Can we spell ‘Faustian bargain’?
A U.S. think tank long associated with (US) liberal views and the Democratic Party critiques an OECD survey about science on the grounds that it is not enough actually about science, a critique clearly motivated at least in part by concern over feeding Creationism and Intelligent Design:
To define scientific literacy as encompassing beliefs as well as knowledge-a definition also embraced by skeptics of evolution-is a dubious position for any science assessment to take.
Yet it gets dismissed by a grown man and a professor for making an “ideological” critique:
Emeritus professor Peter Fensham, a member of the PISA scientific expert panel from 1998 to last year, said there was little distinction between belief and knowledge.
"People like to sharply distinguish as if it's absolute and true, where in fact knowledge is what we believe to be true," he said.
"Knowledge is a matter of belief; they're very closely related." He dismissed the Brookings report as a "right-wing complaint", saying the US was one of only four countries out of 60-odd that objected to the questions on sustainable development being included in the PISA test.
You could not make this stuff up. Yes, as any first year Philosophy student can tell you, knowledge is a form of belief. Indeed it is justified true belief, though what makes knowledge more than just true belief is one of those questions which philosophers have been arguing over for a long time.
As for distinguishing between knowledge and belief being a “right-wing” complaint, the first response should be Andre the Giant’s (that [term], I do not think it means what you think it means). The second is that I do not really think it is wise to state or imply that only people on the political Right care about the difference between knowledge and belief, particularly regarding the nature and value of science.
Clearly, Prof. Fensham’s concerns are, in fact, blatantly ideological themselves. Nor is he alone in this:
PISA is conducted in Australia by the Australian Council for Educational Research. Its chief executive Geoff Masters said the purpose of science courses was to develop a concern for the environment in students.
… On environmental sustainability, students were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with statements that included making regular emission checks a condition of using a car, and producing electricity from renewable sources as much as possible even if it increased the cost.
Agreement was taken as students having a stronger sense of responsibility, which PISA says is correlated with better scores in the science test.
Is this a moment to point out that correlation is not causation? I think so. Not the least because of the way that beliefs can be status markers.
Here’s the thing. Marrying being “scientific” to being “concerned” is very much a Faustian bargain. Not merely because it requires one to epistemically elevate such concern, thereby having the effect of epistemically undermining science in order to give them equivalent status, as we can see in Prof. Fensham’s deprecation of differentiating between belief and knowledge. This is bad enough, but worse follows.
It also perverts the operation of science. If science is to be justified and supported on the basis of such concern, then such concern becomes the legitimating principle. So science that fails to support such concern because “bad” science, or even “un”science.
Doctrinally, Catholicism is as science-friendly as any religion is likely to be, since, according to Catholic theology, truth is indivisible and the world is God’s direct Creation, while Scripture is humanly mediated, so in studying the world, one is studying the Work of God. Any proven contradiction between how the world is and Scripture is to be resolved in favour of how the world is. (Galileo’s problem was insufficient evidence to state his belief that the Earth went around the Sun other than as a hypothesis: for example not being able to explain why we did not observe the stars moving.) Yet Counter-Reformation Catholicism drove scientific activity into Protestant Europe because priestly control over what was published and what could be said put a dampener on scientific activity and publication. The priests were much more concerned about their authority, and the authority of their doctrines, than the good of science.
Priests are natural vectors for intellectual control-due to their claims to hold the authoritative truth-and for bigotry-since operating as community “gatekeepers”, dividing the social world between the Godly “Us” and the Ungodly “Them”, gives them power and status. Their secular equivalents are no better. (In the contemporary West, it is not any explicit Index or Inquisition with its attendant brutalities that operate, but the more subtle levers of access to funding-grants, scholarships, etc-ease of career, media access, ease of publication, social pressure and so on.)
Really, we know how this game of justifying (and thereby subordinating) science to some “higher good” plays out. It does not become different because that was someone else’s “higher good” and ours is different between we are so Wise and Special. The Catholic priests who discouraged scientific publication and activity in Catholic Europe were absolutely convinced that they possessed the final truth and wielded trumping moral authority too.
