One feature of the historiography both of and by those trained in analytic philosophy, the main tradition in Anglo-American academic philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, is the degree to which it resists using certain framing terms that are otherwise quite ubiquitous in intellectual history. It would be hard to imagine a history of twentieth-century literature, for example, that did not use – even if it ultimately rejected – the term “modernism.” That term, despite being fairly straightforwardly applicable to certain aspects of the nascent project of analytic philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s, is only very rarely deployed in writing about the philosophy of the twentieth century, however.

There are reasons for this absence, of course. Two that deserve mention are, first, that historians of analytic philosophy tend to use their actors’ categories as their analytic categories. Thus, if Bertrand Russell calls himself at some time slice a “logical atomist,” historians of analytic philosophy will write about his philosophy at that stage as “logical atomism.” Even their higher-order framing notions – such as “analytic philosophy” itself – tend to be used only because the historical actors (eventually) used them also. A second reason for this category modesty reflects the degree to which the historical writing in history of analytic philosophy is informed by the sensibilities of analytic philosophy itself. To use “modernism” as a term of art to discuss specific types of twentieth-century philosophy would be to understand “modernism” itself as a term that makes good philosophical sense. But to someone of analytic sensibilities, this is a dubious proposition at best – for what sort of philosophical sense could be made of a term that does not seem metaphysical, epistemological, logical, methodological, semantic, ethical, or even clearly aesthetic?

Compare, on these scores, a term that is in common usage in the history of analytic philosophy: “naturalism.” “Naturalism” is a term that is important to many of the historical actors in that history – one cannot understand, for example, W. V. Quine’s or Ernest Nagel’s philosophy without understanding that they meant to endorse naturalism. Moreover, while “naturalism” as it is understood in analytic philosophy is not obviously a phrase that is limited to any one of the subdisciplines of philosophy, it can be and routinely is relativized to those subdisciplines. That is, when we are asked to get clear on the commitments of naturalism, we carve it into ontological naturalism, ethical naturalism, epistemological naturalism, methodological naturalism, etc. While these clarifications might not seem terribly promising as slogans – “ontological naturalism assumes only natural and no supernatural objects” seems analytic or circular – one can hope that a more serious consideration of these elements of naturalism will yield a set of substantive commitments. On this score, “modernism” seems less promising. What would ontological or methodological modernism even be? One scarcely knows where to begin.

My concern in this chapter is not modernism but humanism. “Humanism” occupies a middle ground in the historiography of analytic philosophy. Some historical analytic philosophers have used the term – almost always as a term of commendation. But it has not occupied much historical attention. I think this is unfortunate, because, it could be argued, much of the reception of philosophy, analytic and not, in the twentieth century (and now into the twenty-first) is bound up with concerns perhaps best expressed in terms of humanism. I gesture at that argument, but it is too large for one short chapter. My attention here is more circumscribed. Here I want merely to sketch a few episodes in the history of something I call “scientific humanism” (what I call by that term importantly does not accord with the views of some of my historical actors) and say something about why those episodes mattered to those who participated in them and why they ought to matter to us.

Varieties of Scientific Humanism

Among historians of philosophy of science, one statement of the core commitments of a view its author calls “scientific humanism” will be especially familiar, perhaps. In his “Intellectual Autobiography,” Rudolph Carnap says this about some of the core commitments of the famous group of logicians, philosophers, and scientists he belonged to in the 1920s and 1930s – the Vienna Circle:

The three views that Carnap outlines are clear enough and we need not belabor them. Moreover, it would not be appropriate to argue with Carnap about the usage of words, and thus I grant to him that the views he presents can be called “scientific humanism.” When I enunciate later a somewhat different constellation of views and wish to call them by the same term, we will thus differentiate them from what I call “Carnapian scientific humanism.”

To find an alternative version of scientific humanism to this one, let us draw out briefly the core commitment of Carnap’s views and the place of both science and humanity within them. There are no higher powers that can solve human problems. Thus, the solution to human problems is our own task. The solution to human problems depends on achieving reliable knowledge. Science is a source of reliable knowledge. Thus, science can be used as a tool – an “instrument” – in the solution to human problems and the improvement of the human estate. This set of views is ultimately one form of a pragmatic justification for science – science is humanly valuable because it can help us reliably solve our problems.

The details of this view can be filled in in a variety of ways. Leaving aside the “no supernatural protectors” part of the view (Carnap’s own version of this rejection is that supposed claims about supernatural protectors are meaningless claims and have no place in knowledge or rational decision making), we are still owed something in the way of what “improvement in the conditions of life” of some or all humans amounts to, and an account of the role of scientific knowledge in rational decision making. Carnap himself has a long answer to the latter issue, embedded in his project of the logical foundations of probability (Carnap Reference Carnap1950b), but we shall not concern ourselves with that account here. The former question gets us closer to our ultimate concern: There are at least two dimensions along which answers to the question of the articulation of problems and solutions, as problems and solutions, are relevant. First, there is the question of how to articulate and individuate problems. In particular, how far removed from scientific knowledge-making will the language of the articulation of problems be? Second, what normative language is necessary for the articulation of problems as problems, and of solutions as improvements in the human estate?

On the last issue, Carnap will part company from many American pragmatists who might otherwise be sympathetic to his scientific humanism. For unlike the pragmatists (see Chapters 6 and 8), Carnap will not be able to rely on either a philosophical or a scientific account of human nature and flourishing to point to an objective problem in need of an objective solution. Instead, Carnap thought all valuational claims express subjective values and desires and this expressivism in ethical judgment points to a different concern – the problems that occur in the frustration of the pursuit of subjective value. How exactly subjective values are aggregated into the social problems demanding policy solutions is a difficult, though perhaps not intractable, problem. It too is, fortunately, beyond our concern here.

The fact remains that the view fits firmly into a pragmatic justificatory stance: Science is good as a tool for the solution to problems. And it is in opposition to this pragmatic stance that I wish to articulate a different view that could also with right be called “scientific humanism.” My alternative owes more to classical rationalism than to pragmatism. Its vision of scientific humanism is (with details to be filled in in various ways) this: Science is not humanistically valuable merely as an instrument for the solution of human problems; it is also valuable in itself as an intellectual pursuit of humans. Science is an expression, indeed perhaps the most central expression, of humanity; it fulfills our rational demand for the acquisition of knowledge, both of the world and of ourselves as knowers of the world. This might sound like an embarrassingly moralistic vision to those of a pragmatic bent, but humanism in most of its forms surely has a moralizing or edifying point.

It is perhaps unnecessary to give historical examples of people who have held versions of this view. It is a fairly common view – especially among scientists – even to today. But I would like to give a pair of historical examples to show its historical importance in the modern era, and to show that it can be developed in importantly different directions. Within the seventeenth-century context the person with whom I most associate this view is Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s Ethics (2018/1677) is a long argument for exactly this view: The expression of human conatus (human essence in its active striving) is found in the acquisition of articulated causal knowledge of the world. Those who pursue the life of acquisition of such knowledge live from reason as free persons (as much as is humanly possible) and come closest in the mortal realm to the infinite and eternal intellectual love of God. This high rationalist variety of scientific humanism continues right through the Enlightenment of course, finding perhaps fullest expression in the Marquis de Condorcet and his view of the infinite perfectibility of humanity (Condorcet Reference Condorcet1955/1795). In Condorcet, too, scientific knowledge is not merely a tool to be used in this perfectibility; the pursuit of knowledge is itself a crucial dimension of the increasing perfection of humanity.

In the German Enlightenment, the view also took on a more subtle tone and perhaps darker hue in the work of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, the pursuit of knowledge is an intrinsic project of reason, an expression of the highest of the human faculties. It is also a task that cannot be completed and any attempt to complete it depends on an unwarranted and faulty attempt to use reason beyond the bounds of experience. Moreover, in and of itself the pursuit of scientific knowledge is not quite an expression of moral improvement. However, the critique of reason that his transcendental philosophy provides reveals how scientific knowledge is possible and at the same time also reveals that we can think of ourselves as free. Thus, for Kant, the coming to self-consciousness of the epistemic subject reveals how we can and must embrace the moral vocation of reason. Similarly, in lieu of Condorcet’s vision of the infinite perfectibility of humanity, Kant can only offer the demand of reason in its practical employment to attempt as much as possible to bring the conditions of the Kingdom of Ends (where everyone can act from moral duty) into existence on Earth – again, a task that cannot be completed but is binding on humanity.

Of course, we need not mine the early modern period for elite examples of the view. Cruder versions of the view have been a part of most public defenses of science by scientists and other public intellectuals for the past sixty years or more. It is not too much of a distortion to say that C. P. Snow’s (in)famous remarks on “the two cultures” – scientific and literary – offered a form of scientific humanism. His aim was precisely to claim that “literary intellectuals” had missed half of culture, with a strong suggestion that it was the better half that they had missed. This is not scientific humanism at its subtlest or most edifying, but it is proud and it is unrelenting. Whatever philistinism scientists might perpetuate upon humanities and the arts, the reverse was much, much worse: Literary intellectuals were, by and large, scientifically illiterate to the point of being prehistoric. Having noted that literature professors could not explain the second law of thermodynamics, Snow raised the stakes:

One can find echoes of Snow’s contempt for literature professors all the way up to the present day in the work of public intellectuals who are scientists or who fancy that science needs them to defend it from the relativists, the irrationalists, the feminists, and the social justice warriors.

A more generous form of scientific humanism animated the work of Snow’s contemporary, Jacob Bronowski. Bronowski’s Reference Bronowski1973 television series and book, The Ascent of Man, was not simply about what science could tell us about the ascent of humanity from the veldt to modern times; the pursuit of scientific knowledge was itself the greatest form of ascent humans had achieved. Bronowski was, he told us, interested in telling us a story of the human and the personal in the realm of scientific ideas, but he wanted also to do more than that. For Bronowski, the form of rational knowledge that was found in science was the vocation of humanity, its highest expression and its conscious embrace of human nature. The series ends on precisely this point:

That final gesture of synthesis and reconciliation should not confuse us. If knowledge is our destiny then the explanations of science, by virtue of being in the realm of knowledge, must ultimately weigh more and be more expressive of humanity than are the experiences of the arts.

World War I and the Crisis of the European Sciences

I mention Bronowski because his work brings me close to the topic of the rest of this chapter. Bronowski’s ascent of man was largely a history of science, but he tells us in the introduction to the book that he intended it as a “philosophy” (Bronowski Reference Bronowski1973: 11) – a philosophy of nature, including human nature. Bronowski was a mathematician, a biologist, an author of literature, a polymath, but he was not a professional historian or philosopher of science. Indeed, by 1973 he might have been quite suspicious of what professional history and philosophy of science had become – a highly professionalized endeavor with little interest in edification and arguing over accounts of the development of science that were not likely to support his own vision. But I want to argue that professionalized history and philosophy of science as it developed after World War I was in fact deeply influenced by the form of scientific humanism that I have enunciated, more so than by Carnap’s form of it. I illustrate these claims with two main cases. The great founder of professional history of science, George Sarton, argued explicitly for a robust form of scientific humanism that depended for its expression precisely on rigorous and encyclopedic history of science. My second case is more subtle. I argue that some forms of logical empiricist philosophy of science, a logic-based form of philosophy of science associated with the Vienna Circle and colleagues in various other parts of the world, were more attached to my form of scientific humanism than to Carnap’s. I argue the case for Hans Reichenbach here.

Scientific humanism in my formulation (henceforth, “scientific humanism”) was not a dead letter in the 1920s when Carnap met with the Vienna Circle and found there a shared “Carnapian scientific humanism.” It was, however, under considerable pressure and, if ever it could be taken for granted, it certainly had lost any claim to self-evidence by November 1918. The reason for this is simply stated: World War I was for the countries of the West an unprecedented human and cultural disaster; yet it had been fought among the most scientifically advanced of countries, using the most technically advanced equipment and weapons. For the confident expression of the inevitable improvement of humanity through scientific advancement, World War I was a fundamental crisis.

There were myriad ways to reject scientific humanism after World War I. Among the more famous and least subtle ways was Oswald Spengler’s declinist project (Spengler Reference Spengler1991/1922/1918). Armed with an allegedly objective view of the morphology of history, Spengler argued that the West was in inevitable decline. From this it follows that the forms of scientific knowledge enshrined in the West were no bulwark against decline. Various forms of Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) and philosophy of existence also arose after the war and were by and large forms of anti-scientific humanism and sometimes forms of anti-scientific anti-humanism. The threat that was so keenly felt by the intellectual classes – and perhaps most strongly in the defeated countries of the Germanophone world – was a form of nihilism arising from the destruction of their worlds by the very tools they had thought had made their civilization the greatest in world history. The problem is expressed by the narrator of Erich Maria Remarque’s wrenching war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front:

This nihilism resonated with readers of the novel who had served in the war. Here is how Carl Zuckmayer (1994/1929: 23) expressed the point in his review of the book. (This passage begins with the more literal translation of the title: “In the West, Nothing New.”)

Within this context, German and Austrian professors saw a form of anti-science taking hold in their students during and after the war. Where a life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge had once seemed like a noble and responsible goal of the student, professors now saw their students seeking something else, often enough expressed in language such as “the search for authentic experience and meaning.”

Many who saw this threat took the opportunity to endorse scientific humanism, but often of a new and more subtle kind than the classic versions scouted earlier. One very interesting case is Max Weber in his famous lecture, “Science as Vocation.” In the lecture, Weber is withering on the striving of young people in 1917 for “experience” and “personality.” He ascribes this attitude at least in part to an anti-scientific point of view. He gives a reading of Plato’s Cave allegory in which “the sun is the truth of science, which alone does not snatch at illusions and shadows but seeks only true being.” Having raised this vision of Plato, Weber asks:

Weber rejects this view, not in order to go back to Plato, but rather to reject the mutual presupposition of both positions: that there is some ultimate meaning to life or the world, whether it is to be found in the pursuit of scientific knowledge or in one’s own most inner and authentic experience. In a figure of speech that recalls Kant’s claim that enlightenment is humanity’s release from self-imposed nonage, Weber ascribes the belief in such meanings to childishness:

Where does Weber leave us in light of this? Essentially with the view that the value in science cannot be found in existing meaningful things that are studied in science or any other realm of knowledge – the world, God, happiness, being, what have you. It can only be found internally as a presupposition of the practice of science. That the truths of chemistry are worth knowing is a presupposition of chemistry but not one it can defend against attacks from those who do not similarly presuppose it. Whether we accept or reject this presupposition is, he says, an expression of “our ultimate attitude toward life” (Reference Weber, Owen and Strong2004/1917: 18).

This is, I would argue, a form of scientific humanism, but a form quite different from Spinoza’s or Kant’s or indeed Bronowski’s. It does not answer – indeed rejects as meaningless the demand for an answer to – the question of the ultimate meaning of human life or of scientific work. Nevertheless, the scientific vocation bears within itself an answer sufficient for itself of whether it is worthwhile to pursue science. Weber speaks as a scientist about the virtues of science. If you are unmoved, then you lack the vocation for science. There is no triumphal “ascent of man” here – no insistence that the ultimate telos of humanity is self-knowledge through understanding what science reveals about the extra-human world. Weber is even more minor key than Kant – science isn’t even a vocation of reason anymore in the Kantian sense of a vocation of any finite rational being.

There is, however, a social role for the scientific vocation that is more than merely self-certifying and that genuinely counts as an ethical good embedded within value-free science. For Weber, the vocation of science includes the demand of teaching, and it is in their role as teachers that scientists play a social role that cannot be played by any other profession. Only the disinterested and dispassionate teacher can confront their students with the proper set of “inconvenient facts” (Weber Reference Weber, Owen and Strong2004/1917: 22) – inconvenient, that is, to the moral and political interests and values of the students. Weber concludes: “I believe that when the university teacher makes his listeners accustom themselves to such facts, his achievement is more than merely intellectual. I would be immodest enough to describe it as an “ethical achievement,” although this may be too emotive a term for something that is so self-evident” (Weber Reference Weber, Owen and Strong2004/1917: 22).

So, on Weber’s view, there is a value to doing science as a scientist that you cannot expect to convince those without the vocation for science to agree with. There is also a social value in the teaching of science in bringing inconvenient facts before all members of the society. Because of the universalism of science (both in its topics and its pursuit), some projects associated with other humanisms Weber sets aside. For example, in elaborating his view, Weber at one point eschews using his perspective to evaluate human cultural achievement, saying (Weber Reference Weber, Owen and Strong2004/1917: 23): “I do not know how you would go about deciding ‘scientifically’ between the value of French and German culture.” If we are briefly scouting alternative humanisms available after World War I, it is useful perhaps to note that there were various forms of “new humanism” being developed that had no trouble with that question. Indeed, there were some postwar new humanisms that claimed to be aspects of German culture. A representative case is found in Paul Hensel’s 1921 essay, “The New Humanism.” He begins the essay by comparing the new humanism of the twentieth century with Renaissance humanism that sought to celebrate the works of pagan antiquity, saying that there were of course similarities but that:

Hensel attempts to explain the astonishing fact that new humanism is predominantly a German affair by in part claiming that there was a greater degree of scholarly concern among the Germans than among the French from the eighteenth century onward on the works and culture of Greek antiquity. Concerning themselves overly with the Romans, by the mid-eighteenth century the French had had enough and issued the call “back to nature,” whereas the Germans were truer to the humanist calling and instead said “back to the Greeks”! Hensel’s view seems to be that only the Germans carried forward the true spirit of Renaissance humanism whereas the French changed that project into a form of naturalism.

For Hensel, ultimately, given the history he provides, the crucial figure for new humanism is Goethe, who somehow was able to combine in one person the figures of the philosopher, the poet, and the scientist. For this reason, Hensel (Reference Hensel1930/1921: 277) ends his remarks by saying that: “anyone’s stance toward new humanism depends on what Goethe means to them. And, thus, new humanism is above all a German concern.”

Hensel was not a major philosophical figure in 1921 and is not one now. I briefly raise his remarks here to indicate that it certainly was not the case that “humanism” in Europe after the war was inevitably going to be any form of scientific humanism or any form of political project that would aim for a unity of humanity or universal human flourishing. I mention Hensel for another, more extrinsic reason: He was in 1915 one of two directors – with the mathematician Max Noether – of Hans Reichenbach’s dissertation, and Reichenbach’s views do interest us here.

Scientific Humanism after World War I in History and Philosophy of Science

The early twentieth century was a time for the consolidation of history of science and philosophy of science as distinct professional practices. The single most important figure in the professionalization of history of science in this time period was George Sarton. As we shall see, his vision of the intellectual import of history of science was an extremely robust form of scientific humanism. Within the newly professionalizing vision of philosophy of science, scientific humanism was neither as explicit nor as robust, but I argue that in at least one version of logical empiricism – that of Hans Reichenbach – it can be uncovered.

Sarton began presenting his vision for history of science as “the new humanism” in 1918 in a paper published in French. He presented substantially the same case in 1922 at a talk before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston and on the pages of his new history of science journal, Isis, in 1924. In the 1924 paper he presents the program of New Humanism in three principles. First, “human progress is essentially a function of the advance of positive knowledge” (Sarton Reference Sarton1924: 9). Second, “the progress of each branch of knowledge is a function of the progress of the other branches” (Sarton Reference Sarton1924: 10). He dubs this principle “the unity of knowledge.” Third, “the progress of science is not due to the isolated efforts of a single people but to the combined efforts of all peoples” (Sarton Reference Sarton1924: 11). This principle he calls “the unity of mankind.” The reason why this becomes a project in the history of science, in the first instance, is that because they are theses about the progress of science, the principles of the New Humanism can only be demonstrated historically. He pursued this project through his entire, unbelievably productive career. For example, the “unity of mankind” thesis is illustrated and motivated in dozens of essays he wrote about texts and artifacts from around the world and across historical epochs. His interests spanned material from Babylon, Egypt, India, China, the Islamic world, and much else. This was not mere eclecticism but a concerted effort to detail and appreciate some of the contributions to knowledge of all people and all civilizations.

Sarton is very clear that the New Humanism is most importantly trained on the progress of positive knowledge, of science, precisely because a science has a uniquely progressive historical development. Within the history of human endeavor, he tells us:

Sarton argues that this vision of the history of science allows a new philosophy – New Humanism itself – to be drawn from the study of history. This work goes forward in the spirit of more traditional humanisms but with a different and more synoptic vision:

While this may seem a form of triumphalist scientific humanism that my claim about the crisis induced by World War I should rule out, upon closer examination one sees within the project a clear acknowledgment of the crisis both intellectually and materially and a deeper way in which the project requires an encyclopedic vision of the history of science. Sarton argues that the unities of knowledge and humanity embedded in the New Humanism are real but hidden. They are under threat, especially in the early postwar years, from a more superficial but more self-evident social and political disunity:

It is not too much to say that one educational goal of the history of science is to increase substantially the number of people who appreciate the deeper unity of humanity and, thus, to work against distrust, discord, and war.

This can be seen practically in the curious way that the 1924 essay ends – with two surprising appendices. The first appendix, spanning several pages, is “an urgent appeal to American scholars” (Sarton Reference Sarton1924: 35) for subscriptions to Isis, which had been founded in 1913 but was forced to have a hiatus from publication from 1914 to 1919. The appeal is directed at American scholars because of the ruination of the European economy by the war. Sarton was at pains to argue that the important work of the journal and the New Humanism itself depended on subscription money. If the direct appeal for money in order to advance the New Humanism was not persuasive, Sarton provided a second appendix, this one listing the names of authors and patrons of Isis in its first five years of production (one before and four after the war). The list includes over ninety persons distributed in over a dozen countries, including India and Japan. There are many luminaries in the world of science and history of science, including Svante Arrhenius, Pierre Boutroux, Émile Durkheim, P. E. B. Jourdain, Jacques Loeb, Hélène Metzger, Wilhelm Ostwald, Henri Poincaré, and Abel Rey. The point was no doubt to impress upon the reader that the vision for the New Humanism was not idiosyncratic to Sarton, and that a major international intellectual undertaking was indeed under way.

There is a more direct way in which Sarton saw his New Humanism as being able to begin to heal the wounds of previous wars and dissuade nations from entering new ones. He argued that the arguments nations typically gave for wars were self-interested and fraudulent – an attempt to raise narrow political or commercial interests to the standard of truth. By fostering scientific ways of thinking and standards of truth, the New Humanism would induce a higher honesty:

The result would be what Sarton calls “true internationalism” (1924: 26).

Some of the themes we have just scouted in Sarton are reminiscent of some of the larger elements of the logical empiricist project. Most well known, perhaps, is their insistence on the unity of science, which seems a close cousin to Sarton’s unity of positive knowledge. There is more than a hint of the “unity of mankind” in the unity of science project, also, which very often emphasized its internationalism. We have already seen, however, Carnap expressing a quite different view from Sarton’s regarding scientific humanism. So, our question here is, was there in logical empiricism a form of the more robust humanism we have found in common among Spinoza, Sarton, and Bronowski, and more subtly and problematically also in Kant and Weber? In accordance with practice in current literature on logical empiricism, I refrain from talking generally about the project and argue that there is such a theme in a single, more specific exemplar.

Hans Reichenbach was five years younger than Sarton and had served in the war, despite his commitment to pacificist principles, in the German army wireless telegraphy unit. In the between-war period his more popular work (which was extensive) repeatedly pointed to the importance of science and philosophy of science in solving a specific problem of the early twentieth century: he saw his culture riven by a deep divide between the everyday world of life and the modern world of science. He began his 1930 essay, “The Philosophical Significance of Modern Physics,” on just this point: (Reichenbach Reference Reichenbach, Reichenbach and Cohen1978/1930b: 304): “Alienation between the world of science and the world of everyday life has emerged in our time with a force never known before.” The principal guilt for this unsatisfactory state of affairs he lays at the feet of the academic philosophy of his day, which he sees as enforcing this split, assigning to Einsteinian or quantum physics its realm but claiming they amount to conceptual fictions from the point of view of everyday life. The split was troubling, not merely because it amounted to an attempt to live “a double life” (Reference Reichenbach, Reichenbach and Cohen1978/1930b: 304), but also because it prevented the proper lessons of contemporary science from informing the life of the present. This lends a specific cultural significance in 1930 to the philosophy of science:

Now, this problem – the integration of everyday and scientific world views – might seem to be chiefly due to the progress of esoteric science; who would expect the average person to understand relativity theory or quantum mechanics? This requires, on Reichenbach’s behalf, two responses. More superficially, Reichenbach was not, of course, trying to convert each person into another Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr. But his long engagement in the public understanding of science, which led, among other things, to his books From Copernicus to Einstein (1942/1927) and Atom and Cosmos (1932/1930), did presume that the concepts of science were not wholly beyond the ken of the average person and that an understanding of both the world view of science and how it was achieved was available to the average citizen. Following from this, and more importantly for understanding Reichenbach’s project, he, as we have seen, wanted to blame educated people and especially philosophers for the split between the everyday world and the world of science. He argued that philosophy in Germany at the time was a fundamentally conservative activity that tried to wall off the scope of science so that far more traditional philosophical concepts could be seen as fundamental to everyday and social life. This was an intellectual project of the philosophy of his times but not the only role philosophy could play, nor the one it should play.

The chief lesson, then, of taking the world of contemporary science seriously was a rejection of philosophical doctrines, especially calcified Kantian doctrines of the a priori as determined by a rigid set of concepts that could not be rejected or replaced and in terms of which the world had to be understood. He returned again and again to this rejection of the a priori as necessary and immutable and underscored continually the liberating nature of the new sciences of nature on precisely this score. The essay I just quoted ends on exactly this point:

In other writing from this period, Reichenbach goes beyond this and argues that the liberation of thought in the development of modern science stands in close kinship to the ways of thought and action found in modernizing trends in contemporary society. In this way, modern science stands actually in quite close relation to some social and political aspects of contemporary life – just as they both stand opposed to rigid systems of concepts and values found in academic philosophy. He writes in another popular essay of the period that:

So, Reichenbach’s project was to configure a new philosophy of nature that was precisely the counter to the conservative academic philosophy of his times. One final theme that connects that new philosophy of nature – and of the human knower of nature – to the postwar crisis of the twentieth century and also to Weber’s version of scientific humanism is this: In rejecting the old “reason and the understanding have only a single eternal form” view of the a priori, Reichenbach was rejecting neither the a priori itself nor, certainly, the need for a conceptual understanding of nature. Instead, he was insisting that in the realms both of concepts and values, there is ultimately human choice and, thus, human responsibility. Reichenbach’s view was that his new account of the knowledge of knowledge indicated the ineliminable role of the will in knowledge and also in social life. But there are no external or internal guarantees of correctness of volition. All that he can offer instead are two things: resoluteness of will and willingness to live in a society that aims for the consilience of wills. He never gave up this view and puts the points this way toward the end of his final book, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951: 300, 301):

It is not too much to say that throughout his career Reichenbach pursued a philosophy of modern science that was also a philosophy of responsible social life.

Reichenbach’s vision lacks the encyclopedic scope and the sheer grandeur of teleological ambition of Sarton’s, of course. But it is a synthetic vision in its own right – for the way in which modern science has rejected traditional epistemological and meta-ethical positions is not, for Reichenbach, something the working scientist is well placed to argue. For such tasks, Reichenbach argues for a specialized group of scientifically and philosophically trained specialists, a research community in philosophy. Scientific philosophy has its own task in the modernizing projects of the twentieth century – and it is a task very much within the spirit of scientific humanism.

Coda

I have in this chapter sought to demonstrate that at the originary moment for professionalized history of science and philosophy of science in the 1920s and 1930s, there were robust scientific humanist visions embedded in some prominent exemplars of that work. This is dead obvious, if currently underappreciated, in the case of Sarton. Reichenbach’s scientific humanism is less obvious, less expansive, less optimistic and teleological, but no less real.

Almost a hundred years on, things have clearly changed. Within history of science, in a variety of idioms from postmodernism to Latourian nonmodernism (Latour Reference Latour1993) to a turn to social and cultural history, itself replete with what Steven Shapin has called “tone-lowering” gestures (Shapin Reference Shapin2010), the scientific humanism of Sarton has all but vanished from sight. The more subtle humanisms of logical empiricist and other early twentieth-century philosophy of science are more robustly found in analytic philosophy of science, although perhaps too often expressed in the mode of being a foot soldier in the science wars that raged in the 1990s and blamed sociology, history, and philosophy of science for decreased trust in science (and flare up occasionally still). These days the main and very vocal proponents of scientific humanism tend to be public scientists, and their vision seems less humane than triumphalist and more in need of than informed by serious work in history or philosophy of science.

This intellectual situation seems unsatisfying and dysfunctional. I am less interested in raising the tone than in understanding the stakes. Crises press in upon us from all sides – climate disasters, technology pressed into oppressive economic and social agendas, political extremism. We may no longer think of scientific progress as the master narrative of modernity, but we certainly need scientific and technological progress (as well as moral clarity, political will, social solidarity, critical thinking, etc.) to help us with many problems, including those caused by foolish past and current uses of science and technology. The popular scientific humanism of today seems scarcely up to the task that confronts us. We need humanities scholars – in history and philosophy of science and in many other fields – to help us achieve a scientific humanism or an alternative to scientific humanism capable of joining with the urgent integrated political action that alone can see humanity through its current crises.

Thus wrote John Dewey, whose progressive pragmatist philosophy stands as one of the most important articulations of humanism in the twentieth century. Humanism in the United States, however, came in many flavors, with public intellectuals, activists, and artists from all sides of the political spectrum claiming it as the doctrine best suited to advance their vision of human flourishing. The literary humanists led by literary critics Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt,Footnote ¹ for example, clung to a version of humanism reaching back to Plato, which held mind–body dualism to be the key ingredient to promoting the good life. For these conservative cultural critics, the wholesale embrace of science by what they called “humanitarians” and “evolutionists” such as Dewey represented a kind of regressive barbarism, which, in their view, undermined a conception of the human as distinct from other animals. Babbitt, More, and their followers believed that to keep humans’ animalistic, “wild” appetites in check, we must cultivate in students what they referred to as “the inner check” or “higher will.”

Many progressive intellectuals and social reformers, by contrast, espoused versions of humanism distanced from what they believed was the corrupting influence of religion, and especially Christianity, which, rather than fulfilling its promise to promote the flourishing of all human beings, was used to support economic practices that exploit children and the poor and uphold racist and sexist values (Cameron Reference Cameron and Sinitiere2023). Unlike the literary humanists, prominent sociological humanists such as W. E. Du Bois and Jane Addams adopted a naturalistic, Darwinian worldview, and turned to science as a means by which subjugated communities – African Americans, women, the working class, etc. – might achieve political, industrial, and social equality (Cameron Reference Cameron and Sinitiere2023; Deagan Reference Deagan1988a; Early Reference Early2006; Morgan Reference Morgan2016). The progressive humanism of Dewey shared many of the assumptions of the sociological humanists about human nature. Dewey also believed that rather than focusing on cultivating a controlling higher will by means of an education centered around the classics, we must promote an imaginative and experimental educational approach.

The aim of this chapter is to spell out the intertwining of humanism and science across Dewey’s work and, more specifically, to anchor his account of the value of science in his philosophy of humanism. I begin by situating Dewey’s pragmatic humanism within a culture war in the 1910s and 1920s concerning what human nature is and whether science should guide our efforts to address social ills and promote human flourishing. I then argue that although he agreed with the literary humanists that education needed to be reformed, Dewey insisted in Democracy and Education (Reference Dewey1923/1916) and Human Nature and Conduct (1922), among other works, that to make real social progress, we must cultivate a scientific disposition, a taste for excellence, and flexible cognitive habits to better equip future generations to meet the challenges of the changing conditions of human experience. I conclude by supplementing Dewey, vis-à-vis Addams (Reference Addams and Seigfried2002/1902), with preliminary thoughts on the role that caring about others ought to play in helping us produce knowledge that can be used to promote the common good.

The Literary Humanist Quarrel with Science

The 1920s was an era of profound cultural turmoil and social unrest in the United States. Culminating in the 1929 stock market crash, many citizens were troubled by what they perceived as a dramatic cultural decline. In a poem published in 1923, American poet William Carlos Williams perhaps best expressed a collective anxiety about the lack of human involvement in directing the course of human history, with “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car” (1923). The public intellectuals who rose to prominence at the end of the decade, the literary humanists, likewise worried about the materialism of everyday life, relativistic and naturalistic tendencies in philosophy, and the romantic individualism they believed was being promoted in literature and the arts. Babbitt, More, and their followers embarked on a cultural crusade against what they thought was a misguided entanglement of humanism with science in academia, which, they feared, was contaminating the moral fabric of the community. The source of the problem for the literary humanists was humanity’s lack of self-control. Having thus diagnosed the problem, they reasoned that humans must separate themselves from their natural selves by disciplining their animal impulses and passions, and by cultivating the higher ethical self or will as the means to discover universal values and standards against which to measure their conduct. These universal standards are required to ground the diversity of human experience in a common element, a norm to which we must all aspire (Babbitt Reference Babbitt and Foerster1930: 28).

