be of greater human value than science shaped by standard empiricism (SE), as at present. Whereas SE misrepresents the aims of science, and thus stifles scrutiny of problematic assumptions concerning metaphysics, values and politics inherent in these aims, AOE provides a meta-methodological framework for the scrutiny and improvement of these assumptions and aims. It is this which makes AOE science both more rigorous and likely to be of greater human value than science shaped by SE.71 Social inquiry is, for me, more fundamental than natural science given the aim of promoting human welfare (or seeking wisdom), but it is very definitely not more fundamental given the aim of improving scientific knowledge and understanding of the world. AOE science does not merely seek objective factual truth, and accept scientific realism; it goes very much further in that, according to AOE, physicalism is a relatively secure part of scientific knowledge.

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Person-to-person understanding is my version of what is sometimes called “empathic understanding”, “folk psychology” or “theory of mind”: see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, op. cit., 1st ed., pp. 183-189, 2nd ed., pp. 206-213. See also my The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., pp. 13-14 and 103-112., where I employ the term “personalistic” understanding. 69 And I continue “Only the philosophy of wisdom can do justice to both kinds of understanding, and their interdependence, in a unifying way, both being essential to wisdom”: see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., p. 189, 2nd ed., pp. 212-213. 70 For arguments for these points see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, chs. 4, 5, 8 and 10; The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., chs. 2, 5, 6 and 9. 71 See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, chs. 5 and 9; 2nd ed., ch. 15; The Comprehensibility of the Universe, op. cit.; Is Science Neurotic?; “Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?”, op. cit.

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Person-to-person understanding has a fundamental role within wisdom-inquiry, and cannot, in my view, be reduced to, or fully explicated in terms of, scientific understanding. In fact scientific understanding is itself, I argue, an aspect of person-to-person understanding with everything personal removed.72 In seeking to acquire person-to-person understanding of another, I may be interested in the person, or I may be interested in the world, and I seek to know what the other believes about the world because I think this may contribute to my knowledge of it. Public scientific knowledge emerges from this aspect of person-to-person understanding. (And construing science in this way can aid the rigour and objectivity of science because, as a result of reintroducing the personal dimension, personal aims and motivations, into science, it becomes possible to critically assess, and possibly improve, these aims and motivations.) The crucial point to appreciate is that, in construing scientific knowledge as an aspect of, a development of, person-to-person understanding, we do not in any way undermine the fact-seeking character of science, its objectivity or rigour (just the opposite, in fact). Quite generally, in order to acquire good, authentic person-to-person understanding of another I need to know, not just how that person sees his world, but what relevant aspects of the world are really like. Personto-person understanding (as understood by me) thus presupposes and requires factual knowledge of the world, a concern for factual truth, objectivity, realism (ultimately, scientific realism). The two kinds of understanding, person-to-person and scientific, dovetail together, as I have said, in that they presuppose each other. Finally, in holding that person-to-person understanding cannot be reduced to scientific understanding, I am not maintaining that it can replace cognitive science, AI or neuroscience (which is perhaps what Boden fears). My actual view is that these sciences are enriching, and will continue to enrich, person-to-person understanding, but will not replace this latter kind of understanding. Person-to-person understanding is not folk psychology, as conceived by Paul Churchland, to be replaced eventually by scientific psychology, just as folk physics is replaced by scientific physics.73 72

See my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 188-189, 2nd ed., pp. 211-213; The Human World in the Physical Universe, op. cit., pp. 108-111. 73 See Ibid, p. 135, notes 31 and 32.

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With that misunderstanding I hope cleared up, I return to considering Boden’s main argument. Is Boden right in holding that computers only exist today because they were developed by the military, and without “computers, no cognitive science”? I have my doubts about both claims. It is notoriously difficult to establish the truth of such counterfactual theses as these. Boden herself points out that many of those who played a crucial role in developing computers, and computer models of the brain – Turing, von Neumann, Bush and others – did so initially independently of the military. It was because of the second world war that they were dragged into doing war work. This must have played an important role in inducing the military to fund work developing computers. Quite generally, the war – and above all the outcome of the Manhattan project – played a crucial role in inducing the military to spend vast sums on scientific research (especially, of course, research in physics), as Daniel Greenberg has convincingly argued.74 Suppose the second world war never happened. Hitler was assassinated before he attained power, Germany did not invade Czechoslovakia or Poland, and Japan, without Germany as an Ally, did not go to war with the USA. The founding fathers of the computer in the 1930s and 1940s successfully argued for the fundamental importance of the computer, for research and for civil society. Computers were developed without military funding. Boden may object that this counterfactual story misses the point of her argument. Given that the war did happen, could those responsible for developing the computer have eschewed all involvement with the military after the war, and still found funds (from non-military sources) sufficient to create the modern computer? (Turing did, in fact, work on developing the computer, not very successfully,75 at the National Laboratory in Teddington, UK.) The development of computers might have been delayed, but I think it would be very difficult to establish that we could not have something like the modern computer today by such a research route.

