Science news: Brain plumbing, nekkid Lucy the Australopithecus, more

I've read recently that the amyloid plaque idea of Alzheimer's is not on the most solid ground, but it's verboten to question it, let alone offer alternatives, in serious research journals.

Well, what if it's partially right but not fully so?

This idea, that the brain's glymphatic system flushes brain waste during non-REM sleep, including but not limited to, amyloid plaque, would be one idea. In this case, then, two people with similar daytime levels might differ on Alzheimer's symptom degrees, or even whether they have it or not period, depending on whether their brain plumbing is working well or not.

==

An interesting piece here, ostensibly about Lucy the Australopithecus afarensis, but in reality about body-draped reconstructions off fossil bones of ancient hominins in general. Per the story, to use the old Texas word deliberately, Lucy, and her ilk, actually might have been more nekkid than they've been portrayed. Linked in the piece, the author, a philosopher, notes that the coevolutionary history of humanoids and humanoid-targeting body lice says that not only was Lucy nearly nekkid, her ancestors may have been nearly hairless as much as 1 million years earlier.

Stacy Keltner speculates that shame over nudity arose to reinforce pair-bonding by trying to shame actual or would-be cheaters. The idea sounds interesting, but it also sounds like it involves some backward-reading Ev Psych. Indeed, Keltner cites an evolutionary anthropologist. Nudity and nakedness, if you will, are indeed not the same. But, the speculation as to why nakedness became, essentially, shamed into nudity still seems like awfully thin ice. To put it another way, it looks like a somewhat self-referential take, unable to escape our 20,000? 50,000? years of post-nudity framing.

==

Related somewhat to Lucy, though not on the development of nudity and shame?

Carl Zimmer has reporting on human fossils in Tibet confirmed to be Denisovan. The age range is the biggie. It's from 160,000 years before present, confirming how early Denisovans split off the Homo family tree, to just over 30,000 years bp, including evidence of their interaction with Homo sapiens.

==

Another Zimmer story notes that new research indicates language evolved primarily for communication, and NOT for thinking. Fun sidebar? This is another overturning of Chomsky's claims about language. (I can't say "research," since Chomsky did basically none.)

==

It sure would be nice if NASA could work with the Chinese Space Agency and see some of those far side of the moon rocks that the Chang'e 6 spacecraft brought back to earth. But, because of US Congressional tribalism on China that predates COVID by nearly a decade, US law says it can't.

Meanwhile, bringing back 2 kilos of rocks by unmanned voyage? The American Cold War-based rationale for manned lunar missions (and a manned Martian mission beyond that) continues to lose more and more steam.

Scientism, philosophy, and the Big Bang

Regular readers of this blog and my main one both know that I like to comment at times on the issue of "scientism," which is, in a nutshell, certain scientists overblown claims for science, that it has explanatory power, or will at some day, and explanatory frameworks for many things that are rightly regarded as philosophical.

Aesthetics would be a great example.

"De gustibus non disputandum" Romans said 2,000 years ago, and it's just as true today.

Science has basically nothing to tell — certainly, hard sciences have basically nothing to tell — about why I think Mozart is overrated by many people. He IS and you shut up!

In some instances, the social sciences may indeed have some explanatory value, but even there, it's overblown. The hard sciences, though, are where scientism really hits the road.

And, last week, with Roger Penrose getting the Physics Nobel for his work on black holes, his naysayers on his anti-Big Bang ideas popped up.

I have little doubt Ethan Siegal knows cosmology well. Philosophy, including philosophy of science or more narrowly, philosophy of physics, )per the likes of Massimo Pigluicci postulating "philosophies of ..." for separate hard sciences at least) not so much, it would seem, per this anti-Penrose diatribe.

He says, near the end:

This presents a tremendous challenge for cosmology, and for science in general. In science, when we see some phenomena that our theories cannot explain, we have two options. 

1. We can attempt to devise a theoretical mechanism to explain those phenomena, while simultaneously maintaining all the successes of the prior theory and making novel predictions that are distinct from the prior theory’s predictions. 

