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A Philosophy for Interdisciplinary Studies
HUGO MEYNELL
Dr Meynell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Philosophy and Theology at the University of Leeds; his books include 'An
Introduction in the Philosophy of Bernard Lonergan", "Sense”, Nonsense and
Christianity", "Grace versus Nature" and “New Theology and Modern Theologians.”
The open-mind
Interdisciplinary researcher will frequently find it necessary to
reject the canons of established disciplines as restrictive dogmas. Is
there a set of criteria that can be substituted as a guide to the
scientific enquirer?
Readers of this journal know
that an increasing number of scientists and scholars from a wide range of
disciplines believe that Velikovsky has made discoveries of outstanding
importance, or at least that his proposals merit careful consideration. On
the other hand, an even greater number say or have said that he is a crank,
and that his theories are simply not worth serious examination. If this
disagreement is to get beyond the stage of mutual mudslinging, it would seem
necessary to clarify the question of when and why a theory which is
radically at variance with accepted beliefs is to be taken as a possible
candidate for being true, or at least closer to the truth than its rivals.
Is there any general method of objective enquiry, that is, of the sort of enquiry
which is liable to lead to the truth about things; and if so, what is it?
To put what is in effect the same thing in another way, by offence against
what canons does the crank show himself to be a crank? Considering that all
of us, and not only scientists and scholars, assume that we can set out
methodically to find out what is the case, it is curious how much difficulty
philosophers have found in setting out, to each other and to the lay public,
just how it is that we can do so.
Someone might express the doubt whether we do really assume that we can set out
methodically to find out what is the case. I think it is presupposed by the
belief, which is surely universal, that at least on some matters, one has
knowledge of something of which one was previously ignorant. It is
certainly implied by the very generally held belief that, on some topics at
least, educated men of the twentieth century know more than did any of their
predecessors. And every now and then persons change their beliefs about
what is the case, and, however much they may admit to being swayed on
occasion by inaccurate information or wishful thinking, they would say that
such changes are at least occasionally for adequate reason. So I think it
can be taken as established that what I have called objective enquiry can
and does occur.
It is in spelling out what such objective enquiry consists in that the difficulties
arise. Very roughly, philosophers may be divided up into empiricists and
rationalists, according to whether they stress rather the role of
experience, or that of ratiocination, in the objective enquiry by which we
may come to know what is the case about the world. A great many examples of
what it is to come to know where we were previously ignorant in the affairs
of ordinary life seem to support the empiricist view. Suppose I wish to
know whether there are tufted duck on the nearest reservoir. All the
reasoning in the world will not resolve the matter; but if I look, and see
the birds there, that will resolve it immediately. I was previously
ignorant on the matter; now I know; the crucial difference between
conjecture and knowledge is made by the experience of seeing.
Still,.this kind of account will scarcely do for all matters on which one
could reasonably be said to pass from ignorance, or false belief, or mere
conjecture, to knowledge. It is now established, with as much
certainty as is available in such matters, that the air which we breathe
contains a small quantity of the inert gases argon and neon. Now I
certainly cannot see, smell or feel the argon in the air in the same sort of
way that I might see or smell the smoke in the neighborhood of a wood fire.
That air contains argon and neon has been found out as a result of a series
of enquiries, hypotheses, and tests of these hypotheses; experience, what
people in laboratories saw or heard, certainly came into it, but was by no
means the whole story. To judge by this example, to come to know is
not just a matter of (I) experience, but also of (II) propounding of a range of hypotheses, and of (III)
determining which of the hypotheses is liable to be true by appeal to
such experience. At this rite, empiricists and rationalists would both
seem to be partly right; to come to know is partly a matter of attention
to experience, partly of ratiocination.
