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Sep

2011

'Quixote,' Colbert and the Reality of Fiction - NYTimes.com

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Naturalism Science Literary Criticism Literature

What is fiction? And how does reading fiction affect how we experience the world?
The literary historian Luiz Costa Lima has argued that prior to the invention of fiction, narratives were largely measured against one overriding standard: the perceived truthfulness of their relation to the world. That truth was often a moral or theological one, and to the extent that narratives related the deeds of men, proximity to an image of virtue or holiness would be considered worthy of imitation, and distance from it worthy of opprobrium.
For a prose narrative to be fictional it must be written for a reader who knows it is untrue and yet treats it for a time as if it were true. The reader knows, in other words, not to apply the traditional measure of truthfulness for judging a narrative; he or she suspends that judgment for a time, in a move that Samuel Taylor Coleridge popularized as “the willing suspension of disbelief,” or “poetic faith.”
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- At every step of the way, a fictional narrative both knows more and less than it is telling us. It speaks always with at least two voices, at times representing the limited perspective of its characters, at times revealing to the reader elements of the story unknown to some or all of those characters.
- Like a playwright including a play within a play, with characters dividing into actors and audience members on the stage, Cervantes made his book be about books, and turned his characters into readers of and characters in those books.
- Cervantes multiplies levels of authorship and readership from the first lines of his masterpiece. The front matter of his book is packed with poems of praise ridiculing the practice of packing books with poems of praise; the author’s place of authority is also quickly undermined, as the narrator claims the book to be the work of an Arab historian that he had translated by a market scribe.
  In all cases Cervantes is playing with the previously established conventions of storytelling, and then incorporating that play into his work. The result is a world that mirrors our own, because it includes in its purview our representations of the world and how we judge them. His novel becomes a mise en abyme, with representations of representations of representations, creating characters whose blindness as to the perspectives of those around them becomes the central source of drama and laughter.
- characters can argue about the nature of their perceptions only insofar as we, the readers, have a concept of reality that is independent of their various reports.
- the common notion of objective reality that most of us would recognize today and the one on which Professor Rosenberg’s defense of naturalism rests — as that which persists independent of our subjective perspectives — is mutually dependent on the multiple perspectives cultivated by the fictional worldview. It is not a coincidence that the English term “reality” and its cognates in the other European languages only entered into usage between the mid-16th and early-17th century, depending on the language.
- (In the case of Spain, the first recorded usage was two years after the first book of “Don Quixote” was published.) And it was not until Descartes wrote his “Meditations” at the end of the 1630s that a rigorous distinction between how things appear to me and how they are independent of my perspective entered the philosophical lexicon.
- The fictional worldview, then, is one in which we are able to divide our selves to assume simultaneously opposing consciousnesses, and to enter and leave different realities at will, all the while voluntarily suspending judgments concerning their relation to an ultimate reality.
- This worldview has had an extraordinarily powerful impact on the modern world; in some interpretations it is the very epistemological signature of modernity, affecting equally our thought and politics as thoroughly as it does our art and literature.
- Take the impact on politics. People in the modern, industrialized world tend to ally their identities with large symbolic bodies called nations, and then within those nations with other more intimate groupings — from religious communities to sexual orientations to nuclear family units. Political leaders have become remarkably adept at manipulating the fictional worldview to rally these various levels of identification to their own ends. But if the fictional worldview allows for such manipulation, it also gives us the tools to fight back — tools Cervantes already developed at the dawn of the modern age.

Sep

2011

Why I Am a Naturalist - NYTimes.com

What naturalists really fear is not becoming dogmatic or giving up the scientific spirit. It’s the threat that the science will end up showing that much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life is illusory.

