Extending the Limits of Human Knowledge

Yesterday, Will Wilkinson lobbed the “mysterian” stone at E.D. over his resistance to seeing happiness as something that can be scientifically quantified,

There are no doubt limits to human understanding, but where that limit is is another damned empirical question. I think the probability that we’ve approached that limit when it comes to the mind or human subjectivity or morality or the conditions of human flourishing is approximately zero. I think science is hard, but it’s just laziness or complacency to think the science of X is impossible or pointless. I think I’m trying to argue that your kind of typically conservative (intellectually, not politically) “mysterianism” is motivated by the assumption that if we actually learned something about a putatively ineffable subject matter, it might matter to how people live.

I often feel like people (albeit a relatively small sub-section of people) misuse the term mysterian when they encounter others who mount some degree of resistance to uniquity of science. Mysterianism has its roots in the philosophy of mind and is a term that has posthumously been applied to those thinkers who argued that the hard problem of consciusness (reconciling the subjective components of conscious experience with the objective information we have about the brain) may not be solvable. The New Mysterians, such as they are, have in some cases extended this sense of unsolvability to more problems than just that of consciousness. It is in this regard that Wilkinson seems to be using the term.

But the whole exercise of labeling those people who question science’s ability to solve all problems as mysterians speaks to the underlying bias with which many of those science resisters are often engaged: reductionism. Modern science has exclusively to do with an understanding of the world that is based upon the study of physical matter and in that regard it provides a system with extraordinary explanatory power. But the best of scientists with whom I’ve ever spoken acknowledge that to take that study one step further and forward the often unspoken premise that therefore all understanding can be reduced the study of physical matter is to misunderstand the exploratory nature of science itself.

The assumption of reductionism is that the only way to know something is to know it scientifically. This isn’t science as science, this is science as dogma. And the resulting concern is that by forfeiting all other modalities of knowing, we lose something important about our understanding of the world. Indeed, it becomes difficult to see how we go about resolving issues of, say, value and ethics, in a world bereft of subjects, where all that has ontological status are rocks, trees, atoms, and the like.

Pushing back against the primacy of scientific knowledge is not to suggest that something cannot be known and understood. It is rather to open up space for other modalities of knowing that might provide equally useful to scientific knowledge, perhaps even complimentary. So I tend to agree with Will that we haven’t come close to reaching the limits of human knowing about any variety of topics, but those limits close in much more quickly when we assume that human knowing means only and ever scientific knowing.

Tagged as: human knowledge, modalities, mysterianism, reductionism, science, Will Wilkinson