Ideology and science

Science is not – nor can it be, in fact – immune to ideological influences. Sometimes such influences may have a positive effect, but it would be naive to believe that such factors do not have the potential to cause distortions also.

Scientists, like anybody else, need to be motivated and often this involves them seeing their own research as defending or furthering broad convictions they might have about human nature or the world in general.

There are many cases of great scientists whose major contributions to science were largely inspired by what we now see as utterly false assumptions. Copernicus and Newton might both be seen as examples of this, their discoveries as it were transcending the flawed intellectual matrix – or worldview – within which the theories were framed.

The institutions and practices of modern science are not designed to screen out personal biases and unwarranted assumptions so much as to ensure that published conjectures and theories and experimental results are exposed to rigorous testing and assessment procedures. The system works pretty well on the whole, encouraging intellectual rigor while not excluding the human element – imagination, creativity, etc. – which is essential for innovative thinking.

Areas such as evolutionary biology and the human sciences are particularly prone to ideological influences.

I have previously hinted at such influences in the case of research into linguistic development and evolution, notably in relation to the work of Michael Tomasello and his colleagues who seem to be adamantly opposed to certain formal approaches to the study of language. I am following up on this, and will have more to say in the future. (James Hurford's views appear to chart a sensible middle course, and are looking very plausible to me at the moment.)

And I have recently come across another example of ideology apparently driving scientific judgment and interpretation.

Last week Massimo Pigliucci published a list of his 'best' research papers on biological topics. It's clear from this list (and another on his Curriculum Vitae) that Pigliucci had from the beginning of his research career a special interest in defending and promoting the notion of phenotypic plasticity – the property of the genotype to produce different phenotypes in response to different environments.

In just about all the cited papers – most involving experiments with plants – the power of environmental factors to alter features of the organism are emphasized. A cursory look at the abstracts certainly suggests that the researchers (the papers are collaborative efforts) are highly unsympathetic to any approaches which could be construed as tending in the general direction of what has sometimes been characterized as genetic determinism.

Which is fine. It's only to be expected that researchers will approach such issues with strong opinions, and a degree of adversarial debate and discussion can be productive. In the end, the weight of evidence usually settles disputes, and the controversies then move on to other areas.

So I am not questioning the scientific value of Pigliucci's work – the scope and nature of phenotypic plasticity is clearly a topic of considerable interest.

But it is interesting to juxtapose his research interests in biology with his published comments about human intelligence.

In another of his recent blog posts, Pigliucci claims that environmental – cultural, in fact – factors are solely responsible for differences in patterns of involvement by males and females in different research areas. Genes don't have anything to do with it, apparently.

"[T]he fact," he writes, "that there are fewer women than men in a given field is likely the result of a large number of cultural factors (no, I don’t think it has anything at all to do with “native” intelligence, Larry Summers be damned)."

A commenter makes the point that "the greater variance of male intelligence is well established", and that genetic factors are obviously involved. The greater variance of male intelligence in this context means essentially that there is a greater proportion of individuals with very high intelligence amongst men than amongst women (and also a greater proportion of individuals with very low intelligence).

It is not impossible that some purely environmental explanation for this pattern could be found, but the evidence, even if it is not conclusive at this stage, certainly points to an at least partly genetic explanation. So the fact that Pigliucci seems to have a very strong disinclination to accept that genetics is significant here clearly goes beyond the science and points to a prior ideological commitment.

The emotional tone of his references to Lawrence Summers may not strengthen but certainly doesn't weaken my case. "I can't stand the bastard," Professor Pigliucci notes in a comment.

Pigliucci's strong ideological and moral convictions – which no doubt played a part in his decision some years ago to shift his focus from science to philosophy – may be able to be explained largely in terms of cultural factors.

But I just can't help thinking about Massimo's (hypothetical) monozygotic twin who was raised by a Swedish family. Did he too follow a scientific career? Does he have a penchant for bow ties? Is he a religious skeptic? Does he too have strong views on political and social questions? And what is his attitude to Lawrence Summers, I wonder?

Empathy and language

The practice of pointing by infants raises some interesting questions about the psychological foundations upon which human communicational and linguistic capacities are built.