D. S. Greenberg, The Politics of American Science (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1969). 75 Turing was not good at presenting the case for the importance of his work to his superiors, and his approach to creating a workable computer was flawed: see A. Hodge, Alan Turing (London: Burnett Books, 1983). 6 D. S. Greenberg, op. cit.. 74

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Boden is of course correct in arguing that computers were massively influential in the development of cognitive science, both in being a source of theoretical ideas for the science, and in providing the means to test artificial intelligence models. What she does not consider, however, is a point I made long ago, in 1985: computers may also have played a role in retarding progress in the fields Boden is concerned with: cognitive science, AI, psychology, neuroscience.76 These fields are all concerned to understand the human brain/mind. This is a profoundly intractable problem. It is vital to get as good a basic formulation of the problem as possible, and then choose the best possible preliminary or subordinate problems to tackle in an attempt to work progressively towards the basic problem one seeks to solve – the best possible research route, in others words, to the ultimate goal of understanding how the brain works. The fields Boden is concerned with failed in both of these elementary tasks, in the 1950s to 1970s, in part because of the all-pervasive influence of the idea that one could take the computer, with its distinction between hardware and software, as a good model for the brain and mind.77 In my 1985 paper I argued that, in order to get clear about how to formulate the basic problem properly, it is important to put things into the context of biology and evolution, and ask “what is the function of the brain?” as one might ask “what is the function of the heart or lungs?”. Put in that way, the answer is obvious: the function of the brain is so to guide or control the actions of the animal that, in its given environment, it does what it needs to do to survive and reproduce. Evolution designs brains to be good at this. The fundamental problem, then, is to understand how brains control animals to act so as to be conducive to survival and reproductive success. At the most basic level, the problem of understanding how the brain works is the problem of understanding how the brain controls action. It is not primarily a problem of computation or of intelligence, but of control. At the very outset, this point was appreciated quite well, for example by those who, like Wiener, spoke up on behalf of the cybernetic model of the brain, but it got 76

See my “Methodological problems of neuroscience” in D. Rose and V.G. Dobson, eds., Models of the Visual Cortex (Chichester: John Wiley,1985) pp. 11-21. 77 Margaret Boden, whose knowledge of the history of cognitive science and AI is vastly more extensive than mine, disagrees with my historical remarks about the field. For her account see M. Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press , 2006).

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somewhat lost sight of as the computer model became increasingly influential in cognitive science and AI. In my 1985 paper I argued that, if one takes control as fundamental, it is at once clear that what is required is an understanding of what may be called hierarchical control. At the top of the hierarchy there are (brain) processes determining the overall action: hunting, escaping from predator, caring for offspring. This high level control system controls, we may presume, a large number of lower level control systems which control specific actions (running, leaping, freezing), each of which in turn controls many lower level control systems controlling individual limbs, and ultimately individual muscles – the contraction of individual muscles being coordinated so at to produce the actions required or specified by the high level control system. It did not seem to me that AI and related fields in the 1960s and 1970s made any attempt at all to develop hierarchical control architecture of the type I have just indicated. This obvious idea did not seem to exist.78 And the reason for this failure even to see what is needed seemed to me to come from the all-pervasive influence of the computer model of the brain. My knowledge of desktop computers is extremely limited, but my conjecture is that their architecture did not then, and probably still does not, resemble the hierarchical model I have indicated in the least. I remember well that at some point in the 1970s, the arrival of the idea of parallel processing provoked great excitement. This rather confirms my hypothesis that the hierarchical model was not common currency at the time. If it had been, then parallel processing would not have been treated as a novel idea, for of course such processing is a part of hierarchical control, but only a part. Not only did AI and related fields fail to formulate the basic problem properly (because, I suspect, of the influence of the computer model of the brain); they failed also to tackle the proper preliminary problems, i.e. choose the proper research route. AI, during the 1960s and 1970s sought to develop programmes which imitated fragments of “intelligent” human behaviour, such as playing chess, recognizing objects or speaking a language. The implicit idea, in other words, was that solutions to these 78

But I may be overstating things here. Margaret Boden tells me that in the 1970s a few AI researchers were writing about, but not developing, the kind of hierarchical control systems I have indicated. Nevertheless, it still seems to me that much work in AI at the time did make the mistake I have attributed to it. I do not need to claim that all AI work funded by the military rested on an intellectual mistake.

