Posts Tagged ‘Pragmatism’
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool”*…
We live in a time when a growing number of “authorities” in the U.S. and around the world are actively trading fact for convenient fiction. Science is under attack; there’s (all-too-grounded) concern that we may be headed into a new “Dark Age.”
C. Brandon Ogbunu pushes back, arguing that science– and more particularly, the emerging research field of metascience, a form of scientific self-examination– is essential for navigating our uncertain future…
On May 24, Vice President J.D. Vance authored a post on X that highlighted a “reproducibility crisis” in the sciences. Vance offered this amid a series of other critiques of higher education to justify the withholding of federal science funding to universities over the past several months. His post was timed to accompany a White House executive order that invoked the language of open science to introduce sweeping changes to our federal scientific infrastructure. It came just weeks after the release of plans to cut science funding in the 2026 fiscal year budget.
The playbook is standard: Fuse an aggressive political agenda to a more palatable set of criticisms. In this case, many agree that processes within professional science have, for decades, had significant flaws. In my view, politicians in power are using this as a justification to burn it down. And outside of a few higher-education legal efforts to fight back, the scientific community remains shell-shocked, unable to gather the momentum to resist effectively.
But in addition to resisting the changes, there might be other ways that we can navigate an uncertain future. In recent years, a field called “metascience” (often referred to as “the science of science”) has emerged, charged with understanding the processes of science, how it operates, and identifying themes in what is produced. I argue that this area is going to be essential moving forward in stormy times, as it can dispel the myth that science is an ideological leviathan incapable of self-reflection and can help us rebuild science into a craft that interrogates its fragilities.
As described in a 2018 review, the science of science “is based on a transdisciplinary approach that uses large data sets to study the mechanisms underlying the doing of science—from the choice of a research problem to career trajectories and progress within a field.” It asks questions about aspects of the scientific enterprise, including employment, publishing trends, economic incentives, merit, and other forces that influence science in ways that may escape our intuition…
[Ogbunu explains metascience, and explores examples of work-to-date and questions like: Who is doing science? What are their incentives (and how do they shape behavior)? How innovative is science? He reminds us that “metascientists” are following in the footsteps of humanists and social scientists (Bruno Latour, for example) have examined science practice for many decades…]
… metascience offers a lens that is especially important at this critical moment. Support for science in the face of attacks is critical and necessary. But ironically, one of the best ways to defend the craft might be for scientists to identify the fragilities before the enemy does. We can use data and models, not solely our op-ed voices and social media timelines (though all can be useful). The field is already disabusing us of the notion that science as practiced is based on defensible incentives, neutrality of any kind, or merit, however defined.
Instead, it operates on what looks more like a runaway Matthew Effect, whereby the most established scientists benefit disproportionately from the system of reward — and thus the rich get richer. And the problem isn’t that the flaws exist, but that science’s practitioners aren’t interested in a critical lens towards them.
Metascience won’t fix our problems, but it formalizes ways that we can use to reflect, which may implore us to change science for the better…
Physicians (and other scientists) healing themselves: “Metascience Is More Important Now Than Ever,” from @cbo.bsky.social in @undark.org.
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As we commit to comprehension, we might send insightful birthday greetings to a forefather of metascience, Charles Sanders Peirce; he was born on this date in 1839. A scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher, he was (per philosopher Paul Weiss) “the most original and versatile of America’s philosophers and America’s greatest logician”. Bertrand Russell wrote “he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever.” He is considered by many to be “the father of pragmatism“; he helped formalize the field of statistics; and his contributions logic were foundational– helping to found semiotics (the study of signs).
For Peirce, logic encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science. Peirce approached science as a practice, defining the concept of abductive reasoning to explain scientific advance, as well as rigorously formulating mathematical induction and deductive reasoning.
“What is the reward for knowing the worst?”*…
The estimable Adam Phillips on the (ultimately constructive) tension between psychoanalysis and (especially American) pragmatism…
When Richard Rorty wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism. How one feels about Rorty’s eloquent, deliberate and subtle brashness depends on one’s education and sensibility, on one’s cultural preferences and prejudices, and indeed on one’s politics. There may be a significant difference between getting the life I want and getting the life ‘we’ might want, between a certain kind of possessive, acquisitive individualism and a collective political project (the phrase ‘the life I want’ also implies a stability and a degree of certainty in myself; the idea of the life I want fixes the flux of myself). And there are also, by the same token, interesting difficulties in using Rorty’s pragmatist definition of truth in relation to psychoanalysis, which in a quite different way claims to have an interest in truth and in the lives people claim that they want. Rorty’s description of truth here, read in a psychoanalytic context, couldn’t easily be squared with, say, Lacan’s goal for psychoanalytic treatment, which, in the useful words of Slavoj Žižek, clearly seeks a different version of truth. Lacan’s goal for psychoanalytic treatment, Žižek writes, ‘is not the patient’s wellbeing, successful social life or personal fulfilment, but to bring the patient to confront the elementary co-ordinates and deadlocks of his or her desire’. It doesn’t sound as though helping the patient get the life he wants is among Lacan’s priorities (and ‘deadlocks’, of course, aren’t Rorty’s thing). This can’t help but make us wonder whether, or in what sense, Freud’s psychoanalysis has got anything to do with getting the life you want; and if it doesn’t, what it might be to do with. Freud does, after all, put wishing at the centre of his theory, but only to radically temper it; as if to say, what you think you want is where the problems start. And yet wanting is what, for both psychoanalysis and American pragmatism, there is, in William James’s words, ‘to be going on from’. Both Freud’s psychoanalysis and Rorty’s pragmatism tell us, in their different ways, why wanting matters, and also that wanting has become the thing we most want to know about, as though now we are simply our wants.
