Epistemologicallywise

“What makes a man go neutral?  Lust for gold?  Power?  Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?” — “Captain Zapp Brannigan,” Futurama

There is a considerable body of philosophical argumentation pro and con ethical relativism.  However, I harbor the suspicion that the argumentation is irrelevant to what makes people ethical relativists or anti-relativists.  (We lack a really satisfactory term for whatever the denial of relativism is.  “Realism” has the wrong connotation for non-philosophers.  “What’s so ‘realistic’ about your view?  Relativism seems more ‘realistic’ to me!”  I think “realism” also lends itself to the mistaken impression that to be an anti-relativist you have to be a Platonist.  “Objectivism” would be just the right term, except that it has been appropriated by Randians, that cult of pseudo-philosophers.)  Anyway, back to the main topic.  If philosophical argumentation has little effect on one’s belief in relativism or realism, what does?

When I get into an extended discussion of this issue, it becomes clear to me that ethical relativists generally think that relativism is a more open-minded view.  Realism, they think, is the view of people who are judgmental and narrow-minded.  Realists, on the other hand, seem to think that relativists are morally wishy-washy.  “How can you really believe that Nazism is wrong if you’re a relativist?  And if you don’t really believe Nazism is wrong, how will you oppose it?”

When pressed, my experience has been that philosophical realists and relativists will back down from these commitments … at least nominally.  But I’ve had the odd experience of arguing with someone, having them admit that there is no connection between, say, realism and dogmatism, and then listening to them bring that claim up later in the same conversation as an explicit or implicit assumption.

I saw an article online that attempted to establish a connection between a commitment to ethical relativism and open-mindedness.  (I can’t find the url or the citation.  If you’re reading this and know what I’m referring to, please help me out.)  There were a LOT of methodological problems with the study, as I recall.  For one, the author noted a correlation between flexibility in solving mathematical problems and a tendency to believe ethical relativism, and tried to draw a conclusion about that.  However, just because someone is flexible, creative, and “open minded” in mathematical contexts, that does not entail that he is ethically open minded.  (William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor, was a notorious racist and advocate of race-based eugenics.)  Nonetheless, I think it is interesting that the author of the study was using as his working hypothesis the claim that ethical relativists would be more open-minded.

My own experience has been that people who advocate most loudly for ethical relativism are generally not open-minded. Indeed, in my years of teaching, relativist students have been positively rabid in rejecting anything that challenges their views.

What about the claim that realists tend to be dogmatic?  My experience has been that if people emphasize “facts,” “evidence,” and “proof” a LOT, they are generally extremely dogmatic.  Maybe it is the “proof” part that is the root of the trouble.  In any case, I don’t find most realists to be dogmatic.  Then again, I might be subject to confirmation bias, since, like most people, I find it easier to sympathize with people I agree with.

Does science progress in a cumulative way?  In other words, do later scientific theories build upon earlier ones by keeping older established truths about the world, and adding us more truths?  The standard answer, familiar from Whiggish history and brief historical asides in scientific textbooks, is that it does.  Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy predicted the motions of the planets; Copernican-Galilean astronomy did a better job of prediction and was simpler; Newtonian physics explained how force and mass accounted for the motions studied by Galileo; Relativity Theory adds an explanation of the motion of objects close to the speed of light.

The problem is that this account is either false or misleading at every stage.  The Copernican astronomy was NOT more accurate than Ptolemaic, and required just as many “epicycles.”  Newtonian physics made planetary motion much more complex (and less circular) than Galileo had imagined.  In the Newtonian universe mass is preserved and energy is preserved, and both are found in absolute space and absolute time.  In Relativity Theory, mass-energy is preserved in a space-time manifold.

It’s tempting to say that, despite the differences, the theories are still “talking about the same things.” But what would those things be?  Aristotle talked about the Four Elements —  earth, water, fire, air — and quintessence (the last being the stuff the planets and stars are made of).  Galileo had to drop this elemental theory in order to reconcile terrestrial and non-terrestrial motion, but he didn’t have anything better to put in its place.  Newton talked about objects with mass exerting the otherwise inexplicable force of “gravity” over potentially infinite reaches of space.  Einstein talked about mass-energy causing deformations in space-time.

We might say that the observations are the same.  But what we see is, at the least, heavily influenced by what we think we are seeing.  A “pendulum” is a special thing, a central model for all kinds of regular motion, beginning with Galileo. Prior to Galileo, a “pendulum” is a silly toy, illustrating nothing but constrained fall.  Mass is another good illustration of how nothing is simply observed.  If “mass” could be observed, cave men would have known about it.  Mass is inferred based on observations whose intent is to measure it:  absent the intent, there is no mass to observe.

Are we left with the conclusion that science does not advance?  Perhaps it advances only in the sense that later theories can explain why our ancestors said what they said, and saw what they saw, whereas earlier theories cannot do the same for the latter.  Contemporary chemists can explain why Priestley obtained a gas that encouraged combustion, by saying that it is oxygen.  However, Priestley’s theory that he had isolated “dephlogisticated air” cannot explain many of the phenomena familiar to the modern chemist.  We might say that scientific theories are “trap doors”:  once one has gone through them, one cannot go back.

But are we sure that the crossroads of science can only go one way?  Was there a way to save Aristotle’s theory of the Four (terrestrial) Elements if there had been a brilliant defender of it?  I can imagine a science fiction novel about an alternative present in which we treat illnesses and travel in space, perhaps even better than we do now, using updated Aristotelian physics.