Rosenhouse keeps digging

Here’s a conversation that might occur between grown-ups:

Grown-up #1: I haven’t read Nagel’s book or much of the positive commentary on it, but based on what I’ve seen in the popular press it all seems like a lot of absurd intellectual silliness based on caricature and sheer assertion.

Grown-up #2: Jeez, don’t you think you ought to read it before making such sweeping remarks?  You’re hardly going to get a good sense of the content of a set of complex philosophical arguments from a couple of journalistic pieces!

Grown-up #1: Yeah, I guess so.  Fair enough.

And here’s a conversation between a grown-up and Jason Rosenhouse:

Rosenhouse: I haven’t read Nagel’s book or much of the positive commentary on it, but based on what I’ve seen in the popular press it all seems like a lot of absurd intellectual silliness based on caricature and sheer assertion.

Grown-up: Jeez, don’t you think you ought to read it before making such sweeping remarks?  You’re hardly going to get a good sense of the content of a set of complex philosophical arguments from a couple of journalistic pieces!

Rosenhouse: You know, that’s just the kind of stunningly stupid, screeching, petty tantrum that is typical of you! You and your asinine armchair cogitation!  The dogmatism!  The arrogance!  Etc. etc.

That’s the short version, anyway.  For the long version, see Rosenhouse’s original post on Nagel, my reply to it, and the response to my reply he posted today. 

As you’ll see from the latter, Rosenhouse’s way of dealing with the hole he’s dug for himself is to down a Red Bull or three, sew himself into the seat of a backhoe, fire it up and break off the key.  To his thinking, it is not “arrogant,” “dogmatic,” “stupid,” or “petty” -- to use the language of his latest post -- to make sweeping claims about Nagel and his defenders without having bothered to read what they’ve actually written.  But it is “arrogant,” “dogmatic,” “stupid” and “petty” to object to someone who makes such uninformed sweeping claims.  (At this point it occurs to me that Jimmy Olsen was perhaps not the best choice of illustrations for this post; Bizarro would have been more appropriate.)

For Rosenhouse it was also “arrogant,” “dogmatic,” “stupid” and “petty” of me to respond to what he actually wrote, rather than to what he now wishes he had written.  For example, he now tells his readers that when he said that “It seems that all the immaterialists do is make assertions!” what he was really doing ”was just expressing my frustration with [Andrew] Ferguson’s relentless, unsupported assertions” (emphasis added).  Of course, if that is really all he meant, he could have made that clearer, e.g. by saying something like this: “It seems that all Ferguson does is make assertions!”  Rosenhouse might want to consider such a locution in future, since if you say “the immaterialists,” then us stupid, arrogant, dogmatic, petty English speakers are likely to get it into our heads that the people you really meant to refer to are the immaterialists. 

Rosenhouse, furthermore, assures us that:

I certainly never suggested that I did not have to read the book to fully understand its argument. In fact I specifically said this:

I have not read Nagel’s book, so I don’t have a strong opinion about it. Based on what I’ve read about it, however, I suspect I wouldn’t like it.

Feser didn’t quote that part, for obvious reasons, since then he would not have been able to pretend that I was simply dismissing the book or judging it based on one paragraph.

End quote.  So, the sober, fair-minded, scholarly, measure-twice-cut-once Rosenhouse would never draw a sweeping conclusion about Nagel without having actually read his book, right?  Except that this is what else he says about Nagel in this new post:

If you want arrogance and dogmatism you have to look to the Feser’s and Nagel’s of the world. They’re the ones claiming, on the basis of some asinine armchair cogitation, that they have refuted an enormously successful scientific paradigm.

End quote.  He also assures us that Nagel offers a “caricature of the evidence for evolution” and that his characterization of evolution itself is “absurd.” 