2. Or we can simply assume that there is no explanation, and the Universe was simply born with the properties necessary to give us the Universe we observe. 

Only the first approach has scientific value, and therefore that’s the one that must be tried, even if it fails to yield fruit.

Uhh, wrong!

Accepting there is no explanation is itself of scientific value. It cuts down on possible pseudoscience; it allows scientific inquiry to be directed more productively, and other things.

And, in terms of philosophy of science, it leads to some epistemic humility. (That itself is something lacking in spades among many scientism practitioners.)

Siegal needs to read himself some early Wittgenstein and learn when to be silent.

Now, at times, explanations manifest themselves years or decades later. Planck's solving of the blackbox radiation problem, directly tied to Siegel's post, is one such answer.

BUT.

Even that is not guaranteed. Siegel acting like scientific answers are guaranteed is textbook scientism.

How right was Thomas Kuhn on his "paradigm shifts"?Also, how much does he have to say on scientism?What about larger issues of philosophy of science?

Hot take answers, before we dive in?

About 50 percent right on the paradigm shifts. Not a lot on scientism, but a fair amount on philosophy of science.

I do like that Kuhn's paradigms and paradigm shifts note that science has always had its deductive as well as inductive sides. Good philosophers of science may note that good science has them work in tandem. Good science will also admit when a deductive framework is lurking in the background, and even more when it becomes outmoded. That's the "paradigm," as I see it.

That said, one can ask how well Kuhn applied some of this to himself.

One can also appreciate his broader work on philosophy of science while noting he didn't always apply that to himself either, and that he's of limited value in critiquing "scientism."

Now, let's dive in.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris was a graduate student of Kuhn's for a year. He decades later wrote five New York Times Opinionator columns about the experience (here's the first) and eventually turned them into a book.

His central charge? Kuhn was a relativist rejecting the idea of objective truth.

New Atlantis hated what Morris wrote, in large part because it had the usual Errol Morris style. At the same time, it admitted that Kuhn himself snarled up some of his arguments about science and history.

Steven Poole in The Guardian flat-out claimed Morris got Kuhn wrong.

John Horgan, while saying he thought Morris overdid his killing of Kuhn, said that from personal experience, he found Kuhn "almost comically self-contradictory."

Horgan and Poole also disagree on Morris' interpretation of, and use of, Saul Kripke. Poole thinks Morris understands Kripke as poorly as he does Kuhn, while Horgan says he found Morris' interpretation enlightening.

Horgan finally does a twist on Morris by wondering if he wasn't actually a secret admirer of Kuhn.

==

This Venn diagram reflects about how much I think Kuhn
actually had to say about problems in science in general, and
even more, or less, what he had to say or not about scientism.

Beyond Morris, and with Horgan, my take is that Kuhn did bring new insights to philosophy of science, but that he was, from what I read, self-contradictory. That then said, per this commenter on Morris, perhaps the self-contradictory issue reflects science's messiness.

Plus, he own theory can easily be self-judoed.

And, for people who think he has crushed scientism? First, not in the mind of scientism aficionados, he hasn't. Second, to the degree he can be self-judoed, he hasn't in general. Because ... the next paradigm shift may be around the corner.

Per that and per Kuhn's Wiki page, I think the charge of relativism has some merit. Kuhn himself said "I am not a Kuhnian," but that sounds like the defensiveness behind his allegedly throwing an ashtray at Morris. His paradigm shift does raise questions of how much rational thought is involved with shifting to a new paradigm — or not.

Also, what both Kuhn and Morris (and Popper fans) seem to miss is that it ties back to the old Problem of Induction. Even more, given Kuhn basing his charges about problems with commensurability, or the incommensurability lack thereof, being based on issues with modal logic, Kripke and related, Kuhn connects to Nelson Goodman's New Riddle of Induction. Indeed, Goodman's original ideas later influenced Kripke.

A related issue is that Kuhn probably oversold the whole idea of paradigm shifts. New ways of thinking in science usually aren't as starkly incompatible as, say, classical and quantum mechanics.

Take Charles Darwin. Ideas of evolution had been floating in the biology world for decades. Darwin just thought of a specific mechanism — or two, counting sexual selection.

