Legacy Oxford

humanness.doc

Nov 3

Humanness in their hearts

Where science and religion fuse

 

Theorizing about brain function is often considered slightly disreputable and anyhow a waste of time - perhaps even 'philosophical.'

                                                                Patricia Churchland[1]

 

This is  ... not the kind of area in which decisive arguments are available;  rather it's the kind of area in which one has had a good day if one manages not to drown.

                                                                Jerry Fodor[2]

 

I.  Intro

 

            Attempts to relate science and faith have been of perennial interest to the Christian intellectual community.  Given recent Western academic history, it is perhaps unsurprising that virtually all such attempts have been fundamentally propositionalistic.  The problem has been seen as one of finding, stating and elucidating the right principles of integration, of discovering what propositions (and theories) of science should penetrate theology and religious beliefs, and of discovering what propositions of religious belief and what doctrines of theology should carry weight in the scientific context, of figuring out how contradictions or apparent conflicts between scientific and religious statements should be resolved, of working out how the claims of the two could be made logically consistent, of constructing arguments showing, e.g., how science could provide rational support for religious beliefs.  What I wish to suggest in the following is that that may not be the most productive way to conceive of the problem.

            That viable integration should not necessarily be fundamentally a matter of proposition dynamics is perhaps not really all that surprising.  Our deepest springs are not (at least not all) propositional - much less propositionally articulable. That religion is not ultimately propositional has been and is a widely attractive view.  And over the last two or three decades one influential conception of scientific theories is the semantic conception according to which theories are structures in an n-dimensional state spaces (or sets of models) rather than the traditional axiomatically structured collections of propositions.[3]  If the two relata of science/religion integration are not wholly propositional, then perhaps the conceptual resources for integration will not be confined to or even mainly those of relationships among propositions or propositional entities.  They might, rather, partially reflect other aspects of the dynamics of human rational cognition.  In what follows, I wish to do some initial exploration of one alternative possible approach oriented more in that direction.  I am going to come at the issue from a philosophy of science angle - the angle I know best.

 

II.  The Extra-empirical

 

            The picture of a science grounded on a bedrock of pure empirical data, rigidly structured according to as logically rigorous a system of induction as constructable and shorn of all metaphysics, religion, and other perceived conceptual contaminants, reigned widely as an ideal beginning with its most influential early expositor, Bacon.  That idea persisted in varying forms through the positivism of the early to mid twentieth century, and in popular circles continues to the present.  A science consisting only of what reason could securely build upon a foundation of objective, utterly reliable observation (what could be 'rationally, scientifically proven') was attractive in promising a science having both epistemic security and conceptual purity - protected from all presuppositions, including especially the despised demands and influences of religious obscurantists. 

            But recent history has not been particularly kind to that view, and despite its still wielding significant inertial underground conceptual clout, the erosion of substantive parts of the view is very nearly complete (as is the collapse of positivism).  The past century (especially the latter half) has seen a growing realization of how far humans and humanness penetrates/permeates/suffuses science. There are, naturally, those who have taken that theme to counterproductive extremes.  But while rejecting those extremes, I want to suggest that recognition has perhaps not gone far enough in one orthogonal direction.  Although this does not imply that all is human construct, etc., it does mean that if we are interested in truth – vs. advancing various philosophical agendas – we must revise some of our estimates and rein in some of our claims concerning science. After exploring some threads in that different direction, I will argue that science is in specified ways a profoundly theistic enterprise.

            It is now no longer even controversial that things other than pure data and reason function within science (or that data themselves are not always quite so pure as once thought).  Indeed, other factors - extra-empirical factors - have to function in science for science itself to function.  How exactly does that come about? 

