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Richard Dawkins writes really silly things about science and philosophy
I’ve known Richard Dawkins for decades. Not in the sense that we are pals. But we have crossed paths a number of times, once because I invited him to give a public talk at the University of Tennessee, another because we both contributed to a stimulating symposium on “Moving naturalism forward” organized by cosmologist Sean Carroll. I have never seen eye-to-eye with Dawkins. I think his famous “selfish genes” view of evolution is too narrow. I maintain that his influential concept of memes is nothing but a misleading metaphor. And I think his criticism of religion is crude and ineffective.
But over the years the most annoying attitude that Dawkins has displayed, as far as I’m concerned, is his relentless criticism of philosophy, coupled with a hopelessly naive view of science. And this past weekend he’s done it again. I woke up Sunday morning to the following tweet:
“Science is not a social construct. Science’s truths were true before there were societies; will still be true after all philosophers are dead; were true before any philosophers were born; were true before there were any minds, even trilobite or dinosaur minds, to notice them.”
Now, I normally don’t bother responding to tweets, even of famous people. And I even more rarely write a whole essay about them, such as the one you are reading now. But Dawkins is too influential an author, and what he writes has serious potential to do harm, to both philosophy and science, so here it goes.
Let us proceed sentence by sentence, to unpack the various problems with Dawkins’ view. “Science is not a social construct.” God forbid. The words “social construct” have come to signify — for the likes of Dawkins — a really, really bad thing. He interprets this to mean something along the lines of entirely arbitrary, made up, completely disconnected from empirical reality.
But as philosopher Helen Longino very clearly explains, science is a social activity in the entirely uncontroversial sense that it is carried out by human beings. This means that, inevitably, science is characterized by social structures, including power structures. Science doesn’t mean just laboratory experiments or particle accelerators, it also means research grants, professorships…