So, on the basis of reading exactly three short out-of-context sentences from the Introduction of Nagel’s 128-page book, Rosenhouse is able to conclude that Nagel (1) is arrogant, (2) is dogmatic, (3) grounds his position in “asinine armchair cogitation,” (4) caricatures the evidence for evolution, and (5) provides an absurd characterization of evolution itself.  And yet none of this counts as Rosenhouse having any “strong opinion” about Nagel’s book, or having “dismissed” or “judged” it.  And it is Nagel and I who are “arrogant” and “dogmatic.”  And when I characterized Rosenhouse as having rushed to judgment, I was egregiously misrepresenting him.

Got it.  Glad that’s all been cleared up.

Rosenhouse also can’t understand why I would object to his objecting to Nagel’s claims about what is prima facie true vis-à-vis evolution.  Writes Rosenhouse:

To assert that something is true “prima facie” is to assert it full stop. It is to say that the facts speak so clearly in favor of the conclusion in question that it is the skeptics who are immediately on the defensive. And that was precisely what I was challenging. The claim that human beings are the result of a series of physical accidents coupled with natural selection is not prima facie implausible. Nor is it prima facie plausible. It is not prima facie anything, because we have no intuition about or experience with anything related to the grand sprawl of natural history. It is simply not the kind of thing to which you can reasonably apply the notion of common sense.

End quote.  Well, if Rosenhouse would just read the damn book already before opening his mouth, he’d not only be less likely to keep putting his foot in it, but would also understand why Nagel says what he does.  And if he actually thought about what I wrote instead of reacting to it, he would also see that to say that something is true prima facie is not to assert it full stop.  Prima facie judgments are always made within a context, and have to be evaluated within that context.

Hence, suppose (to borrow an example from W. V. Quine) I said: “Consider the claim that Bernard J. Ortcutt is a spy.  Is that prima facie plausible or not?”  No doubt you’d say: “Neither.  After all, who the hell is Bernard J. Ortcutt?  Why would anyone think he’s a spy in the first place?  What evidence might tell against the claim that he is?  Until I know all that, I have no prima facie judgment to make one way or the other!”  And that would, of course, be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

But suppose instead that you knew who Ortcutt was, knew that he often traveled abroad, kept odd hours and strange company, was being kept under surveillance by the FBI, is known to sympathize with radical Islamist movements, etc.  Then you might reasonably say “Prima facie it is plausible that he is a spy.”  Or suppose instead that you knew that Ortcutt was a fan of James Bond movies and liked to call himself “007,” but otherwise was very timid and to all appearances lived a perfectly humdrum life.  Then you might reasonably say “Prima facie it is not plausible that he is a spy.”

Similarly, if what Nagel was saying was that in the abstract, with no further qualification, “evolution is prima facie implausible!”, then Rosenhouse might have a point.  But in fact Nagel does not do this -- as anyone who’s actually read the @#$% book would know.  What he is claiming instead is that given such-and-such features of consciousness, rationality, etc. (spelled out in the book) and given such-and-such features of how  a purely materialistic construal of evolution works (also spelled out the book) -- given all that, it is prima facie implausible that the former can be explained in terms of the latter.  (Contrary to what Rosenhouse’s readers might suppose, by the way, Nagel does not ignore what Rosenhouse calls the “mountain of confirmed predictions and retrodictions, along with numerous experimental successes” in favor of evolution, for the simple reason that he is not challenging evolution per se in the first place.  What he is challenging is the idea that evolution construed in terms of a materialist metaphysics can account for certain specific biological phenomena such as consciousness, rationality, etc.  Rosenhouse gives the impression that Nagel is challenging the evolutionary story as a whole, and that is simply nowhere close to the case -- as, it cannot be emphasized too often, anyone who would just read the book would find out.)

Again, a grown-up might say: “OK, fine, fair enough, maybe there’s something elsewhere in the book that would change my judgment about how I read those three out-of-context sentences from the Introduction.”  Rosenhouse, however, is the kind of guy who would rather devote a day or two to rationalizing his snap judgment than an hour or two to finding out whether it was correct. 

