Indigenous Myth and Science: From Egypt to New Zealand
lawrencekrauss.substack.com
lawrencekrauss.substack.com
However he unfortunately he later states "I would argue that there is only one kind of knowledge, at least about the real world, and that is empirical knowledge." This goes entirely too far, it seems to reject not just the existence of a priori knowledge, but also intuition derived from the shared experience of being human, knowledge derived from informal experience, etc. He's strayed into scientism; the belief that all truth is exclusively discovered through science. This is a common belief system for 'engineery-types', but it often leads people astray when they ignore and eschew qualitative analysis and focus exclusively on empirical quantitative data. This was McNamara's fallacy; he thought he could win a war by collecting enough quantitative data and crunching numbers, ignoring any consideration that didn't lend itself to numerical analysis as unscientific. He was subsequently blindsided by public sentiment in Vietnam and America, and lost the war.
A few examples of knowledge that isn't empirical: Using your shared humanity to intuit what somebody else is feeling, in order to have compassion for them. Creating art that you know is aesthetically pleasing, without first performing any empirical analysis of what that even means. Knowing that all humans deserve human rights.
They aren't empirical knowledge, which is the point. They are nevertheless knowledge in the sense that is relative to humans.
Another example: I accidentally rear-end somebody at a traffic light. He jumps out of his car hopping mad and storms towards me. I know he is angry, but how do I know that? I know that because of my qualitative assessments of the situational context and his body language. There is no objective empirical analysis going on in this situation, but nevertheless I know what's going on.
Some of it, yes. Some of it seems to be encoded in our genes. It may also be culturally acquired. Furthermore, there exists a priori knowledge, without which you can throw away most of mathematics. Given a set of mathematical axioms, you can derive truths through deduction and pure reason, independent of experience.
> That certainly requires empirical evidence to confirm
Most people do not require such confirmations; they go about their lives without it.
> Some of it, yes. Some of it seems to be encoded in our genes.
How do you arrive at that conclusion?
> It may also be culturally acquired. Furthermore, there exists a priori knowledge, without which you can throw away most of mathematics. Given a set of mathematical axioms, you can derive truths through deduction and pure reason, independent of experience.
Yes and mathematics is not science. You can build all sort of logical constructs that have absolutely no relation to the real world.
> > That certainly requires empirical evidence to confirm
> Most people do not require such confirmations; they go about their lives without it.
I thought we talk about acquiring knowledge? Sure lots of people do not question anything they do, but I don't think we should use that as a standard.
> How do you arrive at that conclusion?
Instinctual behaviors are simple to empirically observe. It's easy to demonstrate an instinctual fear of snakes in people or animals that never saw a real snake before and have no empirical knowledge of snakes. This shows there is knowledge about the danger of snakes encoded in the genes of vertebrates.
That we can study these instincts through empirical means does not mean the individual's instincts are empirically informed. The individual gets this knowledge not through observations of the world, so that well-founded fear of snakes isn't empirical knowledge.
This addresses a real problem that exists: people treating the work of credentialed scholars in the areas of philosophy or social commentary as disclosing "facts" similar to the work of scientists.
> A few examples of knowledge that isn't empirical: Using your shared humanity to intuit what somebody else is feeling, in order to have compassion for them. Creating art that you know is aesthetically pleasing, without first performing any empirical analysis of what that even means.
Knowledge based on experience and trial-and-error is still empirical--i.e. based on "sense experience." Artists paint stuff and then observe how people react to it. Farmers learn from inherited experience and their own experience with harvest cycles.
That said, it's less rigorous than knowledge based on controlled experiments and theoretical closed-form analysis, so I would call it more "skill" or "experience" than "knowledge."
> Knowing that all humans deserve human rights.
This is the opposite of knowledge, it's a non-falsifiable belief or moral assertion.
Artists do this, that is true. But they don't exclusively do this. Artists may also develop their skill in private through introspective means. Furthermore this analysis is almost always qualitative in nature; artists or their audience assessing distinctly qualitative properties of the work.
You ignored the important qualifier which is "about the real world" and by real I assert he means physical world. Your examples do not in fact contradict his statement because they are not about knowledge about the real (physical) world. I also don't understand your segway to Mcnamara. The above statement certainly does not state that data by itself is knowledge, and certainly any (naturally limited) set of data is not necessarily sufficient to predict the future. However this fact does not contradict the statement that we can only confirm how the world works (i.e. acquire knowledge about the physical world) through empirical means.