Comprised mainly of literary critics, the literary humanists leveled many of their critiques at the Rousseauvian romantics or so-called emotional naturalists, who believed that social institutions have a corrupting influence on humans. Whereas Rousseauvian romanticism exalted primitivism, the view that humans are naturally good in a state of nature, literary humanism celebrated the ascendency of humans over nature. And whereas romantic ethics reduced morality to “an expansive sympathy,” the literary humanists believed morality entails a “restraint on passion” (Hoeveler Reference Hoeveler1977: 45). The pragmatists, and “scientific” philosophers more generally, were also among their favorite targets, as they endorsed a conception of human nature as being entirely a product of a material and social environment, and based their philosophy of life on the contingent, organic element of human experience. But no group was more reviled than the so-called humanitarians, who applied the scientific method to the study of human behavior and conduct, and who neglected the fixed, spiritual “center” shared by all humans and which differentiated them from other animals (Babbitt Reference Babbitt and Foerster1930).

Although many of their portrayals of their opponents’ views were simplistic and inaccurate, the literary humanists offer an important window into a culture war over whether science should play any role in our understandings of what human nature is and how humans should conduct themselves. Here I focus on Louis Trenchard More, Paul Elmer More’s younger brother, whose critical attitude toward the sciences served to bolster the literary humanist critiques of naturalist thinkers and social reformers. We will see that More was precisely the man of science the literary humanists needed to legitimize their attacks on what they believed was a harmful approach to understanding the nature of human experience and ameliorating the human condition.

Trained as a physicist, More set out to delimit what should be within the purview of scientific investigation in The Limitations of Science (1915), and later in “The Pretensions of Science,” which appeared in one of the most important contributions to the literary humanist movement, Norman Foerster’s edited collection Humanism and America (1930), and also in The Dogma of Evolution (More Reference More1925), which purports to unmask the extent to which Darwinian evolutionary theory was infecting modern thought. More agreed that science is a valuable tool for helping us to predict the future, for diminishing superstition, and for allowing us greater control of our environments (1915: 187). Yet, despite science’s valuable contributions to the advancement of human civilization, he claimed that it leads us astray when scientists create “a fictitious world of the imagination made out of æthers, electrons, mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and others’ minds with the sensible world of brute fact” (1930: 3, see also 16; and More Reference More1915: 188). In other words, when scientists dabble in the world of metaphysics, they indirectly cause social harm, as they lend authority to what More refers to as the “pseudo-sciences” of psychology and sociology (More Reference More and Foerster1930: 4). Arguing that we need a separate method from that of the “objective” sciences to study the nature of human consciousness and behavior, More contended that any field that investigates subjective phenomena scientifically is a pseudo-science.

More fervently believed that we should be wary of the psychologists and sociologists, “far greater in number than the two descendants of James” (1930: 3)Footnote ² and far more dangerous than the metaphysically inclined scientists, as they cause harm directly by making false and misleading claims about human nature and conduct (1930: 4). In The Dogma of Evolution and “The Pretensions of Science,” More specifies that biologists, and especially Thomas Huxley (1930: 4–5), are to blame for popularizing the misconceptions that the world is in flux and that man is an organic machine subject to physical laws. Worried that, in his words, “an increasingly large number are … turning to scientific doctrines in the hope that a deeper experimental knowledge of the laws of man’s individuality, of his social relations, and of his environment” will solve social problems, More insisted that naturalism is not an appropriate guide for “evolving a society nearer to the ideally good” (1915: 214). His diagnosis of “these new systems of scientific ethics,” however, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the morally inflected scientific naturalism of some of their popularizers, especially Dewey, who, even while arguing that we should cultivate in children a scientific attitude, believed that laws derived from empirical observation are not by themselves appropriate guides to moral conduct.Footnote ³

More’s simplistic understanding of how naturalist philosophers and social reformers conceived the value of science led him to distort some his opponents’ naturalistic conceptions of human nature. This was frustrating to many, including George Sarton, who wrote in a review of Foerster’s collection, Humanism and America, “[o]ne wishes one could send some of these ‘humanists’ back to school that they may learn the A B C of science, and be taught how dishonest it is to condemn things of which one knows nothing” (Sarton Reference Sarton1930: 448). As an example of this, consider some of More’s attacks, which misrepresented scientific social reform projects as “eugenics”:Footnote ⁴

More was not alone in his distaste for and fear of the theoretical commitments of naturalist philosophers and social reformers. His colleague, Babbitt, worried about the philosophical commitments of the naturalists (to whom he also referred as “the Baconians”): “The Baconian has inclined from the outset to substitute an outer for an inner working – the effort of the individual upon himself – that religion has, in some form or another, always required” (1930: 34). Attributing all manner of social ills to his opponents, Babbitt blamed them for encouraging “the acquisitive life and also the pursuit of material instead of spiritual ‘comfort’” (1930: 34). This was due to their supposed allegiance to Rousseauvian romanticism: “the upshot of this myth of man’s natural goodness has been to discredit the traditional controls, both humanistic and religious” (1930: 35). More agreed and added, in The Limitations of Science, that “[s]ide by side with the doctrine that human sympathy is the controlling factor in ethics, and this belief is evidently the basis of eugenics, there has always persisted the contrasted doctrine that the state of man is one of warfare, a survival of the fit” (1915: 258).

It is tempting to point out the many fallacious, uncharitable, and incorrect claims made by the literary humanists, dismiss their arguments as pseudo-philosophy produced by scholars with only a superficial understanding of both philosophy and science, and move on. It is worth pausing here, however, to break down the source of their worries and why it matters. At heart, what the literary humanists were pointing to was a gradual erosion of traditional values, the emergence of schools of thought that challenged their belief that humans are cognitively and morally distinct from other animals, and educational approaches that they feared did not cultivate in pupils their capacity for moral agency. They believed that a naturalistic understanding of the human encouraged citizens to pursue their first-order desires. And they doubted the efficacy of educational and social reform programs built on what they believed were shaky theoretical foundations.Footnote ⁵ On their “correct” version of humanism, the study of human nature ought to be based on “intuition” (Babbitt Reference Babbitt and Foerster1930) and imaginative apprehension of some common element shared by all humans (Babbitt 1919). Literature, and in particular time-tested literature untainted by the romantic celebration of individual experience, was valuable as a source of knowledge of the subjective elements of experience. It is literary humanism cordoned off from scientific psychology, then, that should serve as a guide to human conduct.Footnote ⁶

Although literary humanist efforts to inject fear and suspicion of the encroachment of science into all domains of human life in the public sphere did not find a large audience, their attacks on the authority of science nevertheless succeeded in the decades to come. Several critics at the end of the 1930s charged that faith in science was misguided and undermined the very foundations of democratic thought in the United States (Jewett Reference Jewett2020). In what follows, we will see that, as the literary humanists feared, Dewey’s progressive humanism relocated the source of value to the domain of human experience. We will also see that though their attacks against progressive humanism were off the mark, they nonetheless testified to a burgeoning fear of the authority of science, which helped to shape the contours of Dewey’s positive proposal. As a pragmatist, he did not merely see himself as intervening in narrow, academic, philosophical debates in ethics or education. Despite their abstract quality, Dewey’s philosophical contributions were a direct response to the changing intellectual landscape and social conditions of his time. His philosophy was systematic and holistic, theoretical and pragmatic, and can be understood as a philosophy of humanism.Footnote ⁷

Dewey’s Philosophy of Humanism

Dewey is perhaps best known for championing an instrumentalist conception of science, or the view that science is valuable as a means to helping us accomplish human ends. Science is always value-laden, according to Dewey, as the aims of science are tied to what we value. This could be anything from removing sexist biases from science to valuing objectivity in science. Given that for Dewey, scientific investigation is inextricably bound up with our values – in fact, as Matthew Brown (2020) has recently argued, even scientific facts, when employed as means to solve a problem, are selected for their value to help us accomplish our ends in view – it is surprising that not much has been written about the close entwinement of science and humanism in Dewey’s thought. Perhaps this scholarly gap is the result of our contemporary academic environment, which, with notable exceptions, tends to cordon off the sciences from the humanities. Dewey believed, however, that a proper understanding of human nature and conduct was necessary not merely for designing an educational curriculum that might better serve our democratic aims but also for reenvisioning the role that science might play in advancing progressive social aims. Thus, although he was critical of the tendency of humans to employ science to advance the interests of industry, he was also hopeful that we could cultivate in new generations imaginative and critical habits of mind and a social consciousness that would enable us to harness our collective resources toward solving social problems and ameliorating the human condition.

Like the literary humanists, Dewey worried about the materialism of the age and the lack of a critical attitude in the public. He differed, however, in how to go about addressing these problems. First, he was critical of metaphysical discussions in ethics, which offer accounts of moral motivation disconnected from the complexity of everyday situations (Brinkmann Reference Brinkmann2013; Dewey and Tufts Reference Dewey and Tufts1932/1908). Second, he rejected the dualistic conception of human nature put forth by the literary humanists according to which the animal self is distinct and separate from the reflective, ethical self. Third, since like other animals, we are creatures of habit, Dewey believed that rather than cultivate an inner check, which, as we will see, produces internal disharmony, we must reimagine and artfully cultivate new habits of thought and behavior (Dewey Reference Dewey1922; McClelland Reference McClelland2005). Dewey recognized that intelligent habits are difficult to acquire, however, as social environments tend to encourage mechanical habits of thought and behavior.Footnote ⁸ For this reason, he thought that we ought to concentrate our efforts on cultivating somatic awareness and cognitive flexibility in the young (Dewey Reference Dewey1923/1916; Reference Dewey1922; Westbrook Reference Westbrook1991).Footnote ⁹ By adopting an experimental, or as Dewey liked to call it, a “scientific” disposition, citizens will be better equipped to meet the various ethical and social challenges of the future.

Although the literary humanists were right that the progressive humanists sought to apply the scientific method to human experience, and that many progressive thinkers adopted a naturalistic, Darwinian conception of human nature and conduct, they were entirely wrong to claim that “evolutionism,” as they liked to call it, implies social Darwinism or essentialism about human nature. For Dewey, Darwin’s evolutionary theory shifts our conception of the human, not as essentially distinct from other animals, but as an organism that is not only shaped by but capable of shaping its material and social environment. This new understanding propelled him to examine human valuation practices and inspired him to reenvision the conditions that need to be in place for humans to employ their capacity for moral agency. The literary humanists believed that to resist our first-order desires to consume – to reject materialism as a standard mode of conduct, in other words – we need to turn to the past and derive ideals of conduct to aspire to, but Dewey worried that this approach would leave false beliefs and assumptions unexamined. For example, the classics may propagate falsehoods, uninformed by the findings of the latest science, such as the belief that Black people are essentially intellectually inferior to white people. He also worried that this approach would impair our ability to think flexibly and critically when faced with particularly vexing social problems. Rather than look to the past, we should employ standards appropriate to the specific situation at hand. This is because the material and social environment changes from generation to generation, and we need to apply new solutions to ever-evolving social problems. For Dewey, cultivating an inner check encourages us either to blindly follow fixed rules and take judgment out of the equation, or to suffer because of conflicting intuitions about what we should do, where instead we could be reflecting on the value of traditional standards for solving practical problems.

Key to Dewey’s proposal is an understanding of human nature and conduct as malleable and responsive to the pressures of the material and social environment (Dewey Reference Dewey1922; Brinkmann Reference Brinkmann2013; McClelland Reference McClelland2005; Westbrook Reference Westbrook1991). If his proposed understanding of human nature and conduct is true (an understanding that, he would agree, needs to be verified by means of empirical inquiry), then it follows that flexible, or intelligent, habits will counteract our tendency to settle into mechanical and unproductive habits. Now, just how, precisely, are we supposed to accomplish this?

As early as the 1890s, and with the support of the journalist Franklin Ford, Dewey became enthusiastic about the prospect of engineering an epistemic environment in which knowledge is more equally distributed. Frustrated by the tendency in philosophy to produce theoretical knowledge disconnected from the problems of everyday life, Dewey and others decided to start a newspaper, which was to be called Thought News and distributed across southern Michigan (Westbrook Reference Westbrook1991: 55). The aim of the paper was to spread ideas of democracy and to develop in the public habits of inquiry and a heightened awareness of their social “function” in an “interdependent community” (Westbrook Reference Westbrook1991: 53). Dewey thought that by making philosophy accessible to the community, it would become valuable as a tool for injecting new life into what he and the other prospective founders of the newspaper referred to as the “social organism.” The project fell through in part because of a fallout between Dewey and Ford, whose vision for the paper was much more ambitious that Dewey’s in its scope: Where Dewey wanted to inject new life into philosophy and bridge the gap between the masses and the educated elite, Ford wanted to radicalize journalism and use the newspaper as a vehicle for studying the social organism “like a steam engine” (Ford quoted in Westbrook Reference Westbrook1991: 56).Footnote ¹⁰ Despite its failure, Thought News remains an important touchstone for understanding Dewey’s future scholarly pursuits, which increasingly focused on the need to develop a scientific disposition in citizens to better equip them to solve the problems facing their communities. We will see in what follows that Dewey became invested in reenvisioning childhood education, to cultivate intelligent habits at a stage when minds are most flexible, but let me focus here on just one aspect of how Dewey thought students should be educated.

Much has been written about the importance of experiential learning and, especially, of exposing students to concrete situations so they can learn to appreciate the worth of their experiences firsthand.Footnote ¹¹ But more needs to be said about the importance of these firsthand experiences for cultivating intelligent habits.Footnote ¹² “The formation of habits,” wrote Dewey,

Tastes, however, cannot be developed merely by teaching aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic standards secondhand. Dewey gives the example of a music student who learns that certain formal features of classical music are esteemed by the experts, and hence, that he, as a student of music, should also appreciate those features; this student can even come to believe that his own standards correspond to the conventional standards of what counts as great music. But if he has most enjoyed ragtime in the past, “his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real ‘norm’ of valuation in subsequent musical experiences” (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 275).

Dewey argues that the same principle applies to moral and epistemic judgments, in which “vital appreciation” comes to play a much bigger role in impressing upon us “the measure of the worth of the generous treatment of others,” for example (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 275). When we teach secondhand values – as the literary humanists recommended we do – we create a “split” between our habitual inclinations and the theoretical standards we were taught in school and by our parents. If one grows up in a society where slaves are considered property that ought to be returned to their masters – as Mark Twain’s iconic character Huck Finn’s nineteenth-century contemporaries believed one should – one will experience an internal conflict and perhaps even suffer when one’s habitual inclinations go in the opposite direction. Huck’s adventures with the runaway slave Jim enabled Huck to experience the value of freedom, even though he believed he would go to hell if he did not follow the rules and return Jim to his slaveowners (Twain Reference Twain and Rasmussen2014/1884). This, according to Dewey, creates a “kind of hypocrisy of consciousness, an instability of disposition” (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 275). Similarly, a student can be taught to perform certain analytical moves and acquire information by means of “mechanical rehearsal,” but unless “it somehow comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own,” the significance of the norms will not impress themselves as standards “which can be depended upon” (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 276). Dewey refers to “appreciation” experiences as personal responses involving the imaginative apprehension of their worth, and he emphasizes that “appreciation value” is to be found in all fields of study, not just in the realm of literature and other arts. “The imagination,” wrote Dewey, “is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical” (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 276).Footnote ¹³

Dewey defined “appreciation” as “an enlarged, intensified prizing … [an] enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience appealing, appropriable – capable of full assimilation – and enjoyable” (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 278). Significantly, Dewey thought that the fine arts have an important role to play in education, even though they are not “the exclusive agencies of appreciation.” This is because they are not only “intrinsically enjoyable” but also serve the instrumental function of “fixing taste, in forming standards for the worth of later experiences” by creating “a demand” or an appetite for elevating everything that we do to “their own level” (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 279):

For both Dewey and the literary humanists, the fine arts are instruments to be employed for finding standards by which to measure our conduct in other domains of life. For Dewey, however, they are much more than instruments for moral cultivation – they are means by which we acquire a taste for excellence and a love for doing and enjoying all human activities for their own sake, and not merely for the instrumental benefits that they may afford.

Whereas appreciative experiences of fine art are valuable in that they furnish us with the habits of mind necessary for properly measuring the worth of other, future activities, a scientific attitude inclines us to confront head-on what Brown refers to as the “contingencies” that inevitably arise when we engage in inquiry. Brown defines “contingencies” or “perplexities” as “any moves or moments in inquiry that are genuinely open, where reasonable inquirers could disagree about the way to proceed” (2020: 64). For Brown, as for Dewey, processes of inquiry that settle questions without any forethought or deliberation are not genuinely experimental or scientific, as a scientific attitude requires that we actively evaluate the problems to be solved, that we purposely determine the value of the evidence before us for solving the problem at hand, and that we measure the worth of our interpretations of the evidence. I would add that for Dewey, humans ought to undertake inquiry not merely for instrumental ends but for its own sake,Footnote ¹⁴ and like any other human activity, inquiring practices are most meaningful when we do them well. Doing things well also has the effect of developing in us a taste for excellence. Measured by the consequences of our practical judgments, excellence further enlarges the meaning of human life and affords us the opportunity to appreciate our accomplishments – whether collective or personal – in the same way that we might prize and value a work of art.

