Some time ago I griped about an idiotic piece in The New York Times about how new work in biology is ostensibly posing all sorts of threats to moral philosophy as traditionally done. Well, it’s not just the Times. The last issue of Nature (vol 447, issue 7146) has an editorial with similarly silly drivel, saying roughly the sorts of things that we have to endure in papers from freshmen but that we hope to have successfully eradicated from our students by the time they are, say, juniors. I won’t bore you with the details of what the editorial says and of why it betrays a rather serious ignorance of the subject matter (ironically, it’s an editorial about the ignorance of Senator Sam Brownback; but if researchers are allowed to publish their ignorance in Nature, why shouldn’t a politician be allowed to propound some ignorance now and then?). If you’re interested in the beginnings of an untangling of what all is wrong with the editorial, see here.
I find all of this really depressing because I like to think that it would be a good thing for academics to sometimes venture out of their little specialized niches and engage with broader issues. And it seems to me that doing so with some measure of intelligence should be possible. To take the case at hand, why shouldn’t the biologists be able to understand what it is that philosophers are on about when they talk about the naturalistic fallacy? Sure, it might require some effort, some time spent learning about surrounding issues, some time spent learning what the relevant technical terms mean, and so forth. But why shouldn’t that be possible? Did the writer of the editorial just not bother trying or is this harder than I think it is?
Regardless of how difficult it is to say anything about something outside of one’s research specialty, it seems to me that it would be sensible to be aware that when one does try to do that then one should also recognize that one is much more likely to misunderstand things (after all, we have plenty of illustrations of this!). Given that awareness, before one publicly criticizes position X perhaps one should ask the people actually working on X if one has properly understood X. For example, before biologists talk about the naturalistic fallacy, perhaps they should corner some philosopher and ask them if what they were planning to say makes any sense at all.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer