Bilgrami buggering with Scientism

Is it possible for Akeel Bilgrami to write a single sentence which is neither false nor fatuous? Let us see.

One need not have phobia about science, while finding what has come to be called “scientism” intellectually distasteful.

A phobia is a scientific term. Only medical science can determine whether a 'phobia about science' exists. It may be that a necessary condition for finding 'scientism' intellectually distasteful is having this phobia. This is an empirical matter. Bilgrami's confident assertion to the contrary is worthless.

This is a familiar distinction, oft made.

No it isn't. People have better things to do with their time than to talk worthless shite of this stripe.

What exactly is scientism?

Google tells me it is either
1) thought or expression regarded as characteristic of scientists.
or
2) excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques.

The problem here is that only scientists can tell whether scientism is occurring. The rest of us can't tell if a piece of jargon is scientific or if it is goobledygook. The other thing is that today's scientists are likely to be wrong as to what is or isn't 'excessive belief'. Science moves forward. So, whatever scientism is- it is a movable feast which changes quite radically over time.

Very broadly, it is a kind of overreach in the name of science, taking it to a place beyond its proper dominion.

No. It is either thinking and talking like a scientist or it would be defined by actual scientists as gobbledygook.

Talking nonsense does not take anything 'to a place beyond its proper dominion'. Otherwise pigs could fly.

This can happen in many ways.

It can't happen at all.

One way is in the making of large claims on science’s behalf, claims that are philosophical rather than scientific, yet relying—by a sleight of hand, a fallacious conflation—on the authority of science.

If I claim to be a police officer and strip search you, I am not 'relying on the authority' proper to a policeman. I am simply committing a crime. Even if I really am a police officer and I conduct an illegal search 'under color of law', it is not the case that I am relying on any legal authority. That is why I could be sent to prison for such behavior.

Only a scientist can say what statements have, or lack, the authority of science. If we are not scientists, we should delegate adjudication of all scientific claims to actual scientists.

A philosopher who wants to take on 'scientism' is bound to fall flat on his face. This is not because he has left his proper domain. On the contrary, philosophy is actually a low type of slapstick comedy invented by Aristophanes. Socrates was actually a lap-dancer who broke into stand-up, which developed into peripatetics, thanks to his getting cast in an upstate tryout of 'Clouds'.

I have written critically of one such claim in The Immanent Frame: there is nothing, no property, in nature that cannot be brought under the purview of science as a form of cognitive inquiry.

This is not a scientific claim. However, it is an accurate statement re. possible research programs contemplated by actual scientists at this moment in time. There is nothing in what is currently understood as Nature which isn't considered a possible subject of study by some branch or branches of Natural Science.  This is a purely empirical matter. If there is a counter-example, then there is a refutation. Otherwise, only nonsense is being talked.

The present contribution spells out some implications of these criticisms.
Those who deny such a claim—say, for instance, by asserting that nature contains value properties, which do not fall within the purview of science—are frequently dismissed as being unscientific.

They are actually being dismissed for having shit for brains. If nature contains value properties, a lot of money could be made by quantifying those values and, ultimately, getting to a useful causal structural model such that we can change nature to have more of the value properties we like and less of those we don't like.

Suppose people who say nature contains value properties- e.g. gold has something in its atomic structure which makes it valuable, or H2O has some property such that it quenches thirst- suppose such people also said stuff other people found smart or funny, then maybe everybody would not think them shitheads.

As things stand, we dismiss shitheads like Bilgrami because they are utterly useless.

It is this dismissal that amounts to illicit outreach.

This is not a matter of science. It is a matter of utility- a purely economic matter. Bilgrami & Co aren't paying their way. It may be that they are able to stupefy students sufficiently with their stupid lectures such that those students take a break from repetitively jerking off and jizzing into sport socks. If so, some may argue, they deserve a pay-check. But so do anal bleachers.

It can only be unscientific to contradict some proposition in some science.

Nonsense! Science progresses by not just contradicting propositions but actively falsifying the scientific hypotheses they give rise to.

But no science contains the proposition that science has exhaustive coverage of nature and all its properties.

In Science the term proposition means ' a link between two concepts in a situation where the link cannot be verified by experiment. As a result, it relies heavily on prior research, reasonable assumptions and existing correlative evidence.'
Philosophy uses the term differently, but no proposition in Philosophy is not false.

So, it cannot be unscientific to deny that it does.

Bilgrami is wrong. Currently the Natural Sciences contain the proposition that Science has exhaustive coverage of nature and all its properties. That's why no Scientist consults a priest or astrologer or psychic in the course of his research. However, if human beings are involved, a Natural Scientist may consult a psychologist or physiologist or neurologist or even a Social Scientist, in order to clarify sources of human error.