Science and Humanism

Science, according to Dewey, is a means to human ends, and an end is to be appreciated on its own terms. Accordingly, for something to be a means rather than merely a tool, it must be part of some coordinated, intelligent activity, and fulfill an aspect of our organic need to resolve disturbances or disharmonies that inevitably arise during our transactions with the environment. To perform one of our main life functions – absorbing oxygen – our bodies mechanically employ our lungs. Every time we breathe, we experience temporary relief from the lack of oxygen and the need to take a breath. And the same is the case for every other life function our bodies automatically perform. Our bodily organs are not in themselves means, however, as they have not been intelligently employed as part of a coordinated activity to accomplish an end-in-view. It is only when our minds are focused on the rate and depth of our breath that our lungs become part of the coordinated activity of practicing mindfulness for the purposes of easing anxiety and other types of somatic disturbances. Similarly, a hammer is not a means until we use it in conjunction with other tools to hammer in nails and shape wood into a box:

When we first hammer a nail into a piece of wood, we must be careful not to get our fingers caught. But the longer we practice, hammering nails becomes a habit waiting to be used to build the frame of a house or repair a broken door. Likewise, our practice of mindfulness eventually becomes habitual, as we internalize the skill of slowing down our heart rate by deepening our breaths.

Some habits for Dewey are more malleable than others and can be improved with practice. Only when we have experienced standing straight in a yoga class, for example, are we able to form the idea in reflective experience of how to correctly stand straight and break bad habits outside of the studio. Only then, in other words, are we able to learn the habit of standing straight without “fiats of will” (Dewey Reference Dewey1922: 22–25). Even our ability to discern different colors is the product of “skilled analysis”: “A moderate amount of observation of a child will suffice to reveal that even such gross discriminations as black, white, red, green, are the result of some years of active dealings with things in the course of which habits have been set up. It is not such a simple matter to have a clearcut sensation. The latter is a sign of training, skill, habit” (Dewey Reference Dewey1922: 25). Since skills are subject to improvement, the child could become more skilled at differentiating hues of green by engaging in the practice of realist painting and capturing the many varieties of green of a tree. This understanding of the ways that prior habits influence our ideas applies also to other types of activities, including scientific inquiry: “distinct and independent sensory qualities, far from being original elements, are the products of highly skilled analysis which disposes of immense technical scientific resources. To be able to single out a definite sensory element in any field is evidence of a high degree of previous training” (Dewey Reference Dewey1922: 25).

But what of habits of thought and feeling? On this point, Dewey seems more pessimistic than the “radical reformers,” who put their faith in rapid institutional change, as if quickly changing institutions could change our customary habits of thought and feeling. Institutions, according to Dewey, generally embody our collective habits of thought and feeling; when we attempt merely to change the former, we leave intact the latter, which makes it very unlikely that social change will follow: “Actual social change is never so great as is apparent change. Ways of belief, of expectation, of judgement and attendant emotional dispositions of like and dislike, are not easily modified after they have once taken shape” (1922: 77). This is because, first, as we saw earlier with the example of standing straight, secondhand ideas cannot easily change dispositions to which we have been habituated by firsthand experience. Thus, if we are accustomed to experiencing firsthand a legal system that benefits some members of the community at the expense of others, it will be extremely difficult for some to give up their special privileges. And second, our cognitive habits and dispositions are shaped by our interactions with others. A child that shares her toys with other children will be praised by her teachers and parents. Indicative of a character trait customarily prized in the girl’s social environment, repeated social approbation of similar behaviors serves the function of shaping the child’s future disposition to behave selflessly. This suggests that if we do not change our collective attitudes toward historically marginalized groups, social change will not follow.

It follows that to change embodied habits, Dewey suggests, we must change what is collectively valued. And the only way to produce new, collective values, according to Dewey, is to adopt a “truly humane education,” consisting of “an intelligent direction of native activities in light of the possibilities and necessities of the social situation” (1922: 70). Worried that minds have become inflexible and dependent on fixed belief and the authority of others, Dewey writes in How We Think, for example, that “it is its [education’s] business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves” (1910: 28). Rather than train children by means of “premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of adult habits of thought and affection,” children must be educated to form new habits of inquiry – they must be trained to think critically – to be “serviceable under novel conditions” (Dewey Reference Dewey1922: 75).

A truly humane education must also draw its lessons from “the elaborate systems of science [which] are born not of reason” but of the impulse to hunt, combine things, and communicate with others, methodically organized into “the dispositions of inquiry, development and testing” (Dewey Reference Dewey1922: 136, emphasis added).Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, above all, it must exploit children’s natural tendency to be curious about the world: “[t]raining is such development of curiosity, suggestion, and habits of exploring and testing, as increases their scope and efficiency. A subject – any subject – is intellectual in the degree in which with any given person it succeeds in effecting this growth” (Dewey Reference Dewey1910: 46). In sharp contrast to the literary humanists, who, we may recall, recommended that we cultivate in children a higher ethical will to control their base, animal instincts, a truly humane education cultivates a scientific disposition in future citizens, not merely for slowing down the impulsive drive to hurriedly accomplish one’s goals, but also for avoiding becoming overly interested in reflection disconnected from everyday experience: “We may become so curious about remote and abstract matters that we give only a begrudged, impatient attention to the things right about us. We may fancy we are glorifying the love of truth for its own sake when we are only indulging a pet occupation and slighting demands of the immediate situation” (Dewey Reference Dewey1910: 137). Both the tendency to hurriedly accomplish one’s goals and to become overly interested in reflection, Dewey writes, are irrational to the extent that “the foresight of consequences is warped to include only what furthers execution of predetermined bias” (1910: 138).

The hallmark of a humanistic education is the inculcation of a habitual disposition to inquire into, deliberate about, and test the efficacy of traditional principles under new conditions.Footnote ¹⁶ Progressive humanism does not reject conventional principles outright, as some principles have been tested and proven to be efficacious instruments for ameliorating the human condition, such as the principle of respecting a person’s freedom. Some other principles, such as certain legal principles, may need to be modified so that, in Dewey’s words, they can become “more effectual instruments in judging new cases” (1910: 165). Some traditional principles in fact contribute toward social inequities and must be rejected on the grounds that they do not cohere with the principle of respect for a person’s freedom, as we saw in the example of Huck Finn. But the issue cuts deeper than that. According to Dewey, blindly adhering to old principles is simply “another manifestation of the desire to escape the strain of the actual moral situation, its genuine uncertainty of possibilities and consequences” (1910: 166). A scientific disposition toward moral inquiry takes older principles to be hypotheses to be tested in the imagination against concrete situations (1910: 167).

Dewey gives the example of a young person who has repeatedly experienced the consequences of being kind to others. These experiences culminate in the disposition of kindliness (Reference Dewey1923/1916: 275), which, in addition to acquiring appreciation value (by which he means the value an activity acquires while we are enjoying, prizing or appreciating it),Footnote ¹⁷ reliably produces good consequences in experience. A disposition to approach moral situations as occasions for inquiry will yield reliable predictions of good outcomes that may or may not conform with conventional morality, as can be observed in Huck Finn’s taste for the value of freedom and his intuition that it also applies to Jim’s situation. Although it is true that Huck’s belief that he will go to hell if he does not tell on Jim somewhat limits his moral development – insofar as Huck fails to generalize from Jim’s situation to the plight of all slaves – this is not because of the inherently biased nature of empathy, as Alan Goldman (2010) argues, but rather because Huck is surrounded by adults who dogmatically impress their corrupt moral values on children and steer them in the wrong direction.

A humane education would have afforded Huck the possibility of greater moral development, provided he had internalized the notion that conventional principles are not infallible. In a different social environment, Huck would not have experienced internal conflict but would have rather been encouraged to take in “the full scope” (Goldman Reference Goldman2010: 276) of the situation, test the outcomes in his imagination, and derive the correct principle from the ground up. This is not to say that it is always inadvisable to apply a rule to a situation. But Dewey warns in “The Logic of Judgments of Practice” (1915) that adhering to an ideal or a standard involves no judgment. He gives the example of being faced with the situation of whether or not to buy a suit. If the operating principle is that you already have a suit in mind, then you are not really selecting a suit through a valuation process, as you have already prejudged the situation (1915: 518). It is the oppositive of taking a scientific approach to the process of figuring out what you should do with the outcome of your judgment in view.

A scientific disposition is a cognitive habit that can serve as a means to solving practical problems beyond the domain of what is narrowly referred to as “science.” What we call “science,” according to Dewey, is a sociological artifact, which more than anything tells us about our conventional styles of organizing experience. It also reflects what in his mind is an unproductive bifurcation of the humanities from the sciences in education, which he takes to be largely responsible for impairing our ability to solve problems jointly. In Democracy and Education (Reference Dewey1923/1916), Dewey argues that we have arbitrarily assigned values to various fields, as if aesthetic value belonged only to the domain of literature, and epistemic value, to science. Science, he argues, can have many different values, depending on the problem to which it is applied, as a means:

Although the instrumental value of science is undeniably far more consequential, given the many uses to which scientific knowledge can be put, we cannot neglect the importance of enjoying or valuing the process of doing science well. In other words, although science is instrumental in helping us solve problems, we stand a better chance of ameliorating the human condition when we cultivate scientific curiosity combined with a taste for both excellence and goodness in future generations. This will guarantee better tools at our disposal for solving problems.

Conclusion

At this point, it is worth returning to the problem that Dewey started with: How might we employ science in the service of values that better serve our communities? Recall that he believed cultivating in children a scientific attitude would better equip them to meet the challenges of the future. He also emphasized the importance of firsthand experiences for deriving norms that are personally meaningful and that have been tested in experience for their reliability and success at producing good (or valuable) consequences. But how is Deweyan valuation supposed to work in practice? And how do we guarantee that by cultivating in children a scientific disposition, they will arrive at values that serve the common good? How do we ensure, in other words, that these children of the future, equipped with flexible habits of mind and a taste for the value of excellence and goodness, are going to employ science to serve social rather than selfish, economic interests?

To answer this question, let me first touch on the concept of sympathetic understanding in the work Jane Addams, a prominent humanist sociologist and social reformer in the early twentieth century who influenced the emancipatory focus of pragmatism, including Deweyan ethics, through her exemplary work with poor immigrants in the suburbs of Chicago (Seigfried Reference Seigfried1999). Like Dewey, for whom moral deliberation is a dramatic, artful, and caring process involving play acting, perspective-taking, and anticipation of the consequences of our judgments (Caspary Reference Caspary2000; Fesmire Reference Fesmire1995; Goldblatt Reference Goldblatt2006; Hamington Reference Hamington2010), Addams worried about values that were increasingly becoming more influential – mechanization and materialism – and believed that cultivating the proper uses of the imagination could enable citizens to discover new values (1930: 124) and redeem industry from the role it had played in augmenting social “evil” and “distress” (1930: 28). For Addams, ethical agency is realized when we deliberately choose to expose ourselves to other values firsthand, as we cannot discover new values when we are isolated from other human beings (2002/1902). For this reason, she lived among the poor immigrants of the suburbs of Chicago, and in 1889 cofounded with Ellen Gates Starr the socialist settlement, Hull-House – a thirteen-building complex equipped with a daycare, dining, and other types of gathering spaces where the middle-class residents would learn from the community about its needs. Through that work, she came to appreciate the inherent dignity of all persons and was inspired to mobilize legal reforms to address various social injustices, including women’s oppression, child labor, and the exploitation of laborers.

Addams’ theoretical and practical work sheds light on the importance of cultivating personally meaningful and caring relationships with others for not only experiencing but also internalizing other values by means of sympathetic understanding (2002/1902). The core idea behind sympathetic understanding, as Charlene Haddock Seigfried explains, is that of reciprocity, in which we recognize both our responsibility toward others and our dependency on them (2002/1902: xx–xxi). But perhaps even more important is that sympathetic understanding is a mode of attention that opens space to “the viewpoint, values, and goals of others” (2002/1902: xxi). These values and goals impress themselves on us and become part of “moral deliberation and social transformation” (2002/1902: xxi). Addams’ social ethics suggests that moral deliberation cannot simply presuppose care for the welfare of and a sense of responsibility for others; rather, these things arise from a process in which we internalize the goals and values of others – which will sometimes conflict with our own.Footnote ¹⁸

Dewey was not always explicit about the importance of the value of caring about others to his theory of valuation, perhaps because he worried about the limitations of our capacity to sympathize with others. In Ethics, which Dewey cowrote with his colleague from the University of Chicago, James Tufts, though he follows Darwin in claiming that our success as a species lies in our capacity to sympathize and cooperate with one another, Dewey nonetheless warns that sympathy “rarely extends beyond those near to us, members of our own family and our friends. It rarely operates with reference to those out of sight or to strangers, certainly not to enemies” (Dewey and Tufts Reference Dewey and Tufts1932/1908: 261). For this reason, he draws on Adam Smith in posing the figure of the “ideal spectator” to take the place of the social group. By imagining not whether our peers would approve of our actions but whether the ideal spectator would, we stand a better chance of executing moral judgments that “merit approbation because their execution will conduce to the general wellbeing” (Dewey and Tufts Reference Dewey and Tufts1932/1908: 270). Dewey thus emphasized that actions that merit approbation are those in which we voluntarily make a choice to “bring good to others” (Dewey and Tufts Reference Dewey and Tufts1932/1908: 272).

Despite his reservations about relying on our natural sympathy when we are making moral judgments, Dewey also claimed that “sympathy is the animating mold of moral judgement … because it furnishes the most efficacious intellectual standpoint. It is the tool, par excellence, for resolving complex situations” (Dewey and Tufts Reference Dewey and Tufts1932/1908: 298). When sympathy is mechanical and the controlling factor in our actions, it is likely to produce actions that benefit us and those who are in our circles of concern at the expense of distant others. Sympathy combined with refection, or what Dewey and Tufts in the Ethics refer to as “intelligent sympathy,” by contrast, is bound to produce actions that merit approbation from the ideal observer, who upholds the standards of beneficence and social welfare. From this perspective, sympathy is not merely the animating mold of moral judgment but also the pillar of a humanist science. For science to be humane, caring about others must influence the values we bring to bear when we make epistemic judgments.Footnote ¹⁹

Following Addams, who “studied the everyday world … [and] connected this analysis to the political and economic conditions that generated the mundane and oppressive reality” (Deagan Reference Deagan1988b: 255), for Dewey, a humane science must be similarly employed to serve human rather than industry interests.Footnote ²⁰ The great irony here is that, given the shared aims of the literary humanists and the pragmatists, men and women such as Dewey and Addams were one of the primary targets of the literary humanists, whose skepticism about the metaphysical foundations of humanism was completely unwarranted. Whereas the literary humanists dealt armchair critiques, the progressive humanists were on the ground, successfully employing science to relieve the plight of the working class, women, and children, and advancing the cause of racial equality. When faced with questions about the role that science might play in ameliorating the human condition, one need only read about this period in American history and derive lessons about what the human spirit is capable of when armed with the right imaginative, aesthetic, and scientific resources. The solution, it seems clear, is not to cordon off the sciences from the humanities. If humanism is to ameliorate the human condition, it is as a science of experience.

A Promising Program Threatened

In his autobiography Carnap reported:

Most readers of the present volume will regard the points made here as rather obvious, but not perhaps Carnap’s elaboration:

Yet even Herbert Feigl – not a member of the left wing but more closely associated with the liberal Moritz Schlick – stressed the need for intervention in his own post–World War II manifesto for scientific humanism: “Cooperative planning on the basis of the best and fullest knowledge available is the only path left to an awakened humanity that has embarked on the adventure of science and civilization.” (1981/1949: 377) Yet whether they differed over the kind of intervention needed, all Circle members presumably agreed with Feigl’s conclusion:

Note that what Carnap and Feigl called “scientific humanism” is clearly an expression of values. While Carnap separated such concerns from the “theoretical” discussions in the Circle meetings (and Feigl most likely followed him in this), it is questionable whether the scientific humanist stance could remain a wholly “private” matter.

