76. Why Science Always Carries Human Values with Anjan Chakravartty

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"Dogmatism is the enemy of reason, after all."

Dr Anjan Chakravartty is the Apignani Foundation Chair for the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics at the University of Miami and a philosopher of science whose work explores the nature of knowledge and what science tells us about the world. His latest edited volume, Science and Humanism: Knowledge, Values, and the Common Good, brings together leading philosophers to examine the relationship between science and humanist values — historically deep and increasingly urgent.

Topics we cover

✔︎ Why science is not a value-neutral tool — and why humanists need to think more carefully about what science is actually for 

✔︎ How disinformation campaigns exploit the language of science to manufacture doubt on climate, health, and more 

✔︎ What a genuinely humanistic science looks like in practice — from diversifying research communities to confronting scientism

Connect with Dr Chakravartty and find out more

• University of Miami profile: https://people.miami.edu/profile/axc1256@miami.edu
• Science and Humanism: Knowledge, Values, and the Common Good: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/science-and-humanism/
• Personal Website: https://anjanchakravartty.com/

Transcript

Welcome Anjan Chakravartty

James Hodgson 0:02

Welcome to Humanism Now, a podcast about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassionate change. I'm your host, James Hodgson. Our guest today is a philosopher of science whose work explores the nature of knowledge and how we understand what science tells us about the world. Dr. Anjan Trakturati is the Apignani Foundation Chair of the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics at the University of Miami. His latest product is the edited volume Science and Humanism: Knowledge, Values, and the Common Good. This book brings together leading philosophers from around the world to examine the relationship between science and humanism that's both historically deep and increasingly urgent. How science and humanistic values intersect, diverge, and could work together to address the challenges we face today. Dr. Anjan Trakravati, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now.

Anjan Chakravartty 0:49

Thanks so much, James. It's great to be here.

Philosophy of Science Explained

James Hodgson 0:51

So before we dive into science and humanism, I'd love to understand a little bit more about philosophy of science. It seems like a fascinating subject area. So how do you define philosophy of science?

Anjan Chakravartty 1:02

Well, I think that's a great place to start. Let me start by saying something about what I think philosophy is, and then that will make it easier for me to say what the philosophy of science is. I think of philosophy as what we might call a second order inquiry or a deeper level inquiry in relation to just the sort of everyday judgments and thoughts that we have on a daily basis. In everyday life, we make judgments about what people do. We'll say, oh, that politician shouldn't have done that, or oh, I wish my friend had done this, or they did that. Oh, that's wonderful. That's good. Those are essentially moral judgments. We're calling actions, behaviors, thoughts on the part of people that we encounter in everyday life, we're calling them good or bad, using other terms of moral assessment. But when we step back, if we ever do, to think about what some of those terms actually mean, I mean, what would it mean to actually be good or bad? What constitutes the good? For what kinds of things are we actually blameworthy? When we start to examine the assumptions that underlie these sort of everyday judgments that we make, well then we're doing philosophy. I call it a second order inquiry because we take that first order or ground level discourse where we're making all these judgments, and we step back and we think about the assumptions that underlie those kinds of judgments. And whenever you do that kind of critical reflection, you're really doing philosophy, whether you know it or not. In this case, we're doing moral philosophy. But likewise in everyday life, we make comments about what we take ourselves to know, what we believe, what we think people don't have good enough evidence to believe, and yet still manage to profess their opinion with uh with great force and vivacity. When we make those judgments about what we believe, what people have, good justification to claim, what we take to be an especially solid sort of belief that we would call knowledge, we're really doing epistemology. Epistemology is just the branch of philosophy that's concerned with belief, how we acquire it, how we know whether it's justified or not, and under what circumstances beliefs count as knowledge. So whenever we take something in the everyday and step back to think about the underlying assumptions that are required to make those kinds of judgments, we're doing philosophy. And the philosophy of science is no different. We start with the practice of science, its methods, its techniques for collecting and evaluating evidence and the outputs of science, the theories and models that are produced as a result of this process. And when we stop, step back to think about the strength of these methods, how well they allow us to inquire into the world, what sorts of techniques we have and how they may differ from everyday common sense in allowing us to probe deeper than we might otherwise go. When we stop to think about whether our theories, claims, and models in the sciences are true, or whether, as is often the case, they're idealized or abstracted in various ways, and what that should mean for how we think about the content of science in terms of knowledge. When we start to think about all of these things, we're doing the philosophy of science. So the philosophy of science is really just an examination of the nature of scientific knowledge, and often that takes very specific forms thinking about particular theories in physics, biology, chemistry, the social sciences, and trying to understand what it is that they're telling us about the world.

