How did we get to the point where a respected philosopher of science could place Western science on a par with voodoo and argue that truth in science should be determined by democratic vote? Or that a feminist could call Newton’s Principia a “rape manual”?
In an academic world where such assertions too often call forth neither laughter nor scorn, but serious reflection and measured response, the writings of the late Australian philosopher David Stove are not apt to find a welcome reception. Until recently, Stove was virtually unknown in American circles.
Championed of late by the New Criterion’s Roger Kimball and recommended by notable philosophers of science such as Stephen Stich, Stove has begun at last to get a hearing. A self-proclaimed neo-positivist — and a brilliant, truculent, cantankerous essayist — Stove attacks everything from contemporary philosophy of science and evolutionary theory to religious belief and the intellectual equality of women.
Two of his works are currently available in the United States: Against the Idols of the Age, a selection of Stove’s writings put together by Roger Kimball, and Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism (also available, under a different title, as Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult from Transaction Press). In both volumes, Stove proves a sort of pessimistic satirist, obsessed with laying bare the foibles of the human mind, but with no hope for reform of any sort. Whatever one makes of Stove’s conclusions, he is eminently worth reading, bracing, lucid, and always entertaining.
By far the most persistent target of Stove’s scorn is the contemporary field of philosophy of science. Stove traces the derailment of reasoning about science to the philosophical thought of Karl Popper and, especially, to Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is among the most cited books of the twentieth century. Popper sees induction as always uncertain and feeble: Science, he insists, is not really about “verification” but “falsification.” Since science is essentially a matter of constructing hypotheses and attempting to falsify them, the best it can do is to provide a list of the theories that don’t work.
Kuhn’s work betrays a similar skepticism about progress in science. Kuhn distinguishes between normal science, which operates within an established paradigm, and revolutionary science, which is the period during which rival paradigms vie for the allegiance of the scientific community. Since the rational resolution of disagreement is possible only within an accepted paradigm that provides criteria for settling disputes, there can be no rational conclusion to a conflict between paradigm is a matter of faith, influenced by various mechanisms of propaganda. (From this, yet another philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, drew the natural inference that science itself is merely one paradigm, one worldview, among many, including voodoo. We are living in the jazz age in the philosophy of science, and the theme song is Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”)
Stove lists two reasons for the abandonment of the traditional, progressive, and objective conception of science. First, there was the repulsion felt toward the superficially triumphalist character of nineteenth-century Victorian science. Second, there was the displacement of the Newtonian, mechanistic science by relativity and quantum theory, which gradually eroded confidence in science: If Newton was assailable, nothing remained certain. Of course, the demise of Newton did not actually signal the end of the practice of science or a lapse into anarchy. Even Popper and Kuhn continue to use words like “knowledge,” “discovery,” and “explanation” in their descriptions of scientific activity. These are “success words,” as Stove calls them, words that entail the achievement of truth. Philosophers of science, however, engage in a duplicitous and systematic abuse of language through the neutralization of success words. Popper, for example, uses “irrefutable” and “unfalsifiable” interchangeably, never bothering to note that while the former is a success word, the latter is not. The loss of faith in science led (just as did the earlier loss of faith in religion) to the use of “ironized” words.
One might expect philosophers of science, whose aim is to construct theories about theories, to loose their mooring. But scientific theories themselves, even theories as widely accepted as that of evolution, often rely upon false premises. Emphatically not a creationist, Stove nonetheless anticipates some of the recent criticisms of Darwin’s theory. Stove acknowledges evolution, for which he thinks the fossil record provides incontrovertible evidence. Willing to accept that we have evolved, he dismisses the question of how we evolved as uninteresting.
Darwin’s own answer to that “how question” had recourse to Malthus’s principle concerning the exponential rate of growth of all populations. The natural tendency of all species to increase in numbers sets the stage for competition for scarce resources such as food. In this contest, natural selection operates in such a way that certain species are enhanced and survive, while others are gradually eliminated.
Whatever may be the case for the rest of nature, Stove thinks natural selection does not apply to the human species; in fact, he calls it a slander on our race: The human species regularly adopts practices to limit population and repudiates practices, such as incest, that would maximize population. there is, moreover, no evidence that our species is involved in a constant clash for survival. Of course, Darwinians are nothing if not resourceful in their interpretation of cases and so each counter-example can be reinterpreted as actually providing an “optimum reproductive strategy for the species.” But, Stove counters, this is precisely the problem: “No cases ever do bother” evolutionists.
The dilemma for Darwin is how to account for the manifest contradiction between what we know about human life and what the theory of evolution claims is true of all species at all times. Stove describes three possible responses: cave man, hard man, and soft man.