 

A.  Underdetermination

            Empirical data underdetermine scientific theories in the sense that for any body of empirical data, no matter how large or complete, there are always in principle unlimitedly many theoretical interpretations consistent with those data.  It follows that no body of empirical data (even if complete for the cosmos for all time) logically entails or conclusively confirms the relevant correct theory (or any contingent theory at all, for that matter).[4]  Empirical data by themselves can neither generate, identify, drive us to, nor conclusively confirm some single theory from among all possible competitors.  Underdetermination, then, presents us with a forced choice between empirical purity (at a cost of the theoretical) and theoretical legitimacy (at the cost of empirical rigor). Thus, when we do single out a particular theory, whatever selection process we employ will of necessity involve  'extra-empirical' factors - factors beyond the purely empirical.[5]       A genuine realist science thus cannot survive on just empirical observation and logic, but requires richer conceptual resources and is of necessity integrally embedded in a deeper conceptual matrix from which, I shall argue, it cannot be cleanly detached intact.  What are those resources?

 

B.  First wave: fairly well-behaved basic presuppositions

Among the operative presuppositions upon which science unavoidably depends, many are conceptually unproblematic, and various of them are so familiar as to ordinarily escape special attention.  The following list is not presented as exhaustive.

            1.  General metaphysics.

a.  Intelligibility of nature.  For any robust idea of science itself to make sense, the cosmos must be assumed to be to some degree understandable by the minds doing the science.  Historically science has assumed that nature embodies an inherent intelligibility - that properly conceived, nature's mechanisms and structures make sense.

b.  Basic character of nature. Relevant presuppositions concerning nature include e.g.: that there really is a real world, that it is largely 'out there', that it exists largely independent of us, that it persists, that change is real, that events in that world have effects, etc.  Although change is real, there are also stabilities and uniformities extending through time and space.  There is a unity to reality - we live in a cosmos, rather than a random and arbitrary patchwork of different jurisdictions.  And whatever their ultimate character, there are 'laws' of nature, that seem to inhabit a region somewhere between logical necessity and accidental generalization.  The laws of nature, and nature itself, manifest a logical contingency, but an ordered - not a chaotic - contingency.  There are other sorts of presuppositions as well, which I will not pursue here.[6]

2.  General anthropology

Science, on most accounts, purports to generate knowledge and understanding of nature, produced in interactions between human faculties - e.g., senses and reason - and reality.  And that requires subsidiary presuppositions.

            a.  Human reason.  Our grasping of nature's intelligibility (in any realist sense) requires a significant isomorphism between patterns defining the phenomena understood, and patterns in and of our cognitive structures.  And where our science penetrates beneath the surface into theoretical domains, it must be assumed that our concepts (and cognitive structures) still have some traction.

            b.  Human senses.  For our senses to be a means by which we acquire scientifically essential contingent data, those faculties must be in some general sense reliable re: aspects of the real world.

 

C.  Second wave:  axiology, and other not-so-well-behaved but partially voluntary matters

            None of the above are perceived as seriously problematic, and even Baconians would, if pressed, be comfortable with most of them.  As it turns out, however, the above collection is still profoundly inadequate.  What else must factor in?

            1.  Goals, criteria.  Science can be pursued only if it has some aim, some goal.[7]  All such are, of course, value-steeped - involving assumptions concerning the worth of such goals, the worth of pursuit of such goals, and criteria for making judgments of degrees of success/failure of achieving such goals.  On most tellings, such goals and values are not forced upon us by reality, and in any case pursuit of such goals involves human decision.  What methods are appropriate and productive is of course linked in part to what goals are being pursued, so even 'scientific method' itself may be partially shaped by such choices.

            2.  Methodological principles.  Assumptions concerning what specific approaches to a nature (of the presumed sort) available to investigators (or our presumed sort) are likely to be successful will be inescapable as well.  And exactly what is perceived as constituting - or even merely indicating - "success" in such will also be a crucial and historically defeasible matter.[8]

            3.  Preferred descriptive/explanatory resources.  Defining the very category of 'scientific' - let alone selecting specific theories within that category - has typically been taken to require restricting the explanatory and descriptive concepts legitimately deployable, the types of inferences permissible, and the obligatory structure of a 'good' explanation.  For instance, it is now widely held that the natural sciences cannot employ

teleological concepts, and that scientific explanation must ultimately appeal only to purely material, natural matters. On an even more specific level, in the early modern period, theories whose dynamics were not mechanical, whose ontology was not corpuscular, whose forces were not contact, and whose structure did not meet other favored criteria of intelligibility were dissed and dismissed as beyond the proper scientific pale. The situation is complicated by the fact that such norms on nearly all levels have changed repeatedly historically and have exhibited very different characteristics after Bacon, after Newton, after Darwin, after quantum mechanics, etc. 