James Hodgson 4:11

Aaron Powell Yes, it's interesting. I I think most people think of science as something which is quite concrete and exact and precise. And philosophy is more about the imprecise and examining the more fluid nature of things. So I think it's an interesting middle ground between those two areas of exploration.

Anjan Chakravartty 4:27

Yeah, it turns out that what seem to us to be, I think very often concrete things that we can just read off of the evidence that we have in in everyday life or in the sciences or any other specialized form of inquiry, things that seem very concrete are, once you do step back and think about the underlying assumptions that go into it, turn out to be much more susceptible to more abstract philosophical theorizing than you might have otherwise imagined.

James Hodgson 4:52

And I think that leads us nicely to the theme of this new book, so science and humanism. Why explore the link between these two areas now?

Anjan Chakravartty 5:00

Well, I suppose a uh a more personal answer to start with, as a philosopher of science, my published work has mostly been about specific questions of interpretation of our best science. These are, as you intimated, fairly abstract philosophical debates. You know, how should we think about the idea of theoretical change over time? That's always a puzzle when you think that science gives us knowledge, and yet we are continually changing the way we describe things in nature scientifically. So, how should we think about things like that and debate surrounding questions of knowledge in the sciences? But my graduate education, my PhD was actually in a department for the history and philosophy of science. And one of the things that I'd always been fascinated on, but hadn't really worked on myself, is the long-standing relationship between humanism as a way of thinking about the world and science as our foremost mode of inquiry into the nature of the world. And then during the pandemic, when many of us found ourselves relatively isolated and contemplating the meaning of life, the universe, and everything more deeply than we may have had time for before, I realized that there's a serious connection between these earlier interests of mine in science and humanism and pressing contemporary issues. For example, the increasingly high-profile resistance to and the undermining of science in the public domain, all of which kind of inspired me to set the book project in motion.

What is Humanism For?

James Hodgson 6:23

And you start the first chapter with asking quite a provocative question. What is science for? It's interesting because we had an episode, again, named after a book, with Professor Richard Norman asking, what is humanism for? Which is a very these are very deep and challenging questions. And most people accept science, although the truth comes from science, and obviously my most of our listeners will will sort of accept a lot of the ideas of humanism as well. But when you ask what something is for, it seems like it's quite a difficult concept to examine. Perhaps we could examine each of those then. So as a as a philosopher of science, in your view, what is humanism for?