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preliminary problems could eventually be put together to solve the fundamental problem – an approach that eventually led to a kind of crisis in the field. But such an approach, based again on the computer model is, I argued in my 1985 paper, misconceived from the outset. Putting the problem into the context of biology and evolution would have made it abundantly clear that the proper research route is to follow the path of evolution, and begin by developing artificial brains which mimic the actions, the way of life, of living things with the simplest nervous systems – for example, the neural net of the sea anemone, and then work up gradually to nervous systems of increasing complexity and sophistication. Eventually this did become the approach adopted by AL – “artificial life”. Finally, the computer model misled workers in the field into thinking one could make a straightforward distinction between hardware and software when it comes to biological brains. This, I argued in my 1985 paper, is a grave mistake (and still seems to me to be a mistake). The distinction makes sense in connection with computers. Computers are designed quite specifically to run different programmes, and thus perform different functions. But brains are not designed like that at all. The proper way to think about the brain, I repeat, is that it is a hierarchical control system, and not anything like a computer at all. If these points are correct, there are grounds for holding that the availability of funds from the military for the development of computers, and cognitive science linked to computers, served to corrupt research into understanding the human brain and mind. One could regard this as a specific example of a much broader kind of corruption that overtook natural science (especially physics) as a result of funds being poured into the field by the military after the second world war. Such is the message of Daniel Greenberg’s brilliant and important The Politics of Pure Science.79 Scientists squandered funds on expensive research projects which had poor prospects of yielding significant results. Deceiving grant giving bodies about the aims and likely outcome of research projects became standard. Scientists lost a certain independence from government. The availability of funds for expensive, big science research projects may have distracted scientists from formulating and tackling fundamental problems of understanding.80 There may be, too, a 79

D. S. Greenberg, op. cit. Vast sums were spent on building ever bigger particle accelerators, ostensibly to explore the fundamental nature of the physical universe, and yet basic flaws in the 80

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gradual corrupting influence over priorities of research in that they came to correspond increasingly to the interests of the military. Furthermore, the military may fund science so that students can be trained to work, as graduates, in military research establishments. Accepting funding from the military can, in short, damage science. Furthermore, in so far as it leads to deception when it comes to grant applications for research, it takes science further away from engaging in sustained honest discussion of the problematic aims of science – and thus from implementing humane aim-oriented empiricism and wisdominquiry. Boden presents us with a sharp dilemma. Accepting military funding may be good for science, even essential, but it is also bad, because it supports the military, and may lead to results being used by the military. But if my remarks above are more or less correct, the dilemma may not be quite as sharp as Boden suggests, in that military funding is not as good for science as she indicates. Boden knows vastly more about the history of cognitive science and AI than I do, and she may be able to tear my remarks about the negative influence of computers on these fields to pieces. My point, in any case, is not that military funds only have bad effects on science, but rather that, along with what is good, there may be bad effects as well. Whatever conclusions one comes to concerning this matter, Boden’s central point remains. The question of funding, especially from the military, is absolutely crucial when it comes to the task of developing a kind of science genuinely devoted to the best interests of humanity. relevant fundamental theory – orthodox quantum theory (OQT) – were ignored. OQT is defective because it fails to solve the wave/particle problem and, as a result, is a theory only about the results of performing measurements on quantum systems. It does not tell us what quantum systems, such as electrons and atoms, are (when not being measured), and does not unambiguously declare whether the quantum domain is fundamentally deterministic or probabilistic. The two most basic questions about the nature of the quantum domain remain answered. In order to answer them, what is needed is relatively inexpensive thought, not bigger particle accelerators (which do not help at all). Not till the 1990s did most physicists come to appreciate that OQT is fundamentally defective. In short, during the post-war decades, physicists failed to tackle the intellectually difficult but inexpensive research into the defects of OQT, and instead built ever bigger and more expensive particle accelerators. The sheer availability of funds may have encouraged this betrayal of the Einsteinian quest for understanding. See chapter one, note 3, for references to work on the defects of OQT.

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When ought scientists to accept such funding? When one’s country is engaged in a just war, but not otherwise? So far I have said something about how military funding may corrupt science. But there is another, far more important issue to discuss: the vast size of the military in the world today, the spread of lethal armaments, conventional and nuclear, the threat of chemical and biological weapons, and the obscene levels of funding of the military, especially in the US, but in other countries too, such as the UK. In the UK, 30% of the budget for research and development is spent on the military; in the US it is 50%.81 As I write, the US Department of Defence has just announced that it will invest an additional $400 million over the next five years to support basic research at academic institutions. Far from enhancing the security of the globe, this vast expenditure on the military is a global menace. The US’s military-industrial complex spreads like a cancer through the economy. It is now, for political and economic reasons, very difficult to dismantle or substantially diminish. Having a military of this size makes it almost imperative that it is used, every decade or so, to justify its existence. A war must be found to fight. Its mere existence provokes other countries to develop their military. Thus it was the US that intensified the arms race during the cold war, in massively increasing its arsenal of nuclear intercontinental missiles. The Soviet Union, initially, had far, far fewer missiles, but Khrushchev concealed this fact in order not to lose face, and those involved in the missile industry exploited his deception. The star wars episode during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, is another example of scientists exploiting the situation to obtain funds to pursue their research. This was done quite cynically; no one – apart from Reagan himself perhaps – believed that star wars could actually work. Now, as I write, George Bush seeks to install star wars systems into countries on Russia’s borders, thus provoking retaliation from Russia, which might lead to a new cold war and arms race. Scientists have played a crucial role in these lunatic developments. If science is for humanity, the primary concern of scientists should be for humanity, if the interests of science and humanity come into conflict. The implications are, in my mind, quite clear: the scientific community 81

