IGNORANCE AND HYPOTHESIS

Abstract

1 3 4 Y I G N O R A N C E A N D H Y P O T H E S I S E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I If a creature were asked, ‘‘What’s your definition of science?’’ that intelligent being would do well to borrow Albert Einstein’s answer , from 1939, delivered at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Science, Einstein said, ‘‘is the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization.’’ What creature really understands those words? It’s the kind of question that Noam Chomsky from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asks in a short book that summarizes fifty years of his work in linguistics, brain and cognitive science, and political theory. Excluding notes and a thoughtful foreword by the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami from Columbia University, we get 127 pages in four chapters for twenty bucks. Is it a bargain? Let’s put Chomsky’s title in the form of a multiple-choice question , then think about Einstein’s definition with some care, just to get to the pith of Chomsky’s discussion as I understand it. First, the pop quiz: W h a t K i n d o f C r e a t u r e s A r e W e ? by Noam Chomsky (Columbia University Press, 167 pp., $19.95) 1 3 5 R Human beings are creatures who A. use language B. think, using language C. often don’t think particularly well Among the multiple choices, I don’t include the possibility that human beings attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization. Yet options A through C all have to do with Einstein’s definition of science, to the point where a person could wonder whether humans, alone among all creatures , are scientific. But one shouldn’t presume that we, alone among creatures, reliably excel at science, because of option C. I admire Einstein’s definition, because it assumes very little. He doesn’t say that our big human brains reconstruct existence. We attempt at rebuilding existing things – meaning, I think, that if I gaze out of my window at a daytime’s clear sky, I’m ‘‘attempting at’’ the sky in a post hoc way. The sky I see isn’t necessarily the sky, because I’m already late in the game, a guy looking out of a window at something blue, but maybe it has already changed. I don’t come to know the sky at all because of another issue, which is Einstein’s carefully worded ‘‘process of conceptualization.’’ He doesn’t say that science is conceptualization, only that some process using concepts allows us to reconstruct existence after the fact. Einstein’s ‘‘process’’ suggests that using concepts – and, by implication , reconstructing existence – doesn’t happen just once in a wash of success. Not at all. We conceptualize and rebuild over and over – and once it’s done, we do it again. Maybe Einstein’s definition applies to what we roundly call thinking as much as it pertains to science. I admit that looking at the sky is no act of science until a person stops, perhaps, to gaze at it more intently. All the above leads me without detour to pages 91–92 in the fourth chapter of What Kind of Creatures Are We? The chapter’s title is ‘‘The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?’’ (By the way, every chapter title is a question: ‘‘What Is Language?’’; ‘‘What Can We Understand?’’; ‘‘What Is the Common Good?’’; and chapter 4’s, which I find the best of the lot.) Chapter 4 reproduces, essentially verbatim, a Chomsky article in The Journal of Philosophy from 2009. We might pause to think, with disappointment, that we have mere republication in front of us, not a late-career synthe- 1 3 6 M I Y A W A K I Y sis. Still, ideas do matter, and maybe they bear much repeating – as well as duplication for the public in hardback at a modest price. My quibble notwithstanding, on page 91, Chomsky discusses Galileo’s...