Anjan Chakravartty 6:54

I think that's an intriguing question because, as you know, humanism has been associated with a lot of very specific views and commitments historically in terms of things one might believe or positions that you might take on various issues. But more broadly speaking, I think of humanism as what we might call a worldview. So a worldview is a broad framework that shapes or informs how we see and think about the world. It gives us a way to interpret the world and our place in it. Of course, this always includes things like certain assumptions and beliefs and values, and as such, it's something that shapes how we uh behave and make decisions about how to live. But our assumptions and beliefs and values, even humanist ones, are things that evolve and develop over time, which is why I prefer to think of humanism as a worldview as opposed to, you know, sort of list of beliefs that one might sign up to. It's a worldview that gives rise to certain beliefs in the first place, and I prefer to think of it that way rather than to identify it too rigidly with any given particularly particular laundry list of beliefs. So here's how I describe it. Humanism is a worldview that emphasizes human interests and capacities, like, for example, reason and science, among other things, as a basis for understanding the world and our place in it and for making it a better place. And to give uh that understanding of what humanism is, here are what I take to be its most important features very broadly. First, it has what we might call a naturalistic orientation with respect to questions about what there is in the world and how we can, with justification, come to know about the world. So in philosophy, we just call this, we call this because we like to use terms from other languages to confuse people whenever possible. This is just we call it metaphysics and epistemology. Metaphysics is concerned with what there is, what kinds of things there are in the world and what they're like, and epistemology is, as I mentioned before, concerned with how we know those things and what we know. So a naturalistic orientation with respect to metaphysics and epistemology is focused especially on what there is in the natural and social worlds in which we live, and how and what we can investigate and reason about as opposed to the possibility of supernatural entities or putatively divine knowledge. And then secondly, and uh this is the other, I think, major dimension of humanism, it has an explicitly ethical and political agenda, so a commitment to forms of individual and social and planetary well-being, including things like greater and better distributed freedoms and happiness and welfare, as well as goods like democracy and civil liberties and higher standards of living and so on, through social and political institutions that can bring about the social implementation of those goods. So just, you know, in a sentence, it's a worldview. Humanism is a worldview emphasizing our capacities for learning about and understanding the world and our place in it, combined with an ethical and political set of imperatives for making this world a better place.

What is Science For?

James Hodgson 10:01

And that's a really nice way to describe it succinctly. And that's very interesting as well that you you make the distinction that humanism also has that political imperative, or at least moral imperative that may not be founded in science necessarily. Science informs our views, but actually this is that humanism there's the added responsibility to act on what we know about the world. And I think that's my favorite part in the kind of minimum statement of humanism in Humanist International, is that we have not only the right to find meaning, but the responsibility to find meaning in the world. And I think that's what what distinguishes humanism from other perhaps non-religious worldviews. But then turning turning back to science, another very difficult question is how can we summarize science and what it's for in the length of a podcast?

When and How the Split Happened

Anjan Chakravartty 10:42

Aaron Ross Powell Well, this I think really goes to the heart of the motivation for the book. It's very common, I think, for humanists to think of science just as a resource that can help us to do and achieve things, right? To uh treat diseases, improve nutrition, tackle existential crises like climate change and so on. To do things that exemplify humanist values. And perhaps that's not surprising given the deference that humanists typically give to the idea of reason. Exercising our reason is central to humanist conceptions of how to think about the world and how to act. And you might think of science as a profound application of reason to our inquiry into the natural world and the social world. But the sciences, or reason for that matter, aren't just neutral tools that can be used to produce outcomes we value. So I think this common way of thinking about science on the part of many humanists is really incomplete. Scientific investigation and the application of science are themselves related to values in all sorts of ways. And this was understood historically. The early progenitors of what we now call the modern sciences grew up with humanism. I mean, historically speaking, humanism and the sciences co-evolved to what we now have in the present. So humanist thinking facilitated the growth of and the development of science through increasingly naturalistic orientations for thinking about the nature of the world and ourselves and the relation between the two. When human investigations into the nature of the world and not received dogma or revelation, is viewed as our best bet for understanding these things, deciding how to act, this reorients our conception of what scientific inquiry can do for us. So early humanist thought of the sciences as ways of learning that would help us to make the world a better place and promote human flourishing. And that was, to a large extent, in many cases exclusively, what they took science to be for. So this is this is a view that was quite common, for example, in recent philosophy right up until about the middle of the 20th century. The founding movement of the philosophy of science as a self-aware discipline, a view called logical empiricism, was motivated in large part by the idea that science should function to address inequalities, to improve education, to improve society more generally. And American pragmatism, another dominant philosophical school during this period, was also heavily invested in the idea, especially in the hands of John Dewey, that the sciences have enormous social responsibility for things like encouraging critical thought, improving our health, distributing our resources more equitably, and so on. So the question of why this idea that the sciences are for the good of society and the world is a complex one. It kind of disappeared in some ways from the landscape after the mid-20th century. And of course, that's something I'd be happy to tell you more about and may arise in the course of discussion.