The moral of the stories about selling one’s soul is that one has, in the end, given away everything that really matters to gain things that are so not worth it. The tying of science to environmentalism is a profoundly Faustian bargain. What is given away is so not worth what is “gained”.
To define scientific literacy as encompassing beliefs as well as knowledge-a definition also embraced by skeptics of evolution-is a dubious position for any science assessment to take.
Yet it gets dismissed by a grown man and a professor for making an “ideological” critique:
Emeritus professor Peter Fensham, a member of the PISA scientific expert panel from 1998 to last year, said there was little distinction between belief and knowledge.
"People like to sharply distinguish as if it's absolute and true, where in fact knowledge is what we believe to be true," he said.
"Knowledge is a matter of belief; they're very closely related." He dismissed the Brookings report as a "right-wing complaint", saying the US was one of only four countries out of 60-odd that objected to the questions on sustainable development being included in the PISA test.
You could not make this stuff up. Yes, as any first year Philosophy student can tell you, knowledge is a form of belief. Indeed it is justified true belief, though what makes knowledge more than just true belief is one of those questions which philosophers have been arguing over for a long time.
As for distinguishing between knowledge and belief being a “right-wing” complaint, the first response should be Andre the Giant’s (that [term], I do not think it means what you think it means). The second is that I do not really think it is wise to state or imply that only people on the political Right care about the difference between knowledge and belief, particularly regarding the nature and value of science.
Clearly, Prof. Fensham’s concerns are, in fact, blatantly ideological themselves. Nor is he alone in this:
PISA is conducted in Australia by the Australian Council for Educational Research. Its chief executive Geoff Masters said the purpose of science courses was to develop a concern for the environment in students.
… On environmental sustainability, students were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with statements that included making regular emission checks a condition of using a car, and producing electricity from renewable sources as much as possible even if it increased the cost.
Agreement was taken as students having a stronger sense of responsibility, which PISA says is correlated with better scores in the science test.
Is this a moment to point out that correlation is not causation? I think so. Not the least because of the way that beliefs can be status markers.
Here’s the thing. Marrying being “scientific” to being “concerned” is very much a Faustian bargain. Not merely because it requires one to epistemically elevate such concern, thereby having the effect of epistemically undermining science in order to give them equivalent status, as we can see in Prof. Fensham’s deprecation of differentiating between belief and knowledge. This is bad enough, but worse follows.
It also perverts the operation of science. If science is to be justified and supported on the basis of such concern, then such concern becomes the legitimating principle. So science that fails to support such concern because “bad” science, or even “un”science.
Doctrinally, Catholicism is as science-friendly as any religion is likely to be, since, according to Catholic theology, truth is indivisible and the world is God’s direct Creation, while Scripture is humanly mediated, so in studying the world, one is studying the Work of God. Any proven contradiction between how the world is and Scripture is to be resolved in favour of how the world is. (Galileo’s problem was insufficient evidence to state his belief that the Earth went around the Sun other than as a hypothesis: for example not being able to explain why we did not observe the stars moving.) Yet Counter-Reformation Catholicism drove scientific activity into Protestant Europe because priestly control over what was published and what could be said put a dampener on scientific activity and publication. The priests were much more concerned about their authority, and the authority of their doctrines, than the good of science.
Priests are natural vectors for intellectual control-due to their claims to hold the authoritative truth-and for bigotry-since operating as community “gatekeepers”, dividing the social world between the Godly “Us” and the Ungodly “Them”, gives them power and status. Their secular equivalents are no better. (In the contemporary West, it is not any explicit Index or Inquisition with its attendant brutalities that operate, but the more subtle levers of access to funding-grants, scholarships, etc-ease of career, media access, ease of publication, social pressure and so on.)
Really, we know how this game of justifying (and thereby subordinating) science to some “higher good” plays out. It does not become different because that was someone else’s “higher good” and ours is different between we are so Wise and Special. The Catholic priests who discouraged scientific publication and activity in Catholic Europe were absolutely convinced that they possessed the final truth and wielded trumping moral authority too.
The moral of the stories about selling one’s soul is that one has, in the end, given away everything that really matters to gain things that are so not worth it. The tying of science to environmentalism is a profoundly Faustian bargain. What is given away is so not worth what is “gained”.