C. Langley, C. Soldiers in the Laboratory (Folkstone, Scientists for Global Responsibility, 2005).

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must now refuse offers of funding from the military – especially in the US and UK. But that is not enough. Indeed, it is not even the primary issue. The implication of my argument for humane aim-oriented empiricism is quite clear: scientific debate and discussion needs to proceed not, as at present, at two levels, (1) evidence, and (2) theory, but at three levels, (1), (2), and (3) problematic aims. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the intellectual/institutional structure of science, so that scientists and non-scientists engage in sustained discussion about (a) what it is scientifically possible to discover, and (b) what it is desirable to discover, in the hope that the highly problematic overlap of (a) and (b) can be discovered and pursued. Discussion of research aims and priorities must involve the public, since scientists, however qualified to discern what is scientifically discoverable, are not especially qualified to discern what it is of value to discover. New institutional means need to be created to promote and sustain such discussion. There need to be scientific/public conferences, journals, websites, radio and TV programmes. Journalists, MPs and other public figures need to be involved. And this debate must include, what has been so scandalously neglected up to the present, discussion of funding of military research, and military funding of academic research. It is the deafening silence of the scientific community (apart from a few exceptions82) that is so shocking, and so harmful.83 A long term goal must surely be to demilitarize the globe, so that, eventually, we have police but not armies and weapons of mass destruction. A first step would be to reduce dramatically the size of the military in the US, and the budget for military research and development. To this one might add world-wide nuclear disarmament. These steps require, in my view, massive backing from academia. The US public 82

Boden tells me that the AI community objected vociferously to the “star wars” project. 83 Boden indicates how damaging it can be for a research worker to decide, on an individual basis, not to accept funds from the military. But instead of military funding being resisted on an individual basis, what is required is for the discipline as a whole to find ways to discourage such funding – at least by means of public discussion and reporting of funding. Whether researchers should be blacklisted for accepting funding from the military – as they would be if they faked results – is another matter. However the issue is tackled, it would clearly be highly controversial. Boden’s conclusion is absolutely right: there are no easy answers.

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needs to be educated in how dangerous the massively oversize military is, and what needs to be done progressively to reduce its size. But I do not see this happening without wisdom-inquiry. We are not likely to get the military under sane control unless we have institutions of learning rationally devoted to helping us tackle our global problems, our problems of living, in increasingly cooperative ways.84 Academics urgently need to put their house in order, and do all that they can to implement and pursue wisdom-inquiry. Donald Gillies Donald Gillies summarizes his earlier critique of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), operative in the UK, and then goes on to indicate how matters could be amended to improve both research and teaching. Both his criticisms of the status quo, and his positive proposals, seem to me to be eminently sensible. I was particularly struck by his account of the way the RAE operates so as to encourage Mr. B, good at teaching but bad at research, to do more research, while at the same time encouraging Ms. A, good at research but bad at teaching, to do more teaching. Gillies’s main criticism is, however, that the RAE is designed to avoid the error of funding research which does not produce anything of value, but operates in such a way that it is very likely to commit the much more damaging error of excluding from research those few individuals who have the capacity to do research work of immense value. Gillies’s proposal is that the RAE should be disbanded, and the status of teaching should be transformed so that it becomes possible to advance one’s career via excellence in teaching (and not just by means of research or admin, as at present). Individuals should be free to decide for themselves whether they wish to concentrate on teaching, research, or admin. This might not work at present, because most academics want to keep their teaching load as light as possible. But, Gillies argues, this would change dramatically if teaching was perceived to be a reliable road to promotion. I am tempted to say that Gillies’s proposals are far too sensible and practical to be adopted. 84

I have developed this argument in connection with the infamous “war on terror”; see my “The Disastrous War against Terrorism: Violence versus Enlightenment” in A. W. Merkidze, ed., Terrorism Issues: Threat, Assessment, Consequences and Prevention (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007), ch. 3, pp. 111-133.