James Hodgson 13:40

Aaron Powell Yeah, so so th this idea that really science and humanism began supporting and informing each other. And of course you you identify this asymmetry in the book that we now accept that science informs humanism, but there's less of an understanding that humanism has historically informed science. So why did that divergence happen in your opinion?

Anjan Chakravartty 14:00

Aaron Powell Yeah, I think there are a number of reasons that may have contributed to the idea, certainly in philosophy and more generally in the public domain, uh, that it isn't natural to think of the sciences as something that might have an aim, a goal, you know, a function that includes or that's primarily determined by its capacities to improve the human condition, broadly construed. As I said, that was once something that was taken for granted by a lot of people. I think, you know, among the reasons there are things we could note that come right up to the present day. So some of them are more historically situated. In the Cold War, for instance, there was something of a damper, as well, neither of us were around at that time, but we know that there was something of a damper on conceptions of science that were heavily invested in programs of social reform, especially in the aid of those who were judged to be most in need, in part because progressive policy lobbying of that sort could potentially run afoul of the ambient paranoia of the time surrounding socialism and communism. And the very idea of social reform was viewed in some ways skeptically, and it could become a political liability for one to say that, look, the primary function of this human activity that we engage in science is to actually improve the human condition in these ways by addressing the needs of people who are most in need. That I think is one very general reason. It certainly affected philosophical movements like logical positivism, where, as I mentioned, one of the strongest motivations was to pursue a clarification of the nature of scientific knowledge so that it could function more effectively as a means for social amelioration. A lot of those people were had progressive personal policies, some of them were socialists, some of them, all of them were deeply invested in the idea of reform of economic and distributive systems of justice. And they, I think, felt very pressured to stop lobbying for those sorts of things. Many of them were immigrants to this country and felt very vulnerable in the face of the politics of the Cold War. But there are other factors that bring us right up to the present. So, for example, the increasing privatization of scientific research, which has continued to this day, really favors priorities for science and scientific research that are driven by large corporations and as a result by their motives, which are profit motives, not humanistic values per se. So I think these and other challenges associated with the increasing privatization of science are still with us and in some domains getting increasingly worse in different forms right up to the present.

James Hodgson 16:44

Now I wonder as well if there's a there's a link with the mass social acceptance of science. The fact that now it sci science has progressed so far and can inform so much, but for laymen like myself, to understand what a scientific paper is actually telling us is very difficult. And so there's a skepticism, I think, sometimes with, well, what is the motivation behind it? Do you think there's also uh an element of healthy skepticism that's emerged out of the kind of wide acceptance that science and reason is is one of the best routes to truth?

Anjan Chakravartty 17:16

I think there are various forms of skepticism to be had and that are in place in contemporary society, some of which are healthy and I think are actually going to be part of or will necessarily be part of a humanist conception of the sciences. There are, of course, what we can only label unhealthy forms of skepticism that are promoted by very cynical agendas to undermine and downplay science, that even the people who are attempting to do so know to be motivated by considerations other than truth and knowledge. So there's a long history of this, for example, in the United States that has been very well documented, right? Tobacco companies earlier in the 20th century that commissioned scientific research, quotation marks, that produced results to the effect that secondhand smoke was not harmful, various sorts of things that even people conducting that research knew was stretching the data that they had and probably wasn't true. There has been, in recent decades, very concerted efforts by people acting on behalf of the fossil fuel lobby to downplay and discredit climate science, utilizing various strategies that, of course, they know are misleading, you know, choosing outlier research and presenting it as though that is mainstream research, blowing up what are, in context, minor discrepancies between the findings of various researchers and presenting it as though there's no scientific consensus with respect to uh anthropogenic climate change. So these are all strategies that have been adopted by private corporations and people working for them to generate skepticism in a way that we can only consider to be unhealthy since even its practitioners know that they're lying.

James Hodgson 18:54

Aaron Powell But would you say that's somet something of a victory of science and the scientific method that even those who want to fool people and spread disinformation will try to wrap it up in scientific language or mm you know find outlier research. It still relies on the idea that uh the scientific method is the optimal route to truth.