4.  Epistemic values.  Underdetermination in conjunction with science's penchant for trying to penetrate beyond the directly observable virtually forces science to employ non-empirical principles as (provisional) evaluative and selection criteria.  Although historically unstable, the catalogue of such indicators typically includes empirical adequacy, accuracy, breadth, elegance, coherence, fruitfulness, predictiveness, simplicity, beauty, unifying or sytematizing power, inherent plausibility, explanatory power, interestingness and the like.

            Such characteristics are not easily formally definable, come in a wide range of degrees, often come into conflict, can be given a variety of relative weights and rank orderings, admit of varying procedures for conflict resolution and so forth.  Assessments of such characteristics are highly disputable, and are neither straightforwardly rigorously empirically driven, algorithmic, rule governed, nor neatly axiomatizable.  They in fact operate as values in theory assessments, and application of such standards involve value judgments.  Indeed, they are judgments of relative values, and human judgments of humanly chosen values at that.  Such choice is not necessarily of an "anything goes" sort, but is choice nonetheless.  And given that the very direction of science and that what is or is not eventually accepted as scientifically respectable sometimes tracks back to such choices and value decisions, they are far from inconsequential matters.

            The underlying proximate justification for such values is that they are not just arbitrarily or subjectively chosen, but are norms of good theories - i.e., truth-relevant and intelligibility-relevant epistemic values.  Therein lies their legitimacy in science - that theories exhibiting them are presumed alethically better off than those lacking them, despite the fact that they do not always behave according to notions of propositional good order.  But human choices are part of the landscape nonetheless.

            5.  Concepts/ethos.  The science that we do, the theories we employ, the picture of the world we piece together - human concepts are structural elements of all of them.  In doing science we are inarguably limited to concepts for which our human cognitive faculties are competent. And some of those materials will have very human histories - histories with roots well beyond the domain of the laboratory.[9]  After all, nature cannot simply dictate theoretical concepts or theories.   Beyond that, at any given moment we are in practice limited to a perhaps fairly small subset of those humanly-graspable conceptual resources.  We have not yet thought of everything humans can think of, and what we have thought of arises out of human-mediated resources.  And human choices - religious, philosophical, and even political - have affected the scope and content of such resources.

            We should thus not be particularly surprised when across cultures even as closely linked as English and French, we find different scientific assessment and reception of Newton and, later, of Darwin, or that some of the ethos of post WWI Germany (deep uncertainty and indeterminateness) might seep into the quantum mechanics born there or that field theory should arise during a time of Romantic insistence on the interconnectedness of all that is.  Nor should the parallels between 17th century science and 17th century social theory, nor those between Victorian cultural themes and Darwinian evolution jolt us.  Nor need it make us uneasy that some thrusts of the English Revolution were echoed in directions of newly emerging science or that Newton's very definitions of matter, space and time - the concepts around which he built his science - "were deeply indebted to the liberal Anglicanism of Restoration Cambridge." [10]

 

D.  Third wave:  humanness and deeper matters

But structures of our humanness factor in at even deeper levels - levels of which we are typically not even aware.

            1.  Perception.  It has perhaps never been very controversial that interests, mindset, enthusiasms, expectations, and so forth might affect what was perceptually noticed, attended to, or singled out as significant.  But at present many believe that some human factors are partially constitutive of the very experiences of perception themselves.