Per what I said about physics, I'm not sure there's been a revolutionary paradigm shift since quantum mechanics and general relativity. Dark matter and energy have been accepted without much fight, and string theory has yet to be proven, so neither qualifies.

Biology arguably has had paradigm shifts since Darwin. The acceptance of prions as semi-alive. The acceptance of the reality of epigenetics. These are both at least semi-major shifts, and contra dark matter, both have been fought-over.

Chemistry? Maybe high-temp superconductivity. I'm not sure.

In short?

Kuhnians shouldn't put him on a pedestal, because the paradigm beneath that will shift away. And, beyond that, there's arguably greater shifts in issues in philosophy directly or indirectly tied to philosophy of science than to science itself.

I once thought Kuhn was genius-like myself. Now, I think he should have viewed himself more skeptically.

Basically, Kuhn was good at showing scientists can engage in motivated reasoning. But, in pushing the idea of paradigm shifts too far, and getting defensive about the judo-holes he left, he arguable was doing that himself. And, other than the scientism folks being stubborn, scientism isn't really a paradigm from which to shift.

#Philosophy foot fight falls flat

A favorite modern philosopher of mine, Massimo Pigliucci, on his blog, runs a Friday links roundup. This one, per a link of his about ethical eating, has exploded in comments.

Massimo, per that link, is a "reducitarian." So am I, but for different reasons and for a different moral compass. And, he's very ardent about it.

Fueling the comments fire was, first, Rita Wing, a hardcore vegan, and second, and interesting, or sometimes "interesting," but not-favorite philosopher, philosophical friend, and sparring partner of Massimo's, Dan Kaufman. He's not a philosopher enemy; he's more a semi-frenemy.

And now, our philosophers, with their "philosophy food fight falls flat."

Massimo comes off as defensive, and very defensive for an admirer of Stoicism who even has a second blog about modern Stoic-based advice, "How To Be a Stoic." It's an "if you're not for me, you're against me," defensiveness.

Dan comes off as smug. (That's not new, even more so on his own blog site, The Electric Agora.) That said, Dan seems to largely reject animal rights issues, and not just an extreme, Peter Singer version of them, but all of them. (More on that below, though.)

Behind the "smug," I think Dan's stance is twofold:
1. People can become preachy on this issue without warrant;
2. This isn't that big of a deal for him.

Now, to comments.

First, Wing comes off as sanctimonious, especially when she appeared ignorant about Jainism, notably, "sky-clad" Jains and the most rigorous of them starving themselves to death because they believe even plants have some senses.

I mentioned that vegans, without supplements, have Vitamin B-12 deficiency. Massimo, after critiquing her for an appeal to nature fallacy, called mine a naturalistic fallacy.

I think not, when I unpack the shorthand.

Yes, I can get B-12 from a pill. But that's coming from animal products that, if the whole world went vegan, we'd have to raise just for that purpose. That would be costly, wasteful and have environmental burdens. (More on that in a minute.)

Let me state one other thing for the record, before I dive into the two protagonists.

I'm not a moral realist, but, if I'm presented that as an issue of two polarities, moral realism vs. "moral non-realism," I reject that.

I consider myself some sort of moral semi-realist.

I don't think empirical facts, whether findings of science, recordings of history or other things, should control moral investigation, articulation of positions and stances, etc. I do think, though, that empirical findings should guide such things, and on a case-by-case basis.

As I told Ms. Wing, I'm a definite Humean, and with him, I affirm the "is ≠ ought," IF that means, "an is doesn't necessarily imply an ought." Because an "is" may imply an "ought," and certainly, the extreme idea, that any "is" should have zero consideration on any "ought," is flat wrong.

Back to Massimo, and first with a prelude.

He called extreme Jainism's belief "bizarre." Yeah? So are other religious and quasi-religious arcane dietary beliefs. Kosher rules are just such an example. And I believe veganism is just such a quasi-religious system.

Per the matter at hand, and animal pain, that means getting the best scientific information, and interpretation of it, on what animals can feel pain, or something like it. The "interpretation" issue means no anthropomorphizing.