Scientism And Moral Questions

Anjan Chakravartty 19:14

Aaron Powell Yeah, I suppose it's a it's a backhanded compliment. The idea that if we really want to convince people of something, then what we need to do is we need to dress people up as sciences and have them wear lab coats and hold clipboards while they announce these results that we know to be misleading and false. I think that does speak, in fairness to your point, to uh a kind of social status that that scientific inquiry has and has been hard-won over time and well justified. What's intriguing, though, is that these very same same techniques of applying uh forms of presentation that are characteristic of the sciences or masquerading as genuine science as a means to convince people to believe things that aren't true, ultimately then has the kinds of skeptical effects that one might not like to have associated with genuine science, which is to produce, for example, understandings in the public, false understandings of a lack of scientific consensus concerning certain things that may be important for human health or the health of the planet. So in a way, they are trying to undermine the system from within, but there have been surprisingly successful attempts to do that.

James Hodgson 20:24

Aaron Powell And I on the muddiness and uncertainty that making scientific progress has, some people will maintain that science has the potential to answer every question, even moral ones. Do you think that science can answer every question? And I guess more importantly, do you think we should always look to science for those answers?

Proportioning Rational Application of Reason

Anjan Chakravartty 20:41

Aaron Powell Well, let me start here by defining something that's often called scientism. So not science, but scientism. Typically, scientism is thought of in terms of, you know, sort of two basic ideas. It's usually thought of as an excessive or overly inflated belief or trust in the effectiveness of scientific methods or the truths of science that can be spelled out in terms of these two basic ideas. The first idea is sort of an emphasis on the unimpeachable powers of science to deliver belief and knowledge. Secondly, there's a kind of emphasis on the universal scope of science, and this is what your question is really about, the idea that science can, in principle, answer any sort of question. And I think that it isn't obvious, and sometimes humanists are unfortunately overly deferential to the sciences in this regard. It isn't obvious that we should think that science can, even in principle, answer all questions. And I think you put your finger on one of the best examples for this, potentially, the realm of moral discourse and debate. So consider the, for example, the nature of moral debate and discourse. Surely the sciences, especially the human sciences, but even the brain sciences, which work often in concert with the human sciences, these things may well teach us about aspects of human nature that are relevant to thinking about what we're doing. What might be good for us and what might not be good for us, and how we might optimize or try to maximize our happiness and welfare. So it's not that the sciences are irrelevant, but ultimately when we're trying to decide in the face of very difficult problems where people's interests and values conflict, it's very hard for me to imagine that there's an experiment that we could do, or that there's some kind of study that we could perform to obtain the kind of information that we need to negotiate between people who have very different values and interests in the moral domain. And I think, you know, there's a history of philosophizing about this. There are people who think that perhaps in a very naturalistic spirit we could reduce all moral discourse to certain observations about the evolutionary history and the psychological predilections of human beings. But that seems to me to be, on the one hand, extraordinarily optimistic. I'm not sure why we should think that we would be even close to being able to perform such reductions. And secondly, it's not clear that that's the right level of detail to look when we're trying to think about how we differ in our moral commitments from uh, you know, other denizens of humanity and how we might live together in ways that respect, you know, our various principles, how we might come to some kind of meeting of the minds with respect to those things. So it's very hard for me to imagine that science does, even in principle, answer all questions that we might ask. And then taking this to the more important question that you asked, whether we should look to science to answer every question, I think that that that probably would be counterproductive in all sorts of domains. And if I can add just one more note to this, if you consider, and this is something I'm sure we'll talk more about, the nature of science itself as a form of inquiry, I suggested earlier that it's connected to our values. If choices about what kinds of scientific research we should prioritize or how science should be applied in the world are questions that involve value judgments, which clearly they do, and the sciences themselves don't tell us how we should make those judgments, which generally they don't, then we do need to draw on more than just science in order to promote human and planetary flourishing, right? I mean, arguably not only, but especially in cases involving the human and social sciences where scientific work can't actually be done without making value judgments about things like how we gather and analyze and interpret evidence. So both the naturalist and the ethical dimensions of humanism are crucial.