Consider Carnap’s own Preface to the Aufbau and the collaborative pamphlet “The Scientific World-Conception: The Vienna Circle,” two publications from the late 1920s, and Feigl’s own manifesto of 1949. While the Aufbau celebrates “an inner kinship” “between the attitude on which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life,” including “movements which strive for meaningful forms of personal and collective life, of education, and of external organization in general” (Carnap Reference Carnap1967/1928: xviii), the collaborative pamphlet speaks of an “inner link” between “attitudes toward questions of life” and the “scientific world-conception” of the Vienna Circle, with the former including “endeavors toward a new organization of economic and social relations, toward the unification of mankind, toward a reform of school and education” (Verein Ernst Mach 2012/1929: 80–81). Not only Neurath (see Neurath 1928; 1931; 1932a) but also Carnap advertised “the struggle we wage against superstition, theology, metaphysics, traditional morality, capitalistic exploitation of workers, etc.” (Reference Carnap2013/1934: 177, emphasis added, my translation). More obliquely, Feigl’s North American manifesto – uniting pragmatists, naturalistic realists, scientific empiricists, and others – signaled its social relevance by its historical reference: “All these trends of thought and many others converge in a broad movement that one may well be tempted to regard as the twentieth-century sequel to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century” (1981/1949: 367). What characterized the Enlightenment, of course, was the ambition to bring the advance of theoretical knowledge to bear on liberating people from the shackles of traditional prejudice, religious dogma, and political tyranny.Footnote ⁶

It is possible to discern in the “inner link” or “kinship” that Carnap and Neurath perceived between their philosophy and contemporary movements for social and economic change a purely epistemic ideal, what I have elsewhere dubbed “intersubjective accountability” (Uebel Reference Uebel2020): assertions about what is and could be the case have to be backed by intersubjectively available evidence. It is also possible to regard Feigl’s new enlightenment in related terms. It is inconceivable, however, that Carnap, Neurath, or Feigl would not have noted that using science to improve human life conditions in support of the movements mentioned earlier also requires nonepistemic judgments of value to be made about what should be the case. So the question arises: Is making such judgments a proper part of science and its philosophy?

Despite their sympathy for his scientific humanism, contemporary activist scholars would judge Feigl’s conception of it to be invalidated by the standard picture of value-free science. For Feigl, all value involvement appears to be on the side of applied science. “Scientific knowledge itself,” he declared, “is socially and morally neutral.” (1981/1949: 375). Carnap also, on first impressions, only offered the standard noncognitivist, neopositivist diagnosis. Value questions are external to science and of an entirely different type. Unlike statements of fact, value statements are devoid of “cognitive” meaning, that is, they are not truth-valuable or truth-apt.

It seems that for Carnap, too, the shared enlightenment perspective which his talk of the “inner kinship” designated was limited to the epistemic ideal of intersubjective accountability. Did he also then subscribe to the standard conception of value freedom which bars nonepistemic values from science entirely?

Neurath to the Rescue?

It is at this juncture that one is advised to consult Neurath’s philosophical work.Footnote ⁸ Like Carnap’s, it combines anti-foundationalist holist empiricism and metatheoretical constructivism, but it also promises to give political engagement in science a clean bill of health.Footnote ⁹ Quite apart from his nonreductive naturalism,Footnote ¹⁰ what is particularly attractive is Neurath’s pioneering work on argumentation, now standard in the feminist literature, that legitimates appeal to “contextual,” that is, nonepistemic, values in central areas of science.

Powerfully proposed in the post-positivist literature by Helen Longino (Reference Longino1990) and widely adopted since, it was previously employed by members of the left Vienna Circle, as early as Neurath (Reference Neurath, Neurath, Neurath and Cohen1928) and as late as Frank (1957). Known as the argument from underdetermination, it builds on Neurath’s and later Quine’s generalization of a conclusion of Pierre Duhem’s to all suitably abstract scientific theories. This was the idea that the theories of theoretical physics are underdetermined by empirical evidence: Testing them requires auxiliary theories that themselves resist direct testing. It follows that alternative but logically incompatible theories are able to account for the very same data. It is in the gap between evidence and theory this opens up that Neurath’s and Frank’s logical empiricism and Longino’s “contextual empiricism” locate the logical space that allows scientists to appeal to tiebreakers that are nonepistemic in the following sense. Their employment allows the scientists to settle on a theory or hypothesis to work with but does not distinguish them as epistemically superior to its competitors.

Traditional philosophy of science informed by such Duhemian holism had recognized the gap and sought to address it by employing various background theories (e.g., of perception and scientific instruments) and background assumptions that allow for the assessment and legitimation of evidential relations between the data at hand and a given theory (e.g., the data’s relevance and strength). Yet contextual empiricism also recognizes that among those “auxiliary” or background assumptions, nonepistemic ones figure, sometimes long unnoticed or neglected: Here “contextual values” enter. To safeguard the probity of scientific reasoning, therefore, Longino proposes a procedural conception of objectivity. It is not its production of supposedly perspectiveless representation that distinguishes scientific inquiry as objective, but rather the fact that its knowledge claims are subject to comprehensive criticism of all their presuppositions and assumptions, both evidential and conceptual. Transformative criticism has the task to uncover, uproot, and replace previously unnoticed, unwarranted assumptions.Footnote ¹¹

Neurath’s views on how theories are chosen are highly congenial: “Poincaré, Duhem and others have adequately shown that even if we have agreed on the protocol statements,Footnote ¹² there is an unlimited number of equally applicable, possible systems of hypotheses. … We select one of the systems of statements that are in competition with each other. The system thus selected is not, however, logically distinguished” (1983/1934: 105, translation amended). Neurath remained unspecific about the means by which such a choice is made. It is tempting therefore to invoke a notion he introduced when he criticized Descartes’ sharp distinction between foundationally grounded theoretical and pragmatically oriented practical thinking. For Neurath, the distinction between abstract and action-oriented thinking was not an epistemologically categorical one:

Neurath’s point was that, given that “the differences between thinking and action are only of degrees, not kind,” that both abstract and action-oriented thought must proceed from uncertain ground, it follows that “thinking too needs provisional rules,” that abstract thought also needs rules “which have to be applied as long as one has not reached complete insight” (1983/1913: 2–3). He concluded that scientific thinking is clarified by recognition of the notion of auxiliary motives.Footnote ¹³ As he noted, the simplest form of an auxiliary motive is to have one’s action decided by drawing lots, but his more general formulation deserves notice: Auxiliary motives have “nothing to do with the concrete aims in question.” Transposed from practical to theoretical thought, this means that an auxiliary motive does not, in and of itself, make it more likely that the theoretical aim of thought, truth, is realized. Adopting an auxiliary motive allows a decision to be taken in virtue of its singling out one utility (one particular type of information wanted about the issue at hand) as determining how the inquiry will proceed. In consequence, both epistemic virtues (coherence, simplicity) and nonepistemic criteria (practical utility) are there to be invoked to select one among the empirically equivalent theories.Footnote ¹⁴

For Neurath and Frank, the gap argument was the point at which their logical empiricist epistemology joined forces with John Dewey’s pragmatist attack on spectator conceptions of knowledge (thinking of knowledge as faithful copying). Their conception of how to accommodate nonepistemic values in scientific theorizing has considerable appeal to contemporary theorists who also, however, question whether Neurath and Frank went far enough. For many activist scholars, the gap argument is but the first step toward their rejection of the idea of value-free science: They also embrace the “entanglement” of fact and value (Putnam Reference Putnam2002). Rejecting the principled separation of fact and value and claiming their categorical indistinguishability on epistemic grounds is said to allow for the full truth-valuability of value statements.Footnote ¹⁵ Precisely due to this entanglement, science in conditions of underdetermination and partial ignorance is said to be unable to avoid value questions when decisions about hypothesis acceptance must be taken. In challenging the distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values the entanglement thesis undermines all conceptions of scientific value freedom, but whether this further challenge must be granted is itself highly questionable.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet consider how Neurath’s and Frank’s position looks from another radical variant of philosophy of science that, it has been noted, has begun to merge with empiricist feminism (like contextual empiricism), but has its own controversial history: feminist standpoint theory.Footnote ¹⁷ Where the former can be regarded as originally concerned simply with providing a framework the acceptance of which would make for better and truly objective science (overcoming biases undetected by standard accounts of objectivity), the latter was formulated as a political theory aiming to legitimate interventions in and disruptions of “business as usual.” Here let’s adopt a formulation of standpoint theory by Alison Wylie that renders earlier controversies irrelevant:

Standpoint theory starts from a normative position: It provides an epistemology for social cognition that contests the findings and theoretical presuppositions of traditional value-free philosophy of science as part of a general struggle for justice and equality.

Both Kathleen Okruhlik (Reference Okruhlik2004) and Don Howard (Reference Howard, Cat and Tuboly2019) plausibly identify Neurath as a standpoint theorist of an older variant, namely of Marxist persuasion. Both cite his “Personal Life and Class Struggle”:

Howard aptly comments:

Neurath’s commitment to the cause is unquestionable. (If Carnap had still been inclined to writing polemics engaging with issues of the day – as he did early onFootnote ¹⁸ – this would be equally evident in his case.) But is Neurath’s position more consistent than Carnap’s appeared to us earlier? Moreover, is his own position up to the task?

Okruhlik voices concern about Neurath’s appeal to auxiliary motives. Appreciative of the fact that they allow value-driven decisions inside of science, she worries whether this construction is robust enough to sustain the value commitments it facilitates – and whether it takes the values in question seriously enough. She points to the role of auxiliary motives as “randomizing devices” (suggested by Neurath’s talk of casting lots and rolling dice) and contrasts that with decisions taken “non-randomly” by activist scientists who do as activist scholars deem fit (Okruhlik Reference Okruhlik2004: 63). As we will see, Okruhlik’s is not merely a difference of emphasis. There is a further worry. Auxiliary motives seem to be the wrong vehicles altogether to facilitate nonepistemic value input into science:

To be sure, Neurath’s Marxist social science was not grounded by an auxiliary motive but by his belief that “[o]f all the attempts at creating a strictly scientific unmetaphysical physicalist sociology, Marxism is the most complete” (1973/1931: 349). For Neurath, doing Marxist sociology followed from the ideal of anti-metaphysical social science itself. Yet this does not show that the auxiliary motive does not come into play at other junctures in social scientific reasoning, for instance when cases of underdetermination need resolving. Neurath’s one example of this suggested opting for one of the empirically equivalent hypotheses or prognoses about the historical situation faced on the grounds that doing so provided the broadest base for collective action (1973/1928: 293). Here strategic class war considerations served as an auxiliary motive: an interpretation that was not only plausible on its own but also acceptable to the comrades was what was required. Okruhlik’s conclusion that “Neurath’s standpoint theory is not really a departure from or a rival to [his] empiricism” (Reference Okruhlik2004: 64) nevertheless suggests a major drawback. Neurath “did hold to the empiricist dogma that puts values outside the domain of meaningful discussion. It is this dogma that may constitute the biggest difference between Neurath and feminist philosophy of science” (Okruhlik Reference Okruhlik2004: 67). The spoiler is a dogma of empiricism that even Quine shared: ethical noncognitivism.

By contrast, Howard sees no problem with the way Neurath resolves the gap argument. “For the purposes of understanding Neurath’s philosophy of science in action, what is most important is his argument about the role of the auxiliary motive, for this is what provides legitimation for Neurath’s politically engaged science” (Howard Reference Howard, Cat and Tuboly2019: 64). Rather than see in it a coded stance on meta-ethical matters, he reads it as a description of all too commonly misunderstood problem situations:

Howard’s endorsement of Neurath’s model of politically engaged science does not speak to the charge that noncognitivism undermines the rationality of his political engagement. Instead, Howard stresses that “since, in the end, we must choose on the basis of nonempirical factors, we enhance the intellectual integrity of science by frankly asserting the agendas that motivate science in action” (2019: 54). This leaves Okruhlik’s challenge open – for from Neurath’s understanding of Marxism no rejection of noncognitivism follows.Footnote ¹⁹

Like Carnap, Neurath dismissed normative ethics as cognitively meaningless. Already very early on he declared that “a moral demand can never be proved” (1973/1912: 119): He agreed with Hume’s denial that norms follow logically from facts. He also argued against utilitarianism as a general principle of social organization for, without an arbiter or dictator, “it is not possible to create an order of life which takes account of different views as to the best distribution of pleasures, as would have to be the case with the pleasures of each in a purely utilitarian world” (1973/1912: 122, emphasis in 1912 original). Kantian deontology fared no better, with the categorical imperative a ready object of scorn: “how should we demarcate a discipline as ‘ethics’ if God is eliminated? Can we make a meaningful transition to a ‘command in itself’, to the ‘categorical imperative’? We could just as well introduce a ‘neighbor-in-himself without a neighbor’” (Neurath Reference Neurath, Neurath, Cohen and Neurath1983/1932a: 79).

Neurath then was in no better position to argue for socialism than Carnap – if socialism was understood as an ethical position. But as he did not understand it so, no contradiction obtained for him. Yet Okruhlik’s challenge remains alive as a pragmatical one. As a social scientist, Neurath could argue the case that a radical reorganization of socioeconomic relations is more likely to improve the lot of the proletariat than a continuation of business as usual and therefore is to be recommended if such improvement is desired – but not that it should be desired. This may appear too weak a stance. Is noncognitivism then as detrimental to political activism as many contemporary critics, such as standpoint theorists, claim when they charge it with putting values “outside the domain of meaningful discussion”?

The Appropriation of Weberian Value Neutrality and Value Relevance

The most commonly discussed version of the doctrine of value freedom forbids taking account of nonepistemic values in science generally, especially in theory evaluation. It is also this version that is under attack in the currently most commonly discussed counterargument to the doctrine, the argument from inductive risk.Footnote ²⁰ Roughly, accepting a finding or theory means to certify it as reliable for use by third parties, yet since virtually all findings are only ever reached on a balance of probabilities, their acceptance involves a judgment that the risk of harm caused by inductive failure is low enough to be neglected. Unsurprisingly, no consensus regarding this argument has been reached, resistance turning on whether risk assessment properly falls to the scientist investigating a hypothesis or to the agents or agencies seeking to make use of the findings. Yet like the gap argument, albeit along a different route, the argument from inductive risk seeks to show the entanglement of science with value questions.

For better or worse, Neurath and Carnap appear to have neglected the argument from inductive risk.Footnote ²¹ They were exercised by the possibility of unchecked intrusion of political-ideological values into science. With this concern and the very broad outlines of their response they agreed with Max Weber. Now relations between members of the left Vienna Circle and Weber and his legacy (he died in 1921) were very complex. As economists, Neurath and Weber sparred repeatedly in the Verein für Sozialpolitik, jointly attended the 1917 meeting of the German Youth Movement at Burg Lauenstein as critical “elder statesmen,” and encountered each other again during Neurath’s trial in postrevolutionary Munich in 1919. As philosophers, Neurath and Weber took contrary stands on the materialist conception of history and in the socialist calculation debate (about whether rational economic planning is possible in a socialist commonwealth); Neurath also remained opposed to Weber’s interpretive sociology, forever suspicious of seemingly idealistic tendencies.Footnote ²² Given furthermore that Neurath was concerned with what the conception of scientific value freedom provided freedom for, as opposed to Weber’s concern with what it proscribed, it is perhaps not surprising that Neurath did not advertise his understanding of value freedom as a version of Weber’s – especially as he also had to cleanse it of metaphysical accretions. Carnap fell in with Neurath’s take on the matter.Footnote ²³

Weber’s version of value freedom concerns the results of scientific investigations: It bars a certain type of value statement from being issued as justified by scientific reasoning. Importantly, Weber did not forbid all value statements but only unconditional ones – in all modalities, be they purely descriptive (“x is good”) or prescriptive (“x should be the case”) or expressing commands (“do x!”) – and he left conditional ones untouched. Phrased differently, Weber barred categorical imperatives from science but not hypothetical ones. Neurath’s and Carnap’s agreement with Weber on this point is seldom recognized, but the distinction between conditional and unconditional value statements was equally central to the Circle’s noncognitivism – and their version of value freedom – as is clearly documented in Carnap’s autobiography:

Carnap equated the distinction between conditional and unconditional value statements with the distinction between cognitively meaningful and cognitively meaningless ones. For Weber unconditional statements were unscientific, but he did not deny their truth-valuability. This illustrates that one need not be a noncognitivist to accept Weber’s demand for value freedom (he wasn’t one).

Weber held that in issuing unconditional value statements science overreached itself. He could have but did not appeal to Hume or argue explicitly against the naturalistic fallacy of “deriving an ought from an is.” But neither did he merely claim that “it can never be the task of a science of empirical experience to determine binding norms and ideals from which practical prescriptions may then be deduced” (Weber Reference Weber, Weber, Brun and Whimster2012/1904: 101–102):

What made these two sets of problems so different was the fact of moral and political “value pluralism.” What Weber noted as a striking and novel fact of “modernity,” we take for granted as a fact of “multiculturalism.” “The ‘scientific’ advocacy of practical standpoints is impossible … (except in cases where one is discussing the means for achieving a goal that is presupposed as a fixed given). It is meaningless in principle, because the different value orders of the world are in irresolvable conflict with each other” (Weber Reference Weber, Weber, Brun and Whimster2012/1919: 347, emphasis in original). There is, Weber took it, no evidential standard for which of the many conflicting value judgments should prevail in society. (Neurath’s judgment on utilitarianism as a social philosophy, outlined earlier, converges with this.) For unconditional value statements it is impossible to establish the type of evidence base that is required to sustain claims to objectivity. The question of which social values were to be realized was one to be decided not by science but by civic society and depended on the active engagement of the citizens.

