In this entry I want to take issue with some of my otherwise-fellow travellers on their understanding of science. On two fronts. The first is about something they call ‘the scientific method’. And the second is about what they think science can tell us. To wit:

An activity can be an end in itself. But the word ‘method’ entails a to-some-end. To what end is the scientific method assigned? Presumably to knowing the truth about the world. Why would we want to know that? To afford us prediction and control. To what purpose in turn? To be better able to manoeuvre our way through the world. Better by what measure? The satisfaction of our wants.

Organisms that want for nothing want nothing. We’re not such organisms. We want things. Hence we want to know how to get them. So by ‘the scientific method’ is meant that procedure, whatever it might be, with the best track record for guiding us to what we want.

It’s not an end in and of itself. If it were it would be a game, like solitaire. The ‘method’, aka the rules of the game, would be whatever passes the time most pleasantly. Science can be fun, but presumably that fun is not what we’re paying the widow’s mite for our scientists to have.

Moses was offered a pair of tablets. But imagine instead it was an almanac. An almanac that’s predicted the weather down to every minute of every hour of every day for these 3500 years, and has done so with 100% accuracy. And it purports to predict the weather for every minute of every hour of every day from today to the end of time.

Imagine that what it predicts for every minute of every hour tomorrow proves spot on. The same for every minute of every hour of the day after. And for every minute of every hour of every day thereafter, for the next hundred years. Imagine it’s a hundred years hence. Looking back over that century, our best meteorologists had got it right – oh, let’s be generous – say 78% of the time. You and I are going on a picnic. The meteorologist predicts sunshine. The almanac predicts rain. Do we take an umbrella or not?

Science is a set of causal claims. And causal claims are inductions. What we see is the cue ball hitting the black ball, and then the black ball rolling into the corner pocket. But what we never see – because there’s nothing to see – is the one event causing the other event. A cause isn’t something we experience. It’s something we infer. As are their stories of the invisible agents scientists imagine are doing the causing.

The almanac offers nothing of the sort. Meteorology is based on induction. So is our reliance on the almanac. So the distinction can’t be that meteorology is scientific but reliance on the almanac is not. The difference is that the almanac has proven 100% accurate whereas the meteorologist struggles to make 78%. So do we take an umbrella or not?

No doubt we’ll want to say that the almanac was written by some Laplacean genius, perhaps by God. So let’s replace the almanac with a shaman. Unlike God, he doesn’t know how he does it. Or even that he does it. So far as he knows it’s been lucky guesses all the way down. Perhaps God is whispering in his ear. Conjecture till the cows come home. But do we take an umbrella or not?

In opting to trust the almanac/shaman rather than meteorology, are we doing science or not? Clearly we are, by definition. So when (what Hobbes calls) “the savage people in many places in America” relied on their shamans, they were hardly what some of my otherwise-fellow travellers call a pre-scientific people. If the only available alternative at the time was chance, and the shaman scored better than chance, then reliance on the shaman was science, by definition. To be sure, the shaman has since been bested. But we’re imagining a scenario where their ordinals are reversed. That in fact their ordinals are not reversed says something about the superiority of meteorology over shamanism, but it says nothing whatsoever about the concept of science.

The second front, on which I want to take some of my otherwise-fellow travellers to task, is not their claim that there are two and only two sexes – as we’ll see, they can carve up the world any way they want! – but rather their claim that it’s science that tells us so. But how we carve up the world – or how fine-grained we carve it – is not something upon which science can pronounce. Do your combinatorials. Not unlike a turkey, a world can be carved up in nigh-infinite ways. It’s just that some ways of carving a turkey serve our purposes better than others. Likewise how we carve up sexuality.

For what purposes do we carve up the world of humans into sexes? Answer that question first. Then and only then can science do the cutting for us. I’m a long way out from my high school biology, but if I remember rightly there are two and only two kinds of gametes for the purposes of reproduction. But reproductive gamete location is only one aspect of sexual identity. Another is our sexual response mechanisms. Yet another is whether we do or do not up-talk.

Even an expert in sexology couldn’t exhaust the list because the list changes with the alacrity of sexual culture. So no, Virginia, it’s not a scientific question. It’s an ontological one. And our ontologies are indexed to the purposes they serve. Just as one’s purposes are indexed to the individual whose purposes they are.

In my dotage I no longer have use of many of the sexual categories I had when I was twenty. But at the time, if I recall correctly, it went something like this: Because I was never a pedophile, kids under five, be they boys or girls, weren’t sexual beings at all. By seven or eight I might be wont to say, “She’ll be a heartbreaker when she grows up.” By thirteen her sex was a legal category. But by her late teens, and thereafter, she was either a wanna, a would, a no-thank-you, or a not-on- your-life. Today do I think of trans women as women? I dunno, ‘cuz, well, I just don’t care.

But some of my otherwise-fellow travellers do. Presumably they have uses for the woman/transwoman distinction that no longer does me any service. Hume taught us that “Reason is the slave of the passions.” He should have added that science doesn’t tell us how to carve up the world. Science goes to work only after we’ve already carved it up. So tell me what you want to do with the distinction and then I’ll tell you how science can draw the distinction you want.

In short, you can’t hide your druthers behind science. That’s called the naturalistic fallacy. Don’t do that. Own your druthers. Like I do. Or at least did. Now I’d just druther that we’d move on to what really matters. And yes, it’s the toilet paper issue.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, pure philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots

Tags: almanac, causation, induction, meteorology, ontology, science, sexual categories, shamanism