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If adopted, would they help acceptance and adoption of wisdomInquiry? They might help a bit, perhaps, but not much. The chief obstacles to the acceptance and adoption of wisdom-inquiry by the academic community are, it seems to me, those that I indicated in my From Knowledge to Wisdom. As I have already mentioned, there is what I have called “the lobster pot effect”: standard empiricism, once adopted, shields itself from effective criticism by restricting the intellectual domain of science to testable claims to knowledge (and that which bears on such claims). Criticisms of standard empiricism, arguments for what purports to be an improved conception of science, do not qualify for entry, and are excluded from science. The philosophy of science is not, at present, an integral part of science (as AOE requires it to be). Again, knowledge-inquiry, being built into the institutional structure of academe, determines what is to count as a contribution to academic thought. It determines criteria for publication, for academic excellence, and thus influences such things as promotions, careers, status, prizes, funds for research. Senior academics will tend to be resistant to the idea that what decides these important features of academic life – the aim and methods of academic inquiry – needs to be transformed. Again, what opposition there is to knowledge-inquiry tends to express itself as antirationalism, social constructivism, doubts about the reality or value of scientific knowledge and progress. This has led to a backlash from those defending scientific rationality, the authenticity and value of science. The resulting “science wars” debate has led to orthodox positions becoming all the more firmly entrenched. Both sides in the debate miss the crucial point that “scientific rationality”, so called, is actually a characteristic kind of irrationality masquerading as rationality, there being an urgent need to develop a more rigorous kind of science, and academic inquiry more generally, of greater value when judged from both intellectual and humanitarian standpoints. Standard empiricism and knowledge-inquiry are not, of course, taught explicitly; they are rather implicit in everything that is taught – implicit in much that goes on in universities. These doctrines become deeply ingrained habits of thought as a result, difficult to dislodge, call into question, and revise. Again, rampant specialization tends to make academics responsible for their own speciality, but indifferent to questions about the value, the integrity, of academic inquiry considered as a whole. No one takes responsibility for the intellectual and human value of the entire academic enterprise, and there is no arena for the expression of such responsibility, such

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concerns, should they be felt. It is as if everyone has decided, long ago, that the proper basic task of academia is to amass more and more specialized knowledge, this being so utterly obvious, so wholly beyond all possible doubt, that it can be placed permanently in limbo, ignored and forgotten.85 But just occasionally, as Gillies in effect reminds us, such elementary, banal truisms turn out to be nothing of the kind. Sometimes, what everyone ignores ought to receive the most active attention. Gillies’s proposals would return us to a slightly improved version of what prevailed when I began my academic career in the mid 1960s – improved because greater emphasis would be placed on the value of, and the career rewards to be had from, teaching. But in the 1960s, knowledge-inquiry was even more firmly in place than it is nowadays, in 2008.

85

For these points see my From Knowledge to Wisdom, 1st ed., pp. 45-46, 123-124; 2nd ed., pp. 7-9, 58-59, 134-135 and 305-306; “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Criticism of Specialism”, op. cit. See too works referred to in note 47.

Selected Publications of Nicholas Maxwell Books – What's Wrong With Science? Towards a People's Rational Science of Delight and Compassion (Hayes, England: Bran’s Head Books, 1976). – From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). – The Comprehensibility of the Universe: A New Conception of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; paperback ed., 2003). – The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will and Evolution (Lanham, Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). – Is Science Neurotic? (London: Imperial College Press, 2004). – From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (London: Pentire Press, 2007), second edition, revised, new introduction and three new chapters. – Wisdom in the University (London: Routledge, 2008), edited with R. Barnett. Contributions to Books – “Methodological Problems of Neuroscience”, in D. Rose and V.G. Dobson (eds.) Models of the Visual Cortex (Chichester: John Wiley, 1985), pp. 11-21. – “How Can We Build a Better World?” in J. Mittelstrass (ed.) Einheit der Wissenschaften: Internationales Kolloquium der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 25-27 June 1990 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.), pp. 388-427. – “Beyond Fapp: Three Approaches to Improving Orthodox Quantum Theory and An Experimental Test”, in A. van der Merwe, F. Selleri and G. Tarozzi (eds.) Bell's Theorem and the Foundations of Modern Physics (Singapore: World Scientific, 1993), pp. 362-370. – “A Philosopher Struggles to Understand Quantum Theory: Particle Creation and Wavepacket Reduction”, in M. Ferrero and A. van der Merwe (eds.) Fundamental Problems in Quantum Physics (Leiden: Kluwer Academic, 1995), pp. 205-214. – “Must Science Make Cosmological Assumptions if it is to be Rational?”, in T. Kelly (ed.) The Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the Irish Philosophical Society Spring Conference (Maynooth: Irish Philosophical