That also includes the "folk science" issue of knowing that, if an animal is capable of feeling pain, it's not just factory farming that causes pain. The act of killing an animal, unless you've shot it up with morphine or gassed it with ether first, also inflicts pain.

Massimo also didn't really like this observation. Nor various spinoffs, largely from me, but also from others.

On the commercial side, of empirical facts in record, for reducitarians to ponder, it is to be noted that major fish, such as salmon and catfish, are factory farmed. Therefore, above and beyond the note above, a reducitarian, for even a partial moral cover, must logically avoid factory farmed fish as well as beef, hogs, etc. (And, I'm venturing that a significant minority, at least, do not.)

One smaller note on issues of philosophy, and even more, of psychology, THEN the protagonists.

I see scales and shades of gray in many things, not just what I mentioned above.

Fernando raises an interesting aside in comments there. We have pretty good reason to be sure that any mammal feels pain. And, beyond the idiots in the cosmetics industry, a fair amount of “legit” scientific research causes lab rats pain, let alone dogs, doubly let alone primates.

It seems the only way to justify such research is to be a utilitarian, but of a different stripe of what one’s utilitarian canon contains than Singer. But, Massimo in general is a virtue ethicist.

However, Massimo rightly calls out Kaufman for calling Peter Singer shallow. And he's right. Dan unconvincingly appeals to other philosophers. I disagree with Singer less than Dan — and probably find him a bit more discomfiting. Shallow, though, he is not.

That said, given the degree of Massimo's emotional angst, I suspect Singer hits kind of close to home for him, and he'd like to dismiss him.

As for claims I'm committing the naturalistic fallacy? I suggest a little MatthewArnold. Or if that's not good enough, I'll riff on that and suggest that Arnold was saying, contra Hobbes, we can never totally rise above a state of nature. In other words, the only good Buddha is a dead Buddha. With that, if I am still committing somebody's definition of that, then, I'm definitely making only a non-Edenic appeal.

What I see Arnold as saying is that we're never going to truly transcend "it ≠ ought" issues, and we're certainly not going to expand our addressing of them, on natural issues, if our attempts to transcend a Hobbesian state of nature remain selective. And, yes, that's what I think Massimo is doing.

Contra sky-glad Jains, I do not think plants feel pain. Therefore, if one wants to be vegetarian, as long as they don't preach at me, I think they've got a pretty strong moral standing.

Veganism? Milking a dairy animal causes no pain, per se. Factory dairy farming may, but that's a different critter. Therefore, if one "sources" one's cheese, butter, etc., one can make a legit claim to dairy products. Eggs? It's possible a hen feels a psychological pain from egg theft, so, maybe leave them out. Clothing? If the cow's dead for other reasons, don't waste the leather. Wool-shearing, as long as sheep aren't too exposed to elements, is not painful. Down? If taken from natural molting, no pain.

So, one can certainly ethically wear animal-based clothing. Ms. Wing is wrong, and sanctimonious.

Finally, the issue of animals suffering pain ANYWAY. A leopard or lion would kill a wild cow. Something might kill a wild hog. Varieties of animals kill wild sheep and goats. Bears kill wild salmon. Etc., etc.

Other animals don't have a second-level sense of others, like we do. Even if it cared, an obligate carnivore leopard, can't stop killing a cow anyway.

Is the fact that we can sense pain of other creatures of itself enough reason to stop?

Back to utiltarianism.

What if ... ants and flies sensed pain.

Are sprays and swatters always OK, or, how do you justify it? I'm sure many vegans who aren't sky-clad Jains haven't thought about this and would prefer not to.

Some opponents of factory farms will talk about broader "quality of life" issues rather than pain.

Quality of life is itself a quasi-anthropomorphizing concept when applied to animals. I mentioned free-range cows to Saph. We don't build barns for free-range cows. Millions of them died on the US High Plains in the blizzards of 1886-87. Barning free-range livestock would be pretty silly, in my book.

Dan's blog discusses a piece by Cora Diamond which partially, but not entirely, parallels my thought.