In the last half of his post Rosenhouse responds to the metal detector analogy from my response to Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg’s review of Nagel, which Ferguson had cited.  Just as the success of metal detectors in finding metal does not entail that there are no other, non-metallic aspects of reality, so too does the success of science in capturing those aspects of nature susceptible of prediction and control give us no reason to think that there are not other aspects that are not susceptible of prediction and control -- aspects we should not expect to find by the methods of science, but for knowledge of which we have to turn to philosophical analysis.  Rosenhouse responds:

It is tautological to say that if there are aspects of reality that are not amenable to scientific investigation, then scientific investigation will not reveal them. That, however, is nonresponsive to Leiter and Weisberg’s point.  As I see it, Leiter and Weisberg were making an argument about the burden of proof.  When a particular point of view has been proven wrong in case after case; the centrality of teleology and the supernatural in our understanding of the natural world, for example; the burden shifts to the people defending that point of view.  

End quote.  But this simply misses the entire point.  What was in question in my response to Leiter and Weisberg is precisely what we should count as “proving” or “defending” claims about the natural world in the first place.  Should we regard as “proved” or “defended” only those aspects of nature susceptible of prediction and control?  Why should we regard this sort of method as giving us the only avenue to knowledge of the world (as opposed to an avenue of knowledge, which of course it is)?  As the metal detector analogy was intended to illustrate, merely to appeal to the “success” or “fruitfulness” of the predict-and-control method -- where “success” and “fruitfulness” are defined in terms of that method -- is no answer at all.  There is a tautology here all right, but it is precisely those beholden to scientism who are guilty of putting it forward.  Rosenhouse is like that slow-on-the-uptake kid in philosophy class who says “A is true because B is, and B is true because A is,” and when you point out to him that he’s begged the question, replies: “But that’s a fallacy!”  Well, duh.  Yes, that’s the point.  And you’re the one committing it.

Speaking of begging the question, consider Rosenhouse’s proposed alternative to my metal detector analogy:

A better analogy than Feser’s metal detector would be to the boy who cried wolf.  Every time previously that the boy had cried wolf there was no wolf.  So the people concluded that when he cried wolf this time there also was no wolf.  Does anyone think the people’s reasoning was utterly fallacious?  Were they wrong to think that the boy’s consistent track record of lying gave them a good reason for thinking he was lying this time?

The problem with this, of course, is that whether the philosophical arguments for teleology, theism, etc. put forward by Aristotelians and other metaphysicians in fact “cried wolf” is precisely part of what is at issue.  Nor is it any good to say that they “cried wolf” insofar as they were not arguments of physics, chemistry, biology, etc., because whether the methods of natural science are the only rational methods is also what is at issue.  We old-fashioned Aristotelians and Thomists would argue that it is not in natural science as that is understood today, but rather in those branches of philosophy known as metaphysics and the philosophy of nature, which deal with those aspects of the world that any possible natural science must presuppose, that the foundations of a teleological conception of nature and of natural theology are to be found.  (I have written about the difference between these fields of inquiry in many places, such as here.)

No doubt thinking to preempt such a point, Rosenhouse writes:

Surely it is obvious that philosophical argument alone cannot possibly get you to dramatic conclusions about what matter can and cannot do…  The trouble is that science is constantly changing our view of what matter is. The “material” out of which the world is made looks very different today than it did a century ago.  It wasn’t that long ago that atoms were thought to be solid balls. Today they are vastly more complicated, to the point where even physicists have trouble wrapping their heads around what they do.

But no Aristotelian would disagree with this.  What is at issue is not whether physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are necessary to a complete understanding of the material world.  Of course they are.  What is at issue is whether they are sufficient.  And anyone who actually knows something about intellectual history beyond the potted World Book Encyclopedia version knows that the question of what matter is has, from the Pre-Socratics down to the present, always been as much a philosophical question as a scientific question.  Mach, Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, Russell, Whitehead, and many other thinkers of generations not too distant all knew it; contemporary secular philosophers of physics and philosophers of chemistry know it.  The only people with an opinion on the matter who don’t know it are the sort of people laboring under the delusion that there is some really serious intellectual action to be found at outlets like EvolutionBlog.