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Society, 1997), pp. 98-146. – “Can Humanity Learn to Create a Better World? The Crisis of Science without Wisdom”, in The Moral Universe, edited by T. Bentley and D. Stedman Jones (eds.) Demos Collection 16 (2001), pp. 149-156. – “Karl Raimund Popper”, in P. Dematteis, P. Fosl and L. McHenry (eds.) British Philosophers, 1800-2000 (Columbia: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2002), pp. 176-194. – “Art as Its Own Interpretation”, in A. Ruvoi (ed.) Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 269-283. – “Special Relativity, Time, Probabilism and Ultimate Reality”, in D. Dieks, The Ontology of Spacetime (Amsterdam: Elsevier, B. V., 2006), pp. 229-245. – “Learning to Live a Life of Value”, in J. Merchey (ed.) Living a Life of Value (Values of the Wise Press, 2006), pp. 383-395. – “Practical Certainty and Cosmological Conjectures”, in M. Rahnfeld (ed.) Is there Certain Knowledge? (Leibzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), pp. 44-58. – “The Enlightenment Programme and Karl Popper”, in I. Jarvie, K. Milford and D. Miller (eds.) Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment. Volume 1: Life and Times, Values in a World of Facts (London: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 177-190. – “The Enlightenment, Popper and Einstein”, in Y. Shi et al. (eds.) Knowledge and Wisdom: Advances in Multiple Criteria Decision Making and Human Systems Management (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2007), pp. 131148. – “The Disastrous War against Terrorism: Violence versus Enlightenment”, in A. W. Merkidze (ed.) Terrorism Issues (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007). – “Is the Quantum World Composed of Propensitons?”, in M. Suárez (ed.) Probabilities, Causes and Propensities in Physics (Boston: Synthese Library, 2008). – “A Priori Conjectural Knowledge in Physics”, in M. Shaffer and M. Veber (eds.) New Perspectives on A Priori Knowledge and Naturalism (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2008). – “Popper’s Paradoxical Pursuit of Natural Philosophy”, in J. Shearmur and G. Stokes (eds.) Cambridge Companion to Popper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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Thesis and Papers – Physics and Common Sense: A Critique of Physicalism, MA thesis (Manchester: Joule Library, Manchester University, 1965). – “Physics and Common Sense”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16 (1966), pp. 295-311. – “Can there be Necessary Connections between Successive Events?”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19 (1968), pp. 1-25 (reprinted in R. Swinburne (ed.) The Justification of Induction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 149-174. – “Understanding Sensations”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1968), pp. 127-146. – “A Critique of Popper's Views of Scientific Method”, Philosophy of Science 39 (1972), pp. 131-152 (reprinted in A. O’Hear (ed.) Popper: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. II, Part 3 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 463-487. – “A New Look at the Quantum Mechanical Problem of Measurement”, American Journal of Physics 40 (1972), pp. 1431-1435. – “Alpha Particle Emission and the Orthodox Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, Physics Letters 43A (1973), pp. 29-30. – “The Problem of Measurement – Real or Imaginary?”, American Journal of Physics 41 (1973), pp. 1022-1025. – “The Rationality of Scientific Discovery”, Philosophy of Science 41 (1974), pp. 123-153 and 247-295. – “Does the Minimal Statistical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Resolve the Measurement Problem?”, Methodology and Science 8 (1975), pp. 84-101. – “Towards a Micro Realistic Version of Quantum Mechanics”, Foundations of Physics 6 (1976), pp. 275-292 and 661-676. – “Articulating the Aims of Science”, Nature 265, (1977, 6 January), p. 2. – “Induction, Simplicity and Scientific Progress”, Scientia 114 (1979), pp. 629-653. – “Science, Reason, Knowledge and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism”, Inquiry 23 (1980), pp. 19-81. – “Instead of Particles and Fields: A Micro Realistic Quantum "Smearon" Theory”, Foundations of Physics 12 (1982), pp. 607-631. – “From Knowledge to Wisdom”, The Ethical Record, 88/1 (January 1983), p. 10. – “From Knowledge to Wisdom: Guiding Choices in Scientific Research”,

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Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 4 (1984), pp. 316-334. – “Are Probabilism and Special Relativity Incompatible?”, Philosophy of Science 52 (1985), pp. 23-43. – “The Fate of the Enlightenment: Reply to Kekes”, Inquiry 29 (1986), pp. 79-82. – “Wanted: a new way of thinking”, New Scientist, 14 May 1987, p. 63. – “Quantum Propensiton Theory: A Testable Resolution of the Wave/Particle Dilemma”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 39 (1988), pp. 1-50. – “Are Probabilism and Special Relativity Compatible?”, Philosophy of Science 55 (1988), pp. 640-645. – “What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Us Create a Good World?”, Science, Technology and Human Values 17 (1992), pp. 205-227. – “What the Task of Creating Civilization has to Learn from the Success of Modern Science: Towards a New Enlightenment”, Reflections on Higher Education 4 (1992), pp. 47-69. – “Does Orthodox Quantum Theory Undermine, or Support, Scientific Realism?”, The Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1993), pp. 139-157. – “Can Academic Inquiry help Humanity become Civilized?”, Philosophy Today 13 (May 1993), pp. 1-3. – “Induction and Scientific Realism: Einstein versus van Fraassen”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (1993), pp. 61-79, 81-101 and 275-305. – “Science for Civilization”, The Ethical Record 98 (1993), pp. 12-17. – “On Relativity Theory and Openness of the Future: A Reply”, Philosophy of Science 60 (1993), pp. 341-348. – “Particle Creation as the Quantum Condition for Probabilistic Events to Occur”, Physics Letters A 187 (1994b), pp. 351-355. – “The Evolution of Consciousness”, The Ethical Record 100/4 (April 1995), pp. 16-19. – “Are there Objective Values?”, The Ethical Record, 101/4 (April 1996). – “Science and the environment: A new enlightenment”, Science and Public Affairs (Spring 1997), pp. 50-56. – “Is the Universe Comprehensible?”, The Ethical Record, 192/3 (March 1998), pp. 3-6. – “Has Science Established that the Universe is Comprehensible?”, Cogito 13 (1999), pp. 139-145. – “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism”, Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 49-71.