The cave-man response is that while we once were subject to a ruthless competition for survival, our species long ago escaped from the conditions of natural selection. Of course, this is a tacit admission that the theory is not universally true.
The hard-man response is to insist that the natural order is one of ruthless competition for survival, but that human beings have unwittingly deviated from that order. Those who hold some form of this response often promote the elimination of programs designed to assist those who are ill-suited to open competition — the most famous example being the eugenic elimination of lives unworthy to be lived. The contradiction here is between the alleged inevitability of natural selection and the practice of advocating policies to help the inevitable to reach fruition. As Stove puts it, hard men shouldn’t say that unemployment relief is “deplorable,” but that it’s “impossible.” Although it is considered indecorous to mention the point, Darwin himself proffers a eugenic proposal in the final pages of The Descent of Man.
The soft-man response is that held by the bulk of humanity, including most intellectuals: The soft man simply fails to notice that he’s caught in any kind of inconsistency.
Faced with this range of possible responses to its dilemmas, contemporary evolutionary theory has gone from bad to worse. In a masterful essay in Against the Idols of the Age entitled, “Genetic Calvinism or Demons and Dawkins,” Stove skewers The Selfish Gene. In that book, Richard Dawkins, one of the most popular popularizers of Darwinian theory, describes genes as “hidden, selfish, immoral” with “immense power over us.” Dawkins does caution that we shouldn’t take the notion of selfish genes literally, but it’s not clear in what sense we should take it. Does the self-replicating tendency of genes in any way insure the original gene’s survival? Do genes practice filial piety? Stove locates Dawkins’s thesis in a long line of theories — religious, economic, and psychological — that deny the causal agency of “human intentions, decisions and efforts.” Dawkins’s “genetic puppetry” is yet another tale of “human helplessness.”
According to Stove, theories of helplessness gain a hearing because the “human race is mad.” But Stove is no defender of an intellectual elite. He exhibits his greatest antipathy toward the allegedly learned few. In a volume called The Plato Cult (three pieces from which are included among Roger Kimball’s selections), Stove cites a host of philosophers, from Plato to Foucault, to illustrate the “spectacle of nightmare irrationality” that is characteristic of our intellectual heritage. The “cult of Plato,” which was an integral part of the Renaissance revival, encapsulates the tendency to treat great minds with religious reverence. What we need is a “nosology” of intellectual error, a classification of the diseases that have afflicted the human mind at least since Plato.
Stove does not hope to uncover the single root of all these diseases, which are too numerous and varied even to list exhaustively. And he has no hope for the ultimate victory of reason: Irrationality will always win out, because there are simply too many ways to go wrong. The best Stove can hope is to expose individual cases of corruption where he finds them. Stove is at his entertaining and instructive best when he is deflating the pretension of one or another bloated theory — but he has, as he must, some positive views of his own, and the grounds on which he holds them are not so clear.
One might agree with Stove, for example, that the history of Western science is a success story, a lasting achievement of which is that it has taught us “how to learn.” But does this render the philosophy of science “obvious and superficial”? Stove himself provides no account of how the shift from Newton to Einstein constitutes linear progress, although he insists that it does. There are serious questions here, questions with which Einstein himself wrestled. Stove’s conception of scientific reasoning is so restrained and minimalist that it requires sacrificing part of what constitutes scientific inquiry. One might concur with Stove’s objections to Darwin, but is it reasonable to leave things where Stove does? Should science abandon not only the question of why evolution has occurred, but also the question of how?
Stove’s rationalism is extremely ascetic, by design. As his devastating account of Dawkins shows, he is hostile to theories — unfairly labeled “Calvinist” — that reduce human beings to puppets subject to some omnipotent puppeteer. But then Stove equally resists any hint of “philosophical anthropocentrism” that would seek to save human beings from the painful possibility that the universe is indifferent to their presence. And he is quick to indulge a reductionism of his own when he dismisses religious believers as Calvinists who, in his crude Freudian terms, suffer from an infantile need to be protected.
One wonders how far Stove has distanced himself from the “Calvinist” worldview he so detests. There are, in the end, striking similarities between Stove and Dawkins. Stove’s austere conception of reason, his declaration of the universal madness of the human race, and his assertion of the incapacity of reason to have any positive effect even in the rare instances where it sees the truth — these are perhaps simply a different form of the same secularized Calvinism from which Dawkins himself suffers: a vision of the universe as Calvin’s puppet show, but this time without Calvin’s puppeteer.
Thomas S. Hibbs teaches philosophy at Boston College.
