However, even if we consider only those “positivisms” that have become “scientisms,” this classification remains very broad and must be narrowed for at least two reasons. First of all, scientism’s character clearly depends upon the chosen science. If it is a question for the scientist of reducing everything to a single science that can explain the totality of phenomena, a large number of sciences still remain that could be candidates for supremacy: biology, of course, which has given rise to the various Darwinian or Lamarckian “evolutionary” doctrines; physics, too, which, despite these trends, remains the model of a science and which some neurophysiological theories would like to copy in advocating a total physicalism.61 To these classic natural sciences have recently been added what Herbert Simon calls the “sciences of the artificial,” sciences that study neither humanity (human sciences) nor nature (natural sciences) but human-made objects. Computer mechanisms here become the absolute model for understanding the ensemble of human behaviors. This computer paradigm, so dear to the cognitive sciences, can itself be developed in several more or less antagonistic alternatives (connectionism, total or partial modularity, etc.)
Moreover, within these three62 “candidates for supremacy,” we still find a gradation of positions ranging from those most ontologically marked by scientism to others that are only methodologically scientistic. To clarify this nuance, emerging from a suppressed point of view but conclusive for the purposes of our study, let’s consider an example of this “gradation” at the heart of the “physicalist” paradigm. Otto Neurath, who introduced the term “physicalism,” Rudolf Carnap, who determined its program, and finally Herbert Feigl, who attempted to realize this program, strove for the same end: to make physics the language of reference for every scientific proposition and thus to describe all phenomena—including phenomena traditionally considered relevant to the “mental sciences”—in physical terms. Nevertheless, this common project is not necessarily accompanied by the same attitude toward philosophy. Thus, with this reduction of psychology to physics, Carnap clearly did not intend to declare all philosophy (which he strictly defined as logical “construction” or “structure”)63 useless. I can indicate two noncontradictory movements in Carnap’s first writings: First, there is a reduction of all phenomena to a physical language as “elimination”64 of metaphysics. Metaphysics rests on two major categorical confusions: the desire to ask questions that are meaningless because they are unanswerable (the immortality of the soul, the existence of God) and the development of a pure thought, without any empirical reference that would be likely to invalidate it. Second, and simultaneously, philosophy is constituted as a science, and this in the purest Cartesian—even Hegelian—spirit. Indeed, today we are beginning to see that the Aufbau adopted a manner of philosophizing that resembled the speculative philosophy that came from criticism. In this regard, Peter Galison shows in a 1996 study65 how much the American reception of the Aufbau tended to neutralize its radicality and to obscure its globalizing vision, in a word, to silently pass over the demand for a new form of knowledge and a new way of life—which the 1928 preface nevertheless forcefully expressed:
We feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements, especially in architecture, and in movements which strive for meaningful forms of personal and collective life, of education, and of external organization in general. We feel all around us the same basic orientation, the same style of thinking and doing … It is an orientation which acknowledges the bonds that tie men together, but at the same time strives for free development of the individual. Our work is carried by the faith that this attitude will win the future.66
As Galison remarks, the prudent pragmatism of the American audience could only poorly handle ideas like this, whose coloring hints at a totally different tradition, for which philosophy is a summative discipline, whose spirit sustains scientific knowledge as well as artistic disciplines and allows individual blossoming as well as the harmonious development of the community. This all-embracing character of the Aufbau—which some, like Sir Karl Popper, haven’t hesitated to describe as absolutism—so undeniably links it to classic philosophy that his most astute commentators, like Anouk Barberousse, do not hesitate to read in the Aufbau the resurgence of a Hegelian ambition.67 Carnap sustains the inspiration of Kant as well as Hegel, in that with his idea of a universal and completed science, he attaches himself simultaneously to neo-Kantian projects and to the properly post-Kantian ambition that Hegel, following Fichte, called the “system of science.” To put this more precisely, Carnap, probably through Helmholtz and the philosophy that he studied at Jena under Bruno Bauch, participates as much in the figure of the Aufklärer as that of the Wissenschaftslehrer, inasmuch as it is true that the idea of a universal and unified science, capable of transforming the conditions of personal life as well as community life, takes up a tradition that, beyond neo-Kantianism, draws its roots from the first post-Kantianism. And