James Hodgson 24:29

And how in your research, how have you found people do proportion this great phrase you used earlier, this sort of rational application of reason and and how potentially we could do that in a more humanistic way?

Science As A Source Of Meaning

Anjan Chakravartty 24:40

Aaron Powell Yeah. I think that sadly, people don't do what you just suggested, which I think is a very important thing that they they might want to do as much as they should. And I think that is owing in part to things we've discussed already, the fact that people don't think necessarily that we might conceive of the sciences as something that has as a constitutive aim, the improvement of the human condition, broadly construed, leads them then not to associate ethical considerations with science at all, necessarily. This is a view that was very popular at various stages of our history where people would say, you know, scientists just need to be given complete freedom to do whatever they want. Since there are no value considerations that are relevant to investigating the world, we'll let them do whatever they want. And then after they're done, we'll think about, you know, how we might want to use this science or what the ethical implications of it are. But that I think is increasingly, at least in philosophical circles, and I hope this is something that will become more widely appreciated in the public domain, that's just naive. There are valued dimensions of the sciences that require that we try to attain some kind of balance between thinking about how scientific knowledge is conducted and what it achieves, against the idea that it may need to be constrained in various ways, given the sorts of values that we have.

James Hodgson 26:01

Can science alone provide meaning in the way that religion once did, or does it require the support of a worldview like humanism?

John Dewey and American Pragmatism

Anjan Chakravartty 26:09

Aaron Powell That's such an interesting question. I think the answer is yes, that science can provide meaning, perhaps not in precisely the way that religion once did, because it differs substantially in the way it would. Although perhaps it's, you know, just for starters, important to note that many people, this is going back to something you mentioned earlier, many people don't think that there is anything properly called meaning to be had. And and so I do think that that bit that you quoted, I believe, from Humanists International, that we have a responsibility to seek meaning is is I think that might be humanistic overreach. I think it's it's perfectly possible to be a humanist and not think that there's meaning in any cosmic sense or any objective sense in the world, but still think that all of the sorts of values that humanists want to see exemplified in the world are important. I think it's possible to dissociate those two things. But yes, of course, people do in general find the idea of meaning to be meaningful. They have experiences that feel meaningful, they find certain answers to questions about what are places in the world and how it all fits together, meaningful, and so on. When it comes to those sorts of questions, I think the sciences are clearly, for many people, profound sources of meaning, right? They they, through our investigations, provide the kinds of answers that people uh take meaning from. You know, cosmology and evolutionary biology help us to understand where we've come from and what our place is in the world, physics and geology and ecology help us to understand how it all fits together. The human sciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology help us to understand how we create meaning, right, and and why this is important to us, and so on, right? I mean, all of this, I think, can be a source of great inspiration. I mean, we are by nature curious creatures, right? We are constantly seeking, and the resulting knowledge and the explanations that we're able to provide and the understandings that we're able to manifest, all of these things can be deeply meaningful. I mean, John Dewey thought of this in terms of what he called natural piety, which yields experiences of personal and collective meaning for a secular world. So natural piety for him is seeing ourselves as part of the world and with a sense of awe and reverence and humility. So appreciating our dependence on the world and our capacities to adapt and improve it in ways that reflect our best hopes and values in just the way a humanist might hope it.

James Hodgson 28:38

Aaron Powell You mentioned John Dewey and he is a frequent character throughout the book. Would you mind just explaining what makes him so influential in this space?

