Thank you, @Janet , for sharing your thoughts again. I suspect that we agree on more than you (want to?) think.
I referred to orienting ourselves in the world (by which I meant how we make decisions, often ethical, in relation to one another and life at large) and did not mean specifically the question of medicine.
Interestingly, however, your example brings a seemingly important point to light: Aristotelian logic (as I understand it) assumes static, universally understood, and stable identities in order to make logical statements such as “all A belong to category B and if all B > C then all A > C”.
But in daily language we use words that carry multiple nuances and various meanings that betray such assumptions. The examples of “objectivity” and “medicine” illustrate this quite well.
When I wrote “objectivity” I meant “the ideology of objectivity” but you apparently read “objectivity” to mean “science”, practices of empirical and experimental research, and, in this case, “evidence-based Western medicine”.
Indeed, some people may read “Western medicine” and think of curing people from cancer, tuberculosis or smallpox vaccinations, or healing through antibiotics. Other people may read “Western medicine” and think of Big Pharma and a profit-based, largely bureaucratic medical industry (that kills an extraordinary number of people due to medical error). Some may think of the U.S. medical system where a lack of definition of “health” contributes to underprioritizing preventive care.
So I feel eager to hear how you understand “objectivity” in relation to “Western medicine.” Take, for example, the prescription of opioids. How do you (and how could you) know which factor primarily determines the quantity of opioids prescribed by a resident to a patient? Class? Race? Gender? Pain severity? Personal preference of the medical professional? If fentanyl addiction alone kills more than 100,000 people in the United States each year, upon what evidence do we base our trust when any given doctor makes a prescription for medicine?
Or, in another example, does it seem “objective” to you that, in gathering medical evidence, short-sighted pharmaceutical industries callously decimate populations of horseshoe crabs? Even their name—a misnomer as they have more in common with arachnids than crabs—raises the question of objectivity: who gave this 440 million year old species that name? And would not a name such as “shelled elders” more adequately reflect and protect them? Instead, we accept a name (really, an insult) that indicates that they do not matter enough for us to describe them accurately. (Where have we seen that domination tactic before?)
Likewise, some people may read “yin-yang” in relation to health care and think “flaky homeopathic treatments and other placebos that have no scientific support.” Other people may read the same words and think “integration of meditation and silence into daily habits, balancing a vegetarian diet with exercise such as Tai Chi, resting properly, spending time among trees and natural habitats, and practicing active tranquility” (all things that have scientific support for sustaining mental and physical health).
Furthermore, your pitting of the one versus the other suggests precisely the sort of Either/Or assumptions explicit in Aristotelian logic that I critiqued earlier because, in this case, as in much of life, we can choose Both/And. Yin-yang seems, to me, to express that option. It inherently addresses proportionality and balance rather than asserting that one must choose this culture or that culture, this logic or that logic, this medical approach or that one.
Does this statement exemplify you striving toward “objectivity”?
Would living in the U.S. rather than China qualify as an objective or subjective parameter that impacts whether the concept of opting for traditional Chinese approach to health makes you feel nauseous or curious?
(For the record, however, I did not express my medical preferences but nor would I personally describe “Western medicine” as “objective”).
I did not mean that anything extraordinary takes place there, just that Aristotelian logic does not readily equip us in daily life to navigate real life situations when we act as both parent and child at the same time, when we love/dislike someone at the same time, or when we identify as both a citizen and a non-citizen depending upon which government authority one happens to speak with. (Arvind-Pal Mandair once provided an example of defining Sikhism as legally both a “religion” and “not a religion” depending upon the court case at hand).
You say “throw out the notion” as if it exists and then we get rid of it. But where does it exist? Do you mean in trivial senses (such as “we agree ‘objectively’ that a foot equals 12 inches”, or “most cats have fur,” or “we live on a spherical planet”)? Or do you see “objectivity” (not just reason) exist in any meaningful way in public discourse?
If by “objectivity” we mean fairness or accepting the results of an experiment rather than fudging the results to get a result we desire, then I don’t know of any culture (or even any poststructuralist) who would disagree. The same goes for bringing in relatively uninterested third parties for assessing disputes. No one here argues against that.