Similar principles apply to historical knowledge as to this scientific example,
and perhaps more obviously so. If I want to find out what happened at
the Battle of Actium, or at the Second Council of Constantinople, I
cannot go and take a look at either event, however, I can take a look at
evidence in documents and on monuments which will enable me to
determine, with some degree of confidence, among the many hypotheses as
to what might have happened at the Battle of Actium or the Second
Council of Constantinople, what actually did happen. In this
example, too, knowledge is come by exercise of the three capacities
mentioned in the last paragraph. It is by the persistent application
of them—by (I) attending to experience, (II) intelligently concocting a
range of hypotheses, and (III) reasonably affirming the hypothesis best
supported by the evidence of experience—that the human race has come by
natural science and scientific history. Let us call these capacities,
following BERNARD LONERGAN, "attentiveness", "intelligence", and
"reasonableness"[1]. In fact, it is Lonergan who is the pioneer in the
kind of interdisciplinary philosophy whose nature and implications I
wish to describe shortly here [2].
The exercise of these capacities, to a greater or lesser degree, is of
course not peculiar to scientists and scholars, but common to men at
large. A human movement or noise does not count as action or speech
strictly speaking unless it expresses or presupposes some judgement
based on some understanding of some experience. The bushman who
correctly concludes, from a scratch in the sand scarcely visible to the
naked eye of the average European, that an animal of a certain breed has
passed in the last few hours, has been attentive, intelligent and
reasonable in a high degree. So, to a lesser extent perhaps, has the
small child who detects his mother in a lie in the following example.
He has attended to the sound of his father slamming a door and stamping
his way out of the house; he has intelligently canvassed the
possibilities both that his parents have been quarreling. and that they
have not been quarreling (the latter earnestly asseverated by his
mother); he has reasonably concluded on the evidence, including his
mother's likely motivation in the matter, that the former possibility
represents the truth. That human beings, when they act and speak at
all, are at least to a small extent attentive, intelligent and
reasonable, is the basis of the distinction between the natural and the
human science. In the case of the human sciences, not only the
investigator himself, but the individual or group or community which he
is investigating, is more or less attentive, intelligent and
reasonable. "Ideology" is a term which is much abused; but one may
properly stigmatize a particular judgement or overall view as
"ideological" so far as it is based on avoidance or restriction of
attentiveness, intelligence and reasonableness in deference to emotions
or desires. When in the grip of ideology, I dare not risk considering
a judgement of fact or value, which is perhaps part of the basis of my
whole way of life, on its own merits; so, to preserve my own peace and
comfort, I refuse to attend to inconvenient evidence, and avoid
consideration of frightening possibilities.
How do these
considerations apply to Velikovsky's work and its reception'? In recent
work about t the philosophy and sociology of science, we have heard a
great deal about "paradigms" [3]. These are very general accounts of
their fields held by communities of scientific specialists, which
undergird all particular theories about these fields and direct
research within them. It seems quite useful and unexceptionable to say
that all sciences beyond a certain stage of development (except in
periods of crisis and fundamental change) are characterized by
"paradigms" of this kind; but other statements made about them seem much
more questionable. For example, it is argued that "paradigms" cannot be
justified by appeal to what is independent of themselves; the reason
given for this is that it is only within and in terms of the paradigm
itself that justification can take place [4]. If a proponent of
Aristotelian dynamics is arguing with a champion of Galileo's ideas on
the matter, there is no common ground on which the contestants can meet;
what is counted as evidence by one party will not be counted as evidence
by the other. Further, and in consequence of this last view, it is
maintained that it is misleading to say that one paradigm is more "true"
than another, or that one gets closer and closer to the truth as one
paradigm succeeds another—say, when the pre-Copernican cosmology is
succeeded by the Copernican, or that of Newton by that of Einstein
[5].
If to defy a reigning paradigm is to be a crank, then VELIKOVSKY, who has
defied at least three paradigms, in astronomy, paleontology and ancient
history, is triply a crank. But then, Copernicus and Galileo were
cranks for exactly the same reason. It might be. objected that the
scientific community later came round to accepting the main contentions
of Copernicus and Galileo, so therefore they were not cranks. But if
this is the criterion, then we simply do not know whether Velikovsky
is a crank or not, because we do not know what the scientific community
of the coming decades or centuries will make of him. If it is claimed
that Copernicus and Galileo had good reason for rejecting the paradigms
which prevailed in their time, and commending alternatives, it has to be
asked of what nature these "good reasons" were, which render their
innovations examples of scientific progress, Velikovsky's not so. In
any case, to talk as though them could be good reasons for choosing
between paradigms is to have abandoned the principle that reasoning and
the evaluation of evidence in an established science (apart from the
exceptional circumstances of "revolution" when there is for a time no
reigning paradigm [6] can only take place within a paradigm.