Anjan Chakravartty 28:46

Aaron Powell Sure, yeah. Um I would say that John Dewey was very influential, certainly in the first half of the uh 20th century, but then he died around mid-century, and this coincided with a kind of, I think, waning of a sad, unfortunate waning of the influence of American pragmatism in the philosophical landscape, which has recently, I think, been resuscitated and is flourishing once again. So that's a good thing. It's part of what I called earlier the disappearance of the of thinking about the issue of how science and humanism are connected, that hopefully we might be able to reignite now. But Dewey was especially influential, I think, in thinking about the ways in which human beings are not only part of the world, but because of this amazing thing we've created, this amazing set of things that we've created now, the sciences, we've created a human practice that is capable not only of doing things like generating knowledge and assuaging our curiosity and fueling our natural piety, but we've invented and developed something that is so powerful in its capacities, not only for discovery, but for shaping the world, that the sciences themselves have actually changed our environment, our our social and cultural environment, and increasingly our physical environment in ways that are astounding. And he was extremely impressed by, and I in some ways horrified by the power of these techniques of the manipulation of our environment, both social, cultural, and environmental, that the sciences now can promote. And what he advocated for was the idea that given this, the sciences must take responsibility for the moral and ethical and social challenges that emerge as a function of the sciences themselves having changed our environment. And so he advocated for various ways of doing this. One, he was certainly a believer in the importance of what we might take to be very core humanist values in terms of critical thinking and the rejection of dogma. He became one of the foremost figures and a very influential figure in the philosophy of education because he thought it would be extremely important in order to equip people with the skills they needed to engage with the problems, the challenges that face us today, to instill within them what he called a scientific disposition, which doesn't just apply to the sciences. He thought it applied to everything. It's basically a commitment to a non-dogmatism that allows us to critically scrutinize things, to have a space of possibilities that we can generate in our imagination for how we can improve the world, and then to assess those possibilities in a scientific way. So he's quite an inspirational figure, I think, for humanists more generally, and I encourage people to read more, Dewey, although he's not always the easiest person to read.

Humanistic Science And Social Justice

James Hodgson 31:36

And I think that encapsulates that that challenge with directly applying science that we've discussed. I always think of science as about discovery, you know, discovering the the world as it really is. But it's so true, as you mentioned there, that the application of science is shaping the world around us. And so how we apply science and how we choose to invest in research and technology is going to shape the world even further in the future. So these are again coming back to value judgments. That brings nicely to the closing chapters of the book, where you examine social justice issues like gender equality, marginalized communities, and of course, as we've mentioned a few times, you know, environmental uh and climate science. What does a humanistic science look like in practice as we approach these current issues?

Anjan Chakravartty 32:17

I think the the answer to that excellent, really important question is is implicit in some of our earlier discussions. So let me briefly try to make it more explicit. A lot of the values that people associate with humanism today are in part a historical artifact of entanglements of humanistic thought and the promotion of various ideals associated with the Enlightenment, things like human dignity and equality and freedom and justice and so on. But it's important to appreciate that those concepts or our understanding of those values have themselves evolved, right? So Aristotle was committed to equality and democracy, but not for slaves, of course, and not even for women for that matter. I mean, women were essentially imperfect men for Aristotle. So they shouldn't be allowed to vote, but you know, but of course, a great promoter of equality and democracy. And the Enlightenment wasn't itself a very enlightened time, generally speaking. So the the concrete understanding and application of those very laudable ideals has evolved in ways that in many cases, hopefully, we might regard in terms of moral progress. And once we appreciate that the sciences are also in various ways entangled with our values, we can begin to make sense of the fact that they too, I mean, historically and even in the present, have sometimes failed to live up to humanist ideals. So there are traditions of what you could very well call racist science or sexist science, where assumptions and biases, often what we would now call implicit biases, shared by members of a scientific community, skewed the interpretation of evidence in ways that supported popular sexist and racist views. So a partial solution to this, and it's something that we've seen in practice, is to diversify the scientific community so that people with different kinds of experiences that would not have necessarily all of the assumptions that a more homogenous science scientific community might have and would be able to question things that other people might not think to question, might improve our science in these ways. And that's precisely what happened in cases of sexist science. As women became more prominent in certain areas of the sciences, they were able to point out that some of the assumptions that were built into the way the science was working were in fact, you know, androcentric, male-centered biases. And you know, for example, there are cases today, even today, where large scientific corporations exert pressure on people in the global south to adopt agricultural practices that they've done a lot of scientific research on, right, in the lab, that are not in the interests of people who actually live on this land and sometimes for generations, right, local and indigenous populations who actually understand the soil conditions and the capacities of that land to produce sustainable agriculture in ways much better than a large corporation scientist working somewhere halfway around the world might. So it's important not to lose sight of something that I mentioned right at the start that, you know, another and sort of central dimension of humanism, beyond its naturalistic orientation and its engagement with ethical ideals is its political dimension. The problems I've just been describing are political problems. In fact, the subtitle of the book is Knowledge, Values, and the Common Good. But the idea of the common good is itself a political construction. We don't all have the same values. We don't all have the same interests. Sometimes acting so as to advance the interests of some people are going to come at the cost of reducing goods for other people. And so the political negotiations and the sort of respect and empathy that have to be constitutive of those negotiations in order for them to succeed, in order for us to make moral progress, are also an indispensable part of humanism and its relation to science.