therefore, the idea that he could put an end to philosophical activity through this work is totally foreign to Carnap. This is unquestionably not the case for Feigl, who, with the realized—and no longer merely desired—establishment of “physicalism,” strove to make all philosophy useless. In a significantly titled article, “Unity of Science and Unitary Science,”68 Feigl meant to defend what he called a “radical physicalism,” in opposition to “linguistic” or even “natural physical-ism.” This “radical physicalism” would show that all scientific laws are derivable from elementary physical laws and that every thought is reducible to a physical phenomenon. To verify this second point, Feigl will use all the resources of neurophysiology. But to reduce the entirety of the mental sphere to physical laws, by attributing to each mental property a neurological predicate, is clearly to pass from an epistemological position—according to which each proposition must, in the final analysis, be able to be judged by empirical elements—to a strong ontological thesis, according to which all phenomena are only physical states that follow physical laws. It is this strong ontological thesis that Pierre Jacob, in his analysis of Feigl’s view, terms “reductionist materialism.”69 It is no longer a question of aiming, through philosophy, at a work of clarification of complex concepts, nor of claiming to say what knowledge in general must be (for example, “clear,” and “judged by experience”), but rather of developing the neurosciences, the only ones likely to address the whole of reality (nature as well as humanity). In a word, if Carnap foresaw the elimination of metaphysics because it was a matter, for him, of “bad philosophy,” for Feigl, the project seems more to resemble a dissolution of all philosophy in an exact science, in this case, neurophysiology. In this sense, his scientism is more radical than Carnap’s.
It is this very movement to dissolve philosophy within an exact science that we must investigate first of all. To do so, I have chosen to examine attempts to reduce it to biology rather than the two other paradigms I’ve mentioned, for two reasons: first, because physicalism, which we have just discussed, seems, if we accept the most widely held opinions,70 to have failed in its program, or, to put it more cautiously, physicalism is not currently the program best financed by wealthy American industry and is therefore the least likely to offer new results. Subsequently, because we will later return to the “sciences of the artificial,” we shall study one of its greatest representatives, Herbert Simon.
Radical Scientism in Biology
To determine the inference or type of reasoning that leads to the dissolution of an intellectual practice in another requires that we break down the concrete movement by which biological concepts tend to invade all the “human sciences.” But, even if there are many who use biology in this way, it seems that the biologist model is most common and most fruitful in economics. Various “evolutionary” doctrines have thus been proposed recently to explain the organization of the sphere of
exchange.71 Two extremes can be identified in this evolutionary approach: at one extreme, the biological paradigm is used as a fruitful metaphor; at the other, it is an ontologically grounded primary model that excludes all others. Hence, authors like Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter attempt to use genetics to understand organizational routines, that is, the procedures that businesses employ to acquire and exploit efficiencies (and by extension, the procedures used by individuals in these firms).72 They thus analyze routines—as behaviors produced by the firm—as if they were the firm’s genes, and conceptualize the market as the space of selection among firms. The desire to use biology as the paradigm is clear here—and is immediately attested by their use of the term “evolutionary”73—since two core biological concepts, genetics and natural selection, are employed. Nevertheless, biology is invoked only as a metaphor. So the authors clarify:
We are pleased to exploit any idea from biology that seems helpful in the understanding of economic problems, but we are equally prepared … to modify accepted biological theories radically in the interest of getting better economic theory … We also make no effort to base our theory on a view of human nature as the product of biological evolution, although we consider recent work in the direction to be a promising departure from the traditional conception of Economic Man.74
If we ask what a metaphor’s status is within a scientific structure, the fact nevertheless remains that this literary attitude75 does not put other disciplines at risk because, in these authors’ minds, biology is only a heuristic method, fruitful for the moment but not necessarily exclusive of other analyses if it is really used as an analogy. At the opposite end of the spectrum from this position that employs a scientific paradigm as a convenient metaphor, we find the idea of biology as a primary, ontologically grounded, model. Geoffrey Hodgson vehemently objects to their metaphorical use of biology. It is useful to follow the development of this reasoning to understand how it leads to an explicit dissolution of the various facets of human reflection in an established science.