And to accept that principle, especially if one makes the very natural
inference that the question of whether any one paradigm is true, or at
least truer than some alternative, is a pointless or senseless one, is
to be driven to some pretty paradoxical consequences. According to the
astronomical paradigm of the 1970's, quasars and pulsars exist, and
indeed have existed for many millions of years; whereas according to
the paradigms which reigned in the 1950's and at all earlier times,
there were no such things. But if they exist, and have existed for a
very long time, then the earlier paradigm was false so far as it failed
to acknowledge their existence, the later is true so far as it
acknowledges it. Similar examples can be taken from paleontology. A
few centuries ago, if someone had been given a description of a
dinosaur, and asked whether such a thing had ever existed on earth, he
would certainly have said no, whereas most educated people would now say
yes.. There is thus a perfectly clear sense in which, if dinosaurs
really did exist, the earlier paradigms were false as regards the
matter, our own paradigm true.
If there is thus a clear sense in which one paradigm may represent the
truth better than another, the question inevitably arises, by what token
does it do so, and how can we know whether it does so or not? This
question leads, it seems to me, to a much saner doctrine of paradigms,
in accordance with which they are to be accepted only in deference to
what one might call the "super-paradigm". This is, in a nutshell, that
the truth about things is to be known only by dint of the unstinting
application of the mental capacities already described, of
attentiveness, intelligence and reasonableness. What the exponents of
each of the mature sciences take for granted is due to sustained and
intensive exercise of these capacities in the field by generations of
specialists. Attention to the super-paradigm indicates why once the
geocentric cosmology was a reasonable option for educated people, as an
explanation of the data then available, but is now no longer so. We do
not feel as though we were on a globe spinning and hurtling
through the heavens. There are not constant gales of above hurricane
force blowing always in one direction; the oceans, give or take a few
tidal waves, remain in general remarkably stable, rather than pouring
incontinently over the whole surface of the earth. From early times,
it was known that there were phenomena somewhat awkward to explain, like
the motions of the planets; but no alternative explanation presented
itself which seemed in the least adequate. In course of time, the
number of awkward phenomena mounted up; and the heliocentric cosmology,
when it came, and once its full implications were worked out, was found
to explain not only the phenomena which were awkward on the earlier
point of view, but those which seemed most obviously to confirm it as
well. A view of the matter which was obviously reasonable when less
data had been attended to, and when relatively few possible explanations
had been thought of and tried out. is by no means reasonable when these
conditions no longer obtain.
In the light of the "super-paradigm", the thing to bear in mind about any
paradigm is that it is the fruit of attentiveness, intelligence and
reasonableness as exercised by the community of specialists concerned so
far. It is always possible that more evidence will turn up; that more
theoretical possibilities will be thought up to cope with the evidence
available; or that it will turn out to be more reasonable after all to
accept as probable a possibility which previously seemed against the
evidence. The consensus of the community of specialists does indeed
have a relative authority within a field; one is not a specialist
except in so far as one has been in a better position to attend to the
relevant evidence, to survey the accounts of it which have been
suggested, and to make a reasonable choice of the one most likely to be
correct. But it may be that some solitary specialist, or even
someone outside the specialty [7], may advert to evidence which was
previously unknown or overlooked, or is struck by some fresh
explanatory possibility.
When this happens, and the alleged evidence or the fresh theory is rejected,
especially when they are rejected with contempt, it is worth considering
the other reasons why people hold beliefs besides their being the most
intelligent and reasonable ones to hold on the basis of the available
evidence. Groups of specialists, like other human groups, have been
known to hold views for ideological reasons rather than in deference to
the super-paradigm. Those whose whole mental life has been formed by a
paradigm, whose reputations are staked on it, or who have taught it
assiduously to students over decades, have a heavy emotional investment
in it; they will not be liable to welcome the suggestion that the
evidence is mounting up against it and in favour of some rival account.
