Steve Fuller

TV legal dramas have made us familiar with the phrase “MO”, modus operandi. This phrase deserves greater currency in philosophy. It suggests that understanding an agent’s style of operation offers insight into her motive, if not identity. What, then, is the MO of a truth-seeker? For example, is it to believe what highly reliable and esteemed people believe about some matter? In that case, my beliefs should shift as the experts’ do.  Or, is it to appear respectful to all views, especially those on the extremes of credibility, i.e. those whose minority or majority status is clearly flagged? In that case, I should treat my conformity to expert belief as a private matter (which will be vindicated in the aggregate anyway) and allow others their differing beliefs as long as they are not foisted upon everyone else.

I find neither option satisfying because there is no reason to think that the truth has anything to do with what I believe. This doesn’t mean I stop believing what I do or, as a sceptic or Buddhist might, stop holding beliefs altogether. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the truth is ultimately beyond my comprehension. Rather, I take seriously the idea that holding beliefs, understood as informed mental dispositions, is only one among several ways at our disposal to access, however fallibly, the truth. Another, occasionally more effective, way is to defend a position one does not believe. Needless to say, you will find it hard to accept my argument, if you regard a Romantic virtue like sincerity as part of the MO of a truth-seeker.

But why does the idea of an insincere truth-seeker seem so intuitively implausible? Two reasons stand out.

The first source of implausibility is our default epistemic egoism: We presume that we would not have survived long enough to address this very question, were not most of our beliefs true. On such a view, most of the falsehoods we utter are lies, that is, statements that contradict our beliefs. In that case, insincerity works at best as a brief ironic interlude against an otherwise epistemically reliable backdrop of sincere belief.  While such a position undoubtedly flatters us, it also renders mysterious the idea that truth is something that must always be struggled for, not least because it so easily eludes our grasp. Epistemic egoism is much too complacent to sustain the idea that truth is something “sought” rather than simply “revealed”.

The second reason we intuitively recoil from the idea of insincere truth-seeking is that we routinely conflate the verbal assertions entailed by our beliefs and statements that we are willing to defend publicly. This conflation is achieved via an omnibus category of “intellectual responsibility” that compels us to say what we believe and believe what we say. But for purposes of truth-seeking, what really matters is that we are willing to defend, or ideally justify, whatever we say – regardless of whether we believe it. A deep but unappreciated point about the history of epistemology is that the inventor of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, was a lawyer by training who regarded experimentation as an inquisition conducted on nature: One’s mettle – human or otherwise – is proven exclusively by the integrity of one’s responses to the inquisitor’s probes.

I draw a strong distinction between what I believe and what I believe needs to be said. The distinction presupposes that knowledge is a collective enterprise, all of whose members potentially benefit from any one of them managing to achieve, or at least approximate, the truth. However, it does not follow that the best way to do this is by trying to establish the truth for oneself as a fixed belief and then making it plain for all to hear or see, so that it might spread like a virus, or “meme”, as Richard Dawkins might say. In the case of deep or complex matters, it might take too long to form a belief that one is willing to promote as true. But potentially more worrisome is that one might form beliefs too quickly and stick to them too tenaciously, which might attract followers but for the wrong reasons – namely, a desire to conform to a position whose apparent strength is also likely to attract others: aka the herd mentality.

So, how best to contribute to the knowledge enterprise? My answer is that you should say what needs to be said in a situation where you are well-positioned to say it. If knowledge is indeed a collective enterprise of indefinite longevity, then each of us plays an extended walk-on role. The hard part is figuring out the plot of this soap opera. Intellectual history is certainly written this way. Figures make a difference to what Richard Rorty popularised as “the conversation of mankind” by responding in interesting and pertinent ways to other figures. But how do you know they have? Turn the page – or tune in next week!  Is it important whether, say, Kant believed his transcendental arguments as much as Hume believed his sceptical ones?  Of course not. For all we know, Kant and Hume were lying or bluffing. But, epistemologically speaking, all that matters is that they prompted others to respond in ways that we take to have moved us all closer to the truth. That’s what makes them, quite literally, great philosophical actors.