However, without reading Diamond's original, I think Dan's piece isn't totally relevant to Massimo's piece, as he is not adopting a quasi-Singerian position. And MPBoyle in comments is one reason I not only stopped writing for Dan but largely stopped reading.

I do think he in particular, Boyle, misses friend Thomas' points. And, one of those is that Diamond, and from her, Kaufman, may push some things too far.

On the other hand, Massimo's own stance is presented largely in terms of the western world, and beyond that, a more privileged subset of it.

And, I mean that. Not all Americans, with our factory agriculture, can afford to pay to be vegetarians, let alone vegans. Many can't easily even afford Massimo's reducitarianism.
 
Finally, in an interesting sidebar from the non-human portion of the natural world: sometimes vegans, under duress, become cannibals!

==

As noted, my animal ethics is based on environmentalism, and two subgrounds.

One is that it takes 10 pounds of food to put a pound of weight on a cow, about 8 for a hog, etc. Except in places, like savannah plains that are semi-dry, and not suitable for much agriculture, where we should ranch animals like cows (or better, in the US, the native bison), we have too much livestock. We can feed people better with a more vegetable-based diet.

This is even more true in places in the world where most cannot yet afford the Western hankering for meat.

Second is global warming, and things like cow farts.

Too much livestock is killing our future. And, killing it more rapidly than most conservative-minded scientists want to admit — along with all the other causes of global warming.

Finally, there's good non-ethical reasons to avoid not meat in general, but modern factory farmed meat, especially in the US, or countries making special trade with the US. Food safety reasons. That article ignores the fact that the USDA's own stateside food safety programs suck as is.

There's yet other issues.

A stance like Massimo's, to get back to capitalism, involves a certain amount of privilege. I mentioned that in a late comment that he didn't address. So, too, do other moral issues that are in part, aesthetics issues in disguise.

Next, it's not just veganism, or even vegetarianism, that are arcane dietary systems. Some, as those of a Kamchatka Peninsula people, are culture-wide.

Finally, one last thought.

Massimo, it's OK to be non-Stoic once in a while.

Is the concept of god outside of science?

David Ottlinger, a former philosophy prof on a personal sabbatical, says yes. 

I say no. And, I offer a no that isn’t a scientism-based no.

First, I have to respectively disagree with Ottlinger on how we define the "sciences." I count the social sciences as sciences. If anything, it seems to be quasi-scientism to claim they’re not.

And, I'll also have to respectively disagree with the details of why we disagree. Psychology is becoming more scientific, through folks such as Kahnemann, Ariely, et al, on a regular basis, as far as gathering empirical data, analyzing it, and constructing theories. And, of course, evolutionary psychology — done correctly! — is just the fusion of this with evolutionary biology. Evolutionary anthropology is a similar fusion with cultural anthropology.

There are differences, of course.

For example, to go to history, now that I've touched on psychology and anthropology, and indirectly on sociology.

Historic events are multi-causal, of course. There was no "one" cause (and even no "three" causes) of, say, the American Revolution. And, historians will disagree which of those causes to weight more. But, history can and does conclusively rule out that, say, Manchu China had any causal contribution to the American Revolution.

Therefore, this:

Arguments modeled on science tend to fail because they do not appreciate the subtleties of the concepts and the ambiguities of implication.

Is precisely how the social sciences, at their best, are both social and scientific, because they appreciate the subtleties of concepts involved, but still bring a scientific eye to bear as much as possible.

To be specific, evolutionary psychology ideas of things like pattern detectors and agency imputers being part of the basis of religious evolution, even if ev psych can never meet provability hurdles of modern psychology, do seem reasonable and fit with what we know about human mental development.

While said social sciences can't provide "the answers" on this issue, they certainly can — and, in my opinion, should — "inform" philosophy.

Hence, my "philosophism" tag, for attempting to unduly exclude the sciences from this issue.

Yes, animals are conscious. And?

The "and" is meant to be first a rhetorical question, not a bit of snark. But, with further reflect, there is snark, too.

What raised it?