What use then was there for science, indeed social science? Weber’s answer (of which we heard echoes in Carnap earlier) is as follows:

Furthermore, scientific policy advice had to respect the same strictures as purely theoretical science: Unconditional value judgments were barred. Any advice was to be formulated in terms of conditionals which asserted means–ends relations: These are bona fide empirical statements, legitimated by intersubjectively available evidence (Weber Reference Weber, Weber, Brun and Whimster2012/1904: 102). (From here on I distinguish Weber’s and the Circle’s versions of value freedom as “value neutrality.”)

To see these ideas implemented in a social science context, consider Neurath’s contribution to the Werturteilsstreit in an internal discussion document for the Verein für Sozialpolitik dedicated to addressing Weber’s challenge to social scientific value discourse. (Neurath’s use of “pleasure” and “pain” as generic terms – “Lust” and “Unlust” – does not indicate a sensualist understanding of utility.)

Note that the two occurrences of value statements specified in §7 are illustrated in §8 and §9 respectively. Value judgments may become a datum for empirical behavioral science (as in §7a and §8). Yet value judgments can also be passed within empirical science (as in §7b), but only under one condition: that the standard of evaluation be agreed, that is, made explicit (as in §9). In other words, conditional value judgments about matters investigated in empirical social science are permissible.

So Weber held that the value pluralism of modernity prevents unconditional value judgments from commanding universal consent and therefore excluded them from empirical science. Neurath and Carnap excluded unconditional value judgments from science because of their verificationism according to which statements must, at least in principle, be testable by reference to intersubjectively available evidence to be cognitively significant. Since the practical outcomes remain the same, one may wonder whether Neurath’s and Carnap’s version adds anything significant to Weber’s value neutrality. The answer is that, importantly, it subtracts something. Given Weber’s repeatedly advertised allegiance to the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert’s idealist value theory, empiricists could not but reject Weber’s original version. For Rickert’s philosophy of value, modernity’s value pluralism was simply a mistaken illusion of the age; whether he himself agreed with this or not, Weber limited his prohibitions to the realm of empirical science. Since Weber also denied, like Rickert, the unity of science thesis – a core doctrine of logical empiricism which disputed a special status for the human sciences – Neurath and Carnap had to transpose Weber’s conception of value neutrality from a neo-Kantian to a naturalistic setting.

Consider that Weber spoke as if “value relations” constituted the sole objects of “the cultural sciences,” that is, social science, whose “transcendental precondition” was “that we are cultural beings, endowed with the capacity and the will to adopt a deliberate position with respect to the world, and to bestow meaning on it” (Reference Weber, Weber, Brun and Whimster2012/1904: 119, emphasis in original).

This is the neo-Kantianism that the Circle theorists were unable to accept. Fortunately, it was possible to rescue something tangible, as Weber himself once hinted at.

Detranscendentalize and demetaphysicalize Weber’s value talk and what you get is the simple recognition that the pursuit of social science is guided in the choice of its subjects and in the determination of its research agendas by the interests of its researchers – and that there is nothing wrong with this. Indeed, as has often been noted (e.g., Nagel Reference Nagel1960: 486), what’s also called “value relevance” is not the sole property of social science at all but extends across all disciplines (saving the unity of science).

Another difference between Weber and Neurath also deserves notice. Value neutrality on its own does not address worries about biased procedures in the gathering of data, the generalization of hypotheses, and the evaluation of theories by peer groups.Footnote ²⁴ It must be complemented by an argument that recognizes and regiments nonepistemic value choices in these respects. It may not have been a coincidence that Neurath’s gap argument also makes room to consider these matters so as to complement his adoption of Weberian value neutrality and value relevance.

Neurath’s Noncognitivist Standpoint Theory

For Weber, value neutrality came combined with value relevance which Neurath and Carnap separated from the idealist philosophy with which he had associated it. This allows for the partisan choice of research projects but forbids partisan formulations of research findings. Importantly then, it allows for a transformative agenda quite independently of the value considerations legitimated by the gap argument. Neurath’s socialist economics, in particular his radical proposals for the socialization of entire national economies in the wake of World War I, also express this stance. Depending on whether he was speaking as a scientist or citizen advocate, we can find fiery speeches and propaganda among his output, but also scientifically neutral discussions of the conceptual frameworks required to develop such schemes for social transformation.Footnote ²⁵

Yet Neurath’s transformation of Weberian value-neutrality-cum-value-relevance stands in a challenging relation to standpoint theory. One might wonder whether the description of Neurath as a standpoint epistemologist is felicitous: Without affirmation of nonepistemic values, standpoint theory may feel like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The puzzlement is understandable, but two further questions arise. First, whether pursuing research programs that are informed by political agendas demand for their success that the unconditional value statements that inform their adoption be proclaimed alongside and on par with their results. Second, what the role of unconditional value statements is for standpoint theory and what that tells us about the relation between standpoint theory and general epistemology and philosophy of science.

The first question must not be misunderstood. The issue concerns neither scientists hiding the value commitments of their research programs nor strategies of obtaining and dispensing research funding. The question is rather: What is lost in terms of research output if the prescription of value neutrality is followed? I submit that it is nothing that is of strictly scientific value. To be sure, the public persona of scientist activists may be less headline-grabbing than if they were moral crusaders. But note that value neutrality does not prohibit the very same scientists from being passionate advocates of the agendas their research is meant to further – but this they would do as only citizens in the civic arena, not as expert scientists: vide Neurath! They can even use their scientific results to bolster their political argument (present the facts of deprivation, say, and likely means of alleviation). The only thing they cannot do is claim that science gives unconditional backing to their agenda (here of providing alleviation of the deprivation).

Answering the second question is more complex. With standpoint theory regarded as a normative political theory, the role of unconditional nonepistemic value statements is plain: they state its basic value axioms and are thus indispensable. With standpoint theory regarded as epistemology, it is not clear what role they have to play. What is clear, however, is that under the heading of standpoint theory, both normative proposals and descriptive theses have been put forward.Footnote ²⁶ Standpoint theory, we saw, emerged as a normative political theory to articulate anti-discriminatory demands and overturn androcentric bias in traditional epistemology and philosophy of science and found application in the sciences and in the provision of health, social care, and law across society generally. Yet standpoint theory is not only about advocacy (especially in criticizing undesirable practices), however important that is; it also made significant contributions to epistemology itself. For instance, it has challenged what Okruhlik called “the dogma of the intersubstitutability of epistemic subjects” (Reference Okruhlik2004: 67) – that epistemology be blind to their social situatednessFootnote ²⁷ – and from this recognition of a desirable pluralism of perspectives follow consequences for how to think about objectivity and question the ideal of the “view from nowhere.”

Given that standpoint theory is both politically and epistemically normative, its stand on unconditional nonepistemic values can be a differentiated one. It would of course be nonsensical to bar it, as a political theory, from asserting unconditional value statements, but it is not at all clear why, as an epistemology, it should insist on issuing them. Prohibiting them would not rob standpoint epistemology of its critical bite, given the transformative agenda of its political wing, but only distinguish between the roles of engaged advocate in the civic arena (with scientific malpractice in view) and the role of epistemologist (parallel with first-order scientists). The move to procedural objectivity away from the view from nowhere conception would not be endangered.

Let me stress that it is not my business to suggest how feminist epistemologists should go about theirs. What is my business, however, is to argue that value neutrality is much less detrimental than it may at first appear. To ask the question, seemingly so absurd, of what standpoint theory would lose if it were to renounce unconditional nonepistemic value statements, is to clarify in what sense it is appropriate to think of Neurath as a standpoint theorist in pursuit of a transformative agenda. My answer is that he can count as one if we allow for a noncognitivist version of standpoint epistemology (and set him to work further on the situatedness of cognition which he only began to consider). Cognitivist and noncognitivist standpoint epistemologists can speak as one as civic actors; they agree in their politics, after all. Only their activism as scholars and scientists proceeds in different voices – but this does not change any potentially transformative results of their theorizing.

Discussing Standpoints with Carnap

Yet is this all there is to the issue of cognitivism versus noncognitivism? Carnap’s remark (Reference Carnap and Schilpp1963b: 82) that one’s meta-ethics rarely if ever determines behavior may well be true, but there remains Okruhlik’s worry, prompted perhaps by unduly strident talk in Carnap’s London lectures (Reference Carnap1935: 23), which may suggest that noncognitivism “puts values outside the domain of meaningful discussion.”

Elsewhere, however, Carnap had already clarified that “the exclusion from the domain of theoretical judgments does not relieve us of the ability, even the duty to adopt a practical attitude. There is a fundamental difference between both, however, which we must come to understand” (Reference Carnap2013/1934: 176, emphasis in original, my translation). Here we touch on the all too often neglected positive part of the message of Carnap’s noncognitivism: his recognition of the “other” of scientific reason and the indispensable complementation of reason by this other, the will and willing. All action requires decision, and this demands that we “adopt a practical attitude” on what’s at issue – and that includes value questions.

“Adopt[ing] a practical attitude,” taking a stance, is what agents do. (One is tempted to say that is what makes for an agent.) Carnap’s terms are striking: “Pflicht der praktischen Stellungnahme” (duty of adopting a practical attitude) and “Sache der praktischen Stellungnahme” (matter of adopting a practical attitude), the former denoting the normative, the latter the descriptive dimension of exercises of the will. The same duality applies to assuming, taking, and adopting a “standpoint.” (“Praktischer Standpunkt” is a close cognate of “praktische Stellungname.”)

But what, in Carnap’s hands, makes for a responsible Stellungnahme that is within the means, intellectual and affective, of the agent? Elsewhere I discussed the recognition of cognitive autonomy and reflexivity as required for rational action by Neurath (Reference Neurath, Neurath, Uebel and Cohen2004/1913); here I turn to Carnap’s later analysis which illuminates their recognition of the all-too-human condition of having to adopt practical attitudes:

Carnap offered the fact–value distinction as a basis for an “explication of value statements” (Reference Carnap and Schilpp1963b: 1009). The distinction is an analytic one made for pragmatic purposes: It cannot be overstressed that it is not an ontological distinction (Reference Carnap and Schilpp1963b: 1003).

This is also true of noncognitivism: It provides a framework for analysis. Assume a list of (1) “statements connected with values or valuations” (behavioral descriptions, means–ends and utility claims) and a list of (2) statements connected with values or valuations that are “clearly analytic if true, otherwise contradictory” (statements whose truth is intelligible given only the meaning of the terms used: logical truths, T-sentences, conceptual explications). Now the “thesis of noncognitivism” can be stated in a conditional form: If a statement on values is neither factual (belongs to category [1]) nor analytic (belongs to category [2]), then it is noncognitive. This is consistent with some value statements being factual and “rejects only those conceptions which regard knowledge of values as a knowledge sui generis, essentially different from factual and logical knowledge” (Carnap Reference Carnap and Schilpp1963b: 999–1000). Next, define “optative” as “a general kind of meaning common to all statements expressing a wish, a proposal, a request, a demand, a command, a prohibition, a permission, a will, a decision, an approval, a disapproval, a preference, or the like, whether or not they also contain meaning components referring to matters of fact.” Any sentence that “has a meaning component of this sort” is an “optative sentence.” Now noncognitivism asserts unconditionally: “There are pure optatives” (Carnap Reference Carnap and Schilpp1963b: 1001). So even pure optatives are far from meaningless, but their type of meaning is not descriptive: The direction of fit does not go from world to mind but from mind to world. (Their acceptability to a subject is determined by whether they correctly express the way she wants the world to be and whether they are consistent with her other value commitments.) Noncognitivism only holds that there are statements that do not describe and cannot be true or false since they instead express that something should be the case.

In a recently discovered fragment, Carnap called such statements “value functions” and integrated them in a Bayesian decision-theoretical framework. (Given a credence function, a body of evidence, and a set of possible actions, it can be defined what a “rational action” is, namely an action for which there exists no alternative that is preferred by the agent in that situation.) People possess many different partial value functions; importantly, however, Carnap allowed that “there is also a comprehensive value function” which “comprises all aspects” of what a person values and “in which the relative weight of each aspect in any possible overall situation finds expression – aspects that are sometimes in mutual conflict” (2017: 192). Carnap affirmed that there are “standards of rationality for value functions” and made some proposals, but noted that they would not rule out as irrational value functions that “would be considered by most people, perhaps all, as completely wrong and immoral” (2017: 193). As elements of a decision-theoretic calculus, Carnap’s value functions were judged only for their formal fit. No “purely valuational criteria” to feed into the comprehensive value function were mentioned by him, so the nature of its “weighting” of individual value functions is left undetermined.

The significance of his decision-theoretical calculus for our concerns is that it shows that, his noncognitivism notwithstanding, Carnap took practical reasoning very seriously (the model links up with his long work on inductive logic). Moreover, by analyzing “complex value statements” into components which are either purely factual or purely optative it becomes possible to exhibit the value commitments expressed by the complex statement (Carnap Reference Carnap and Schilpp1963b: 1009–1011). This provides an example of the first of the modes in which “a scientific treatment of value-judgments” may proceed, according to Weber. It can “help the striving person to reflect on the ultimate axioms that form the basis of what he is striving for, on the ultimate value standards that he applies or that he should apply in order to be consistent” (Weber Reference Weber, Weber, Brun and Whimster2012/1904: 103). Significantly, it is science – here formal science: logic in the broad sense – that provides this clarification. Add to this what, as Weber already noted, the empirical sciences can offer regarding practical value questions: consideration of “(1) the unavoidable means; (2) the unavoidable side effects; (3) the resulting competition between a number of different possible valuations [on the basis of] their practical consequences” (Weber Reference Weber, Weber, Brun and Whimster2012/1917: 315, emphasis in original). Together, the logical and the consequential analyses of value statements – that is, analyses addressing questions of logical consistency and dependence and questions about means–ends relations and resources – provide endless material for discussions that inform decisions. However, what “the cognitive” cannot do for us – and on this point all three, Weber, Neurath, and Carnap, are uncompromising – is what only the will can do: make the decision.

Here Carnap embedded what became his decision-theoretical conception in a naturalistic psychology that is open to elaboration by neighboring disciplines. Carnap’s discovery of the “other of reason” does not reveal a hidden metaphysics but points to the complexity of the behavioral sciences. It also reveals a refreshing honesty about what philosophy can do: If we wanted to ennoble his common sense as “metatheoretical reflexivity,” the additional adjective “deflationist” would be appropriate. (Given this analytical stance, he and Neurath need not even deny the de facto entanglement of facts and values in the wild, only that they cannot be disentangled.)

In sum, when it is alleged that noncognitivism “puts values outside the domain of meaningful discussion” it must be answered that this is false for Carnap’s and, we may take it, Neurath’s versions of it. They can discuss what value statements and valuations entail and presuppose logically and what practical consequences are likely to attend to action taken or not taken in their light. Thereby they can impress on agents the responsibilities they face. What they cannot do is establish the truth of unconditional value statements. I submit that cognitivists cannot do this either. (Forceful claims to truth without evidence, if repeated often enough, may prove effective in certain historical situations, but this does not make them rationally justified.) Noncognitivists are no less fit for the public contestation of values than cognitivists.

Conclusion

Needless to say, what I have defended here needs elaboration and supplementation in all sorts of ways, not being a theory in its own right but a gloss of a perspective recovered from underappreciation.Footnote ²⁸ What prompted this investigation of the practical dimension of the metaphilosophy of the left wing of the Vienna Circle was the disquiet felt by activist theorists about the doctrine of value freedom and noncognitivist value theory. With their position on value freedom clarified as subscription to demetaphysicalized Weberian value neutrality and their position on noncognitivism identified as recognition of the other of reason (there are pure optatives, statements whose acceptability to a person is not determined by the satisfaction of truth conditions), their use of value relevance can now be regarded as noncognitivist standpoint-taking within science. Other arguments may also have to be considered, but given those discussed here I conclude that activist scholars and scientists need not deny all forms of value freedom. Neurath’s and Carnap’s form of value neutrality, even their noncognitivism, does not prevent the epistemology of science playing its part in the moral and political struggles of the day.

What Needs to Be Explained

Science, in fact, gives us great powers of prediction and control. What more should we want from science? What is it, exactly, that the realist thinks science does that the pragmatist cannot explain? Scientists and philosophers of a realist bent have regularly insisted that we should want more, much more, from science than mere pragmatic success in prediction and control, and that science can or does deliver such things.