@JonathanTSeattle wrote:
I don’t know if claiming to promote “science” or “reason” in themselves guarantee not having anyone tell someone what to think (just ask a Scientologist who claims to believe in both “reason” and “science”). Besides, some UUs do hold beliefs akin to “New Age faith movements”. But, if “reason” helps communicate something (and I believe it does), I fail to see what we might further gain from believing in “objectivity.” Perhaps you could enlighten me?
To me, striving toward some mythical state of unattainable “objectivity” (a “God’s eye view” or “view from nowhere”) strikes me as eerily similar to a Baptist’s belief in the perfection of Jesus Christ and the duty of us “sinners” to strive toward His unattainable perfection. Should we find that surprising? Many of those who developed the myth of an “objective” science that would save all of us from everything primitive (especially heathen superstitions) grew up in Bible-thumping colonialist societies whether Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, or Puritan.
And if the ideology of “objectivity” serves to mask individual and institutional bias (apparent, for example, in the court system) and it surreptitiously translates into Eurocentrism and assuming that all societies should turn to the so-called Enlightenment for guidance in terms of organizing society, then yes, I do believe we could benefit from scrapping it.
Of course, degree matters quite a lot in terms of things that we can measure (such as extent of household waste, number of cars on the road, or square-foot of space allotted an animal or person in incarceration). But, unless you can tell me how to measure something as mystical as “objectivity,” I don’t know how we can make the measurement of degree useful there.
Interesting. Have you looked into this question? Would you say that, for example, this Poststructuralist Lifestyle Analysis (1997) article does not theorize degree? If not, how do you reason?
Ironically, philosophers have more traditionally critiqued Aristotelian logic for insufficiently addressing the question of degree. For example, the ancient sorites paradox (sorites=Greek for “heap”) built upon the characterization of a “heap of sand” as remaining a “heap of sand” when one removes a single grain. The paradox arose when, after removing a single grain at a time repeatedly thousands and thousands of times and reducing it to nothing, one could ask (without receiving a clear answer): at which point did it no longer qualify as a “heap of sand”?
As an article in New Scientist wrote earlier this year:
[The sorites paradox] is often used as evidence that classical logic might be insufficient to describe the world around us. That is troubling because, though we don’t pay it much attention, logic runs through human knowledge as if it were a stick of rock. We assume that we can build up a sequence of facts into systems of thought. But if logic itself is lacking, where does that leave us? Paradoxes start with a premise that seems true, apply reasoning that also seems valid, but end up at a false or contradictory conclusion. As a result, many paradoxes force us to question what we think we know. They come in different varieties, some more difficult to explain away than others.
…One solution to the sorites paradox is to admit that terms are sometimes too vague to be useful outside of everyday conversation. But some philosophers argue that logic itself needs a refresh. One approach is to say that there are different degrees of truth. Take the case of my hair removal. Halfway through the process of plucking, I am still not bald, but I am less “not bald” than I was at the start. Fuzzy logic, a kind of computing using degrees of truth rather than 1s and 0s, was introduced by computer scientist Lotfi Zadeh in 1965.
In other words, addressing complex questions of degree has spurred thinkers to develop forms of logic beyond the conventional binary dualism found in Aristotle.
Could your feeling unconvinced possibly have anything to do with a less-than-careful consideration of my words? After all, you wrote that I “don’t value objectivity and reason.” When did I say that I did not value reason? In fact, I explicitly expressed support for Le Rae’s and Christine’s formulations regarding reason, and I apply reasoning in my communication with you. Again, do your remarks here reflect you “striving toward objectivity”?
I cannot say what motivates you nor what you should or should not do. But if you see faith in “objectivity” as a requirement for engaging in dialogue, then I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions there.
Personally, I think we mean different things by the term. You seem to equate “objectivity,” with “non-biased” whereas I think of it as “bias-masquerading-as-non-biased.” I suspect that if you defined the term as I do, or if I defined it as you do, then we would actually agree (at least more than we have seemed to do thus far).
So do I. And yet, your implication that I do not, illustrates for me the futility in believing that, by inserting certain words in our bylaws or Principles, we shall somehow resolve problems such as the two of us now experience. You feel committed to reason. I feel committed to reason. We both attempt to apply reason in our communication with one another. And yet, it seems that we have not only remained stuck but you even seem to interpret my rather extensive commitment to communicate as a lack of “good faith.”
If you genuinely feel that I do not act in good faith, then I feel perfectly willing to cease wasting your time any further. I trust you only participate so long as it feels constructive.