 So, then, how do I determine what to say? Here is a handy step-by-step procedure:

1. What has been already said – especially said well and recently?  Whatever you do, don’t say those things.
2. What could you say of significance that hasn’t been said?
3. Of those things, which ones could you get away with saying?
4. Of those things, which ones are you willing to develop further in the face of various forms of resistance?
5. Of those things, which ones come with a pretext likely to promote maximum exposure, participation and impact?
6. That’s what you say – and Godspeed!

If you are scandalised by this MO, then you may secretly harbour a religious need for mental transparency that would render your words a window into your soul. Transparency of this sort has always dampened free critical inquiry. Publicity of thought is fine: Back up what you say with something we can see. But to ask, however innocently, “Do you really believe what you’re saying?” is to restrict the terms of discourse by forcing an immediate resolution of all the ambiguities, qualifications and reservations that might otherwise play themselves out in a more liberal context of inquiry. 

It is easy to forget nowadays that the original 18th century Enlightenment was not a time when people measured their words according to their beliefs. On the contrary, it was a golden age of irony, role-playing and, indeed, considerable scepticism – most famously Hume’s – about the very existence of a soul that might deliver a coherent statement of belief. What made the Enlightenment so controversial in its day was not so very different from what makes postmodernism so controversial today: Both suspend belief in established epistemic authority without necessarily endorsing an alternative. The difference is that nowadays the Vatican has been replaced by the Royal Society, and the critical function of something called “Reason” by something else called “Deconstruction”.

The most influential school of the philosophy of science in the 20th century, logical positivism, also insisted on this strong distinction between transparency of mind and publicity of thought. For the positivists, only the latter mattered to the conduct of science. This led them to focus, perhaps to exaggeration, on the role of testing theories against the evidence, ideally in the form of experimental hypotheses. Whatever their shortcomings, the positivists were clear that proposing a scientific theory is not like taking a loyalty oath or professing a religious commitment. A young fellow-traveller of the positivists, Karl Popper, turned this point into a general philosophy of the “open society”, on the basis of which he criticized the likes of Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn for treating science as a kind of faith-based community.

These abstract points of social epistemology acquire concrete purchase upon considering the US Supreme Court ruling, Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). Here the justices decided that the mere presence of religious motivation is sufficient to disqualify a theory from science instruction in state-supported schools. To philosophical eyes, this looks like a blatant commission of the genetic fallacy, especially given how much of today’s science was the product of religiously inspired inquirers. I mean here not only physicists like Newton and Maxwell but also biologists like Carolus Linnaeus and Gregor Mendel, the former responsible for the modern taxonomy of species, the latter for the fundamental principles of heredity. However, the justices set their sights on Christian fundamentalists who reject Darwin’s theory of evolution because it contradicts the Genesis account of divine creation. But why not simply ban the teaching of false science rather than worry about the perpetrators’ motives?

As it turns out, over the years creationists have come to take seriously Francis Bacon’s original idea that the scientific method is content-neutral. In other words, once a theory, whatever its religious or ideological origins, has passed certain publicly observable trials, it becomes scientifically respectable – no matter how much that upsets the established scientific community. Creationists are helped by the fact that today’s secular school systems presume the validity of Darwin’s theory. Positioned as underdogs, they are now defending the right for their alternative theory to be taught alongside - not instead of - Darwin’s. This in turn has spawned a “teach the controversy” approach to biology instruction, epitomized in a new textbook promoted by Seattle’s Discovery Institute, Explore Evolution. Even creationism’s strongest opponents admit that its arguments are getting harder to defeat as creationists play more by the rules of science. However, because the US Constitution mandates a separation of church and state, these efforts at scientific gamesmanship can be short-circuited by simply citing the ultimately religious motivation for “creation science”.

