Knowing what to say

Since I had a go at "other ways of knowing" recently, I feel that I should comment on Steven Pinker's essay on Scientism. PZ Myers gave it a huge serve, and linked to an even bigger one.

In my piece I was careful to say "science (or some broadly similar approach)", because I am not remotely silly enough to imagine that only the fields seen as "science" display a concern for evidence. History is an obvious example.

I was also careful to include mathematics, although really I should have gone more broadly and mentioned logic and philosophy.  These are fields that say "if you assume things that look like this, then you can show things that look like that". This allows a tiny amount of empirical investigation (in showing the assumptions hold) to provide a huge amount of knowledge, as anyone who has ever studied physics can tell you.

But there are many fields that are very important to humanity - art, literature, music - which are not ways of knowing. Often they are ways of communicating facts or emotions or wonder or even just a sense of companionship in a lonely universe. Science may make these better by providing tools for creating them, or providing deeper understanding of how the communication works. Science may change what is to be communicated. But it won't replace them, because that's not what it does.

And some of them, by cultivating imagination and creativity, provide grist for the mills of science by allowing people to think in different ways about what they see (or don't see). Or at least grist for the mills of engineering, by suggesting new things that can be built. Here there is a convergence with philosophy, in that a well-written novel might tell us how humans would behave given certain conditions; it might fall far short of the rigor of logic, but still suggest ideas for more careful investigation.

Having said that, science will remain in conflict with things that claim to be ways of knowing, but have no grounding in reality. Here I'm talking about rubbish like homeopathy, tarot cards, psychics, creationists etc - things that could have been real (in some alternate universe), and that claim to be empirically real, but fail to provide evidence even when given the opportunity.

Pinker's sin, it seems to me from reading the criticism, is to assume that science will eventually know everything and can therefore help these other, lesser fields to advance. It's much truer to say that science can sometimes help other fields to achieve their goals, and that they can sometimes help science to achieve its goals.

My claim is that "other ways of knowing" will either become part of science (rarely) or fade into nothing. As the saying goes, the name for alternative medicine that works is "medicine".