As presently conceived, perception involves more of the observer than merely mechanically operating sensory faculties, and some of that additional involvement is active.  Such activity can grow out of anything from very specific theory-based expectations through broader conceptual commitments, or background mindsets, to full-blown worldviews.  And it is not that such factors merely direct or filter perception, but that they partially shape the very content of some perceptual experiences.  Thus, when veteran telescopic observers draw detailed diagrams of canals on Mars, when reputable professional physicists write technical papers reporting properties of the lines generated by their N-ray difractors, when professional followers of Darwin discuss observations of Bathybius haeckelii, or when early microscopists produce sketches of homunculi, we need not necessarily dismiss it all as just invention, self delusion or deceit.  And when the two sides of 19th century disputes over heredity systematically report different observed behavior of chromosomes during meiosis, we need not necessarily attribute it either to incompetence or to desperate efforts to save face by the losing side.  If perception is indeed an active process, it may well be that in all these sorts of cases, the scientists in question were perfectly accurately reporting the actual contents of their conscious observational experiences.[11]  And if, as some argue (a la Kant), the constitutive activity of the subjective is preconscious, so that even our most basic perceptual experiences are simply presented to us already actively shaped and completed, then there is little prospect of self-correction.[12]  Our awarenesses and experiences thus come to us in some degree shaped, screened, assessed – with a pre-interpretational cast to them.  That is emphatically not to endorse the counsel of critical and epistemic unconditional surrender according to which cognition (or worse, reality or truth) is ‘interpretation all the way down,’ whatever that ultimately comes to.  But it is to say that within our cognition some tinge of (pre)interpretation is never completely absent.

            Where might such preconscious content come from?  On modular theories, essential information-structures are built into the operation of the brain itself.  For instance, Steven Pinker regarding vision:

 

[O]ptics is easy, but inverse optics is impossible.  Yet your brain does it every time you open the refrigerator and pull out a jar.  How can this be?

      The answer is that the brain supplies the missing information, information about the world we evolved in and how it reflects light. [his emphasis][13]

 

 Such built-in preconscious specialized information is essential for solving otherwise insoluable inverse problems in other areas as well (e.g., kinematics), and constitutes part of Pinker's case for modularity.  This of course amounts to a neurophysiological solution to underdetermination.

 

            2.  Intelligibility

            Among key tasks of the scientific enterprise, perhaps none is more fundamental than that of making parts of the world understandable, or intelligible to us.  The concept understanding is extremely difficult to explicate.  But the basic idea is straightforward:  understanding something involves removal of at least some of its mystery.[14]  The process of coming to understand something involves a transition from mystery to sense-making.  What seems to make sense is, of course, tightly connected to such important epistemic factors as background beliefs, conceptual matrix, theory commitments, paradigms, and even worldviews.  But what seems to make sense is also notoriously dependent upon psychological circumstances, mental condition, levels of various substances in the brain and so forth.  Both batches of factors provide some potential for human intrusion into the process. 

            But there is something even more fundamentally human at work here as well. Identification of sense-making, or intelligibility, presents itself to us experientially as a particular feel, a particular seeming, that defines our conviction that something makes sense, that we have gripped the correlation of reality to cognition.  The presence of this experiential dimension may explain why our talk in this area is so often metaphorical - we ‘see’ it, the ‘light dawns’, we ‘grasp’ the matter, and so on.[15]  And we cannot get behind or underneath this experience to examine its credentials.  Any  evaluation of its credentials would have to employ resources and procedures whose justification would ultimately track back at least in part to that experiential dimension itself - the support for those credentials would have to strike us as themselves making sense.  As with our other faculties of cognition, at some point and in some circumstances it must simply become a human brute given of the process. This general point was behind the remark of the physicist Sir Denys Haigh Wilkinson that even on purely scientific questions, after having done all the science we can do, finally we ”cannot do more than say ‘this makes me feel good;  this is how it has to be.' "[16]  Others have made similar observations.[17]  In fact, Paul Thagard even includes a "happiness node" in his computational scheme for justification of theories.[18]  Of course, the opposite sorts of convictions operate in this region as well.  A.G. Cairns-Smith mentions “a feeling of unease” which may be generated by a “false picture” even when that picture may still be successfully accommodating new evidence.[19]

            It appears relatively clear that that experiential dimension can be triggered by any number of (suspect or completely unsuspected) human factors.   Things that make intense sense in dreams, or to the intoxicated, or to the mad, are often utterly indescribable in ordinary discourse.[20]  Not only is this 'sense' faculty thus not infallible, but there is apparently no non-circular procedure for justifying reliance upon it.  Any such case, to have any chance of being convincing, would have to employ resources and procedures the justification for employment of which would ultimately track back at least in part to the faculty itself.  There is thus apparently some internal faculty of human cognition upon which we cannot escape placing a crucial dependence, but into whose inner workings (and propriety) we cannot look.[21]  And this faculty of course operates more deeply than formal principles of scientific methodology. [22]  Some have argued that that situation is cognitively pervasive.[23]

