Piggliucci Gets Spanked

Carlin Romano teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania. and is "critic at large for The Chronicle Review", a blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Romano reviews Piggliucci’s new book, “Nonsense on Stilts”, and starts by defining a ”now common genre of science patriotism” … “A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness?”

This is only part of Piggliucci’s arrogation though. Like other members of this genre, Piggliucci has contributed to science not at all. Most of the members of the genre are biology teachers, writers, and – primarily – Atheist apologists and desperate-sounding evolutionists.

While Romano does not go that far in his critique, he does appear to take science more rationally than does any member of what he calls the science patriots. Romano realizes (in the sense of grasping the reality) that science has limits that are self-imposed rather than naturally imposed; that the products of science are invariably contingent and not necessarily related to truth. Piggliucci, on the other hand, mouths these principles but in no way brings them to fruition in his mind or philosophy. Piggliucci is a preacher of his version of truth.

Romano lists a few of the sarcasms and Ad Hominems foisted by Pigglucci. As Romano says, ”Tone matters. And sarcasm is not science.”

Of course, Piggliucci is not writing science; he is writing about science, or at least what he thinks is science. Having never been a contributing scientist (nor a student of philosophy) doesn’t seem to influence Piggliucci’s hubris toward making proclamations concerning those subjects. In fact, he is now in the process of defining a new fallacy, that of “fluffy thinking”, which apparently is any proposition not based on Philosophical Materialism. Fluffy thinkers are to be singled out for ridicule; it is a moral duty of the public intellectual, as Piggliucci’s website self righteously makes clear.

Self righteousness does not derive from logic or science. Logic and science naturally incubate a cautious objectivity, a hunger for more investigation, better hypotheses, new answers bringing new questions. Real scientists are cautiously objective, rather than caustically cocksure (Romano’s term).

The self-righteous are convinced that they own the truth (Truth); that they are therefore superior, morally; and therefore they are entitled. Entitled to what? To denigrate everyone who is inferior. The warriors use ridicule as their weapon, and rationalization as their back-up.

Romano:

”As an epigram to his chapter titled "From Superstition to Natural Philosophy," Pigliucci quotes a line from Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Science warriors such as Pigliucci, or Michael Ruse in his recent clash with other philosophers in these pages, should reflect on a related modern sense of "entertain." One does not entertain a guest by mocking, deriding, and abusing the guest. Similarly, one does not entertain a thought or approach to knowledge by ridiculing it.”

The Science Warriors are not interested in entertaining thoughts counter to their own agendas. They are interested in issuing counter claims in the form of generating reductio versions of opposing logic, and attacking those false constructs with invective and ridicule. We will not likely see any definition of “critical thinking”, or of First Principles, or of rational processes from Piggliucci: it is doubtful that he has studied these or even recognizes their existence as real intellectual cornerstones. But he will create “fluffy thinking”, and will loudly assail that construct.