Is Everything Relative?

A Debate on theUnity of Knowledge

     Prof. Wilson: The way I see where we are at the present time (and I thought Paul Gross was expressing it very well) is that the great branches of learning have met, like two continents coming in sight of one another, and it's for real. And we have begun a very interesting discourse within a new frame. Whether that perception of where we are is true or a mirage, will be evident as we and other scholars proceed. I just wanted to make a couple of remarks about Prof. Rorty's observations, quickly. I believe that you understate the richness of our scientific knowledge by speaking of it as something in the top down that is somehow being placed upon all knowledge and claiming to enmesh it in a single system of explanation. That's not what consilience is all about. It isn't just one big tool that is applied, like chromatography or partial-differential calculus. It is the interlocking of explanations. Paul Gross made the point with reference to developmental biology that when the continents within the biological sciences --molecular and developmental biology (and this is certainly true of molecular, cell, evolutionary biology and ecology) -- came together, there was not an imposition of some single big principle that determined everything and could be unpacked; rather an interlocking of explanations through consilience that did emerge and has been well established across the levels of organization. One does not take molecular biology and impose it in some way as an explanatory scheme for ecology, but one notices that the immediate, adjacent level of organization of the organelle in cells is consistent; what we observe at that level of complexity is very likely consistent with what we have learned more and more at the level of macromolecules (and that turns out to be the case), and so on to the cell and the organ. It works. Consilience really has spread across all the natural sciences. That is the way it is. And it isn't any kind of single formula that has done it but the procedures of explanation and that is the way it will proceed. To say that 'all mind is material' is vacuous sounds correct. But when the details come out, we are saying vastly more than that -- that the details of mind are not only material but they conform to a process or entail processes which are increasingly understandable in both neurobiological function and in genetic evolutionary history. That is something that is not centuries old, and it is not even decades old. And then when it happens, as it happens, the line between the great disciplines will disappear. We will see if that is the case. On hardware and software (that is Hillary Putnam's distinction, originally) -- it's a bit misleading. Bear in mind that hardware, if we can use that metaphor, really evolved according to its capacity to produce product, however diverse, that survives in a changing and harshly unforgiving world. A crude parallel could very well be the game of chess. There are rules of chess that are invariant as there are some algorithms of mental development that are invariant or only weakly variant, yet there are some one-followed-by-150-zeros ways to play a game of chess. This is the way evolutionary biologists look at the origin of the diversity of life. It's virtually endless in what it can yield, and yet it plays by certain rules - at the molecular level, the cell level, the organismic level, and in the still largely unstudied rules of ecosystems assembly. Once we've learned those rules we'll be able to figure out this immense diversity of biological forms that, in fact, is consilient from molecule to ecosystem. And finally, Prof. Rorty said he would be more persuaded if we presented testable hypotheses. I think he's referring to a distinction in his own mind that he makes between the knowledge as use of things to do something or accomplish something, and pure information at an epistemological level. I'm not sure that's what he's referring to but let me suggest what these hypotheses are that could be predicted in advance, that we could say, "it won't work": -Incest won't work -Arbitrary color qualifications won't work -Territorial surrender won't work And I think we could produce quite a long list of others that are quite pragmatic.

     Prof. Rorty: Perhaps one small point in something Paul Gross said about Kuhn: I don't read Kuhn as producing rules of theory choice. I think of him and associated developments in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science as saying, "there aren't going to be rules for theory choice. The idea that there was a thing called the scientific method which contains such rules didn't pan out." There is an explanation of the consensus reigning among natural scientists and the lack of consensus ranging in other academic disciplines: the natural scientists are united by a common goal, namely successful prediction; the people in the other disciplines don't have this as their goal. But once one has said that, one has said on this post-punian view (which I accept) pretty much all there is to be said about why the natural sciences have been as successful as they have: they knew what they wanted. The other disciplines, moral philosophy for example, disagreed about what they wanted.

     Prof. Gross: I agree with what Prof. Rorty just said. That is, for purposes of this discussion, my understanding is close enough to his explication.

Question and Answer Session begins. Jay Tolson, editor of The Wilson Quarterly, moderated this exchange.

Questioner: Prof. Rorty, you may have considered Prof. Wilson's recent examples of predictions that won't work kind of trivial or obvious, like incest. Let me throw out two and see what you think: 1-The whole society (or village, as it's sometimes called now) can have the same interest in the upbringing and well-being of children as their biological parents or the parents they're reared with, 2-What former governor Jerry Brown called "new economic efficiency" can satisfy all our human needs to where considerations of the natural environment -- what Prof. Wilson calls 'biophilia' -- have no meaning.

Prof. Rorty: I guess I don't see how knowing about epigenetic rules would help with the latter question. I mean, we may have to decide between no trees or no bread at some point, if things get bad enough. It will be a very hard decision. But I don't know what biology will do for us in that respect. About taking a village to raise a child, I take it Mrs. Clinton's point is perfectly clear and it doesn't involve saying that all members of the community will have the same interest as the parents, it's just that the parents can't do it by themselves.

[Questioner explains that he was trying to provide examples that did not now have clear answers, as Prof. Wilson's examples did.]

Prof. Rorty: That is the kind of example I had in mind. If he could have, then indeed there would have been more plausibility than I presently find, but I would prefer to have it done not retroactively, so to speak -- prospectively, with some experiment that in fact still looks promising, but for which we are told, "try it, and you'll see."