In this context, the version of creationism known as “intelligent design” (ID) theory made life especially difficult for the US legal system because it cast all of its arguments in scientific terms, often capitalising on biological phenomena that Darwinists admit they find difficult to explain. Moreover, the specific focus on design tapped into historically deep regulative ideals of science, notably what Leibniz and Kant called “the intelligibility of nature” – that is, the idea that nature is constructed so that we may understand it. The most obvious source of this assumption is that humans have been created in the image of the divine creator: We can make systematic sense of reality because our own minds are micro-versions of the creator’s. To be sure, an assumption is hardly a proof.  Nevertheless, in a time when films like The Matrix and philosophers like David Chalmers popularise the idea that reality may be the output of a complex cosmic computer, and indeed the simulation is increasingly replacing the laboratory and the field as the site of original scientific research, ID’s version of the “God Hypothesis” is not without a certain intuitive plausibility.

Here my own MO as a truth-seeker comes into play. I agreed to serve as an expert “rebuttal” witness in the first US trial to test ID as fit for public science instruction, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005). In other words, my testimony addressed the arguments of those who thought ID had no place in science classes. As a tenured professor steeped in the history, philosophy and sociology of science, I was well prepared for the task and relatively immune from whatever adverse consequences might follow, which in fact never went beyond “personal abuse”. Given the suspicions of ID as “warmed over” creationism, I had no illusions that this was anything other than a thankless task. At the same time, I held no strong personal views about whether life was “intelligently designed” (in some sense) or, as Darwinists maintain, the product of “chance-based processes” (in some sense). If anything I was slightly biased to the latter. So I was genuinely curious what the Darwinian response to a robust defence of ID’s inclusion in the curriculum would look like.

As it turns out, and somewhat to my surprise, the arguments invoked to oppose ID were remarkably weak – at least from a philosophical standpoint. Of course, the religious motivation of ID supporters was easy to spot, and that settled the matter for a judge who simply upheld the Edwards judgement that religiosity is tantamount to original sin in the pursuit of science.

What made the anti-ID arguments so philosophically weak was their repeated reliance on a winner-take-all approach to the history of science. Thus, Darwinism, by virtue of its current dominance in biology, is presumed to be exclusively entitled to interpret all research in the discipline to its advantage, even though much of it had been done, and might now be used, by those opposed to Darwinism. Moreover, without this exclusive epistemic licence, Darwinism is open to familiar questions from the philosophy of science about how evidence from heterogeneous sources can be integrated in support of highly general claims. In particular, how are results produced under the artificial conditions of today’s labs or computers supposed to “confirm” events and processes that took place in the mists of time, especially when the closest we have to direct evidence of the evolutionary past – the fossil record – requires the interpretation of radiometric data that are themselves contestable? 

To be sure, lower-level disputes of interpretation regularly occur in each of the natural sciences relevant to the case for evolution. However, it seems that Darwinists, now aided and abetted by the US legal system, wish to prevent these pressure points in the theory from possibly coming together to inspire an alternative to the Darwinian orthodoxy. Indeed, the US National Academy of Sciences would make allegiance to the metaphysical position underlying evolution – naturalism -- a condition for any scientifically sanctioned dissent. Thus, an exceptionally disagreeable feature of the current controversy is the tendency for evolutionists to call the more scientifically literate ID theorists “liars”, which pre-empts the need to answer ID’s substantive charges by presuming that not even its own supporters believe them – that is, they “know better”. But when did science enter the confession box, such that I don’t need to take your arguments seriously unless they are served with the right sincerely held beliefs?

One of the few historical generalisations on which philosophers of science agree is what Hilary Putnam originally dubbed the “pessimistic meta-induction”: All theories of wide explanatory scope in science are eventually shown to be empirically false, usually because they overreach their grasp. From that standpoint, Darwinists appear to be postponing the inevitable. Of course, that doesn’t make ID true, but ID may be well-positioned to point out the deep systemic flaws in Darwinism that Darwinists themselves have no incentive to recognise, let alone explore. If that’s true, then insofar as truth-seeking is a collective enterprise at least partly detachable from the scientific fashions of the day, then people who consider themselves part of that enterprise should do what needs to be done to ensure that Darwinism is dialectically foiled. And that may be a role that has my name written on it, and ID may be my prop.

Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He is most closely associated with “social epistemology”, the title of the first of his fifteen books, the most recent of which is Science vs. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution (Polity, 2007). He is President of the sociology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.