A simple example would be to say that extra policing of certain ethnic groups would reduce crime rates. Purely empirically this might be correct, but there is a broad consensus that this is also morally wrong.
Historically, the solution to that conundrum would be for each ethnic group to be responsible for policing their own. We still see traces of this in the modern notion that due process requires a trial by "a jury of one's peers". Someone's "peers" back then would've been not just any fellow citizens, but people actually sharing the same general background as the accused. Disputes between groups would've been solved peaceably, through monetary restitution and the paying of damages; but punishment was strictly an internal matter.
Morally wrong is to be opposed to what is good and virtuous. Scientifically wrong is to be demonstrably false.
To your last point, it gets more interesting when the topic is "Increased police presence is necessary in geographic areas experiencing high crime rates"
What does necessary mean here? What does" right" or "wrong" mean in the context of this situation? Does right or wrong change with the nature of the crimes being committed, or the nature of the people committing the crimes, or the nature of the victims? Is it right to not increasing police presence because the perpetrators are predominantly of one race, even if the victims are also of that race, as are the police themselves?
How do you achieve consensus- empirically or otherwise- on such a simple statement when no two people may be using the same words the same way?
Also, in your example about human rights, this to me is a choice we make. It's not any sort of physical law of the universe, and as such science doesn't say anything about it.
> nor is he saying that in the absence of empirical knowledge you shouldn't use other less rigorous information to make decisions.
As I read it, he's saying that only empirical knowledge exists [at least in the context of "real world" or physical phenomena], rendering the term 'empirical knowledge' essentially redundant. How could you use non-emperical knowledge if such a thing doesn't even exist?
Limiting the scope of consideration to simple physical phenomena: What about your innate intuition about the way physical objects behave? Is there no use for that? Nobody gets out a pencil and solves kinematic equations every time they try to catch a baseball. There's a great deal of utility to be found in the intuitive knowledge of how the physical world works.
Specifically 1. The use of the scientific method, which is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena.
I'm not going to debate your incorrect assumption about his statement. To anyone who practices science it's abundantly clear what he was saying, and it is in no way saying that "intuition" or anything else somehow doesn't exist, only that these are not valid ways to knowledge about the physical world. I agree with that.
Again, these other things can be useful, but they should not be confused with knowledge of the world as learned through science.
We decide that some things are moral, others immoral or ethical and unethical.
Example: "Clovis first" settlement of the North America vigorously drowned out other voices, sometimes with aggressive nasty personal politics (read about how how Tom Dillehay was treated personally about his discoveries at Monte Verde sometime, got pretty nasty). All the while indigenous Americans were insisting in various capacities that they had been much longer. And lo and behold, archaeology is finally starting to 'discover' these facts, but in reality much of the evidence has been here all along (though a lot of it is probably underwater), it just required looking for it and not immediately discounting its possibility.
And yes, this doesn't mean that "science" is wrong or the scientific method intrinsically flawed. And usually these things shake out eventually. But I don't think there's anything wrong with shaking people a bit and asking them to open their eyes and ears and accept that what they think they're doing as a pure empirical method needs to be scrutinized carefully and part of that is accepting that there are stories and knowledge out there that have all too easily been discounted with the same kind of attitude the author of this article is presenting.
> I do take issue with one sentence in original letter by the seven scientists: “Indigenous knowledge may indeed help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science.” As a blanket statement this is not strictly correct. Some indigenous knowledge is scientific in nature. Surely indigenous people’s survival depended on empirical examination and trial and error testing associated with a variety of natural phenomena, including: which plants were beneficial or harmful to eat, which might provide useful medicines; how the detailed migratory behavior of animals that might serve as prey would impact on hunting success, tidal variations and annual weather cycles, to name just a few.
We speak in the past tense, but there are plenty of other such abuses, ongoing.
Lawrence Krauss is calling out just such an abuse. It is not the only one. Each has to be fought, in detail, on its own ground; this one, on this ground.
Throughout the author keeps dodging the relationship between science and scientists, insisting on the purity of science itself. But that's precisely the point. It's an ideal. Not a bad ideal, but a process to get to. And it means scientific organizations and science as an academic and so on have to take responsibility for the history and their roles in it.
What has been demonstrated is that these particular oral traditions do not carry factual information about geology. Treating them as factual information about geology would be abuse.
