Justin E. H. Smith

Interview with Cumhuriyet

[To be published, likely in an edited version, in the Turkish national newspaper, Cumhuriyet]

1. What is the current most important debate in the philosophy of science for you, philosophically and methodologically?

Only speaking for myself, and not for academic philosophy in general, I would say that the most important debate concerns the nature of scientific reasoning itself, what it has in common with other forms of human thought (e.g., ideology, mythology, morality, 'common-sense', etc.), and also how it is distinct from them. The prevailing idea of science for a long time had it that scientific reasoning makes a radical break with these other forms in that it gives us an impartial view of the world. While this is certainly to some extent true, more sophisticated reflection on science reveals that it is also deeply culture-bound, not just in the sense that cultural values play a role in the interpretation of data, but also in the very choice of programs of research. The sciences that deal with the distant, experimentally unrepeatable past, such as paleontology and cosmology, are particularly susceptible to influence by elements of pre-scientific thinking.  I've often thought, for example, that one would learn a good deal by doing a comparative study of Big Bang cosmology with creation myths from around the world. This is not to say that moden cosmology does not have a unique relation to the truth among all the different ways human beings have accounted for their origins, but only that it would be surprising if no pre-scientific, mythological tropes made their way into the way in which scientists talk about this highly speculative question. 

2. Did Harun Yahya send you his book of creation? What do you think about it? (Maybe you know that the magazine of the Turkish Academy of Science and Technology censored the February issue, which was about Darwin's theory. It was a big scandal here.)

No, and I'm offended that he left me out! I would have liked to pore over all the beautiful images, particularly the one of a caddis fly that turned out to be a fishing lure Harun Yahya had copied and pasted from the internet (to see the work of the talented artist who created it, go here: http://www.grahamowengallery.com/fishing/more-fly-tying.html). I have tremendous respect for traditional belief systems --I've already said I think we should study the way scientific thinking overlaps with them-- but there's nothing 'traditional' about a politically driven mass media campaign to deny the best available theory of the origins of life on earth. Real traditionalists are not worried about that theory. I think the content of the claims of creationists, whether of the Old Testament literalist school or of the intelligent-design school, are entirely without interest. To the extent that their movement is interesting, it is so as a social and political phenomenon.  One interesting question is why it only gains traction in certain societies, e.g., Turkey and the United States, and not so much in others, such as Saudi Arabia and Sweden.  It seems to me that in the Saudi Arabian case we are looking at a society in which what the individual citizen thinks about matters such as this is of no consequence, as long as the citizen behaves in the way that the state dictates.  In the case of Sweden there is a high degree of freedom of expression, coupled with high science literacy and a general lack of interest in fundamentalist or revivalist religious movements.  But in the US and Turkey both there is robust and chaotic democracy, with different factions competing to have their vision of the social good predominate. Couple these with mediocre science education, a proneness towards populist suspicion of elite expertise, and a religious tradition that cannot easily accommodate the thought that humans are a particular kind of animal, and what do you have? The spurious pseudoscience of people like Henry M. Morris and Harun Yahya.

‘A corporall Philosophy’: Language and ‘Body-Making’ in the Work of John Bulwer (1606-1656)

[To appear in Ofer Gal and Charles Wolfe (Eds.), Embodied Empiricism (Springer Verlag)]

Justin E. H. Smith

Francis Bacon, in his 1605 work The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, argued for a ‘real character’ or artificial language that would be able to communicate intended meanings from one person to another with perfect transparency.  This is a project that would be important throughout the rest of the century, with thinkers such as Samuel Hartlib, John Wilkins, and G. W. Leibniz all making significant contributions to the study of aritifical and formal languages. 

Notes of Cogitations are of twoo sortes; The one when the Note hath some Similitude, or Congruitie with the Notion; The other Ad Placitum, hauing force onely by Contract or Acception. Of the former sort are Hierogliphickes, and Gestures. For as to Hierogliphickes, (things of Ancient vse, and embraced chiefly by the AEgyptians, one of the most ancient Nations) they are but as continued Impreases and Emblemes. And as for Gestures, they are as Transitorie Hierogliphickes, and are to Hierogliphickes, as Words spoken are to Wordes written, in that they abide not.

In some fashion or other, it is the first kind of ‘Hierogliphickes’, in the sense Bacon describes here, that will dominate in the 17th-century efforts to develop an ideal, artificial writing system, one that would not be based on mere convention, but would instead serve transparently for producing ‘Emblemes’ of the things one wishes to denote.  The second variety Bacon identifies, gesture, will in contrast gain little attention.  Yet little attention is not none at all.  Over the course of the 1640s, the obscure Baconian natural philosopher John Bulwer would develop his predecessor’s notion of transitory hieroglyphics into an elaborate system, one that would indeed serve as the starting point for the later sciences of, among other things, sign language and sociolinguistics. 

According to Jeffrey Wollock, Bulwer would entirely ignore Bacon’s interest in an ideal language, focusing instead exclusively upon Bacon’s characterization of gesture, indeed turning this into the centerpiece of his chirological project. According to Wollock, “this was in part because [Bulwer] retained older views on the inherent ontological harmony between man and the universe, but also because, for Bulwer the physician, the underlying neurophysiological basis of gesture confirmed it as the universal ‘language’ of humanity.”  It would be more correct to say, however, that Bulwer does not abandon the search for an ideal language, but indeed believes that he has already found one in gesture.  In examining why he believes this, we might be able to discern an important rift in 17th-century debates about the universal character, between those who believe that this can be nothing other than an artificial language, and those who believe that it is precisely artifice that obscures meanings, and that any universally comprehensible system of communication will be perfectly natural as opposed to artificial.  But in considering Bulwer’s understanding of the natural, and of the way that nature equips bodies with a sort of mute natural language, we are also able to gain access to a curious, if not terribly influential,  theory constituting a point of contact between early modern philosophy of language on the one hand and the early modern metaphysics of body on the other.  The best way to draw this connection out, over the course of the following two sections, will be to focus on Bulwer’s very different --and at first glance unjustifiably different-- judgments about two different ways in which the body is implicated in human activity: as the vehicle of meanings in body language, and as the object of human artifice in tattooing, foot-binding, and other forms of body modification.