            So the whole idea of understanding (scientific or otherwise) rests upon an involuntary endorsement of the objective legitimacy of specific human inner phenomenal experiences associated with particular things having a genuinely sense-making appearance.  That we are not dealing here with some 'objective' human-free process seems amply clear.[24] Thus, one of the foundational aims of science and its key operative faculties may not even be definable in human-free terms. That is not to say that it does not work, is unreliable, should be ignored, is irrational to trust, or anything of the sort.  I believe none of those to be true. But its workings seem to be largely involuntary, we have little clue as to how it works or why the things that trigger it do so, and it seems to be both profoundly human and inevitably (maybe even essentially) affected by a wide variety of human factors and foibles.[25]

            3.  Explanations are what supply the materials which allow that seeing.[26]  And a good explanation must supply the sort of materials which, in the complicated human cognitive context in question, will trigger that shift from mystery to sense.  Such shifts are mediated by a complicated, enmeshing system of outlooks, stances, theoretical commitments, expectations, sensitivities, psychologies, and the like.[27]  Many of the relevant factors we can easily identify.  But not all may be explicitly identifiable.  And various of the crucial components do not seem to be propositional. 

            One hint of that indefinability, unidentifiability, or even non-propositionality is the fact that many explanations from past eras (in science and other areas) have such a peculiar feel to us, and we often cannot fully say what it is about those bits of past science that strikes us as so out of whack.  That perception may stem from changes of scientific and theoretical tastes or sensibilities over time.[28]   The indefinable out-of-whackness we sense often isn't just that we have better data in hand and can thus uncover empirical difficulties in earlier theories, but that there is just something ineffably wrong about the whole setup.  Later, I will try to say a little about what that might be.

            4.  Reason.   It is tempting to think that whatever other domains of human cognition may be human-colored, at least reason - especially such rigorously rational pursuits as mathematics, logic, and 'scientific reasoning' - will not be tainted.  But that seems unlikely.

              a. Human intuition.  As paradoxical as it may sound, even our most rigorous reasoning rests at bottom upon human intuitions.  Formal reasoning (mathematics, formal logic, etc.) cannot proceed without at least some basic axioms, derivation procedures, formation and transformation rules, and other inferential resources.  Those in their turn can be justified only as basic givens which have the property of just seeming right (or necessarily true, self-evident, incorrigible, etc.), or which when employed in ways sanctioned by the system itself generate results which exhibit some required virtue (consistency, etc.). But either way, there will be an ultimate dependence upon some human capacity for registering or recognizing the special character involved.  That capacity might be some judgment concerning consistency or coherence, or concerning the rational unacceptability of contradictions.  Or it might be an unshakable sense that the foundational logic operations that seem absolutely right to us, really are absolutely right - that our inability to even imagine how denials of such intuitions could even be thinkable, testify to their absolute legitimacy.  Or it might be something else entirely.[29]  Mathematician Keith Devlin notes (more or less apologetically) that:

 

if you push me to say how I know [that Hilbert's proofs are correct], I will end up mumbling that his arguments convince me and have convinced all the other mathematicians I know.[30]

 

Here we find shared human convictions at the very heart of mathematics.  And speaking of our "precision intelligence" Pinker says:

 

No rational creature can consult rules all the way down;  that way infinite regress lies.  At some point, a thinker must execute a rule because he just can't help it;  it's the human way, a matter of course, the only appropriate and natural thing to do - in short an instinct.[31]

 

So we deal here with not merely convictions, but instinct.  Indeed, the credentials in question may not always even rise to the level of instinct. von Neumann is quoted as claiming that

 

in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.[32]

 