This declaration on issues of animal consciousness from Cambridge, which seems rather "loose" on detailed, nuanced discussion on issues of consciousness, but rather heavy on being a PR event. I'll discuss both in what follows.

First, brief thoughts on io9's take on it.

For people who follow evolutionary biology enough, or theory of mind issues in philosophy, it's not that big a deal to note that a variety of animals have some degree of consciousness. Evolutionary biology points at expanding brain complexity, even without getting bogged down in the world of evolutionary psychology. Theory of mind points at things like embodied cognition, hinting that animals with suitable appendages and/or use of items as tools will develop some sort of consciousness. 

It's almost like io9's writer was engaged in some version of speciesism.

Second, some points specific to the declaration, focusing on this graf:

 "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states," they write, "Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."

Here's a few points to note, in light of that, though.

This is important in informing us on animals rights issues. That said, before we all become Peter Singer, there's points to note:

1. Consciousness is not a black-white, on-off issue. It's an emergent property of some sort.

2. Related to that, there are degrees of consciousness, reflected in things like "levels of thought." For example, a dog, or an octopus, has no idea that I know it's thinking about something. A chimpanzee does, whether about me or a fellow member of Pan troglodytes. However, it probably doesn't reach third-order thinking; that is, a chimp probably doesn't know that **I know it knows** I'm thinking about it. And, certainly, no critter outside of H. sapiens reaches fourth-level thinking/awareness.

Closely tied to this are communications skills, and levels thereof. It's pretty clear that dolphins talk to each other. It's certain that octopi don't. And, while pheromones, etc., are a form of communication, beyond that, it's pretty clear that dogs don't communicate in depth with each other, and most of what they do vis-a-vis their two-legged masters is imitation, not communication.

3. Points 1 and 2 apply to emotional awareness and complexity, too. An octopus doesn't have as deep an emotional life as a dog, surely. It, in turn, while deep enough, isn't as deep as a chimp or, say, an elephant or dolphin, which in turn aren't as deep as us.

4. The "problem of other minds," or heterophenomenology, means that we'll never likely pin down No. 2 and 3, on a per-species basis, to an exact level of precision. I don't care how much more precise fMRIs get as far as either brain space focusing or real-time brain action measurement, they wont' get that precise, and, even if everything seems analogous to human brain actions, we won't know exactly what they're thinking, or emoting. This is especially true with more primitive emotions, or actions like whether a certain animal feels pain or not. Is that an emotion from some degree of quasi-conscious cognition, or is it a purely reflex action.

5. Related to that is the issue of "projection." Sure, those chimps might look oh-so-conscious, but it that because they look so much like us, from hairless faces and forward facing eyes down to opposing thumbs? Or, does a dog look oh-so-conscious precisely because he or she is "mirroring" us and we don't stop to think about that?

Contra what a Singer might say, none of this is "speciesism." Hopefully, our species is smart enough that, should sufficiently advanced aliens ever visit us, we'd admit they're on at least one level higher yet.

Back to other animal species here on earth, and riffing again on the Singer angle.

The above notes about levels of consciousness, combined with pain perception, say that we should be more enlightened in animal ethics in general. But, we don't need quite the same level of concern in our laboratory dealings with an octopus or other mollusk as with a dog, let alone as with a chimpanzee or dolphin. 

So, saying "animals are conscious" or "more animals are conscious than we thought before" is nice, or "nice," but it doesn't really tell us a lot.

The grunt work is in identifying levels of consciousness (after all, we H. sapiens are sometimes less conscious than at other times), followed by discussing what this means for how we should act toward animals.

That (as Singer shows, regardless of what one things of his particular  views and program) is where science leaves off and philosophy begins. What do these levels of conscious mean? What does our reaction to trying to sort out and assign levels of consciousness mean? Beyond faulty brain examination tools and maze-type tests, what do the particular tools that we use to try to determine consciousness mean?

All these things are important because, although the Cambridge Declaration is a statement by a small group of scientists, it's going to be one that's repeatedly used by scientific activitists. And, given that a signatory like Christof Koch works on issues of consciousness, the failure to note that consciousness is a nuanced issue, and that, as many people have pointed out in discussion of consciousness as a phenomenological issue, that people still don't see one "universal X" as a keystone of consciousness, is part of why this declaration, while "nice," and while interesting, even as a scientific document, is less than perfect.