James Hodgson 36:04

This is such a fascinating area, but we we probably should wrap up. So if I can ask you one incredibly unfair question, given the amount of time and resources that's gone into this book, if you could summarize the relationship between science and humanism in a sentence or two, how would you frame it?

Anjan Chakravartty 36:20

All right. It's always a good discipline to see if you can summarize something in a sentence or two. So here's a long-ish sentence for you. A humanistic worldview emphasizes, among other things, the application of our reason to facilitate human flourishing, broadly conceived. And the sciences are extraordinary examples of the application of our reason to inquiry into the nature of the natural and social worlds that we inhabit. So while it's only natural that humanists hold science in high regard, what's even more important is that we appreciate what this entails for the nature of science itself. It entails that science, too, should facilitate human flourishing and that we should aspire to this as an aim of science.

James Hodgson 37:06

Wonderful. Before we go, we have our standard closing question. What is something which you've changed your mind on recently and what inspired that change?

Anjan Chakravartty 37:13

I'm so glad you warned me about this in advance, because I would I would definitely have been put on the spot. I tried hard not to believe anything at all until I've had a chance to consider it very carefully. And once I've done that, you know, of course I'm open to changing my mind. Dogmatism is the enemy of reason, after all. But it takes a lot for that to happen, so I had to rack my brain. But I did come up with something. So during the pandemic, we adopted a greyhound from the tracks here in Florida, where dog racing was just about to become illegal, a victory for humanism. We talked about having a dog or a dog's for many years, and we finally did it. He's the only dog I've ever had myself. And one thing among the just uncountable number of incredible things I've come to appreciate in the five and a half years since is what seems to me to be the stunning continuity in various cognitive abilities and capacities for emotion and judgment and even fairness, I think, that we share with these amazing creatures. And a lot of philosophy, historically speaking, and a lot of religious teaching for that matter, views human beings as being importantly and crucially differently, cognitively and otherwise from various other forms of life, right? And of course there are differences, but I think that arguably this is often greatly exaggerated. I'd always thought that they are exaggerated. I mean, surely there are differences in degree, but I'm now utterly convinced that in many cases, it's hilariously anthropocentric to view those kinds of differences as differences in kind. So this isn't so much a huge change of mind as opposed to moving from what I thought was plausible earlier on the just on evolutionary grounds, shifting from that to knowing something very deeply now on the basis of my own experience. And I thought that might be a good example for today, because as well as being transformative for me personally, it's also indicative of why over time what we take to be humanist values have to evolve as we learn more about the world. And we have to appreciate that human flourishing itself is a concept that has to be understood in terms of the uncountable number of ways in which we are products of nature and parts of nature, and thus uh we depend on it just as it depends on us. So it turns out that that humanism is at least in one sense poorly named because human flourishing requires flourishing well beyond humanity.

James Hodgson 39:30

Anjan Trackravati, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now. Thanks so much, James. It was a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of Humanism Now. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a rating and review. And why not share this episode with a friend? It really helps more people hear about the show. And we're building a growing community over on Ko-Fi. Special thanks to our supporters. If you would like to join them, links are in the show notes. You can follow us on all social media at HumanismNow Pod, and thanks once again for listening to HumanismNow.