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– “Can Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization, Journal of Applied Philosophy 17 (2000), pp. 29-44. – “Observation, meaning and theory”, Times Higher Education Supplement, no. 1,427 (17 March, 2000), p. 30. – “A new conception of science”, Physics World 13/8 (2000), pp. 17-18. – “Are There Objective Values?”, The Dalhousie Review 79/3, (Autumn 1999), pp. 301-317. – “Weinert's Review of 'The Comprehensibility of the Universe'”, Philosophy 76 (2001), pp. 297-303. – “Wisdom and curiosity? I remember them well”, The Times Higher Education Supplement, no. 1,488 (25 May 2001), p. 14. – “Cutting God in Half”, Philosophy Now 35 (March/April 2002), pp. 2225. – “Science and meaning: why physics can coexist with consciousness”, The Philosophers' Magazine 18 (Spring 2002b), pp. 15-16. – “Is Science Neurotic?”, Metaphilosophy 33/3 (April 2002), pp. 259-299. – “The Need for a Revolution in the Philosophy of Science”, Journal for General Philosophy of Science 33 (2002), pp. 381-408. – “Three Philosophical Problems about Consciousness”, Ethical Record 107/4 (May 2002), pp. 3-11. – “Two Great Problems of Learning”, Teaching in Higher Education 8 (January 2003), pp. 129-134. – “Science, Knowledge, Wisdom and the Public Good”, Scientists for Global Responsibility Newsletter 26 (February 2003), pp. 7-9. – “Do Philosophers Love Wisdom”, The Philosophers’ Magazine, Issue 22, 2nd quarter, (2003), pp. 22-24. – “In Defence of Seeking Wisdom”, Metaphilosophy 35 (October 2004), pp. 733-743. – “Does Probabilism Solve the Great Quantum Mystery?”, Theoria 19/3, no. 51 (2004, pp. 321-336. – “Science versus Realization of Value, Not Determinism versus Choice”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12/1 (2005), pp. 53-58. – “A Revolution for Science and the Humanities: From Knowledge to Wisdom”, Dialogue and Universalism XV/1-2 (2005), pp. 29-57. – “Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism”, Philosophia 32/1-4, (2005), pp. 181-239. – “Is Science Neurotic?”, Philosophy Now, Issue 51 (June/July 2005), pp.

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30-33. – “Science under Attack, The Philosopher’s Magazine, Issue 31, 3rd Quarter (2005), pp. 37-41. – “Philosophy Seminars for Five-Year-Olds”, Learning for Democracy, 1/2 (2005), pp. 71-77 [reprinted in Gifted Education International, 22/2-3 (2007), pp. 122-127]. – “Knowledge to Wisdom: We Need a Revolution, Philosophia 34, 2006e, pp. 377-8. – “Three Problems about Consciousness and their Possible Resolution” (PMS WIPS 005 (November 15, 2006), http://www.petemandik.com/blog/pms-wips/ . – “Can the World Learn Wisdom?”, Solidarity, Sustainability, and NonViolence, 3/4 (April 2007), http://www.pelicanweb.org/ solisustv03n04maxwell.html . – “From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Need for an Academic Revolution, London Review of Education, 5/2 (2007), pp. 97-115 [reprinted in R. Barnett and N. Maxwell (eds. Wisdom in the University (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1-19]. – “Are Philosophers Responsible for Global Warming?”, Philosophy Now, issue 65, (January/ February 2008), pp. 12-13. – “Do We Need a Scientific Revolution?”, Journal for Biological Physics and Chemistry, 8/3 (September 2008).

