Bad Guy Team-Up: ID + SSK

So I was watching NOVA last night--on the Dover "Intelligent Design" case--and found out something interesting. It turns out that Steven Fuller testified for the ID side. Now, you probably don't know who Fuller is. He's a sociologist who writes on the sociology of science, "social epistemology," "SSK" (strong sociology of "knowledge"*) and science studies. And if you're not familiar with that stuff...well, it's a long story, but the short version goes like this: despite some interesting bits, it's basically a swamp of confusions. A little bit of skepticism, a little bit of relativism, a little bit of trendy po-mo social constructionism, a little bit of meat-ax naturalism, a little bit of resentment against philosophy and philosophers**, a lot of social doxastic determinism and sociological tunnel-vision...stir well...and you get a real mess. Typical claims in the area include, e.g., that physical objects can't cause us to have beliefs, only other people can. So, roughly, if you're standing next to a tree, you can't come to believe that there's a tree there unless another person comes along and exerts social pressure on you to believe that there's a tree there. Trees can't cause beliefs about trees, but peer pressure can.*** When put this starkly, most SSK types will backpedal and deny that that's what they think--but that's what they think. If you doubt that, go read Barry Barnes and David Bloor's "Rationalism, Realism, and the Sociology of Knowledge" (though they try to back-pedal, too, in the end).

Anyway, as it turns out, Fuller was in there testifying for intelligent design to be taught in high school science classes. Nice. Bad guy team-up! (Well, confused guy team-up, anyway...)

Now, the thing is that, on a sufficiently broad conception of "intelligent design theory," I might even count as a quasi-advocate of something like that view. I'm at least interested in--and even to some extent sympathetic to--the view that something like intelligence is a real force in the universe, and that there might be some tendency toward order in the world. I don't believe that an agent or person created life, but the kinds of positions I'm sympathetic to would not make a strictly naturalistic biologist happy. I also think that the American educational system would be a lot better if students learned some philosophy in high school--including, perhaps, discussions of the argument from design. (In philosophy class. Not biology class.) So, anyway, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to these guys' position.

Though, of course, Michael Behe and the lot from Dover were basically busted because they were so obviously pushing a religious view for religious reasons. (In one draft of the ID textbook, Pandas and People, researchers found that the ID folk had just gone through an old creationist textbook they'd written and tried to replace 'creationism' and 'creation' with 'intelligent design theory' and 'intelligent design.' The most amusing part of the whole business came when it was discovered that they'd forgotten to delete correctly, and had thus included in one of their manuscripts words like "creaintelligent designtionism." Now there's a transitional form for ya...)

So why is Fuller on the ID side? Well, it isn't clear, but part of the answer seems to lie with the sociological blinders aforementioned. If you've ever been around folks in sociology, you probably know that many of them have a tendency to radically over-estimate the importance of the phenomena they study. (That's common in most disciplines, actually.) That is, they think that social forces--which, make no mistake about it, are very strong--are stronger and more influential than they actually are. They also have a tendency to ignore other important influences on human action--e.g. experience of the physical world and reason. In some places, Fuller states that he testified for the ID folks because they are the losers in a social power struggle for control of biology departments and curricula. Now, there's a confusion in there typical of sociologists of Fuller's type. There is an element of power struggle in all this, but it's not the only element, it's not the major element, and it's only marginally relevant to the question at hand. The court needed to determine whether or not "IDT" is science, and whether or not it was being pushed for religious reasons. Intelligent design theory is not considered bad science because it lost a power struggle in bio departments; rather, it lost out in bio departments because it's bad science. It's considered bad science because it is bad science; though sociologists like Fuller often come dangerously close to saying the reverse. If one could show that it lost out in bio departments solely or primarily because it lost a political battle, then that would be relevant. But you cant' show that. What with it being false and all.

The major problem with the "sociology of knowledge" (more properly referred to as "the sociology of belief") is that it ignores the fact that sometimes the facts cause our beliefs. That is, sometimes we believe things because they are true, or because they are better supported by the evidence. In fact, it is something like an axiom of the strong version of such sociological views that our beliefs can never be explained by facts or evidence, but must always be explained by (non-rational) social forces. What you get, therefore, is basically a self-refuting view that begins with an axiom that virtually entails skepticism and then goes on to try to defend a positive (and very implausible and easily-refuted) theory of human belief-acquisition.

So what we get is, roughly, postmodernism in the defense of old-time religion.

A toxic combination.


*Note: not actually about knowledge at all, but, rather, orthodox belief.

** Seriously. These guys' papers are filled with little tantrums about how much better and smarter and cooler they are than philosophers. They are very angry that no one else will admit this!

*** You might note that it's implausible in the extreme that only a certain species of primate can cause beliefs in us...especially since we only know of the existence of those primates because photons bounce off of them and strike our retinas and so forth...which is, of course, exactly how we know the tree is there, too...