They are legitimate facts about Pacific anthropology.
I always get bristly when this sort of idealisation of indigenous knowledge/systems/religion etc is used. The consequences of religion/mythsticism were/are almost always worse than science. In case of the Maori, they were used to justify genocide (the first thing tribes from the north island did when they acquired guns was to go south and wipe out other tribes for some perceived offence from the far past).
It seems likely the same thing happened to the Marquesans who first discovered Hawai'i, once people from Fiji or Samoa or someplace arrived. The latter's descendants still talk about "menehunes", small people who come out only at night.
Brits, not long after, hunted Tasmanians for sport.
This incarnation, pun intended, has greater sway amongst the elites and those in the position of promulgating and legitimizing these positions. It’s a bit concerning that these aren’t your traditional uneducated proles espousing these views but rather highly educated elites. This is what we call ideology. It's not out of "provincial ignorance," for example.
Obviously evolution should be taught as well, but it's a narrow mindset to assume we actually have it all figured out, can proclaim an objective truth about our existence, and everything else is just non-sense.
Because you have to admit, there are so many things we don't really know, and we can't be pretentious, like nothing ever could possibly challenge the paradigm of our current understanding. Like for example the picture of the pyramids in the blog post, how did those exactly came to be? Well nobody knows. Another thing that nobody knows, is how exactly atoms and particles work, and it really demonstrate the fragile legs on which we're standing here. It means we don't actually have working model of our reality. Which is pretty big deal if you want to proclaim things as true.
Not to come across as too wacky, but some of these old spiritual texts are really interesting, they don't have to be taken at face value, but there's some buried wisdom there that makes them worth mentioning in schools I think.
The subset of people in the US who would be willing to push that agenda are neither insubstantial nor marginalized from political power (in recent memory they've been within an unhealthy septuagenarian's heartbeat of the presidency).
> But the more worrisome assertion is that the group of seven’s letter had “caused "considerable hurt and dismay" among staff and students”, as if that matters.
Now, this transforms Krauss from someone who is merely wrong to someone who is an idiot.
However Krauss seems to goes further. If knowledge is asserted to only come from scientific means, and if the purpose of schooling is to impart knowledge, that seems to leave little room for classes which don't purport to be science classes in the first place.
You could presumably make room for these classes through twisted logic along the lines of "Actually English Literature is science because we're making empirical observations about the words written on this paper...", but I don't think there is much real utility in this line of reasoning. It's much simpler to simply accept there are some subjects that have value yet aren't science.
Remember that he is replying to an initiative to bring Maori perspectives (mysticism) into science classes as an equally valid system to explain the physical world, to which he answers the only valid way of explaining the physical world is the scientific process.
as you claim in your next sentence
> The question is not if Maori had incredible seafaring skills and knowledge about navigation.
so no, they work therefore they don't contradict science. And the thing is, that science class is anyhow highly simplified, so you may as well teach them in a Maori context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#Ideological_...
> There is just Science: a process that allows us to understanding how the world works by careful empirical investigation supplemented by rigorous theoretical analysis and predictions that are then subject to additional empirical testing.
I take issue with this definition. It uses a lot of words which seem meaningful, but are just arbitrary thresholds: "careful", "rigorous", "testing".
How do I know if I'm doing "careful empirical investigation" or just "empirical investigation"? Am I being rigourous enough to be "Science"? How do I tell if my "testing" is valid?
Is it "Science" if I think parachutes work? There's evidence, but it could simply be a placebo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81tauranga_M%C4%81ori#Dis...
Other aspects of the issue seem more like social choice - i.e. 'free-market economic theory' as practiced today is no more 'scientific' or 'mathematically sound' than Maori Matauranga social notions about how best to organize societies and 'pursue happiness' - perhaps they have different notions of what happiness means, is all.
It's entirely possible the some of the scientific models we now use are similar in nature to the Mayan calendar, even though they're based on accurate observations and make good predictions. It's an interesting concept, in any case.
But calling mythological creation stories science is not. Rangi and Papa are no more scientific than Cronus and Gaia. It's literally teaching creationism, just a different creation story than the Judeo-Christian one.
Of course we all understand that. But isn't the reality that Science is skewed towards Science That Gets Funding? Empirical data is empirical data, but Western Science is a _particular_ selection of the empirical facts that reflects the politically-influenced institutions of science in the West right?