Influential figures within a field, with jobs and money in their gift,
cannot quite always be relied upon to have the highest motives in
penalizing or discrediting those who disagree with them; the dismantling
of long-established courses, and the junking of venerable textbooks, can
require a degree of self abnegation of which by no means all are
capable.[*]
It is
true that scientists and scholars simply would not be able to get on
with their work if they attended to the work of every crank who has
views on their subject. The crucial question, as I have already
suggested, is who is a crank and why. Consideration of the
super-paradigm enables one to articulate the distinction between the
crank and the man who is to be taken seriously as a possible
discoverer. A crank properly speaking, on the account I am proposing,
is one who not merely rejects a paradigm or important aspects of it, but
one who does so without deference to the super-paradigm. To test whether
a man who rejects a paradigm is or is not a crank, one has to ask: Does
he understand the paradigm from which he differs, its implications, and
the evidence upon which it is based? Does he understand why it was
originally established, and why, if it did so, it supplanted some
earlier paradigm? Is the evidence which he adduces genuine, and does it
really support his alternative proposal against the paradigm?
The controversy over the
possibility of Velikovsky's theories from the point of view of celestial
dynamics has been well aired, and needs some specialist knowledge to
deal with properly; anyone who thinks that, however brilliant
Velikovsky may be as a speculator, and however scurvily he has been
treated by the scientific establishment, the evidence here is more or
less conclusive against him, should read ROBERT BASS’s articles
[8].
The question of whether Velikovsky's proposals on the redating of
ancient history make him a crank is at least equally instructive, and
illustrates the principles which I have just sketched in a way which is
probably much more intelligible to the average layman. I suppose most
of those who have read a very little about the kingdoms and dynasties of
ancient Egypt assume without question, as I did before reading
Velikovsky on the subject [9], that centuries, decades or even years
assigned to events by historians were reliably established and confirmed
by a great deal of mutually supporting evidence. Now Velikovsky has not
only drawn out the implications of the accepted dating for the events of
ancient history with which he is concerned, and the rival dating which
he advocates himself, with respect to a very wide range of phenomena;
but he has also given a well-documented account of how the accepted
dating was arrived at. This is to the effect that on a number of
hypotheses, none of very great probability, and taken together very
improbable indeed, astronomical data could be and were used to fix exact
dates for a very few events in the late Middle Kingdom and the New
Kingdom of Egypt. A rather remote possibility was, faute de
mieux, accepted categorically; this was the easier since no
independent checking which afforded any degree of precision was
possible. The apparent mutual support which now exists between the
dating of these events and that of many others is entirely deceptive,
since all the other relevant dates have been assigned on the assumption
that the initial hypothesis was correct. Independent checking of a
less precise kind gave rise to anomalies from the first, which have been
increasing in significance and quantity ever since; taken singly, each
of them can not unreasonably be shrugged off—there has seldom been a
hypothesis with any scope in history or natural science which did not
give rise to some difficulty—but taken together, as Velikovsky
presents them, their effect does seem overwhelming. The period of the
domination of Egypt by the Hyksos, traditionally, and consistently with
all other available evidence, reckoned to have lasted about 500 years,
comes out either as embarrassingly short (about 100) or absurdly long
(about 1600); the Greek. the Cypriot, and the Syrian (Ras Shamra)
datings which have been brought into conformity with the Egyptian result
in a "dirk age" of some five to six hundred years, in which nothing
seems to have happened, in the history of these places; archaeologists
have, with quite monotonous regularity, found articles in adjacent
levels in these places which have strong indications of coming some from
the beginning of this "dark age", some from the end; surprises in the
radiocarbon dating of relevant material have been numerous and
bewildering, the more so when one takes into account results whose
publication has been withheld; and perhaps above all, there appears to
he no correlation whatever between the histories of Egypt and Israel,
for all that each of them is apparently very well documented. One is
inclined to say that, if such a multitude of anomalies does not
constitute a case for re-examining the basic assumption which gives rise
to them, especially when an alternative view which copes with them
perfectly well is available, it is difficult to see what such a case
would be.