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Naturalism Science Philosophy

Naturalism is itself a theory with a research agenda of unsolved problems. But naturalists’ confidence that it can solve them shouldn’t be mistaken for “dogmatism,” nor can its successes be written off as “slick packaging,” two terms Professor Williamson used in his essay to describe why he rejects naturalism.
While dealing with puzzles that vexed philosophy as far back as Plato, naturalism has also come to grips with the very challenges Professor Williamson lays out: physics may be our best take on the nature of reality, but important parts of physics are not just “abstract,” as he says. Quantum mechanics is more than abstract. It’s weird. Since naturalistic philosophers take science seriously as the best description of reality, they accept the responsibility of making sense of quantum physics. Until we succeed, naturalists won’t be any more satisfied than Professor Williamson that we know what the natural world is. But 400 years of scientific success in prediction, control and technology shows that physics has made a good start. We should be confident that it will do better than any other approach at getting things right.
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- Naturalists recognize that science is fallible. Its self-correction, its continual increase in breadth and accuracy, give naturalists confidence in the resources they borrow from physics, chemistry and biology. The second law of thermodynamics, the periodic table, and the principles of natural selection are unlikely to be threatened by future science. Philosophy can therefore rely on them to answer many of its questions without fear of being overtaken by events.
- “Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?” Professor Williamson asked in his essay. His question may be rhetorical, but the naturalist has an answer to it: nothing that revelation, inspiration or other non-scientific means ever claimed to discover has yet to withstand the test of knowledge that scientific findings attain. What are those tests of knowledge? They are the experimental/observational methods all the natural sciences share, the social sciences increasingly adopt, and that naturalists devote themselves to making explicit. You can reject naturalists’ epistemology, or treat it as question begging, but you can’t accuse them of not having one.
- Naturalism takes the problem of mathematics seriously since science cannot do with out it. So naturalism can’t either. But what about other items on Professor Williamson’s list of disciplines it would be hard to count as science: history, literary theory? Can science and naturalistic philosophy do without them? This is a different question from whether people, as consumers of human narratives and enjoyers of literature, can do without them. The question naturalism faces is whether disciplines like literary theory provide real understanding?
- If semiotics, existentialism, hermeneutics, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism transparently flout science’s standards of objectivity, or if they seek arbitrarily to limit the reach of scientific methods, then naturalism can’t take them seriously as knowledge.
  That doesn’t mean anyone should stop doing literary criticism any more than foregoing fiction. Naturalism treats both as fun, but neither as knowledge
- What naturalists really fear is not becoming dogmatic or giving up the scientific spirit. It’s the threat that the science will end up showing that much of what we cherish as meaningful in human life is illusory.

Sep

2011

Naturalism and Its Limits - NYTimes.com

Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.

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Naturalism Science Philosophy

naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. That is no tautology. Why can’t there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?
Naturalism is not incompatible in principle with all forms of religion. In practice, however, most naturalists doubt that belief in souls or gods withstands scientific scrutiny.
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- What is meant by “the scientific method”? Why assume that science only has one method? For naturalists, although natural sciences like physics and biology differ from each other in specific ways, at a sufficiently abstract level they all count as using a single general method. It involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predictions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is called the hypothetico-deductive method.
- One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method.
- Although a few naturalists, such as W.V. Quine, argued that the real evidence in favor of mathematics comes from its applications in the natural sciences, so indirectly from observation and experiment, that view does not fit the way the subject actually develops. When mathematicians assess a proposed new axiom, they look at its consequences within mathematics, not outside. On the other hand, if we do not count pure mathematics a science, we thereby exclude mathematical proof by itself from the scientific method, and so discredit naturalism. For naturalism privileges the scientific method over all others, and mathematics is one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of human knowledge.
- Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History? Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its bite. Naturalists typically criticize some traditional forms of philosophy as insufficiently scientific, because they ignore experimental tests. How can they maintain such objections unless they restrict scientific method to hypothetico-deductivism? But if they are too exclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its credibility, by imposing a method appropriate to natural science on areas where it is inappropriate. Unfortunately, rather than clarify the issue, many naturalists oscillate. When on the attack, they assume an exclusive understanding of science as hypothetico-deductive. When under attack themselves, they fall back on a more inclusive understanding of science that drastically waters down naturalism. Such maneuvering makes naturalism an obscure article of faith. I don’t call myself a naturalist because I don’t want to be implicated in equivocal dogma. Dismissing an idea as “inconsistent with naturalism” is little better than dismissing it as “inconsistent with Christianity.”