But whatever starting point we pick will have a similar status - complete and unavoidable dependence ultimately upon some faculty or set of faculties, some intuition(s), that we human beings have.  There simply is no other way to get any such project off the ground - or even onto the runway to begin with.  That will hold true of any rational project - logic, mathematics, and scientific reason included.[33]

            b. Emotion. Obviously, emotion could be involved in science in a variety of conceptually superficial (although perhaps practically consequential) matters - e.g., choice of research problems, and so forth.[34]  But emotion may operate more substantively in certain types of rational decision-making.[35]  A number of neurophysiologists (e.g., Antonio Damasio, Oliver Sacks) on the basis of both laboratory and clinical studies have argued that people lacking appropriate emotional functioning can be incapable of full normal cognizing in some cases and in particular seem to be unable to make rational decisions in cases involving their own welfare.  On the view advanced, what we typically take to be rational behavior especially in practical decision-making is an outcome of complex interactions among a number of systems of neural systems.  Among the components involved are systems associated with emotion (e.g., the amygdala and other parts of the limbic system).  What has recently apparently emerged is that certain sorts of rationality are compromised or absent in the absence of emotion - that when the 'emotion' systems are damaged or otherwise without effective function, the sort of rational decisions essential to normal social functioning and even to some types of personal welfare are not made.  Without functioning emotion, the 'decision-making landscape' is flat, leaving the person involved with less than sufficient reason to pick any one goal or strategy over any other.  Indeed, Damasio argues (in connection with his 'somatic marker hypothesis'[36]) that were emotion not involved in such decisions, practical decisions in real time would generally be impossible.[37]  It was thus, he argues, a near evolutionary necessity that nature

 

built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it. [his emphasis][38] 

 

And various structures in the brain (e.g., tonically active neuron sites in the caudate) directly integrate reason inputs (from the prefrontal cortex) with emotion inputs (from the amygdala).[39]

            Emotion may be involved even more deeply in some cases.[40] Ramachandran and Blakeslee discuss a variety of fascinating cases of neural impairment.[41]  Among the most fascinating are cases involving very specific failures of identification (connected to Capgras syndrome).  For instance, one patient insisted that his parents were actually not his parents, but imposters or stand-ins who merely looked identical to his real parents.  Oddly enough, although he denied their identity when they were visually present, he unhesitatingly accepted their identity (auditorally) as his parents when talking to them by phone.  The explanation seems to be this.  Image recognition (including faces) begins in the temporal cortex, the initial information then passes via the amygdala into the limbic system where the emotional significance of the given image is assessed.  That pre-consciously associated emotional component is partially determinative of the consciously perceived identity of the person involved.  In pathological cases of the present sort, the connection between initial visual image processing (which functions normally) and the amygdala is broken, and in the absence of the emotion component, the identification of the person as parent fails.[42]  (Ramachandran hypothesizes that auditory identification pathways had not been damaged, explaining why phone identification was thus unproblematic.)

            So absolutely identical sensory images (the 'imposters' look identical to the real parents - indeed, in this case they were identical) generate convictions concerning identity which, so far as we can discern, have no emotional content  whatever - whether this is or is not one's parent is a straightforward matter of bare propositional fact.  Yet, it is the presence or absence of an emotion processing input of which we are not even aware which determines whether the identification process yields 'parent' or 'not parent' - i.e., a non-conscious emotional factor determines the proposition accepted concerning those identities. 

            Emotion can even - properly, on some views - run deep in what are de facto more specifically science-relevant directions.  Although Damasio does not argue explicitly for it, he suspects that other types of rationality beyond the practical (and he specifically includes scientific reasoning and mathematics) function essentially like the rationality of practical decision-making.  (Of course, if one takes science to be a species of value-shaped practical reasoning, then possible implications of Damasio's views come very near the scientific surface already.)  According to Ronald de Sousa

 

Emotions are species of determinate patterns of salience among objects of attention, lines of inquiry, and inferential strategies.[43]

 

As such, they "set the problems" to which relevant beliefs (and desires) are the answers.  They will thus constitute a profound shaper of the conceptual and inferential landscape upon which beliefs, inferences, cognitive strategies, and theories will have to rest.