It is easy to forget that all accounts of the goals of psychoanalysis are prescriptions presented as descriptions. In the guise of telling us what the goal of psychoanalysis is – what the concept of cure is, what a successful treatment entails – theorists are simply giving us their own account of what they take a good life to be and what they assume a person wants (a person who walks into an analyst’s office walks into a vocabulary, and a vocabulary is always a vocabulary of wants). Psychoanalysts, to their credit, have been more than willing to tell us what the good is that we should seek; though not quite so willing to open up their proposed goods for discussion, or indeed to suggest that their proposed goods might be experiments in living and not absolute values. For Freud, the goal is recovering the capacity to love and work, or, rather more grimly, to turn hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. For Lacan it is ‘not giving ground relative to one’s desire’; for Klein it is reaching the Depressive Position; for Winnicott it is about enabling the patient to play and to surprise themselves; for Ferenczi the patient is not cured through free association, but cured when he can free associate, and so on and on and on. All the interesting psychoanalytic theorists are telling us what, in their view, constitutes a good life. Old-fashioned psychoanalysis always had a known destination.
What the Rortyan pragmatist wants us to ask is whether and in what way, say, Lacanian psychoanalysis helps us to get the life we want, understood in terms of the good we have been encouraged to seek. It does not need us to ask whether Lacanian theory and practice is in any sense true. Pragmatism wants us to ask, what is the life we want – or think we want? Whereas psychoanalysis wants us to ask, why do we not want to know what we want? (According to Michel Serres, the only modern question is: what is it you don’t want to know about yourself?) Psychoanalysis wants us to ask – against the grain of traditional philosophy – why do we obscure the good that we seek? Pragmatism takes for granted that the good we seek is what we want and asks us how we are going to go about getting it. Indeed, pragmatism tells us that we are good at knowing what we want and good at letting our wants change. In an implicit critique of, among other things, American pragmatism, Charles Taylor, in The Ethics of Authenticity, defines his notion of a moral ideal: ‘I mean a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be where “better” and “higher” are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire.’ Rorty’s work always runs the risk of seeming to promote a kind of capricious, impulsive egotism.
Clearly psychoanalysis and American pragmatism are uneasy bedfellows; they fall out over the phrase ‘knowing what you want’…
Read on to Phillips’ unpacking of that tension, and for his “resolution”: “On Getting the Life You Want,” from @lrb.co.uk.
(Image above: source)
* Donald Barthelme, Snow White
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As we decipher desire, we might send experimental birthday greetings to Stanley Milgram; he was born on this date in 1933. A social psychologist, he is best known for his obedience experiment conducted at Yale University in 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects (asked to administer painful electric shocks to “learners” they believed they were supervising) would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
Among the most controversial of all psychology studies ever published, the experiment has been repeated many times around the globe, and with fairly consistent results; but its interpretations have been in dispute from the start.
“As for us Indians, we have our own problem before us. It is the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle.”*…
The current approach to this challenge seems to be (to oversimplify, if only slightly) to create a majoritarian Hindu state that homogenizes those differences. But it wasn’t always so. Scott Stroud tells the story of Bhimrao Ambedkar, an Indian student of John Dewey, who worked for a very different, more inclusive, kind of country…
When one thinks of American pragmatism, one often puts too much emphasis on the American part. It might even stunt our enquiry, irrevocably fixating on thinkers such as John Dewey, William James, and Jane Addams. But there is more to the story of pragmatism than what happened in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. Pragmatism itself was a flexible, loosely allied approach to thinking that held few maxims in common other than the idea that our theorising and arguing ought to come from lived experience and ought to return back to experience as the ultimate test of its value. Its advocates such as Dewey greatly affected nations such as China through his teaching and lecturing, leading us to see that pragmatism has a global narrative connected with it. Is there a similar tale to be told about pragmatism and its interactions with India?
