Epistemic Virtues and Leibnizian Dreams: On the Shifting Boundaries between Science, Humanities and Faith

Abstract

The following discussion considers three aspects of the Sciences-versus-Humanities divide: (1) the historical evolution of disciplines in the modern period through the beginning of the twenty-first century; (2) the epistemology of the sciences versus that of the Humanities as defined and practiced in that same period; and (3) the ways in which the two cultures interact with each other and with religion and faith today. It finds that while it may feel ancient and natural, the historical divide between what are called the Humanities and the Sciences is really quite new and contingent; that no single “scientific” epistemology exists but rather many “epistemic virtues” replace each other over time, often overlapping between the Sciences and Humanities, and that, finally, as the Humanities/Sciences divide increasingly weakens or becomes complicated, as is happening today, knowledge and faith are juxtaposed to a greater degree.

Notes

Notes

1. T. H. Huxley, “Science and Culture,” in Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London: Methuen, 1893–1902), 271–338.

2. Matthew Arnold, “Literature and Science,” The Rede Lecture, Cambridge 1882, published in The Nineteenth Century (August 1882), 216–30.

3. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Canto], 1993).

4. The term “binary economy” is borrowed from Caroline A. Jones and Peter L. Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998).

5. J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Harper and Brothers, 1928), 220–21.

6. Julian Huxley, A Scientist Among the Soviets (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), 60.

7. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1937), 1132–33.

8. J. G. Crowther, Soviet Science (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), 14.

9. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 71.

10. Quoted in Mary Jo Nye, Blackett: Physics, War and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 84.

11. Letter from Orwell to Arthur Koestler, quoted in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 69.

12. E. M. Forster, “The Challenge of Our Time”, B.B.C. Radio, 7 April 1946.

13. Hillary Putnam, “Philosophy and Our Mental Life,” in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 291–303.

14. William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (London: Cass, 1967); John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1973).

15. Frederick von Hayek, “Scientism and the Study of Society,” Economica, n.s. 9.35 (1942): 267–91.

16. Thomas Carlyle, “On History” (1830), in The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present, ed. Fritz Stern (London, 1970), 95.

17. H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London, 1936), p. v.

18. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1957).

19. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins, vol. 2 (London, 1983), 65–68.

20. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, trans. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detriot, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

21. Peter L. Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

22. Of course, we are becoming much smarter today about the possibility of directed adaptation and “informed” rather than “random” variation, but we need not get into that here. I’m referring to Darwin's and almost every one's intuitive feeling.

23. Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926).

24. Various groups have been using the trading zone idea in political contexts—where scientists and non-scientists meet, clash, collaborate. See, for example, Michael Gorman's edited book on the Trading Zone.

25. Quoted in Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibnitz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 76.

26. Ibid., 310–11.

27. See Noam Scheiber, “Science Fiction,” The New Republic, 5 September 2005, on the adoption by ID and religious fundamentalism of a post-modern, relativist strategy in which the assumptions of scientific standards are curiously enmeshed.

28. Einstein, telegram to a Jewish Newspaper, 1929, Einstein Archive 33–272, printed in The Expanded Quotable Einstein, ed. Alice Capaprice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 204.

29. Einstein to Solovine, 1 January 1950, Einstein Archive 21–474, printed in Capaprice, The Expanded Quotable Einstein, 216.