As a document of philosophy, or philosophy of science, for that matter, it lacks more yet. 

Add in that these aren't "junior varsity" scientists, and that 60 Minutes was there, presumably at their invitation, to "memorialize" the event, and from where I stand the public relations angle of the thing only rises. Why else would you have Stephen Hawking, who has done zero scientific work on issues of consciousness, present?

To me, this document is as much pop science as it is science.

Also, by having Hawking involved, it's a false appeal to authority, a fundamental error of logic.

Let's duly note it as a news event and move on, but not while filing this, as a PR event, in our collective memory banks for times in the future when its signatories make statements about consciousness.

It's sad that Koch et al decided to exploit Hawking to, I presume, make this a capital-S "Science" event. That too, will be duly filed away in my memory banks. So, too, will Hawking playing along.

So, too, will the old "follow the money" adage. With Obama announcing the "decade of the brain" research idea here in the US, and similar things abroad, I think it has to be asked.

I'm kind of doing a slow burn at myself, as much as anything, as I finish updating this, for not picking up on the PR and logical fallacy angles earlier.

Philosophy's the same by any name

I agree in part with Colin McGinn, that many people may have bad conceptions about philosophy. But, his idea of renaming the discipline will have little effect. As for the science-philosophy gap, that comes im large part, in many areas, from scientists believing they're too good to need the insight of philosophers, especially those pesky critters called philosophers of science.

Well, as something like Pop Ev Psych shows, noooooo, scientists often need a lot of philosophical help, even straightening out.

‘Healthy’ red wine data is bogus - Science, science and #scientism

An AP story has the details:

A University of Connecticut researcher known for his work on the benefits of red wine to heart health falsified his data in more than 100 instances, and nearly a dozen scientific journals are being warned of the potential problems after publishing his studies in recent years, officials said Wednesday.

UConn officials said their internal review found 145 instances over seven years in which Dr. Dipak Das fabricated and falsified data, and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity has launched an independent investigation of his work.

There’s no indication of the motive, but the university just turned down nearly $1 million in federal grants related to the fake research.

Meanwhile, at least one resveratrol seller is scurrying to distance itself from these findings.

It's not surprising.

First, even legitimate medical claims have a much lower margin of error for false positives, or p-value, than do natural sciences research. 5 percen vs. 0.01 percent is huge indeed.

But, that's secondary to the huge nature of the fraud, and the second half of the header for this post.

Scientism is obvious to those who know about.

For those who don't, it's a bit of hyperrationalism that says almost everything in your, my and Horatio's universe is understandable by scientific investigation. Some Gnu Atheists engage in it, notably Sam Harris. Some "professional skeptics" at least skirt its edges.

Other "professional skeptics," along with some scientists, don't go that far but are bad enough.

For them, Science with a capital-S is put forth instead of science.

I use the capital-S Science for a Platonic Idea of science, if you will. The professional skeptics and some scientists claim that science is not only the best endeavor of the human mind, but that it's on a plane all by itself. In situations such as the above, though, they're stuck. Was Das never a scientist? Or, rather, a Scientist? Like a lapsed Christian, was he once a Scientist, only to become a heretic?

And here, though Science doesn't have exactly the same take on scientific research as does scientism, the end result ... idealizing science some way, and even as a quasi-belief system, is the same.

The reality? Science is no less a human endeavor and no more one, as far as ethics of its practitioners, than any other. Beyond the laughable but mild problems of Gnu-style atheists, we've seen Nazi and Japanese medical experimentation, Soviet Lamarckianism at the hands of Lysenko and much more.

The idea of rational, ethical, human behavior is one we hope for in fields outside of science, anyway. We shouldn't expect science to do better at it than we do other fields.

Democracy: An intrinsic good or "only" a utilitarian one?