(Does “Beloved Community” look like this? Or does the repeated use of phrases such as “Beloved Community” and the entire project of revising Article II amount to little more than desperate attempts to resolve chronic relational crises and endemic structural conflicts through comparatively easier challenges such as repeating or changing words rather than lifestyles, paradigms, institutions, or relationships?)
No one said that you should do anything and, as I wrote above, I do care about degree. But if you want to know if I “adequately and faithfully represent the argument of [my] sources” then you can check. I provided my sources so that you (and everyone else) could do precisely that. And, “objectively” speaking, I think we could agree that “science” typically uses this method of citing sources for people to corroborate data and messages rather than basing conclusions solely upon the authority of someone’s claim.
Finally, as none of my other arguments seemed convincing to you, I shall draw now inspiration from your own amendment proposal, #147, Add Depth, Breadth, and Specificity, in which you affirm and promote:
Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder […] which renews our spirit; [and] Religions and spiritual traditions which […] center love, justice, and harmony with one another and with nature. Ethically informed science and reasoned inquiry, which … [reveal] the awe-inspiring diversity and beauty of nature.
(I only quoted the “nature” sections but I do appreciate your proposed formulation as submitted on June 4th, 2023).
If you do not view claims of “objectivity” as Eurocentric then maybe you could acknowledge them as anthropocentric?
If we agree that “objectivity” means “based on facts and not influenced by personal beliefs or feelings,” can we also agree that the biases of language, culture, class, stature, gender, experience, and species unconsciously shape the cognitive lens through which we select, prioritize, and view all “facts”?
For me, those feelings of mystery and wonder that you mentioned humble me in the face of eco-system, plant, fungi, and animal intelligences of which I comprehend virtually nothing.
And if I cannot comprehend them, then how could I possibly organize them into parameters from which to conceive a hypothetically “neutral” place of “objectivity”?
Elizabeth Jakob, a spider expert, said (in article linked above):
We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets … We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.
My ignorance, body, and social location seems to invariably doom me to at least some degree of human arrogance and anthropocentric bias—even by assuming a human-nature binary that, along Aristotelian lines, conceptually segregates “me” from “them.” Me giving lip service to eco-centric perspectives cannot rescue me from my humancentric cognition, language, and experience.
And I don’t even have an octopus teacher (or similar animal acquaintance) to put me in check when I cross boundaries. (Although I appreciate it when other humans help me see those boundaries).
As Adam Kirsch wrote in the article linked above on animal intelligence:
Only humans commit atrocities such as war, genocide and slavery—and what allows us to conceive and carry out such crimes is the very power of reason that we boast about.
And likewise, Justin Gregg, specialist in dolphin communication, cited in the same article, wrote:
Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame. […] The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect. We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.
It seems tragically ironic that Aristotle regarded only humans, among all living creatures, as possessing a rational soul. (Spoken like a true anthropocentrist.)
How could we even possibly come up with an “objective” means of assessing intelligence, measuring happiness, treating addiction, building homes, resolving a headache, or designing a city park? Do we, in those pursuits, include perspectives from A.I., animals, indigenous people, plants, or hypothetical spirits when we make such determinations (in order to expose and correct the implicit biases of our own feelings and beliefs upon the “facts”)? Also, which animals, which indigenous people, to which degree and how? (I would expect scholars in those respective fields to feel eager to hear about any concrete suggestions).
In sum, I do reject the ideology of “objectivity,” which I see as the deceptive pretense that the scientific industrial-capital complex has not brought us (and continues to bring) massive weapons of untold horror and violence, a global pandemic of toxic addictions, the automated objectification and ruthless exploitation of animal and plant life (alongside intellectual and cultural theft through copyright laws and patents), and brought much of the life on our entire planet to (or over) the precipice of destruction.
I do reject the ideology of “objectivity” and the scientific industrial-capital complex that promises to relieve us of all of those problems and crises that they and the false pretense of “objectivity” delivered. This does not mean that I reject scientific methods nor that I oppose research yet a blunt Aristotelian binary filter that separates the world into “pro-science” and “anti-science” might perceive it that way. (Not just degree seems important here but nuance as well.)
I also wholeheartedly embrace reason and I would hope that seemed self-evident long prior to now. I thank you again for this opportunity for fruitful exchange.
Yet, I wonder, will changing our bylaws help improve difficult conversations such as these in any way?
And, if so, how?