One common refrain is that what is central to scientific progress is basic or pure science, the pursuit of scientific knowledge wholly independent from our practical aims, interests, and activities. Such science pursues or arrives at Truth in the sense of accurate representation of Reality, or at least knowledge of the deep structures or unobservable features of our world. Science aims at, and its success is judged by, not only increasing success in prediction and control but also increasing our power of explanation and understanding of the world, judged according to a set of explanatory or superempirical virtues or epistemic values; these virtues or values guide inquiry as much as the pragmatic ones, says the realist. Ultimately, the goal is not just instrumental but also to arrive at a full scientific world-conception or worldview in which we can understand the universe and our place within it. Indeed, realists commonly argue that the high degree of predictive, experimental, and technological success science has achieved would be a miracle if its theories were not in fact tapping into deep truths about the nature of the world beyond our senses. It is generally thought that this set of values, aims, goals, and achievements cannot be accounted for by the pragmatist. Let us try to get clear about what, exactly, the lacunae are supposed to be, and then determine which pose genuine problems for the pragmatist.

As a preliminary point, while some pragmatists of the past may have been committed to philosophical views that would prevent them from acknowledging that science posits unobservable entities, the contemporary pragmatist has no such compunctions. If electrons, quarks, markets, mental states, laws, kinds, or what have you play significant roles in bodies of knowledge that enhance our abilities to predict and control, many contemporary pragmatists have no qualms about them as objects of knowledge realistically construed. There is no reason that the pragmatist need be a strict empiricist. Indeed, the classical pragmatists frequently criticized the traditional empiricists for their view of experience; rather than understanding experience as composed of atomic sense-data (a bundle of independent and simple sensations such as color and shape), the pragmatists saw experience as having depth, structure, and continuity. There’s no reason that a pragmatist cannot say, first, that our main contact with electrons concerns what they can help us predict and control, and second, that on that basis we understand them as real elements of the furniture of the world.

Preliminaries out of the way, there are three challenges to the pragmatist in accounting for these aspects of science that seem to go beyond mere prediction and control.

First, there is the question of “pure” or “basic” research with no obvious or immediate applicability. In such cases, scientists are surely doing scientific inquiry, and that inquiry is aimed at expanding our powers of prediction and control; but being able to predict and control those particular phenomena serves no particular use that we can foresee. That might be because the objects of that research are distant in time (paleontology and the biology of dinosaurs) and space (astronomy and the distant stars and galaxies). It might be because there is nothing inherently interesting about the subject to anyone but the scientists who study it, perhaps because it is too removed from our common experience and no technological application has been conceived (much recent high-energy particle physics). It might be because the nature of the phenomenon forbids fine-grained prediction or any intervention whatsoever, such that no utility is on offer (physical cosmology). How can the pragmatist account for the value of such inquiry?

Second, there is the question of virtues, values, standards, or criteria for science that go beyond the pragmatic concerns of prediction and control. We can think about this challenge in a few different ways. Such superempirical epistemic standards might include things such as a scientific theory’s explanatory power, simplicity, unifying ability, or fruitfulness for future research. Some have tried to give pragmatic justifications for these standards, arguing for example that they make a theory easier to use, and thus more testable. In this case we reduce the supposed nonpragmatic virtues to pragmatic ones. Some would argue that such standards come in only when the evidence has run out, when empirical and pragmatic factors underdetermine theory choice. If we hold that these superempirical standards are on a par with pragmatic and empirical criteria, then there may be contexts where we choose less accurate and less “useful” theories, because, say, they provide simpler, more unifying explanations. (If we would never do this, then those standards are not actually on a par, and the challenge to the pragmatist is minimized.) If choosing such theories is a reasonable way to proceed, the pragmatist must be able to account for it.

Third, there is the question of scientific worldviews. What I call “construction of a scientific worldview” is an important part of the creative and constructive activity of science that does not consist of empirical inquiry into specific phenomena. Scientific theorizing also involves synthesizing across a wide range of empirical inquiries, in order to provide a larger picture of the universe (and our place in it). This form of theory construction typically builds on past achievements of observational and experimental research, but it need not and often does not have much direct contact with empirical inquiry itself. The grand theorizing by figures such as Newton and Einstein sometimes have such a character; so does the work of synthetic popularization by figures such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan. Sometimes this work inspires, redirects, or guides future empirical inquiry, and so in retrospect its pragmatic value seems clear. In other cases, often the most ambitious examples of such work, the connection to particular empirical inquiries remains tenuous. The significance of the latter seems very difficult for the pragmatist to explain.

In what follows, corresponding to these three challenges, I seek to provide some basic evaluation from within a broadly pragmatist point of view of the following:

1. (1) Scientific inquiry that is “useless.”

2. (2) Scientific inquiry guided or judged by standards other than prediction and control.

3. (3) The construction of a “scientific worldview.”

In the following three sections, I explore these three topics in turn. As we will see, the first two of these challenges can be handled in a relatively straightforward way. The third challenge, however, will require us to explore in depth pragmatist views about religion and humanism in order to fully assimilate the positive significance of scientific worldviews into a pragmatist approach.

The Pragmatic Value of “Useless” Science?

In a way, ironically, those inquiries that are supposedly impractical are the easiest for the pragmatist to account for. The results of a scientific inquiry may not be “useful” in the narrow sense of immediate applicability in medicine, engineering, or policy; but nevertheless, as genuine inquiry, it might be governed by the broadly pragmatic criteria of prediction and control. Still, insofar as the pragmatist emphasizes the increase in our prediction and control of phenomena that interest us, there remains a problem of accounting for why we would be interested in such recherché phenomena as basic science often tackles, such as the biology of prehistoric creatures or the behavior of distant stars.

In “Genuine Problems and the Significance of Science” (Brown Reference Brown2010), I worried about this issue in the context of thinking about Philip Kitcher’s (2001) account of “scientific significance” and the aims of science. According to Kitcher, the “significance” of a scientific problem or scientific inquiry can be understood as its place in a network of interconnected aims and projects, and the grounding points in this network, from which all significance ultimately flows, are obvious practical uses, on the one hand, and questions of what he calls “natural curiosity,” on the other.

Consider the work of an auto mechanic. A mechanic is an inquirer, engaged in problem solving in relation to the diagnosis and repair of malfunctioning vehicles. The work is not quite scientific, although it is notoriously difficult to draw such lines, but it draws on some science and engineering knowledge, design specifications of the vehicle, manuals, heuristics and rules of thumb, intuition hard-won by experience, and a good bit of guess-and-check. It is typically pretty unsystematic, ad hoc, in response to the specific case in front of the inquirer.

Suppose the auto mechanic consistently runs up against a problem that cannot be solved with the resources available to them. After reflecting on the pattern of failures, they determine that the source is not in a lack of skill or knowledge on the part of the mechanic but with some principle of engineering that they regularly rely upon. In most circumstances, this principle helps the mechanic in the repair of diverse automobile engines. But in a certain number of cases, their inquiry fails, and no successful repair can be made. Most mechanics would just accept that some cars cannot be fixed, but our mechanic is particularly dogged and becomes so consumed with the solution to the problem that they go to school for an engineering degree, hoping to determine its source, and so becomes eventually a working researcher revising the very principles of engineering that they once used as a mechanic.

Suppose our newly minted engineering researcher consistently runs into trouble when dealing with particular principles learned from basic physics. Often those principles serve them well, but on certain occasions forming a pattern, they fail to aid the engineer in their inquiry. Our engineer reads more and more about the physics involved and realizes that the ultimate source of the problem is a gap in our knowledge of physics, finally pursuing another degree in that field so as to work on revising our understanding of the laws of physics.

In this fantasy story, we see how the work of a physicist might have traceable lines to the work of the engineer, even the auto mechanic – and such lines (understood conceptually rather than embodied in a single person) are part of the story of significance for Kitcher. But other work in physics does not seem to have such clearly traceable lines. Nevertheless, the physicists working on problems without such traceable lines of connection to practical concerns are drawn to those problems as much as our fantasy mechanic-turned-engineer-turned-physicist. According to Kitcher, there are some kinds of questions about the nature of the world, life, and human nature that we are all naturally curious about. A similar story could be told in terms, not of practical inquiries, but of these questions of natural curiosity. According to Kitcher, for even seemingly abstract and technical scientific inquiries, we can trace their significance back to a combination of all the practical problems and questions of natural curiosity that they bear on in some way. The amount and strength of such connections helps us compare the significance of different scientific projects.

The concern I raised in my earlier paper in response to Kitcher was that when we start weighing the value of different projects, on Kitcher’s view, and we have to rank projects that might, for example, contribute to reducing worldwide deaths from malaria (or cancer or COVID-19) with projects that mainly satisfy our “curiosity,” the latter would be totally swamped. “Curiosity” seems inadequate to defend anything like a robust program of basic research whose significance is largely basic knowledge rather than practical results, given the wide range and depth of immediate practical needs that scientific inquiry might help us meet. In other words, Kitcher’s account of significance seemed to me unable to provide the defense of basic research that he seemed keen to provide. So, although Kitcher’s account seeks to defend basic research with little practical application on the basis of our natural curiosity, it seems like his account will systematically devalue it in favor of practically significant inquiries.

Perhaps this devaluation is the right approach, though. After all, when it comes to possibly saving human lives or satisfying our curiosity about whether megafauna from tens of millions of years ago had feathers, does it not seem inhumane to prefer the latter? When these trade off, should we not obviously prefer the former? The pragmatic point of view seems to be understood that way.

Scientists develop conceptual, material, explanatory, and methodological resources in systematic ways. They are often driven by the existence of a difficult puzzle that only a specialist can understand as a puzzle. Some of these have the sort of obvious lines of relevance to practical problems that I described earlier. Other puzzles may only have relevance later, when systematic generalization of the puzzle solution is achieved, and the practical payoff can be seen. Vannevar Bush made a strong claim that basic science would inevitably yield useful by-products. At the same time, he held that scientific progress depended on it being unconstrained by a focus on practical results: “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown” (Bush Reference Bush1945: 12). In this strong form that guarantees progress and applicability from unconstrained basic research, this argument is untenable, because often basic research fails to translate to application, while mission-driven, applied research is much more fruitful on its own than Bush would admit (Sarewitz Reference Sarewitz2016). Still, this is one path by which seemingly useless science sometimes proves its use, through unanticipated future application, even when Kitcher’s “lines of significance” cannot be traced beforehand.

Perhaps part of the problem concerns the way that we think about what is or isn’t “useful.” There is a tendency, under the regime of neoliberal capitalism, to assimilate the “useful” to the economically productive; to see scientific knowledge as useful if it contributes to technology that sells or to technocratic solutions to policy problems. Here, turning to classical pragmatist philosophy and particularly Dewey’s reflections on the concept “useful” provides a crucial corrective. In Art as Experience, Dewey writes:

And again in Experience and Nature:

Here Dewey captures and responds to a common misconception of pragmatism and “instrumentalism,” and helps us resolve some worries about “useless” inquiries and the value of curiosity. Dewey points out that the definition of “useful” must be situated not in the demands of capitalist modes of production but within human experience, where what is useful concerns not only survival but flourishing. In this sense, delight, wonder, the enjoyment in finding a clever solution to a difficult puzzle, are all definitely useful, perhaps even more useful than those results that “contribute” in an economic sense. In any case, insofar as scientific practices of inquiry enable forms of prediction and control that contribute to the enrichment of life and experience, our “appreciation of the meaning of things,” then they are useful and significant.

Nonpragmatic Criteria in Science

Some philosophers of science insist that there are standards or criteria for hypothesis acceptance or theory appraisal that are independent from the criteria of successful prediction and control and that these nonempirical criteria may in some cases supplement or even outweigh empirical prediction and control. In some cases, it is taken as simply a brute fact about science that it answers to such nonempirical standards or “epistemic values” (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1977). Others see these “superempirical virtues” as independent grounds for belief in the truth of a scientific theory, and thus part of a robust case for scientific realism (Churchland Reference Churchland, Churchland and Hooker1985). My response here is relatively brief: These claims are largely confused; either the criteria in question reduce to or are instrumental to prediction and control; or they are not criteria that guide genuine scientific inquiry and belief.

One version of the idea of nonpragmatic criteria for science is simply that science aims at more than prediction and control; it aims at truth. Another version is that certain superempirical epistemic standards or values are valuable because they are truth promoting. We could mean two things here by “truth.” One thing we might mean is true predictions of observation and experiment. This is just to restate the claim that science aims at prediction and control, rather than being an alternative to it.Footnote ³ Or we could mean truth in a broader sense, the truth of the whole theory in all its parts, not just the truth of the predictions it makes. Truth in this sense by definition exceeds prediction and control; but also truth in this sense cannot be considered an independent aim or standard for anything. Our only means of assessing whether we have come near to the truth in this sense is our assessment of the success of theories in facilitating successful prediction and control. We have no additional access to the truth, no way to aim at it, other than through our most successful science.Footnote ⁴

This is not to deny that science achieves the truth sometimes; that is a separate issue. Nor is it to deny that science might aim indirectly at the truth, by aiming at successful prediction and control. But the idea that science aims at truth directly and independently as such is a misunderstanding of what an aim is. To be able to aim at something, one must have some sense of how the aim might be achieved, how to recognize whether the aim has been achieved, or whether one is moving close toward achieving the aim, however indirectly. In the case of truth in a sense that goes beyond accurate prediction, we cannot meet any of these requirements (Laudan Reference Laudan1984: 137). If truth means that our theory accurately pictures the “underlying reality” beyond our concepts and observations, then we have no way of getting outside of our experience and conceptual frameworks to compare the picture with what is pictured. Likewise, if we want to know whether certain superempirical virtues of theories are truth promoting, not in the sense of enabling better prediction and control but in the broader sense, we have no independent grounds to answer this question. At best, we can say either that theories with such virtues tend to have characteristics that match our assumptions about what the world is like, or that they are instrumental to better prediction and control of phenomena.

An argument from the pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce suggests a third option for thinking about truth as an aim (or, in his terms, “regulative ideal”) of science. According to Peirce, the truth is whatever belief scientific inquirers would tend to settle on in the long run of inquiry; a belief (result, hypothesis, theory) is true if it would withstand testing and evaluation in every test scientific inquirers might subject it to, without falling into doubt. This is sometimes taken to be a pragmatist definition or theory of truth, and often not considered a plausible one.Footnote ⁵ It is probably better understood as an elucidation of the relations between truth, belief, and inquiry (Misak Reference Misak2004). This is of a piece with various other attempts by pragmatists to redefine or elucidate truth in ways that make it a tractable aim: as successful belief (James), as unrevised in the ideal limit of inquiry (Peirce), as warranted assertibility (Dewey),Footnote ⁶ or as ideal rational acceptability (Putnam Reference Putnam1981). This pragmatist line intrinsically links truth to success in prediction and control, rather than treating it as an independent goal or standard.

One could also understand the long-run achievement of truth as a substantive claim rather than a definitional move: If there is a truth of the matter, then scientific inquiry, taken to indefinite lengths, would settle upon it. The long-run success of science is thus evidence that science aims at truth. This is a common claim of the scientific realist. However, truth in any of these senses is, again, not an aim that inquirers could have in view instead of successful prediction and control. Rather, the claim is that in thoroughly exploring improvements to successful prediction and control, inquirers get the truth, in the long run. In this way, “truth” is aimed at only indirectly, through the pragmatic aims of prediction and control. The former does not provide independent standards of evaluation.

Some philosophers of science have argued for certain nonpragmatic standards for scientific inquiry as being intrinsic scientific criteria in their own right. Thomas Kuhn, for example, articulates five criteria for good scientific theories: “accuracy, consistency [with other theories], scope [of phenomena encompassed by the theory], simplicity, and fruitfulness [for future research]” (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1977). The first, accuracy, is just another term for predictive success. The other four are ambiguous: They might be understood purely as features of the theory or relations between theories, or they might be understood as characterizing relations between theory and evidence (Douglas Reference Douglas2013). Simplicity understood as a feature of a theory might be characterized ontologically (number of theoretical posits required), mathematically (as a property of the equations or models constituting the theory), computationally (in terms of the difficulty of making calculations), or otherwise. Understood as a relation between theory and data, simplicity means that the theory has a lower degree of complexity than the evidence it covers (Douglas Reference Douglas2013: 799). If these nonpragmatic standards (also called epistemic standards, superempirical virtues, epistemic values, or cognitive values) are ways of characterizing the relation between theory and evidence, then meeting them is either instrumental to greater success in prediction and control, or they pick out a particular type of prediction or control as particularly valuable. They do not constitute a standard independent from success in prediction and control. On the other hand, if we conceive of standards such as simplicity as inherent properties of theories independent of their relation to evidence, then such standards cannot be criterial for science at all.