Notes on Contributors Joseph Agassi is Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and York University, Toronto. A former assistant to Karl Popper, he has authored dozens of books and hundreds of contributions to the learned press, including: Science and Its History: A Reassessment of the Historiography of Science, A Philosopher's Apprentice: In Karl Popper's Workshop, Series in the Philosophy of Karl R. Popper and Critical Rationalism, with I. C. Jarvie, A Critical Rationalist Aesthetics, Series in the Philosophy of Karl R. Popper and Critical Rationalism, and with Abraham Meidan, Philosophy from a Skeptical Perspective. Margaret A. Boden is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (and its British and European equivalents). In 2002 she was awarded an OBE "for services to cognitive science," and (besides her Cambridge ScD and Harvard PhD) she has honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex and the Open University. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, and has been translated into 20 languages. Her latest books are The Creative Mind and Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science. Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, Fuller is best known for his work in the field of ‘social epistemology.’ His most recent work has focused on the future of the public intellectual and the university, as well as the biological challenge to the social sciences, especially as it bears on the future of ‘humanity’ as a category in terms of which we define ourselves. He has published fifteen books and his work has been translated into nearly twenty languages. Relevant recent works include The Knowledge Book: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture and New Frontiers in Science and Technology Studies. A sectional president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fuller was awarded in 2007 a ‘higher doctorate’ from Warwick for long-term major contributions to scholarship. Donald Gillies carried out undergraduate and graduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge and the London School of

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Economics in 1962-70. Since 1971, he has been a member of staff of London University and is currently Professor of Philosophy of Science and Mathematics at University College London. He has published five books in the areas of foundations of probability, philosophy of artificial intelligence, history and philosophy of mathematics, and history and philosophy of medicine. His two most recent authored books are: Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method, and Philosophical Theories of Probability. David Hodgson is a Judge of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia. He is also deeply interested in philosophy. He has published Consequences of Utilitarianism and The Mind Matters, and many articles on philosophical topics including consciousness, probability, plausible reasoning and free will. Mathew Iredale has written the ‘Sci Phi’ column for The Philosophers' Magazine since 1998. He has a degree in Human Sciences from University College London, an MSc in History and Philosophy of Science from the London Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and a PhD in Philosophy of Science (supervised by Nicholas Maxwell) from University College London. He recently contributed an article to a special issue of the London Review of Education, discussing to what extent Maxwell’s ideas have been taken up by other academics. Copthorne Macdonald is a writer and independent scholar. Among his eight published books are three that deal with aspects of wisdom: Toward Wisdom, Getting a Life, and Matters of Consequence. Since 1995 he has tended THE WISDOM PAGE (www.wisdompage.com), a website that provides internet access to wisdom-related resources. Nicholas Maxwell has devoted much of his working life to arguing that we need to bring about a revolution in academia so that it seeks and promotes wisdom and does not just acquire knowledge. He has published numerous papers and five books on this theme: What’s Wrong With Science? From Knowledge to Wisdom, The Comprehensibility of the Universe, The Human World in the Physical Universe and Is Science Neurotic? For many years he taught philosophy of science at University College London, where he is now Emeritus Reader. For more information see: www.nick-maxwell. demon.co.uk.

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Leemon McHenry is Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University, Northridge and Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He has taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Old Dominion University, Davidson College, Central Michigan University and held research positions at Johns Hopkins University, UCLA and Edinburgh. He is the author of Whitehead and Bradley: A Comparative Analysis and numerous papers in the metaphysics, philosophy of science and medical ethics. Alan Nordstrom has been Professor of English at Rollins College since 1970. Among his publications are a study of Shakespeare: Disingenuous Hypocrisy, a collection of essays and verse: The Good Life, According to Me, and several gatherings of verse, including: Ped·Antics and Sophics. Karl Rogers is a Research Fellow in Science Studies at Bath University, and a Visiting Lecturer in Discourse Analysis at the Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires. He is currently living in Argentina with his wife and two children. His books on the history and philosophy of science include: On the Metaphysics of Experimental Physics, Modern Science and the Capriciousness of Nature, and, Participatory Democracy, Science and Technology. Jeremy Shearmur is Reader in Philosophy at the Australian National University. His Political Thought of Karl Popper and Hayek and After were published by Routledge in 1996, and his and Piers Turner’s edition of Popper’s After the Open Society was published by Routledge in 2008. Shearmur was educated at the London School of Economics, where he also worked for eight years as Karl Popper’s assistant. He taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, political theory at Manchester University and the Australian National University, was Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University, and was also Director of Studies at the Centre for Policy Studies in London. His forthcoming book is entitled Living with Markets. John Stewart worked in physiological genetics from 1963 to 1973, (PhD and Research Fellow at Cambridge University, then 3 years in the USA). Since 1973 he has lived and worked in Paris; in existential doubt over the social utility of science, he took some "time out" from his career (1973-87: Radical

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Science movement, Science Shops in France, etc). Since 1987 he has returned to science, investing in the paradigm of "enaction" in Cognitive Science.