1. The honorific use of “science” and its cognates
2. Inappropriately borrowed scientific trappings
3. Preoccupation with “the problem of demarcation”
4. The quest for “scientific method”
5. Looking to the sciences for answers to questions beyond their scope
6. Denigrating the non-scientific

http://pervegalit.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/haack-six-signs-of-scientism-october-17-2009.pdf
Susan Haack – Six Signs of Scientism – YouTube

Some of what she describes seems like what Richard Feynman had called “cargo cult science”. What might she herself think of that label?

On the demarcation problem, I prefer to avoid it and think of pseudoscience as failed science or seriously flawed science.

Funny you should mention that. I read and blurbed her latest book for her and was planning to blog it next month. Asking her for an interview is a good idea. I’ll do that.

Ms. Daisy: Fine is arguing against the scientific establishment, and only against a few very specific claims in it, not the whole of gender differentiation biology. So let’s not misrepresent that. She does not in fact rebut the point Roo was making. But Fine does rebut extreme, exaggerated, careless, and “pop” versions of it. That is an important difference.

Fine does not even challenge the well-established fact that sex hormones cause physical and neurophysical differences in behavior and perception, for example. And the resulting or related structural differences in the brain are likewise well established and unarguable. Against it “Fine presents no original science but assiduously takes to task those who do, at least where the work seems to show brain gender” (Farrelly). But that practice has its own utility, and Fine does us a service in that respect.

There are certainly many problems and valid criticisms to be made of much of the gender differentiation literature (both methodological and ideological). And Fine’s more cautious conclusion is correct: we ought to exercise considerable caution when linking neural and hormonal sex differences to “accomplishments” or “abilities,” and any science on this question needs to be more rigorous and intelligent than it has been. But Fine confuses that fact with there being no evidence whatever of biological gender differences in the brain, or in behavior, or personality, or even ability. And that’s simply a fallacy. It’s certainly not science.

The biggest refutation of Fine’s less cautious thesis is the existence of transgenderism, and its demonstrable association with observable differences in brain structure, and its resulting differences in feelings, interests, and perceptions.

For an unmistakable analogy, on average women differ in strength from men, and men naturally build muscle faster and more easily than women, and this is biological, not cultural. Thus, men and women do differ in abilities as a result of biology. However, this does not justify the sexist assumption that all women are physically weaker than all men or that no woman can become substantially stronger, with the same effort, than she would be otherwise. I discuss this analogy in detail in my blog Are Women Just Stupid? (where I take on the sexist assumption that the answer is yes).

To carry that analogy over to the brain, it is undeniable that on average women feel some emotions differently (sometimes more readily or strongly) than men, and that this has a biological cause (both hormonal and in terms of brain structure). The obvious example: sexual libido. This varies just like bodily strength (and thus “average” does not mean “all”), but its distribution in any population differs to a measurable degree by gender and this has been solidly linked to biological differences in brain structure and body chemistry. Many other differences occur, from how vision is processed to how emotions are felt, when someone undergoes hormone replacement therapy and changes their body chemistry to that of their cross-sex gender (changes that therefore cannot be explained as cultural constructs but are unmistakably biological). Those differences will not be a product of brain structure, but we know some differences are (gender dysphoria has identifiable correlations with differences in brain structure that precede hormone replacement therapy, although they have a hormonal cause at stages of fetal development affecting brain construction).

So just as Fine argues that we shouldn’t take the scientific claims of cognitive gender differences to any extremes, so we should not take Fine’s criticisms to the opposite extreme.

I do have ideas of how to start such a project. And I may do so in a few years (when I have no other projects). I’ve already got much of the project plan written.

I have no idea how to write system-coherence-testing software, though. I was expecting to use the only one of those that we already have in operation: humans trained in vetting logical syllogisms.

But if you have something more concrete in mind, let’s talk.

Cool. I had a similar problem with the Kitzmiller ruling (although, like Haack, I found it otherwise spot on). I had long been advocating a different solution, but that decision led me to articulate in more detail my original demarcation principle (not between science and nonscience, but between natural and supernatural, which the Kitzmiller decision conflates) in Defining the Supernatural. This then led to an article in Free Inquiry making the case in print, and my work on this has influenced other scientists and philosophers who cite or defend my position in their own publications (e.g. Yonatan Fishman in a 2007 article for Science & Education, also responding to Kitzmiller). I understand how the courts are constrained by precedents on issues like this (the Kitzmiller demarcation principle is built out of prior rulings, not independent philosophical reasoning, and to an extent the judge had no choice in that respect), but I do hope we can get this one changed–for the reasons I lay out in my intro to Defining the Supernatural.

…erasing the difference in sex is illusory — one of the great tenets of the fallacy of imposing PC ideology on the working of the brain.

So actual science is “PC”?

I wonder what Haack would say to the idea of a hypothetical piece of software I’ve contemplated for years now: a world view builder. Some *good* way to represent views metaphilosophically. This is because one of Bunge’s complaints can be read as saying that we have all these little papers about problems, and even if we are convinced that (say) someone has gotten it right, how do we check it against a big picture? Now, Bunge (and in a different way, Haack) are realists – they think one should try, asymptotically, to do this. I have no idea how to start such a project – which I thought also would be good for students.

Incidentally, the “systems building” stuff is so foreign to some contemporaries that they miss its point in otherwise perceptive works. Peter Simons’ classic of mereology, _Parts_, misses one advantage of Bunge’s mereology because he fails to see how it takes part in a system. In this case, it allows proving of a very basic conservation law. A filling in of another “crossword entry” in Haack’s metaphor. (It is interesting to finally hear where that comes from!)

A good read! I had never heard of her, but then I’m only really beginning to get into philosophy. Thanks for introducing me to her work.