Hodgson describes his theory of “Universal Darwinism” as resting upon the three concepts of variety, inheritance, and selection. Each of these concepts has an ontological equivalent in a social or human science, in this case, economics:
Underneath the very real differences of character and mechanism, biological evolution and economic evolution might have types of process or structure in common, when considered at a sufficiently general level of abstraction. At this level, we are not addressing mere analogy. We are considering a degree of identity in reality.76
Thus, routines and genes, once they are taken at a sufficiently abstract level, can be considered as concepts possessing the characteristics of inheritance (storage and transmission). “At least at that abstract level, inheritance is part of both underlying ontologies.”77 Similarly, the mechanisms of selection, once transposed into the domains of human exchange, are not analogies but well and truly realities: “Some firms have the greater potential to survive than others. It is the same with natural organisms. In looking to biology, Nelson and Winter did not merely make useful analogies.”78
When we trace the author’s steps, we see an extension of biological concepts to another domain. This extension is not conceived of as a tool but as a transfer. The mechanisms of natural selection are the same in both cases. We are thus witnessing the subsumption of one science into another, in this case, economics into biology. But Hodgson goes one step further, applying these concepts not only simply to firms and the marketplace but also to individuals and in general to all human activity. Thus, in his view, individuals’ habits79—encompassing habits of behavior as well as of thought—are a social equivalent to their biological genes. In sum, “the crucial point is that all action and deliberation depend on prior habits that we acquire during our individual development.”80 Two fundamental claims overlap here: first of all, the movement from the economic sphere (theory of firms) to the individual (theory of habits) and second, the desire to explain the whole of human activity in terms of this theory; it is no longer simply a question of a specific kind of behavior (for example, the calculation of interests in an exchange of material goods) but rather of all behavior, including our ways of thinking. Hodgson thus speaks of deliberation and reason as reducible to a series of habits. Because “habits” (already reduced to the concepts of inheritance and selection) are the key to understanding “deliberation and reason,” it follows that deliberation and reason are habits, and, by transitivity, they can be understood in terms of inheritance and selection. In a word, Hodgson’s thesis is that humanity (as the set of possible behaviors) can be understood only through the concepts of inheritance and selection.
The dissolution of all the human sciences in biology—and, later, the advent of a single science as capable of explaining all human reality—is manifest here. But what should we conclude from this examination? First, if a movement were to be rejected by many philosophers as metaphysical, Hodgson’s project is surely an example of such a movement. To reduce all phenomena to one or two constants and to a single law (which Hodgson calls “universal Darwinism”) thus seems, today, to be the work of “scientists” (economists, biologists) more than philosophers. Would metaphysics, in the sense that was once decried, take refuge with the supporters of the strictest scientism? This point (which isn’t an argument in itself) notwithstanding, we should note that in fine (that is, at a very high level of abstraction), Hodgson must face the problem of the possibility of his own discourse. In effect, given what Hodgson tells us about rationality, must we conclude that Hodgson’s discourse can be explained in the same terms? If so, Hodgson is saying that his thesis x is the product of habits of thought, themselves dependent upon an institutional context, itself a product of natural selection. If he applies the contents of his discourse on rationality to his own rational discourse, then he must say that his thesis is neither true nor universal but is a moment in the history of natural selection. Thus, he has relativized himself—he states at the same time and in the same way that “my thesis is true and is not—unlike Nelson and Winter’s—a metaphor or an analogy,” and “my thesis as a snapshot of a moment in the evolution of the species” could change tomorrow. And yet this is what he objected to in Nelson and Winter’s stance, according to which if a better model is discovered tomorrow, they will adopt it, thus making biological concepts into simple tools, not ontological theses. If Hodgson does not want to fall under the force of this argument (applying what he says about human rationality to his own rationality as a scientific researcher), he is compelled to stipulate that there is an exception to his thesis, namely his own discourse. But that, too, invalidates his general thesis.
