Galileo and the relationship between the humanities and the

sciences
Ever since Galileo, science has been strongly committed to the unification of theories from
different disciplines. It cannot accept that the right explanations of human activities must be logically
incompatible with the rest of science, or even just independent of it. If science were prepared to settle for
less than unification, the difficulty of reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity wouldnt be the
biggest problem in physics. Biology would not accept the gene as real until it was shown to have a physical
structure DNA that could do the work geneticists assigned to the gene. For exactly the same reason
science cant accept interpretation as providing knowledge of human affairs if it cant at least
in principle be absorbed into, perhaps even reduced to, neuroscience.
Thats the job of neurophilosophy.
This problem, that thoughts about ourselves or anything else for that matters couldnt be physical, was for
a long time purely academic. Scientists had enough on their plates for 400 years just showing how physical
processes bring about chemical processes, and through them biological ones. But now neuroscientists
are learning how chemical and biological events bring about the brain processes that actually
produce everything the body does, including speech and all other actions.
Research including Nobel-prize winning neurogenomics and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
imaging) has revealed how bad interpretations explanations of our actions are. And there are clever
psychophysical experiences that show us that introspections insistence that interpretation
really does explain our actions is not to be trusted.
These findings cannot be reconciled with explanation by interpretation. The problem they raise for the
humanities can no longer be postponed. Must science write off interpretation the way it wrote off
phlogiston theory a nice try but wrong? Increasingly, the answer that neuroscience gives to this question
is afraid so.
Few people are prepared to treat history, (auto-) biography and the human sciences like
folklore. The reason is obvious. The narratives of history, the humanities and literature provide
us with the feeling that we understand what they seek to explain. At their best they also trigger
emotions we prize as marks of great art.
But that feeling of understanding, that psychological relief from the itch of curiosity, is not the same thing
as knowledge. It is not even a mark of it, as childrens bedtime stories reveal. If the humanities and
history provide only feeling (ones explained by neuroscience), that will not be enough to
defend their claims to knowledge.
The only solution to the problem faced by the humanities, history and (auto) biography, is to
show that interpretation can somehow be grounded in neuroscience. That is job No. 1 for
neurophilosophy. And the odds are against it. If this project doesnt work out, science will have to face
plan B: treating the humanities the way we treat the arts, indispensable parts of human experience but not
to be mistaken for contributions to knowledge.
Alex Rosenberg, American philosopher, and the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke
University, Bodies in Motion: An Exchange, NYT, Nov 6, 2011.
Do the humanities need to be defended from hard science?
As the mathematician and physicist Mark A. Peterson has shown in his new book, Galileos Muse:
Renaissance Arts and Mathematics, Galileos love for the arts profoundly shaped his thinking,
and in many ways helped paved the way for his scientific discoveries. An early biography of
Galileo by his contemporary Niccol Gherardini points out that, He was most expert in all the sciences and
arts, as if he were professor of them. He took extraordinary delights in music, painting, and poetry. For its
part, Peterson takes great delight in demonstrating how his immersion in these arts informed his
scientific discoveries, and how art and literature prior to Galileo often planted the seeds of
scientific progress to come. ()
Clearly Galileo was an extraordinary man, and a crucial aspect of what made him that man was the
intellectual world he was immersed in. This world included mathematics, of course, but it was also full of
arts and literature, of philosophy and theology. Peterson argues forcefully, for instance, that Galileos
mastery of the techniques involved in creating and thinking about perspective in painting
could well have influenced his thinking about the relativity of motion, since both require
comprehending the importance of multiple points of view. ()
The idea that the perception of movement depends on ones point of view also has forebears in proto-
scientific thinkers who are far less suitable candidates for the appealing story of how common sense
suddenly toppled a 2000-year old tradition to usher modern science into the world. Take the poet,
philosopher and theologian Giordano Bruno, who seldom engaged in experimentation and who, 30 years
before Galileos own trial, refused to recant the beliefs that led him to be burned at the stake, beliefs that
included the infinity of the universe and the multiplicity of worlds. ()
Galileos insight into the nature of motion was not merely the epiphany of everyday
experience that brushed away the fog of scholastic dogma; it was a logical consequence of a
long history of engagements with an intellectual tradition that encompassed a multitude of
forms of knowledge. That force is not required for an object to stay in motion goes hand in hand with
the realization that motion and rest are not absolute terms, but can only be defined relative to what would
later be called inertial frames. And this realization owes as much to a literary, philosophical and
theological inquiry as it does to pure observation.
Professor Rosenberg uses his brief history of science to ground the argument that neuroscience threatens
the humanities, and the only thing that can save them is a neurophilosophy that reconciles brain processes
and interpretation. If this project doesnt work out, he writes, science and the humanities will have to
face plan B: treating the humanities the way we treat the arts, indispensable parts of human experience but
not to be mistaken for contributions to knowledge.
But if this is true, should we not then ask what neuroscience could possible contribute to the very debate
we are engaged in at this moment? What would we learn about the truth-value of Professor Rosenbergs
claims or mine if we had even the very best neurological data at our disposal? That our respective pleasure
centers light up as we each strike blows for our preferred position? That might well be of interest, but it
hardly bears on the issue at hand, namely, the evaluation of evidence historical or
experimental underlying a claim about knowledge. That evaluation must be interpretative.
The only way to dispense with interpretation is to dispense with evidence, and with it
knowledge altogether.
William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of
German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the J ohn Hopkins University, Bodies in Motion: An
Exchange, NYT, Nov 6, 2011.