            There is even some evidence that evaluation of the logical validity of simple syllogisms involves different combinations of neural systems depending upon the emotional salience of the topic of the syllogism.[44]  In any case, on a number of levels reason and emotion seem to function as a unit.[45]

            Some interesting recent work has focused on the role of emotion specifically in science.  Many of the cited instances have an 'external' feel about them, but others do not.  For instance, Paul Thagard has recently argued that one important and legitimate factor in theory justification in science is whether or not acceptance of the theory maximizes coherence - including emotional coherence.[46]  And Christopher Hookway has recently argued that emotion in some cases runs close to the cognitive heart of science.  According to Hookway, felt emotional responses can be one way that intuitively applied but unarticulated epistemic evaluative criteria present themselves to us cognitively.  If that is the case, then given that some individual criteria - not to mention the complete catalogue of criteria - may be not only unarticulated but propositionally unarticulatible, i.e., it may be that

 

effective epistemic evaluation could turn out to be impossible without ... appropriate emotional responses. [my emphasis][47]

 

Further, in scientific investigations, some sort of stopping procedures are essential both because theories are in principle subject to massive underdetermination and because investigative, experimental and explanatory regresses threaten in the absence of applicable stopping points.  Emotion constitutes a mechanism for stepping out of the regress:

 

[T]he end of inquiry must be regulated by an emotional change.[48]

 

(That, of course, fits nicely with the earlier remarks of Wilkinson and others.)  And given that relevant emotion may be how unarticulated epistemic criteria present, that need not undermine the rationality of such procedures.  Emotion can not only stop the regress, but

 

Emotional judgments ensure that our reflections stop at the right place.[49]

 

            Various people (e.g., de Sousa) argue that

           

[E]motions apprehend an axiological level of reality[50]

 

If that is true, and if we indeed live in a coherently integrated cosmos, then not only may human reason functionally depend in part on emotion, but science's capability of zeroing in on actual truth may thus depend upon emotion as well.  In any case, to the extent that experiences of emotion tie into reality, or to the extent that they are essential even to scientific rationality, to that extent they cannot be dismissed as mere subjectivity, wholly irrelevant to truth.

            But even if one finds some of that unconvincing, even the merely practical effects of emotions, moods, and general affective states can go in surprising directions.  Although the interpretation of some of the data is controversial, Fiedler and Bless suggest that

 

Positive emotional states facilitate active generation, whereas negative emotional states support the conservation of input data.  In other words, positive moods should encourage the application of prior knowledge structures (schemas, stereotypes, scripts) to infer new information beyond the available data.  In contrast, negative mood states should induce a conservative set to adhere to the input data as carefully as possible.[51]

 

(That might explain why one never hears of a jovial positivist.)  In fact, judgments concerning whether or not one needs additional information to solve a problem can apparently be influenced by the character of one's occurrent affective feelings.[52]

            It seems thus clear that Joseph Forgas is correct in his contention that:

 

[I]n the last twenty years or so ... empirical research [has] established that affective states have a widespread, automatic and largely unnoticed influence on both the content, and the process of cognition.[53]

 

            c.  Somato-kinetics. In fact, Damasio believes that even the body gets involved in reason in ways so substantive that, he claims, the body

 

contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind. [his emphasis][54] 

 

That sounds extremely odd, but remarkably, in responding to a question concerning the "internal or mental images ... mathematicians make use of;  whether they are motor, auditory, visual, or mixed," Einstein responded that

 

the psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought ...  are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type.[55]

 

            And as it turns out, Einstein was not alone here.[56]  Of course to the extent that our concepts are shaped or determined by contingent human neurophysiological structures (rather than contingent human sociohistorical structures), which have (allegedly) resulted from contingent - even accidental - vicissitudes of our history, they may have tinges bearing no substantive relationship to anything whatever.  It is not at all obvious that the substantive contents of various concepts generated by a physiology driven by biochemistry in turn driven by physical laws and randomness must be related either to each other or to relevant aspects of nature in any truth-preserving or truth-reflecting ways.  And even if it did appear obvious, that appearance might itself be a mere epiphenomenon of neurophysiological quirks.  In a related vein, the one-time Marxist J.B.S. Haldane remarked:

 

[I]f my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.  They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.   And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.[57]

 

(Nor any reason for supposing any of Dawkins’s anti-religious memes to be true.)