To sum up what has been said so far, we have considered two types of scientific inquiry that at first glance seem not to fit the pragmatists’ account of science: “useless” science that lacks immediate applicability, and science guided by nonpragmatic criteria. In both cases, we have found that the pragmatist can fully accommodate the value of the relevant science while clearing up certain misconceptions. But not all scientific activity can be understood as problem-solving inquiry directed at our capacity to predict and control. Much of the science that we find really inspiring, that informs both public understanding of science and science education, consists of attempts to synthesize and build on the results of pragmatic inquiry in order to understand how it all fits together. I group such attempts under the traditional heading of “the scientific worldview” or “scientific worldviews” in the plural; it is these that constitute the greatest lacuna for the type of pragmatism under discussion here.

Scientific Worldviews

Religionists are often inclined to see the tension between science and religion in terms of a clash between very different worldviews. “The scientific worldview” is variously depicted in terms such as materialism, mechanism, determinism, and reductionism, and as opposed to ideas such as spirituality, idealism, magic, and miracles. An early exemplar of scientific worldview building is René Descartes’ treatise The World, written between 1629 and 1633 and published posthumously (1998/1677). The book combines epistemology, physics, biology, and metaphysics to paint a picture of an entirely mechanical understanding of the physical world encompassing the nature of matter and light, astrophysics, living organisms, and the mechanics of perception (with room, however, for God and the rational soul). Descartes sought to provide a complete and systematic alternative to the worldview late medieval philosophers had created in synthesizing Aristotle and Christianity; in the process he synthesizes new scientific research and ideas with his own creative speculations. Many scientists, philosophers, educators, and popularizers have followed in Descartes’ footsteps, attempting to build on the latest science to create a comprehensive account of the nature of the world.

How are the various results of science synthesized into a scientific worldview? It is a more difficult and complex matter than it may seem. On the ground, we see diversity and disunity in science. Science involves a hodgepodge of approaches, theories, concepts, and conflicting results. A frank survey of everything actually going on in science shows that it provides no single map of reality, that it has little or no overall organization to its theories and methods, and that inconsistencies abound (see Feyerabend Reference Feyerabend and Terpstra1999; Dupré Reference Dupré1993; Galison and Stump Reference Galison and Stump1996; Kellert, Longino, and Waters Reference Longino and Galavotti2006). Even fundamental physics contains different approaches that are apparently inconsistent and so far resist combination into a successful, testable theory. Beyond the realm of theoretical physics, we’re in even more of a mess. On a pragmatic and contextual account of science as problem-solving inquiry, aimed at prediction and control of phenomena that interest us, this is not much of a surprise. We might well expect science to be as diverse as our interests. In everyday science, there is no need to take it all together – specialization and contextualism help us keep the mess in hand, and localized conflicts are a spur to further inquiry.

But all this plurality, as Paul Feyerabend aptly pointed out in his later work (1999), problematizes the notion of the scientific worldview. One way we might articulate “the scientific worldview” would be a thorough survey of this mess, a list of achievements, gaps, and internal clashes. This would be pretty convoluted, to put it mildly, not to mention self-contradictory, and it would not do the job the scientific worldview is thought to do; when we ask how it all fits together, we expect something more than concatenation in response. Instead, we need to ask what happens when we try to create, from a survey of this mess, a single, coherent worldview. Thanks to the messy reality of scientific practice, any attempt to craft a coherent worldview based on science is not a straightforward matter.

The construction of a scientific worldview has three features. (1) it is selective; it leaves a lot out, and emphasizes certain aspects of science over others. (2) it is constructive and creative; it stitches the remaining pieces together into a coherent and compelling story. Finally, (3) it is philosophical; it is part of metaphysics or ontology, not on the same footing as ordinary scientific inquiry, whose warrant is largely connected to situations of practical problem solving and successes in prediction and control. It goes beyond particular empirical problems to paint a grand picture but not a uniquely compelling one. In other words, the scientific worldview cannot be read off of science directly but must instead be constructed by creative, philosophical interpretations that select certain elements of science for emphasis. Because there is a degree of free choice in deciding how to construct a worldview from the materials of science, it is probably best to think about this in terms of multiple, potentially competing scientific worldviews in the plural.

Any worldview has consequences for our lives, hopes, and sense of purpose. In Science and Moral Imagination, I describe worldviews as “complex evaluative standpoints where particular valuations are tied up with more general ideals, principles, and institutions, as well as factual beliefs, theoretical claims, and metaphysical commitments” (M. J. Brown Reference Brown2020: 142). This emphasizes the fact that our sense of how it all fits together is never a neutral, disinterested matter, but one that touches on questions about the meaning of human life and our place in the world. This connection should come as no surprise to those familiar with constructions of scientific worldviews. Many of the most creative articulators and passionate defenders of versions of the scientific worldview – such as Jacques Monod, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Jerry Coyne – have explicitly drawn out moral or political lessons, or have argued that the scientific worldview challenges not only earlier ideas but traditional ways of life.Footnote ⁷

As such, scientific worldviews closely connect with the traditional function of myth or religion, and a scientific worldview will have to compete with other worldviews – traditional religious, speculative philosophical, and alternative interpretations of science. These worldviews, because they are so loosely connected to the pragmatic dimensions of science, will be judged less by typically scientific standards than by philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical ones.

Why do we need a scientific worldview at all? What is the pragmatic value of such a thing? Why should we not simply rest content with the various results of particular scientific inquiries and leave these further questions to theologians and metaphysicians (or perhaps just leave them alone)? I think there is a story for the naturalistic pragmatist to tell about why we should want a well-crafted scientific worldview. To tell it, I turn to what might seem like an odd source: pragmatist analyses of religion and religious experience.

Pragmatist Accounts of the Religious

Recall a part of the earlier quote from Dewey’s Experience and Nature: “The characteristic human need is for possession and appreciation of the meaning of things” (1988/1925: 272). We can join this to a statement from Dewey’s pragmatist forerunner James that “the life of religion … consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto” (James Reference James1902: 53).Footnote ⁸ This starts to give a flavor of the classical pragmatist philosophy of religion. According to James and Dewey, religion speaks to deep needs in human life and experience, for meaning on the one hand and guidance on the other. Insofar as religion allows us to understand and appreciate the meaning of things and to adjust ourselves to the world in a way that promotes the good, it thus performs a pragmatic function.

These pragmatist thinkers draw a distinction between two aspects of religion as ordinarily understood. On the one hand, there is institutional religion. Both thinkers exclude the institutional side from their positive account of the value and function of religion. They considered organized religion a secondary development that at best did not get at what was centrally important about religion; at worst, they saw religious institutions as tied to “creeds and cults” that interfered with the expression of religious experiences and values (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934: 21). On the other hand, there is what James calls “personal religion” and what Dewey calls “the religious,” which they see as playing a positive role in helping us understand the world and our place in it, thereby providing a solution to our uneasiness about ourselves and our standing in the world, as James puts it (1902: 508).

Where James and Dewey differ is on the question of whether the supernatural is an essential feature of religion. For James, religion requires not only some “unseen order” but also a mystical or supernatural order that resonates with the “higher part” of our own being (1902: 508). On a Jamesian account, then, it seems doubtful that a scientific worldview could perform the religious function. Dewey believes, on the contrary, that supernaturalism is an addition to the religious from the institutional side of religion, and that we can liberate the religious to better function in our lives by removing the supernatural accretion.

Supernatural belief hardens into dogma as a result of institutional forces; Dewey explores this claim at length in A Common Faith (Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934). But supernaturalism has its origins, not as a primitive attempt at science or philosophy, but in an aesthetic urge, Dewey argues in Art as Experience:

In sum, religion functions as much or more so on the aesthetic plane than on the intellectual, scientific, or philosophical. This is not to dismiss the value of religion in the least; according to Dewey, the aesthetic is also the realm of experience where meanings are at their fullest. Insofar as the role of religion is to give us and help us appreciate the meaning of things, we must ultimately operate on the plane of artistic expression as much as if not more so than the merely cognitive or intellectual.

The function of religion is not only aesthetic, however, but also moral. In A Common Faith, Dewey emphasizes both the continuity of humanity with nature and the continuity of the human community past, present, and future, calling this the “community of causes and consequences” that is “the widest and deepest symbol of the mysterious totality of being the imagination calls the universe” (Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934: 56). The interacting network of human beings with nature throughout time is the environment in which our ideals, aspirations, and values are formed by acts of moral imagination, which unifies the aesthetic and moral functions of religion with its attempt to wrestle with the universe as a totality. As we use our moral imagination to shape the purposes of our lives, we make our character as we make a work of art (Fesmire Reference Fesmire2003: 107).

It is in this relation between our values and the “mysterious totality” of the universe that Dewey, contra James, gives a naturalistic analysis of the role of faith and of the religious in experience. That is, he attempts to give an account of faith and religious experience without any reference to supernatural entities such as spirits, souls, immaterial substances, and so on. Dewey’s hope is that a naturalistic picture can help provide what traditional religion once provided in terms of social cohesion and personal meaning, but for a secular, humanistic, democratic world. One of the core concepts in Dewey’s account is the concept of natural piety:

To practice natural piety is to approach the world with humility and reverence but not passive fatalism. In a secular age, it may be difficult to see the value in talk of “piety.” But for Dewey’s part, natural piety is a much-needed perspective attuning us to our dependence on the world for the success of our endeavors. We are in the world, Dewey is saying, not in the way that a button is in a box, but as part of a complex network of interacting dependencies. This should be a cause for humility and reverence. We are parts of the world that can act toward a reflectively chosen end to improve our lot. We form purposes and ideals reflecting not only momentary desire but our attempt to understand what is ultimately desirable.

It is in this capacity for reflective or intelligent action that Dewey finds room for naturalistic interpretations of faith and the divine. Dewey defines faith as “the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices” (Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934: 23). To have faith is to believe in one’s ability to bring such ideals to realization through our desires and choices, even if only in the long run. Similarly, Dewey defines God or divinity in naturalistic terms as the unity of our ideal ends, “the values to which one is supremely devoted,” in our imagination (Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934: 29). It is important to Dewey that such ideals are neither (yet) actualized, nor “mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias” (Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934: 34). Rather, these ideal ends are possibilities made coherent through action in connection with conditions in nature that promote their realization. As Dewey says, “It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name ‘God’” (Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934: 34).

Here, aesthetic meaning, moral values and ideals, human ingenuity and intelligence, and social cooperation come together to form secular concepts of faith and the divine (if words such as “God” and “the divine” are too inseparable for you from supernaturalism, consider instead using a term such as “the sacred” or “the spiritual”). Central, again, is the notion of natural piety, the humility and reverence for nature that makes our lives possible, as well as a faith in the human community to cooperate toward realizing those ideals.

According to Dewey, militant atheism and modern supernaturalism are allied in presenting an image of humanity in isolation from nature, and thus the negation of natural piety.Footnote ⁹ Against both, Dewey holds that the religious quality of our experience, our worldview, and our way of life is ineliminable but must be situated within the natural world of our experience. In the present day, it seems that natural piety and faith in our ideals and our community are precisely what we need more of. We need a common, secular, democratic faith that can support and encourage them.

The Religious Function of Science

Here I think we can begin to address the religious function of science. The synthetic and visionary parts of science associated with the articulation of a scientific worldview can, I believe, help fulfill the role of cultivating natural piety and providing the basis of a faith in our ability to realize our ideal values. There seems to be a deep human need to understand the nature of our world and our place in it, which has long been fulfilled by mythology and religion. This understanding is often linked with the grounding of the values of a culture. We can also point to the value of the experiences of wonder and belonging created by such an understanding, and, by extension, we can see worldview-making as an imaginative and inspirational attempt to use science to help us appreciate the wonder of the universe.

Dewey found just such a cultural role for science: “The flights of physicists and astronomers today answer to the esthetic need for satisfaction of the imagination rather than to any strict demand of unemotional evidence for rational interpretation” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1987/1934: 37). This is the aesthetic role that was previously played by supernatural “theologies and cosmogonies.” Perhaps on the somewhat darker side, in certain ways, science is also hardening into dogma in just the way that supernatural belief had done before:

From our perspective today, this may seem like an exaggeration. After all, are we not inundated, especially in the United States, by those who deny the authority of science? First, no; despite a few exceptions of politicized issues, the US public still strongly trusts scientists and scientific knowledge (National Science Board 2020). Second, Dewey, as both a preeminent philosopher of education and a pioneer in empirical education research, was long interested in science education and concerned that the instructional methods common to science teaching focused exclusively on content, taught as timeless truths, rather than on scientific methods of inquiry. We can and should question whether treating science as something that should be accepted unfailingly by a passive public is what we want, though it certainly makes the religionist analogy more persuasive.

Let me instead emphasize the positive. Imaginatively constructing a scientific worldview can serve the positive religious function for the public identified by James and Dewey. It can give us an understanding of our place in the world, the meaning of it all, a pious relation to nature, and the faith in the ideals we seek to realize. “The scientific worldview” can help not only the secular public but also the scientific community; it can act as a motivation for scientists, something grand to work toward, a flag to rally to. For Dewey, “Faith in the continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human endeavor is more religious in quality than is any faith in a completed revelation” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1989/1934: 18). This faith is on display in the everyday inquiry of scientists that in turn is consolidated by the worldview-builder.

Ultimately, this part of science, which is an activity genuinely connected with scientific inquiry, science education, and science communication, has more in common with religion than with experiment, inquiry, or technical application. This similarity should affect the way we approach scientific worldviews. Understanding the religious function of scientific worldviews suggests complex criteria for responsible worldview construction that pulls against many current tendencies in contemporary naturalism, humanism, and scientism. In particular, we need to think carefully about the relation between our worldviews and our values and traditional ways of life.

In his very late works, Paul Feyerabend defended a thesis that he called “Aristotle’s principle,” or sometimes the “Existential Criterion of Reality.” The reason for the former name has to do with the way that he interprets Aristotle’s response to Parmenides’ monism, the philosophical theory according to which the World is one and unchanging: “Aristotle criticized Parmenides in two ways. He tried to show the mistakes in Parmenides’ reasoning[,] and he pointed out that change, which Parmenides had called unreal, is important in human life” (Feyerabend Reference Feyerabend and Terpstra1999: 200). Feyerabend extracts a principle behind the second strategy: “real is what plays a central role in the kind of life we identify with” (1999: 201).Footnote ¹⁰ This principle is already tacitly at work in Feyerabend’s work starting in 1975, where he attempts to combat overconfidence in science. Feyerabend came to see scientific realism as supporting a kind of dogmatism about science and an undeserved special role for science in society, which hurt the freedom of people in our society to pursue their own values and traditional forms of life. This was the sort of work for which Feyerabend was labeled “the worst enemy of science” (Theocharis and Psimopoulos Reference Theocharis and Psimopoulos1987). His work in that period exemplifies the negative version of Aristotle’s principle – don’t treat something as real if it conflicts with the life you want to live, and don’t accept pictures of reality that make that life impossible or burdensome. He thus became concerned with, as the title of one provocative essay put it, “How to Defend Society from Science” (Feyerabend 1975).Footnote ¹¹

The positive version of Aristotle’s principle treats “real” as an honorific appended to those results of inquiry that we are willing to incorporate into our worldview, as a result of endorsing their role in our practices. In other words, we are willing to treat something as real insofar as it plays a role in our valued practices and forms of life: what we care about and identify with. This is a value-laden judgment. The principle does not license an “anything goes” attitude toward what we should regard as real, but rather links it to our cherished values and practices. What “plays a role” in our practices should be understood pragmatically, as what actually plays a role in practices that we value, that are successful and unproblematic. What’s more, while our decisions about what we give the honorific “real” to makes a real difference to our practices, it is a matter of the philosophical interpretation of science, not a matter of acceptance or rejection of the science itself.Footnote ¹²

Between scientific worldviews and our values (and the practices and ways of life they are connected to) is a complex, two-way street. Of course, in various ways, values inform the results of scientific inquiry. (For studies of values in science, see Part III.) What’s more, as Feyerabend argues, our values should play a role in the selective activities of worldview building. The worldviews we adopt are or imply complex evaluative standpoints, informing the ideals we pursue and the values we hold.

As I put the finishing touches on this chapter, we continue to deal with the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and there remains major public dissensus over the severity of the problem, the efficacy of the scientifically validated preventatives for the disease and public health policy decisions made during the crisis, and questions concerning the seriousness of “long COVID.” We face increasingly severe and irreversible fallout from the climate crisis, but our elected representatives seem focused at best on half measures, where they acknowledge its reality at all. We have faced significant challenges to the institutions and the very values of our secular, pluralistic, democratic society. If ever there were a need for a secular worldview that could inspire natural piety and a faith in our ability to realize our ideals, now is the time. It is the religious function of science to provide such a worldview. Those of us committed to science and to humanism should bring our moral imagination to bear in order to better meet that need.