tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post2824431818546804315..comments2023-11-03T08:02:25.369-04:00Comments on AmericanScience: A Team Blog: Steven Pinker's New ScientismDavid Roth Singermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12841041983824755867noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-28823366906931742792013-08-09T10:16:34.423-04:002013-08-09T10:16:34.423-04:00Thanks Patrick – I agree, and I think comparing th...Thanks Patrick – I agree, and I think comparing this moment to Snow's fifty years ago could be instructive. As a side note: nowhere does Pinker pack a zinger quite like Snow's line about asking his literary friends about the meaning of mass (the equivalent, he says, of them asking him "Can you read?"). It ends with this:<br /><br />"So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."<br /><br />I agree about Brockman! Will have to deal with him as a major player when I get into the more recent history of evolutionary psychology and public intellectuals..Hankhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02841787256060612291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-51598111870143399822013-08-08T21:22:45.665-04:002013-08-08T21:22:45.665-04:00Nice piece...when I read Pinker's essay, I imm...Nice piece...when I read Pinker's essay, I immediately thought of the "Two Cultures" debate and wondered how this new variation would play out. I doubt it will spark the same cottage industry that the Snow/Leavis exchanges did but Stinker Pinker's essay does certainly speak to the crisis - real or perceived - in the humanities today.<br /><br />BTW - Brockman has always been an interesting character. I was intrigued by him for his Edge.com stuff as well as the fact that he was a book agent for some f the characters in The Visioneers.Patrick McCrayhttp://www.patrickmccray.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-59616260040684162422013-08-08T17:40:08.993-04:002013-08-08T17:40:08.993-04:00Thanks Willy D.! I like the point about technologi...Thanks Willy D.! I like the point about technological determinism especially. And you're right that students don't need any help bridging the two (especially in HOS courses, where lots of students are extremely well-versed in current science) – much the opposite! <br /><br />I'd be curious to see a list of current projects coming out of, say, Harvard's English department, that Pinker thinks could use an injection of current scientific ideas (or ideals). I'm reminded of one a popular put-down amongst philosophers: "That's not interesting – it's empirical."Hankhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02841787256060612291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-70042094192914069372013-08-08T14:33:47.655-04:002013-08-08T14:33:47.655-04:00Great stuff, Hank.
I think you put your finger on...Great stuff, Hank.<br /><br />I think you put your finger on the essential issue when you point out that the what needs most interrogation is Pinker's implied model of human interaction and the image of interdisciplinarity that rest upon it. What I think frustrates me most about Pinker is the implicit methodological determinism: knowledge is made by "information," information is one-directional in its growth, new information produces new intellectual tools, and we ought to use those better tools rather than obsolete one. In a way, it reduces intellectual history to a kind of technological determinism. (But as we well know, technology doesn't even fit any model of technological determinism.)<br /><br />I think the crux of the problem comes in his discussion of "Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith." To him, those are great thinkers who could have been better if they had tools that hadn't been invented yet. They are sort of tragic figures to him. ("When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge?" he asks.) It's not that simple. New (even "scientistic") perspectives cloud and even foreclose alternative perspectives. If you gave Descartes an fMRI, he probably wouldn't have come up with anything remotely Cartesian. The use of certain intellectual "tools" requires trade-offs. (Economists might point out that we need to pay more attention to our budget constraints.)<br /><br />And, if my students in Columbia's Contemporary Civilization class are any indication, today's undergrads need no prompting to bring the findings of evolution and neuroscience into conversation with Descartes and Rousseau and Hume. Of course we should do that. But the way Pinker describes that conversation, it sounds awfully one-sided. <br />Willy D.http://www.columbia.edu/cu/societyoffellows/cf12_deringer.htmlnoreply@blogger.com