            Here then is another place for characteristically human but non-propositional input into science - one would anticipate that Alpha Centaurians (or even different human genders), with vastly different bodies presumably supplying a different content, would reason in different, or perhaps even incommensurable, ways.[58] 

            Tacit recognition of a role for the body within abstract cognition itself may underlie the conviction of Kuhn and others that hands-on training is an essential part of science education, that relevant aspects of scientific pursuits may not even be expressible - much less reducible to propositions - but may be part of a very literal somatic ‘feel’ that guides a significant part of scientific activity (what Karin Knorr-Cetina calls an ‘action/cognition mesh).[59]  (And of course, many religions take acts of worship to be essential to the grasping of the very content of religious faith itself.)

            d.  Gedanken models.   Some have argued that reasoning (of at least some types) is not propositional, but involves direct mental manipulation of mental models.  For instance, Nancy Nersession argues that key types of reasoning

 

"developed as a means of simulating possible ways of manoeuvering within the physical environment".[60]

 

Such reasoning processes are, she claims,

 

modal in format and employ perceptual and possibly motor mechanisms in processing.[61]

 

On this view

 

The reasoning process is through model manipulations and involves processing mechanisms used in perceptual-motor activity.

 

Such reasoning would again introduce an implicit physical and non-propositional motif into the operation of reason itself.[62] 

            e.  Other.  Various people have argued for the involvement of other factors and faculties as well.  For instance, it has recently been argued by Fauconnier and Turner that many of our deepest cognitive processes rest ultimately on our faculty of imagination. [63]  And, of course, the roles of culture, social structures, and the like are frequently cited in this context.  Much of that is familiar to many, and I will not pursue such  additional suggestions here, except to note one intriguing hint that so far as I know has not gotten much attention.  The societal connections are not necessarily as straightforward as one might suppose.  Beliefs generated by emotions are often temporary - not outliving the emotion in question - but sometimes such beliefs do become 'fixed' and it has been argued that this fixing occurs more readily to people in collectivist cultures than in more individualistic societies.[64]  Thus more enduring affective states - moods or 'sentiments' - may not only contribute to the persistence of belief (perhaps partially accounting for the frequently remarked and scientifically indispensable tenacity scientific belief and commitment), but different sorts of societies may contribute that in varying degrees.

 

 

E.  One more wave:  personhood and individuality

            All of the above factors have potential consequences for human cognition - from perception to common sense to the most delicate tweaks of our theorizing.[65]  What might be the consequences of all this humanness here?  Looking at nature through night-vision goggles, everything is tinged green.  Looking at reality through human-cognitive goggles, everything is tinged -  what?  We can abstract away the greenness, being able to isolate it by contrast with other experiences as an artifact of the system.  In the human-cognitive case, we apparently have no abstraction-permitting contrast - all our experiences are human-mediated.  And this humanness cannot be purged from science.

            Science-relevant factors get even more specific.  Individual perceptions of color and the like may be absolutely unique - we don't seem to have any definitive way of telling - but nonetheless seem to be generally isomorphic for most of the human species.  But other individually varying things may be less well-behaved.  As one example, consider elegance, beauty and other such aesthetic matters.   Many major physicists both past and present have been struck by an aesthetic dimension in nature.  Nature’s laws have often been cited for their symmetry, their elegance, their order, their unity, their exquisite meshing, and for the harmonies sung by their mathematical structure.  All of those have been taken as constituting part of their beauty.[66]  This aesthetic dimension is perceived as so fundamentally infused into the structure of law that many physicists take beauty to be a pointer toward truth.[67]  Aesthetic properties seem to be dimensions of the deep match between cognition and the cosmos and are part of the intuitive intelligibility of the cosmos.  Some scientists have made even stronger claims.  Thus Polanyi:

 

No one who is unresponsive to such beauty can hope to make an important discovery in mathematical physics, or even to gain a proper understanding of its existing theories.  [my emphasis] [68]

 

<