A British philosopher of science, Philip Kitcher, makes the argument that in at least some science issues, and specifically that of anthropogenic global warming, it's clear that democracy's "good" in general is "only" utilitarian, and that in the specific case of AGW, it has, at least right now, no intrinsic good at all.

In other words, to put this bluntly, sometimes, as in this case, democracy is bad.

Do we need this, or Kitcher to tell us that, though? Probably not.

Stereotypes about it aside, specifics of how democracy was structured in Weimer Germany show it was utilitarianly bad, in the end. Ditto for the fledging socialist democracy of Russia between the two 1917 revolutions.

When democracy in a specific situation is bad for structural reaons, that doesn't mean other versions of democracy would be bad in that situation. The more stable-post WWII Germany democracy might well have survived Weimar. A different Russian leader than Alexander Kerensky, western democracies not threatening a loan cutoff if Kerensky took Russia out of the war, or both, would have increased the survival odds for 1917 democracy.

That said, those historical issues all center on matters readily understandable by laypeople. The average citizen, though, as the SciAm blog points out ... just doesn't get global warming. Or other science issues.

Now, as the article notes, Kitcher's proposed solution is both expensive and unwieldy. Beyond that, psychologically, as Chris Mooney and others have noted, many people reason and argue to strengthen in-tribe beliefs, and Kitcher's program simply isn't likely to overcome that.

So, in a place like the U.S., a nonparliamentary democracy where the use of executive orders has steadily expanded over the last decades, how much democracy should a president "sacrifice" if he or she is really ready to "go to the mat" on this one?

Let me add that, right now, I am reading Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus." Per statistics such as the fact that 18 states now allow loophole-ridden "philosophical exceptions" for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children, it's arguable that democracy kills people. No, not as often as dictatorships. But, this is a clear illustration of why, even if "intrinsic goods" exist a lot in the world, democracy doesn't have intrinsic worth.

I should add a bit about my philosophical inclinations, as part of why I think Kitcher has some good thoughts.

I'm an anti-absolutist in general, and specifically, somewhat related to this, an anti-idealist. So, I generally shy away from claims of things having intrinsic value, unless it's something like clear, evolutionarily-grounded questions of ethics.

At the same time, though, I'm not a utilitarian, certainly not ion the narrow philosophical sense, because utilitarianism has a boatload of philosophical problems, some of them ethical (as Sam Harris, probably unwittingly, demonstrated in "The Immoral Landscape.") What means are "allowable" to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number? If we decide, in dire emergencies, to "weight" needs of children vs. senior citizens, by how much do we do that? And who decide? How much of a supermajority, speaking of democracy, should be required for many "hedonistic" calculus" issues? Bentham, Mill and their followers, including Mr. Harris, basically ignore or dodge these and related questions.

So, really, my answer is that democracy doesn't have an intrinsic value, and that, in principle, we can never agree on how much utilitarian value most things in life do or do not have. That's kind of where Walter Kaufmann comes from on "Without Guilt or Justice" which pretty much demolishes Rawls, and by extension and indirectly, utilitarianism in general.

Was Thomas Kuhn a relativist? A postmodernist?

Part 4 of Errol Morris' series of long columns about his intellectual relationship with the philosopher of science is the best yet.

He indicates Kuhn seems to be strongly influenced by the later Wittgenstein, but that he goes beyond even that:

Why stop at historical relativism? Why not imagine each and every person in a different island universe? And indeed, Kuhn at least in one instance seems to embrace that possibility. In one particularly bizarre passage in “The Road Since Structure,” he suggests that his critics are writing about two different Thomas Kuhns – Kuhn No. 1 and Kuhn No. 2. ...

To me Kuhn’s claim – that there are two Thomas Kuhns plus two books by the same name and author – suggests that there may be no coherent reading of Kuhn’s philosophy.

Weird indeed.

Given the ashtray incident and other things, I think we have to seriously look at treating Kuhn as a semi-guru, and a pre-postmodernist.

After all, when his "paradigm shift" idea went big in New Age circles, Kuhn had chances to object, and didn't.

And, along with this analysis, we have stop treating him so seriously in general.

Anyway, click the link up top, and read the three previous essays. They're great.