It is wholly unscientific to deny that the Natural Sciences aren't wholly autonomous, or to assert that Scientists need to defer to theologians or aestheticians or shitheads like Bilgrami.

What follows from denying it? If value properties (or more simply, values) are in the world, including nature, why does science not have full coverage of nature?

Values aren't in the world anymore than our feelings about things are in the things themselves. Suppose this weren't the case. Then by changing how we value or feel about a thing, we could change what that thing is or what it is doing. Thus Magic would have full coverage of nature. Scientists wouldn't get any funding. They'd be reduced to teaching Philosophy while Bilgrami would wear a cape, like Dr. Strange, and defend the Earth against Thanos using his mystical powers.

Presumably because value properties are peculiar in that when we perceive them in the world (including in nature) they prompt our practical agency—not our theoretical agency; not our agency that seeks to explain and predict, but the agency that seeks to address the normative demands those perceptible values make on us.

Very true! If you have anal sex with the Washington Monument it is not the case that you are guilty of public indecency nor that you are mentally ill. Rather, the fact is, marble obelisk has a particular value property- viz. attracting assholes to try to cram it up themselves.

Fuck you Washington Monument! Why do you have to be so goddam sexy that you make these irresistible normative demands on Bilgrami and his ilk?

To give an example I have given before, if we see a phenomenon in the sky in meteorological terms, we might seek to explain it by invoking concepts such as H20, condensation, etc., and we might seek to predict its trajectory.

Yes. We have a structural causal model which is very useful- that is economic.

But if we see the very same phenomenon at the very place in the sky in value terms—say, as a threat—it does not prompt our explanatory and predictive stances, it makes normative demands on us.

We don't see it in 'value terms'. We see it in 'economic terms'. Economics does not have an externalist theory of value. It has a marginalist theory of value. Nobody is puzzled that diamonds cost more than water though the latter alone is vital for life and thus ought to be more valuable. This is because we have a structural causal model of the Economy similar to the structural causal models of the Natural Sciences.

We then seek to address these by exercising our practical agency, for instance by going to the local municipality to seek protection for our thatched dwellings.

Fuck off! When has anybody ever done anything so ridiculous? Thatched dwellings foresooth!

Value properties (such as threats) in nature thus fall outside the scope of science because they prompt what Immanuel Kant called “practical” reason and agency, the subject of his second Critique, quite outside the reach of physics and mathematics that are the explicit examples of the theoretical domain mentioned in the theme-setting Preface of his first Critique.

Kant was wrong about both 'Pure' and 'Practical' Reason. We have known that there are no 'synthetic a priori' judgments since the Michelson Morley experiments. Science proved that armchair philosophy was rubbish.

In recent years, there has been a small but growing recognition of this idea that nature, even artifice or things, are quite properly describable in terms that do not exhaustively fall within the purview of natural science, but rather make normative demands on our practical agency.

Nonsense! People, not things, make 'normative demands' of us. No sane person thinks the Washington Monument is normatively demanding Bilgrami have anal intercourse with it.

Our 'practical agency' is not something Philosophy can say much about. Why? Its existence involves trade-offs and uses up costly resources. Its exercise has a game theoretic component.

However, I want to strongly dissociate myself from certain philosophical commitments that seem to others to follow from the idea that nature and “things” make normative demands on us.

What Bilgrami wants aint what he gets because he is as stupid as shit.

What I want to disavow is the claim made by some (Jane Bennett, somewhat differently by Bruno Latour) that the use of the expression “normative demands” here is literally true.

As opposed to utterly meaningless.

Bennett explicitly commits to such an intentional vitalism in nature;

Nonsense! She merely says there are 'quasi agents'. The truth is Agency doesn't really exist. It is a concept merely. What we signify by it is very much in the eye of the beholder. I say this wireless keyboard is charming but unreliable coz it looks good but freezes up when most needed. I said the same thing about my Uber driver- a very charming and personable Old Etonian who, however, dropped me off at the wrong restaurant. Later, I changed my view because, it turned out, the man, into whose car I had drunkenly climbed, was my new neighbor and that he had dropped me off as an act of kindness.

How did he view his own agency? It has been suggested to me that the poor fellow was terrified coz I iz bleck.

What type of 'Agency' did my neighbor actually exhibit? Was it Kantian and autonomous or was it Cowardly and heteronomous? Or was it a complicated sociological 'assemblage' into which all sorts of different things factored? He might say that he did feel a moment of fear but at the same time felt there was a good after dinner anecdote in the making- a 'Silk' being mistaken for a horny-handed cabbie!- while the truth might be that the poor fellow was actually the victim of Nietzchean sheep morality.

Latour, more complicatedly, attributes intentions to “assemblages” constructed around nature and artifice. It is both wrong and unnecessary to make any such reckless theoretical commitments. 

But Moral Philosophy consists of doing nothing else.