Any narrative of pragmatism’s influence and evolution in India will centre on Bhimrao Ambedkar, a student of Dewey’s at Columbia University in New York. Some might recognise Ambedkar (1891-1956) as a chief architect of the Indian constitution in the 1940s. Others might recognise him as the indefatigable leader of India’s ‘untouchables’ (now denoted by the self-chosen label ‘Dalit’), given his constant advocacy for the rights of those oppressed by the complex and long-rooted caste system. Ambedkar himself was a so-called untouchable, which only fortified his commitment to seeking justice in the law and in social reforms for India’s most vulnerable populations. At the end of his life, he channelled his frustration at the prevailing caste consciousness within Hindu society into a conversion effort that tried to convince his fellow Dalits to convert away from Hinduism and into a more egalitarian Buddhism. On 14 October 1956, just weeks before he died, he led what was at the time one of the world’s largest voluntary mass conversions. This event held in Nagpur featured Ambedkar, his wife Savita, and an estimated 500,000 Dalits converting to Buddhism. For reasons such as these, Ambedkar was voted the ‘greatest Indian’ in post-independence India in a poll that included more than 20 million votes being cast.
Ambedkar was not merely a political figure or leader. He was also a philosopher. One can see the evidence for this in the reconstructed Buddhism that he advanced in his final years, coalescing in his rewritten ‘Buddhist Bible’, The Buddha and His Dhamma, which was completed just before his death on 6 December 1956. In this book, Ambedkar reconstructed the narrative of the Buddha, de-emphasising traditional formulas such as the four noble truths, and foregrounding poverty, injustice and the building up of social communities. In short, he reconstructed the Buddhist tradition and its myriad texts to show how it could function as a social gospel, or an engaged philosophy that could even meet the growing waves of those inspired by Karl Marx and Russian communism in the 1950s…
The politician and thinker whose philosophy of democracy challenged the caste system: “The Indian pragmatist,” from @scottrstroud in @aeonmag.
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As we contemplate community, we might recall that it was on this date in 1492 that all remaining Jews were expelled from Spain. On March 31 of that year, the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the patrons of Christopher Columbus) had issued an edict– the Alhambra Decree— ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by this date that year.
“Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself”*…
And indeed, what was true a century ago seem still to hold. Everyone seems to hate/fear inflation, but it has radically different impacts on different groups within our society…
Inflation is widening America’s wealth gap.
• Prices have risen across the nation, and so have wages across all income levels.
• The lowest-earning households gained an average of $500 in earnings last year. But their expenses grew by almost $2,000.
• Meanwhile, the upper half of earners pulled further ahead as their incomes outgrew expenses significantly.
“Whom does inflation hurt the most?” from Scott Galloway (@profgalloway)
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As we ferret out unfairness, we might cautious birthday greetings to James Mill; he was born (James Milne) on this date in 1773. A historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher (a close ally of Utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham), he is counted among the founders of the Ricardian school of economics (and so, among other things, a father of monetarism, the theory that excess currency leads to inflation).
His son, John Stuart Mill, studied with both Bentham and his father, then became one of most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism (perhaps especially his definition of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control). JSM also followed his father in justifying colonialism on Utilitarian lines, and served as a colonial administrator at the East India Company.
Gumby: “Do you want to try it, Pokey?” Pokey: “No thanks, I prefer grass”…
source: L.A. Times
If you have a heart, Gumby’s a part of ***YOU!***
– Gumby Theme Song
Art Clokey, the creator of the whimsical clay figure Gumby, died in his sleep Friday at his home in Los Osos, Calif., after battling repeated bladder infections, his son Joseph said. He was 88.
Clokey and his wife, Ruth, invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after Art had finished film school at USC. After a successful debut on “The Howdy Doody Show,” Gumby soon became the star of its own hit television show, “The Adventures of Gumby,” the first to use clay animation on television.
After an initial run in the 1950s, Gumby enjoyed comebacks in the 1960s as a bendable children’s toy, in the 1980s after comedian Eddie Murphy parodied the kindly Gumby as a crass, cigar-in-the-mouth character in a skit for “Saturday Night Live” and again in the ’90s with the release of “Gumby the Movie.”
Today, Gumby is a cultural icon recognized around the world. It has more than 134,000 fans on Facebook…
Instead of flowers, the family suggests contributions in Gumby’s name to the Natural Resources Defense Council, of which Art Clokey was a longtime member.
“Gumby was green because my dad cared about the environment,” his son said.
Read the whole story in the L.A. Times (January 9, 2010), more about Art here, and more about Gumby here.
As we recall that in the end we’re all “just clay,” we might raise a toast to the Pragmatist-in-Chief– American psychologist and philosopher William James (brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James); William was born this date in 1842. James’ theories of interrelations– recognized in his day as importantly novel, but problematically weird– seemed, on the heels of Einstein’s work, to have been positively prophetic.
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