I wish to continue a thread from facebook about recent talk organized by IISc Freethinkers.
the audio link of entire talk is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzfcvypYljU
the review from iisc group doc is here
the audio link of entire talk is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzfcvypYljU
the review from iisc group doc is here
Quote:We recently organized a talk titled ‘Doing Natural Philosophy’ by Rajesh Kasturirangan of NIAS. Kindly find a link to listen to the whole talk.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzfcvypYljU)
Below is our response. Kindly give your opinions.
[Disclaimer- this critique came out as a result of reflection over the recent talk given by Prof. Kasturirangan, organized by IISc Freethinkers. We had intended to organize a philosophically insightful talk, which this talk very much was. This critique should be seen as an honest and informal reflection rather than a formal analysis]
The speaker starts off with remarks that freethought is an elitist position since it implies that other people are not thinking 'freely enough'! Also he says that it is ‘incoherent’, ‘unsustainable’ etc because we ultimately fall prey to a dogmatic behavior of some sort, and that we may not have the facility to use logic as much as we would wish to. Then he says that the thinking may not be really free (we think by free here he means ‘original’) since it is always influenced by some context, group agenda etc.
All that is fine, but he’s probably NOT critiquing whom he intends to. His subject appears to be some sort of anarchist intellectual (he mentions protagonist from The Fountainhead to be an archetype of a freethinker). Freethought implies forming opinion based on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas; in this sense it is really a very 'constrained' form of thinking. No doubt that the spirit of freethought may have its root historically and for most people personally in being rebellious and nonconformist; but as a mature ideology we think that it has moved comfortably beyond that. Also, it is a methodology rather than claims about the nature of reality. We think that if this methodology by definition is inconsistent, that should presuppose the scientific method, logical methods to be inconsistent (which they very much could be! but that’s a meta question). Though rationalists, atheist, freethinkers groups are many times marred with dogma- but that is no different from scientists being marred with dogma. In a similar way, the elitist position of a freethinkers is not by design, but by the social structure we are living in which makes it difficult to fulfill the stringent criteria freethought attempts to achieve (same as science!)
This was a major disagreement on our part since many of us were puzzled by his stress on colloquial and political connotations of the word ‘free-thinker’ than what we abide by. We are very similar to scientific skeptics. But whether we call us skeptics or rationalists or freethinkers- some word will send wrong signals to some set of people- hence we retained the most commonly used word.
The speaker talks about Beerbal as being epitome of a freethinker. This actually highlights the significance of freethought and contrasts it with crude rationality by which everyone lives by anyway. Beerbal went against the authority of his times, he was not just applying reasons for his own well being. This can be well extended to 'breaking the coconut before driving for good omen' case which the speaker points out during the talk.
Science is limited. There are outliers everywhere which science deals with inadequately. All the arguments against scientism were very well accepted by us and audience except one- the speaker while pointing out the recent CERN experiment, also hints that sometimes even when the evidence is out there scientist may not want to accept it which indicates their stubbornness, after a while he remarks that the fierce competitiveness would actually encourage scientists to find an anomaly if there is one. This was slightly contradictory!
While the speaker undermine whole of Darwinism/ Creationism battle as more of political and not a scientific endeavor, this demarcation alone doesn't reduce the pertinence of it.
But, we all agree, this was an an intriguing talk and lead to some healthy insights. We look forward to be more insightful about dealing with innocuous rationales which are not purely scientific in nature, for instance (ref. to the talk)- why should exposing kids in Mathikere to scientific institutes like IISc lead to a better society, and in what ways?