Re: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism

> When you write "attacks on MN are not consistent," I need to know whose attacks you are speaking about. First, are they coming from outside of the USA, i.e. the place where MN was coined? Second, are they coming from inside of natural sciences or outside of natural sciences? <

If methodological naturalism is defined as the premise that
explanations using physical laws are a good approach to a wide variety
of situations, then it is an assumption that we use every moment. We
assume that floors, chairs, keyboards, our muscles, etc. will behave
in consistent ways under consistent conditions. Both ID-motivated
complaints that science is unduly excluding their approach and
postmodern claims that science is merely a social construct with no
more validity as a description of the physical world than anything
else one wants to dream up run afoul of this. It is perfectly true
that appeals to "teach only science" can cover attempts to exclude
theological views. It is also true that the practice of science is
affected by social factors. Neither of these proves that MN is wrong
and should be abandoned; they merely suggests that there are limits-on
the one hand philosophical reasons to expect exceptions and on the
other hand reasons to expect actual human attempts at discerning
natural patterns to be flawed. But in practice I mainly see attacks
on MN as excuses to ignore its results where it has been successful
rather than rightly identifying its limits.

> My view, which I think has been consistently expressed at ASA, though not always temporally so (due to time constraints), has shown that MN privileges certain voices in the academy at the cost of others. As an example, the idea of invoking MN as if it was significantly relevant in anthropology or economics, is highly questionable. Your contention that then 'those may not be sciences' is an affront to their position as rigourous scholarly disciplines that have an important impact on social and personal lives. This kind of privileging of natural science, seen through the pseudo-philosophy of MN, betrays the integrity of the academy by fragmenting rather than seeking to unite its voices.<

There are a number of ways in which MN does apply in anthropology and
economics, though rarely can one trace things all the way to a law of
physics. More importantly, the above presupposes the premise that MN
or science are designations that indicate that something is better.
Something can be a rigorous scholarly discipline with important
impacts without being a science. (There may be a semantic issue here
in that "science" is used more broadly of scholarly disciplines in
other languages and in older English usage than in modern English,
where it is largely associated with natural sciences). Of course,
it's popular to represent one's own and related fields as superior
(I've heard the classification of academic departments into real
majors and hobbies, for example), and academic politics can set fields
against each other. Perhaps related to that is the potential for
bureaucratic opinion that areas that bring in more money are more
important, and natural science has much more in the way of grants than
most academic fields. (However, this tends to leave all academic
fields as losers relative to athletics and maximizing tuition income
by keeping students happy.)

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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