Prof. Gross: Let me add something to this. I worry about social experiments, especially large scale ones. They have had far more often bad results than good ones. But let me suggest another possibility, another potential utility of the consilient-seeking. I'm thinking of the most coherent and moving statement of the imperfectability of society that I know, which is the several stages of Isaiah Berlin's thought about why utopias can't work. But these statements are not entirely convincing. They take the form that justice and mercy are ultimately incompatible (if you have full justice you can't have full mercy and vice versa -- paired opposites of that kind that are mutually incompatible); and since everybody's prescription for utopia or the ideal society includes several sets of those pairs, that the idea of perfect society is incoherent. Now the trouble with this moving and interesting argument is that it's not absolutely clear that all people talk about the same thing when they talk about liberty, or about justice and mercy. I can imagine that a sufficiently careful examination of the current meanings and the history of meaning of those ideas which are universally present in societies from a seriously evolutionary perspective might well produce agreement on what they really mean -- some universality in their meaning. Only in those circumstances might it become possible to decide whether such a pair is a pair really of incompatibles. In which case we drop it from our plans for perfectibility of society, which we've already agreed isn't perfectible anyway, if you follow Isaiah Berlin. So I'm sorry, that's a sort of obscure argument but that's where I think consilience might lead.

Questioner: Professor Wilson, on what grounds do you believe that natural selection formed a human brain and mind? Is this based on any experimental science more persuasive than the peppered moth and finch beak examples? Or is it a philosophical deduction from materialistic assumptions?É.On what grounds do you believe that natural selection formed the human brain?

Prof. Wilson: The experimental evidence is, I think, two-fold. One is from the emerging epigenetic rules, particularly as they pertain to reproductive life and parenting, that appear. They have elements programmed in the brain. The same is true of early infant rapid acquisition of language and smiling and other facial expressions. At that level, certainly, the epigenetic rules are very adaptive. If they don't appear, if they're thrown off, then you get reduced survival and reproduction even in societies that are attempting to keep them going. And at the other level -- the functional level -- we're finding increasing evidence that aberrations of this kind that cause maladaptive behavior (that is, less survival, less reproduction with the societies) do indeed represent or stem from neurological alterations. These include, for example, those underlying schizophrenia -- the raising and lowering of neurotransmitters that bring about the schizophrenic systems; and depression, and, most recently, OCD, where scientists are beginning to work out the circuitry that has to be exactly in place in order to keep ritual or repetitive behavior running amuck. All of this is converging to make a case, persuasive to me anyway, that human behavior, including many elements of thought - taste, for example, in OCD and OCD-like elements - are neurobiological processes on a genetic basis that originated by natural selection. Now, if that does not come about from a philosophical position extended to mold the data, if in fact there were evidence of other processes such as by design or that they were not adaptive, if there were some other explanation, then think scientists would leap to seize it and run with it.

Questioner: I'm an economist and I'm concerned that your messages suffer from overreach. I'm not sure why it's necessary to have an hypothesis that underlying human behavior is governed by common principles in order to justify the kind of interdisciplinary work that you're talking about. It seems to me that common human problems are becoming increasingly clear; that we're suffering from the kind of fragmentation of knowledge that you all have acknowledged, and it's certain that the social sciences have been a major part of that fragmentation; but that it's not necessary, even if reality were diverse in its behavior, its underlying organizing principles, that wouldn't undermine the basic approach that you've got, the basic message, for greater interdisciplinary work. To pick up on your last phrase, Professor Wilson, you could have interlocking explanations without having consistent explanations and you'd still need to have interdisciplinary work.

Prof. Wilson: I think that at the present time, the best explanation for the organic phenomena that make us up, body and mind, is evolution by natural selection. We have sought in vain for other explanations such as guidance or ontogenetic driving forces within the organic machine; all these have been considered and discarded. Natural selection is the one that comes through. It is supported in detail, I believe, in the most careful studies of microevolutionary change and of adaptation in organisms below the human species. It seems unlikely that the human species evolved in a different way. Though it's possible that we will find some kind of psychic phenomena that has not been measured or named in the future, and that would be one of the most exciting developments, it might be the most important development in the history of the study of human biology if it happened. On the issue of evolution, I want to just add another thought here: there are those who believe that the entire structure will come tumbling down, that is the possibility of any biological foundation, or the social sciences, or the human sciences, because they will not accept evolution by natural selection. Let me say this about it: a lifetime of study that I have conducted, and all that I have read and all that I have heard leaves open only two possibilities: One is that a designer -- a divine presence or some force beyond our understanding at this time -- calls the evolution of life on earth and cleverly salted the earth and all those organisms from poll to poll in a way to make the human intellect believe that it was self-assembled by mutation and natural selection. That's one alternative. The other alternative, which I lean to, because it's a simpler explanation, is that all the diversity of life including the human species did evolve by mutation and natural selection.

Questioner: Prof. Rorty, you've used a vocabulary like the later Wittgenstein tools, and so forth -- ideas, tools that serve human purposes. Wittgenstein was concerned to preserve the autonomy of what he calls different forms of life, and some think he was also concerned to preserve what he called 'the higher' -- religion, ethics, aesthetics -- from the encroachments of logical positivism, which is apropos today. What would you say about religion? Do you think in a community of Shamans, for example, if their shamanistic beliefs work for them, in a Jamesian sense, then are their beliefs true?

Prof. Rorty: I think culture started out thinking that the people who could give you moral advice were also the people who could predict the results of what was going to happen under certain circumstances. In our jargon, religion and science were blended together. We have now separated the two out, so that we look to different people for predictions of what will happen if you do or don't take this medicine, or do or don't perform this action. We look to one set of people for that, call them the scientists, and another set of people, call them the moralists, for advice about what to do with your life. The Shamans combine both functions; we have divided the labor. Dividing the labor turned out to be a good idea.

Questioner: I've never seen a five pack of beer. How is evolution by design compatible with the fact that we ended up with ten fingers instead of twelve?

Jay Tolson, moderator: But we don't have advocates here of intelligent design.

Questioner: I'm just agreeing with you. It's a rhetorical question.

The afternoon session concluded here.