Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Leon Wieseltier on Pinker, scientism, and the humanities

By Rick Garnett

This essay, "Crimes Against Humanities", is long, but well worth reading -- especially, I think, if one is a high-level administrator of, or generous benefactor of, an institution of higher education.

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2013/09/leon-wieseltier-on-pinker-scientism-and-the-humanities.html

Garnett, Rick | Permalink

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This is a long and contentious article. By no means am I done reading it, but a few comments are appropriate here.

Science is a method, it confers no authority in any situation. It just provides a method for searching out the most reliable information about the observable world. Some things about the observable world are not appropriate to the Method, but where the Method reaches, its results are the most reliable. “Reliable” does not mean correct or even Truth, it just means the results can be trusted more than the results of other methods in the same situations.

It is not for science to say whether it “belongs in” morality, politics, or art, but it is not for anyone else to say either. Science is a method, if its method is applied to morality, politics, or art then its results are there for all to decide what to do with. Science has value whenever any testable claim about the world is made, whether by a chemist or a chaplin.

Science has no pre-set boundaries, its realm is the realm of anything rationally testable. The “larger ideas about life” are outside science only so long as they posit nothing testable, when they are pure faith or opinion. Once they make testable claims, then science may be applicable.

sean s.