First, wrong.
The idea that nature makes demands on us is a metaphor.

No. An idea is an idea. It may be expressed as a metaphor. But 'Nature makes demands on us' is not a metaphor. It is true for some people- e.g those who feel they are 'answering a call of nature'- but not may be true of others.  By contrast, nobody makes demands of me. They may talk themselves blue in the face but they are demanding nothing. They are simply wasting their time. Once they see it- and this generally happens very quickly- either they go away or use coercive means to gain their end.

Nature contains values but their normative demands are not intentionally made.

Nature does not contain values. However it does contain biological objects- like cats and babies- whose normative demands are intentionally made. It is entirely possible that co-evolved processes occur at some very small or very large scale of the Cosmos. Indeed, it has been suggested, Time itself evolves.

The reason is straightforward.

All reason is straightforward- at least compared to Bilgrami type idiocy.

It is a mark of what we mean by intentionality that subjects who possess intentionality are potentially appropriate targets of a certain form of criticism.

Like babies and cats. I on the other hand don't possess intentionality because I am not an appropriate target of a certain kind of criticism because I'll hit back by vindicating myself and showing the critic is a cretin.

I can criticize you for doing something wrong or for having destructive thoughts, as you can me.

We will succeed but Bilgrami will fail because he is a cretin.

More relevantly to our present topic, I can criticize you for making certain normative demands of me—unreasonable ones, by my lights. But we don’t criticize elements in nature or artifice in the same sense. We may say “a hurricane was destructive” but that is a “criticism” only by courtesy, not the sort of criticism that you and I make of each other’s doings and thoughts and demands.

What Bilgrami means is that it is only worthwhile criticizing a thing or an agent if there is a change this will change the outcome. Yet his own oeuvre shows he must be wrong. Clearly there is a pleasure in criticizing things just coz it makes you feel good or you can do nothing else. Equally, to achieve one's objective, it may be better to flatter or coerce rather than criticize.

The view I oppose seeks a wider application for intentionality than my restricted one.

 Nature has intentionality or teleology.  Bilgrami's 'restricted' application is as crazy as Magic's unrestricted one.

I don’t want to dogmatically rule this out. We may cautiously admit some cases of this, but only if we have sober grounds continuous with the grounds on which we attribute human intentionality.

We may, even more cautiously, refuse to admit any such shite unless it cures cancer or, at the very least, invents a better type of smartphone.

The possibly admissible cases are not those of the intentional vitalists.

Nor of the unintentional vitalist- which is what we suspect Bigrami, big booby that he is, of being.

Thus, we might allow, for instance, that a group or collectivity of individual human subjects has intentionality.

Sure. Then we make a structural causal model which allows us to change that intentionality. If we can't, the research program degenerates.

This is quite different from saying that elements in nature or “things” have intentionality.

Not at all. We may start off with teleological models and then try to find structural causal models. Once we can change what previously appeared as 'intentionality'- e.g. my keyboard's bloody-mindedness- we know we are on the right track.

A group of individual human subjects might be said, qua group, to have intentionality, precisely because it can engage in the deliberative structure of thought and decision that individual human subjects do.

Nonsense! Collective decision making is nothing like that of individuals save by Muth Rationality- i.e. the reflexive accessibility of the Correct Structural Causal Model.

This happens, say, when individuals in the group put aside their individual preferences and think from the point of view of the group, bestowing on the group a singular point of view.

This can only happen if there is a unique Structural Causal Model which is Common Knowledge.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contractualism may be read as viewing the general will to be the outcome of such a group reasoner and decision-maker.

No it may not- save by cretins. Why? Coz the findings of Incomplete Contract theory are accessible to us. We know a lot more Math than Condorcet. The General Will is that there ought not to be a General Will save of a cheap talk sort.

And that is precisely why we can criticize the group (a corporation) over and above criticizing individuals (its CEO).

Rubbish! The Corporation has legal personality. That is why we can criticize and punish it.

We may extend the criticism and even punish the corporation (rather than the CEO) by fining it. But elements in nature and things do not possess or carry out any such deliberative structure or process, so there is no similar ground for attributing intentionality to them, nor, as a consequence, intelligibly criticizing or punishing such elements.

Fuck off! If a shoe keeps biting you- throw it out. If some particular type of virus or vegetation has a deleterious effect on Public Health, eradicate it by all means. Criticism is ineffective. Change the incentive system and you change the fitness landscape for the thing, or collection of things, in question.

That is why talk of nature making normative demands on us is metaphorical in a way that it need not be in the case of a group, and certainly is not in the case of individual human subjects.

Normative demands have to be backed up by existential threats. Otherwise they have no effect whatsoever. You can normatively demand shite till you are blue in the face. But if Mummy sends you to bed without any supper, you soon learn your lesson- unless your name is Greta Thurnberg in which case you fail miserably all the same.