So what should we conclude from this example of an attempt to annex the totality of thought within a single natural science? First, that this position is no more viable than Rorty’s radical skepticism, and that it paradoxically exposes itself to the same danger of self-refutation. Next, that the dissolution of philosophy, if that is what was wished, has not at all been accomplished. Finally, that the announcement of philosophy’s death seems, once again, to be a bit premature.
This troubling convergence between the most widely proclaimed scientism and the most commonly espoused skepticism is an important accomplishment of my examination, because it shows that, despite these positions’ apparent diversity, the same contradiction emerges—a contradiction that prevents us from taking seriously the proposition that philosophy has come to its end.
But I probably should better specify the conclusions to be drawn from this analysis of Hodgson. It is not at all a matter of claiming that the concepts of “genes” and “natural selection” are not pertinent concepts in themselves. Neither Darwin nor any particular aspect of his doctrine is under dispute, only the desire to reduce the entirety of the world, human behaviors and human practices, to the core concepts of a single science. Hodgson’s error here rests in a categorical confusion or a confusion of levels of discourse. To better clarify
this essential point for my broader analysis, I should illustrate this confusion of levels with another example, something other than this form of evolutionism in economics. So, it is more and more common today to hear a given biological thesis x directly compared either to “philosophy” itself or to whole sections of philosophy, or to an entire tradition—Western philosophy, idealism, Cartesian philosophy, etc. But one can only be surprised by the mass of clichés that certain discourses adopt to show the supposed effects of the contents of biological science or neurophysiology on philosophy. As an example, let’s look at a simple thesis of current biology. Consider the following claim: “It is evident, and we can no longer reasonably doubt, that these cognitive processes [’perception, purposive action, conceptual organization, reasoning, learning, communication, and language are all encompassed by the concept of cognition’] are represented and embodied in the nervous system; they are, in the final analysis, so many manifestations and expressions of the brain’s functioning.”81 By what erroneous presumption, by what confusion of levels of discourse, was this simple thesis able to be promoted, by some, to the status of invalidation of the philosophical tradition or even some part of philosophy (for example, the famous Cartesian dualism)?
The first presupposition, and the first cliché, consists in believing that it’s a question here of a univocal and perfectly determined biological thesis that arises “fully armed” against “philosophy” or some philosophical claim. But the claim that a cerebral process corresponds to a cognitive process is, even in biology, susceptible to multiple interpretations. Thus, staying only within what they call “neurologism,”82 Denis Fisette and Pierre Poirier distinguish three radically different forms: “reductivist neurologism,” “nonreductivist neurologism,” and “eliminativist neurologism.” Furthermore, beyond these three wide currents, we can note, as has Jean Delacour, for example, that on the one hand nothing today allows us to say that either a psychic state or a neurobiological phenomenon is the cause of the other; on the other hand, for some biologists, the parallelism is not necessarily total. Thus Delacour claims that it is doubtful that every state of the nervous system has a psychic equivalent. Here Delacour mentions “the case of action potentials, the capture of glucose, reactions of the oxidizing metabolism”;83 in the inverse case, certain psychic states seem to him to be “purely cultural” (without neurobiological equivalents). The bidirectional relation thus cannot currently be asserted—this is why Delacour denies that it is a relation of complete reciprocity. Against what he calls “reductionism” or “naive causalism,” he advocates a moderate form of parallelism.84 I am the last person in the world to judge whether this thesis is valid or not. My point is only to show that this is not a univocal and perfectly determined biological thesis that could be compared without further ado to “philosophy” in its entirety.
The Death of Philosophy Page 5