As explained in an article cited in the comments section of the previous post, young children routinely point to direct the attention of a nearby adult to something the infant finds interesting and apparently wishes the adult to see and appreciate also.

When an infant doesn't start pointing by the appropriate age (about 12 months), it's often a sign that they don't have an intuitive sense of other minds – and also of linguistic problems ahead. (I originally came across discussions of this phenomenon in material on identifying the early signs of autism.)

The article referred to above draws on papers by Michael Tomasello and his colleagues which explore the phenomenon of infant pointing and associated behaviors. Tomasello and his fellow researchers argue for "a deeply social view [of the process] in which infant pointing is best understood – on many levels and in many ways – as depending on uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation and shared intentionality (e.g., joint intentions and attention with others). Children's early linguistic skills are built on this already existing platform of prelinguistic communication."

The researchers note that the kind of pointing they discuss is unique to humans and depends on certain key insights about the existence and nature of other minds as well as emotional factors – essentially a desire to share one's perceptions and to share in the perceptions of others.

A cursory reading of sources cited in the Slate article and related material suggests to me that Tomasello and his colleagues may well be overplaying their intuitions about sharing in their claims about the origins and development of human communication and language.

Of course, emotional factors cannot be ignored, but could not these elements be explained in terms of cognitive imperatives and the practical benefits of collaboration and reliable information transfer?

György Gergely and Gergely Csibra explicitly challenge Tomasello's views on the centrality of the emotions associated with shared intentionality and focus instead on the communication mechanisms necessary to ensure efficient cultural learning.

A crucial point relates to the efficacy of the highlighted emotions. Tomasello and his colleagues posit the desire to share emotional states as a key explanatory factor rather than merely as one element in a diverse suite of human abilities and behaviors.

But I am nowhere near having a sufficiently strong grasp of the material to take sides in this dispute.

It is clear that the same (or similar) perceptions and feelings which apparently motivate gestural communication – however we might characterize them – certainly do seem, in normal infants, also to motivate and facilitate the child's rapid and apparently easy acquisition of whatever language or languages they are routinely exposed to.

Significantly, though, the complexities of language can be learned (albeit often with some difficulty) even by those who lack a strong intuitive sense of other minds.

It's certainly plausible that the historical development both of prelinguistic modes of communication (like pointing) and language amongst our ancestors was dependent upon (amongst other things) certain empathetic perceptions and feelings. But, of course, the cognitive and affective factors involved are in practice always inextricably linked, sometimes in very complicated ways.

In his work on autism, Simon Baron-Cohen distinguishes between the cognitive and affective aspects of empathy. Cognitive empathy is all about what we perceive and understand about the mental states of others, whereas affective empathy concerns our emotional responses to this knowledge. Strength or appropriate responses in one area does not necessarily entail strength or appropriate responses in the other.

For example, the autistic person typically scores poorly on tests of cognitive empathy (e.g. reading particular emotions in pictures of faces cropped to reveal little more than the eyes), but often exhibits appropriate affective responses (e.g. to perceived suffering). By contrast, the psychopath typically has no problem at all with cognitive empathy (or language, for that matter), but displays deficiencies in terms of affective response.

Speculations about the way language evolved will necessarily draw on the findings of cognitive and developmental psychology as well as other areas. But, while it is reasonable to assume that affective responses played a role in the development of language, I have some doubts about the way Tomasello and his colleagues present the basic issues and about some of their key claims.

Also, as someone with a background in formal approaches to language and syntax, I am naturally wary of approaches which downplay the significance of this side of things. I was unimpressed, for example, by the comments by one of Tomasello's co-researchers, Malinda Carpenter, quoted in the Slate article.

The fact that pointing seems to call on a sophisticated understanding of what is going on in the heads of other people, she noted, "suggests that [infants] can do so much more with pointing prelinguistically than we ever thought before."

Until recently, people thought that this sort of knowledge only emerged with language. But when Carpenter, who was drawn to this work through an initial interest in language, started looking at prelinguistic gestures, her perspective changed.

"[E]verything’s already there!" she said. "I completely lost interest in language because you can see so much complexity already in infants' gestures."

It depends on what you mean by 'everything', I suppose, but I would have thought that language adds a little something to the mix.