It
would seem that, on the criteria which I suggested earlier, Velikovsky
is not a crank in relation to the field of ancient history. He has
adduced a vast amount of amply documented evidence which tells against
the "paradigm"; he has advanced an account of his own which seems to
cope with the evidence perfectly well; and he is able to give a
convincing account of how the paradigm was arrived at in the first
place. An account by a defender of the accepted chronology of how it
was arrived at, which makes it seem more worthy of credence than it
does on Velikovsky's account, seems urgently called for.
Study of the reaction of
the scientific community to Velikovsky's theories—of what is known as
"The Velikovsky Affair"—is notoriously inclined to provoke people not
only into speculations about matters of fact and theory, but into the
making of value judgements. It is one thing to aspire to know the
truth; it is another (though certainly a related) thing to aspire to do what
is good and right. (One ought, among other things, to try to ascertain the
truth. arid one can hardly do the right thing without knowledge of the
relevant facts.) Bernard Lonergan has distinguished what he has termed
"the four transcendental precepts", the first three, which I have already
described as constitutive of the "super-paradigm", concerned with the
finding out of what is true, the fourth necessary in
addition if one is to do what is good: "Be attentive, be intelligent,
be reasonable, be responsible “[10]. It is one thing for me to come to
the conclusion that I have wronged another person, and that I ought to
make amends; it is another for me to decide actually to do so. It is
one thing to judge, on the basis of the available evidence that a man
has been badly treated by the scientific or scholarly community; it is
another to decide to do something about it. And it may be a highly
responsible act for a scientist or scholar seriously to re-examine the
case for the paradigm on which he was brought up, and on the assumption
of the truth of which he has made his reputation; to make sure whether
strenuous exercise of attentiveness, intelligence and reason will really
indicate that it is still the best option available.
And it
is no wonder, in the circumstances, that there should often occur what
Lonergan has called a "flight from insight". a refusal to consider a
possibility when the consequences of doing so would be too frightening,
or inconvenient, or disturbing to one's ingrained habits of thought and
behaviour [11]. There are all sorts and degrees of flight from insight,
ranging from the virtually: inevitable reaction to extreme trauma in the
infancy of the individual (as described by FREUD) or the history of the
community (as postulated by Velikovsky), to the habit of shirking
inconvenient evidence and avenues of enquiry which might be established
over the course of time by a tyrannical parent or employer or a
privileged race or class. In both types of case, some restriction or
misdirection of attentiveness, intelligence and reasonableness will be
engaged in to make life tolerable; the community which has survived
will evolve a myth, the individual or class who lives a life at the
expense of others will construct a respectable story of what he or it is
up to.
A central problem both for the historian and the psychoanalyst is to get
at what really happened from the myth or the respectable story.
Lonergan has in fact applied his philosophy to constructing theories of
interpretation and history; the general outlines of these will probably
be clear to the reader from what has already been said [12]. Every
account of things held by an individual, or shared in common by a
society or group within it, is to be understood as due to a mixture of
attention and inattention to evidence, of intelligent understanding and
lack of understanding, of reasonable judgment and absence of judgment,
of responsible decision and refusal to decide. How do these principles
apply to the reconstruction by an historian of a catastrophic event of
the past from a myth'? Those who underwent the catastrophe did not have
the range of explanations of the arrival of comets, the coming of
earthquakes, etc., available to men of later generations. The forms of
explanation which they took for granted—the family commotions and
squabbles of very anthropomorphically conceived gods—, quite apart
front the sheer terror to which they were subjected, would certainly
affect what they thought they, observed, as well as what they thought
worth remembering and telling their children. What we would regard as
a crucial clue might have been reckoned by them as a mere flounce by a
goddess in the course of a celestial family row. The contemporary
investigator must exert his attentiveness, intelligence and
reasonableness to the uttermost—in assembling the relevant evidence,
in thinking up a range of possible explanations, and in preferring the
explanation which copes with the evidence best—to determine on what
combination of attention and inattention, of intelligence and deficiency
of intelligence, of reason and failure of reason, the myths were
constructed on the basis of what was observed and undergone, and so, bit
by bit, by comparison of a large number of myths from a wide range of
cultures, a probable account of what actually happened can be built up.