Second, unnecessary.
There is no theoretical advantage in multiplying notions of intentionality,

There is no advantage of any sort to be gained by keeping Bilgrami & Co in business.

one that human individuals (and perhaps groups of human individuals) literally possess, as well as another that things in the world (including nature) also literally possess; conversely, no disadvantage, nothing we lose, in conceding that the idea that nature makes normative demands on us is a metaphor. Why not? Because it is not a metaphor that can be paraphrased away without loss of meaning and information. It is not a dispensable metaphor.

First he say it is a metaphor. Then he says it is not a metaphor. Fuck is wrong with this cretin?

And the crucial point is that when we say a metaphor can’t be paraphrased away, we are not merely putting forward a linguistic thesis about a certain figure of speech.

If we say any speech act can't be paraphrased we are either referring to nonsense or else we are lying.

The linguistic thesis that a metaphor is not paraphrasable away has a metaphysical counterpart.

Rubbish! Every figure of speech is paraphrasable, otherwise it is either phatic or performative or it isn't intelligible speech at all. 'Strike while the iron is hot' means 'act when the time is propitious'. 'Strike while because while struck me' is not usefully paraphrasable. It is either a joke or it is nonsense.

There is no 'metaphysical counterpart' to this.

To make the linguistic claim is simultaneously to make the following metaphysical claim: there is an aspect or a fragment of reality, which can only be captured by that metaphor.

Rubbish! There are countless of other similar speech acts which can be supplied which would serve the same purpose.

And the reality that is captured by the metaphorical attribution of intentionality to things, to elements in nature, when we say that they make normative demands on us, is as authentic as any reality that literal attributions of intentionality describe.

Says who? High Court Judges? Tax Inspectors? If I say, 'my money liked Switzerland and so it went there and entered a numbered bank account of its own volition. I am not guilty of tax evasion at all.' will it get me off the hook with the IRS? Will I evade a Jail sentence? No. That's the reality dude.

It is just not the same reality. It is not intentionality.

It is nonsense like everything else in Bilgrami & Company's oeuvre.

Thus, without compromising at all the significance of the fact that value properties are in nature, making normative demands on us, I can still disavow intentional vitalism.

Coz nature is unintentionally making the normative demand of me that I continue to exhibit my cretinism till I keel over and die or stop getting paid to write this shit.

3.
I began by joining many in distinguishing science from scientism. Let me close with a vexing question, which must be left to another occasion, if for no other reason than that, at the moment, I have no answer to it, not even a useful way to think about it. Even so, it is a question that surely occurs to all who have reflected on the nature of science and scientism. If the point of the distinction is that one should be able to keep separate science itself from the overreach for science that scientism seeks, we can’t avoid asking: how separate can they be kept?

That is a question for scientists. Currently there are questions about the scientific status of string theory. However, those questions will disappear once new experimental observations are available. Ordinary folk won't understand all the details but we will get the gist because Scientists find it worthwhile keeping us in the loop coz they need our tax dollars.

Philosophers, however, fuck up when they talk to us coz we can see we are smarter than them. That's why we don't want to give them any more money.

It is certainly true that they are logically separate. There is no logical link between science and scientism of this sort. One does not entail the other. But might it be that there is a predisposition in the kind of thing science is that it leads to overreaching claims on its behalf.

A 'predisposition'? Why not just say 'destiny'? But why stop there? Why not make a distinction between Aryan Science which has a good destiny and Jewish Science which has an evil destiny as 'Planetary Technology'?

Philosophers ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche

a lunatic

and Martin Heidegger

a Nazi time-server who wrote ignorant shite

through Mohandas Gandhi

not a philosopher

to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,

 who were too stupid to understand why Germans didn't want to be Communists after they saw what Commies get up to when they grab power. The fact is, there had neither been any disenchantment or re-enchantment of nature just coz people thought it natural to prefer 'Negro' music to some stupid Second Viennese School shite he happened to like. The fact is he and his ilk were credentialized cretins. Nature had given them shit for brains and relentless Careerism could not reverse the outcome.

have written to suggest an affirmative answer to this question.

Only because they had shit for brains.

In doing so, they take it for granted that the notion of a “predisposition” here is a clear and transparent one.

Coz they had shit for brains.

Are they right? Noam Chomsky, too, has suggested that science is too often conceived in such a way that it is predisposed along these lines; and has sought to correct some of the assumptions that underlie such a conception of science.

Which is why his Research Program crashed and burned long ago. If the i-languages he banged on about really exist, how come we don't have an accurate Universal translator? The fact is, the man failed both in his own field as well as in his ultracrepidarian excursions into Paranoid Political theory.

As I said, themes to be explored on another occasion.

By cretins, coz cretins we will always have with us so long as shite Professors have tenure.