Humanism and Scientism

Evolutionary psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker insists we separate the scientific study of people from the ethical side, that we resist the naturalistic fallacy, and that we realize that the positive and normative concerning people are two different realms played out by the same agents. This all draws a parallel with the philosopher Wilfrid Sellers’ view that there is a scientific view of people and a humanistic view of people, which are different but coexist. The philosopher Paul Churchland (along with his wife, Patricia) resists the view of his teacher, Sellars, and insists on the scientific view of man becoming an all encompassing view. Not only a scientific view, but an eliminative materialist view. But if one believes that humans are even in the most basic way endowed with some evolutionarily installed equipment that gives us certain dispositions and intuitions that constrain what world view we can easily hold, especially in the realm of ontology about ourselves, then it seems unlikely that a strictly materialist vocabulary will come to constitute our general culture anytime soon.

Our general culture has not quite fully caught up with the rest of the scientific world view, i.e. those worlds of Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and the rest of them, much less so with a psychologically demanding view of the Churchlands. When I say psychologically demanding, I mean only in the broad sense of what is difficult for most people to understand, internalize, and apply in their day to day lives. Now that doesn’t mean we’ll never have a naturalistic world view permeate the general culture, but it seems that even those who are most habituated to that naturalistic view are still having significant problems reducing everything downwards. And there are serious intellectual arguments as to why the nature of the evolved mind/brain will actually never allow us to fully materialistically eliminate it all in our conceptual systems, or close the dichotomies that Pinker and Sellars propose. Edward Slingerland covers this point in his work, which can be seen as a broader attempt to defend the irreducibility of mind on cognitive and epistemological grounds.