It may be noted that exactly the same general principles should be
applied in the discovery of what really happened in the infancy of a
neurotic patient; his own recollections, which would be of a nature to
render the actual events tolerable to himself, would have to be compared
with those of members of his family, each of whom would have a bias of
his own to be taken into account. Investigation of how a nation formed
an empire, or how a ruling class established itself in a society, would
follow the same lines.
The interdisciplinary
philosophy due to LONERGAN. which I leave been trying to sketch, may be
commended as doing justice to the opposed viewpoints of empiricism and
rationalism; as taking account of the great achievements of Western
science without the slightest tendency to rule out a priori
views of the world which are more "primitive"; as being neither
positivist nor relativist, but promoting a kind of "objectivity," which
adequately accommodates our knowledge of human “subjects"; as offering
a solution to well-known problems in contemporary philosophy of science;
and as providing the basis for a practical philosophy through which
rival moral and political views may be impartially compared and
evaluated. It does have other applications; the case of religion ought
just to be mentioned, where the conclusions drawn by Lonergan from his
principles, whether validly or otherwise, are thoroughly, subversive and
shocking. But what I have been specially concerned with is with the
bearing of these principles on the proper evaluation of Velikovsky's
work; if I persuade anyone to investigate the matter a little further,
this article will have achieved what it set out to do.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
[1]
B. J. F. Lonergan: Method in Theology (Darton, Longman & Todd,
1972), pp. 20, 53, 55 ,231-2.
[2]
The principal source for this philosophy is Lonergan's Insight: A
Study of Human Understanding (Longmans, Green & Co., 1957). For a
simplified account of the basic argument, cf. H. Meynell: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Bernard Lonergan (Macmillan,
London, 1976).
[3] The term used in this sense was put into currency by T. S. Kuhn in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).
[4]
Kuhn, op. cit., p. 93.
[5]
Ibid., pp. 169-70.
[6]
Ibid., pp. 5-6
[7] Kuhn
says that really important discoveries in a specialty are often made by
comparative newcomers to it: ibid., p. 90.
[8] R.
W. Bass: "Did Worlds Collide?", Pensee IVR VIII (1974), pp. 8-20:
"'Proofs' of the Stability of the Solar System", ibid., Pp. 21-26,
reprinted in Kronos Vol. II, No. 2 (1976), pp. 27-45 and in this
issue of SISR. [See also idem,;"Can Worlds Collide?".
Kronos Vol. I, No. 3 (1975). pp. 59-71 —Ed.]
[9] On
the manner in which the conventional chronology was established, cf. I. Velikovsky:"Astronomy and Chronology", Pensee IVR IV, pp. 38-49,
reprinted as a Supplement to idem.: Peoples of the Sea (Sidgwick &
Jackson, 1977).
[10]
There is an elegant philosophical argument which can be used against those
who would deny the indispensability or even the existence of these basic
mental capacities. Do they do so as a result of having attended to the
relevant evidence, of having intelligently grasped the possible
explanations, of having reasonably judged that the thesis which they are
advancing is to be preferred to its rivals on the basis of the evidence, of
having reasonably decided to speak their minds accordingly? If they do not,
there is no point in taking them seriously; if they do, they have exercised
these capacities in the very act of arguing against them. Cf.. Method
in Theology, pp. 17-18.
[11]
Insight, pp. xi-xiv, 199-203.
[12]
Ibid., chapter XV; Method in Theology, chapters 8 and 9.
S.I.S, REVIEW VOL. III
[*]
For a survey of some aspects of the response of scientists to
unorthodox ideas, see also Brian Martin: "The Determinants of
Scientific Behaviour", in SISR 11:4, pp. 112-8 —Ed. |