Fresh from the News

Two topics made the headlines recently.

– 1 –

The first headline related to artificial intelligence: the other week for the first time a machine passed the Touring test. While you can find the details of the Touring test here let’s sum it up like this: the first computer software has succeeded to make a human believe that it was a human too. If the hypothesis, expressed in earlier blogs, is correct that under the complexity paradigm information asymmetries will always and immediately get exploited you start to wonder when you will get phished.

– 2 –

The second headline concerns an App: Taxi drivers in Berlin, London, Paris, Sao Paolo and Chicago were striking and protesting. Now, that’s something new. For the first time taxi drivers coordinated their strike action across towns, cities, countries and even continents.

They were striking against a mobile app called UBER. This app, like Wundercar and others, enables users to book rides from people who happen to “pass by”. Officially, the rides they book are thus private rides from a place to a place on the route of the drivers – but actually, the drivers are people who happen to have a car and the time to offer this service. Factually, a Berlin court just handed out a provisional injunction. However, Uber decided to ignore for the time being. Of course the private drivers have a competitive advantage over the classic cap drivers since they pay lower insurance – probably for passenger and the car – and perhaps no tax. And the app providers have of course located their company in one of the low tax countries around the global or within the EU.

What is remarkable about this strike is the quick response the sector has shown. Since the app offers rides for as little as a 2/3 of the normal price taxi drivers are certainly right to assume that it would cut into their existing business. Compare that to the quite rise of Amazon and you start to wonder whether times are not changing for internet start-ups that want to cut directly into established sectors.

Yet, also the back-end of this business is interesting since the UBER-drivers have to hand over 20% of their fair to the app providers. This is still less than the cap drivers who in some cities have to hand over up to 60%. But UBER is everything but a small fish in terms of capital. The start-up has been able to collect 900 mill € from investors and its current value is estimated to be 13 bill €. And guess who has been one of the big investors? Yes, it is Google! Start to wonder whether Google might not already be thinking of an autonomous cap car fleet driving through town to pick up UBER-clients? To be continued at a court close to you.

Science is not our opponent but scientism might be – a riposte to Pinker

In his essay “Science is not our enemy” Pinker takes up only one of several evils science, in his view, has been accused of in a recent spate of essays in the USA. Rather than picking up the critique of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, and positivism that Pinker also identifies he chooses to address the critique of scientism. Focussing on the essayistic versions of this critique is fair game and probably appropriate given the articles he refers to. However, Pinker’s approach to critics of scientism itself constitutes a reductionism inasmuch as he reduces the corpus of this critique to a less than acceptable size.

Pinker claims that scientism, by which he means the critique of science, is more of a boo-word then a coherent theory. He is wrong on that. In fact the scientific critique of science is more than a few centuries old. It runs at least from Schiller’s Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man and the later errors of German romanticism, the contrast between “explaining” and “understanding” following Dilthey and on to Husserl’s phenomenology. This tradition had tremendous impact on the social sciences mostly through the works of Max Weber who argued for a discipline signified by “understanding” its object area (subjects) since unlike in the natural science it constitutes its own standards (meanings).

However, not all social scientists have strictly distinguished between the human and the natural sphere. More commonly social researchers have imported new methods from the natural science whenever they were interested in these. Physics in particular has been acknowledged by many, even critical thinkers, as superior to the social sciences but already the appreciation of chemistry and biology was often lower. (The reader may recognise the distinction between hard and soft science here, which one might consider outdated today in the wake of complexity science.)

While there are in fact many who have employed the term “scientism” in an essayist style there are and always have been scholars or scientists who have developed coherent theories criticising the sciences as scientism. In essence these authors link scientism to the application of natural scientific methods to the social sciences and humanities. They are, however, hardly ever specifying these methods in detail – let’s say by providing a blacklist of methods. Indeed, there is no interest in doing so because their point is not to dismiss these methods but to point at a very particular problem of the social sciences: their theories are rebuilding the ship on sea, so to speak. The social sciences have addressed this as social reproduction or dpuble hermeneutic. Unlike the natural sciences which establishes a supposedly objective mirror of nature (Rorty) the social sciences and the humanities face the (normative) question where society should be going.

Many social scientists have thus defended a methodological dualism. Others have distinguished on grounds of different methods, e.g. quantitative vs. qualitative or interdisciplinary vs. transdisciplinary methods. Still others have done so on grounds of the interaction-orientations of humans to each other. These different methodological currents in the social sciences and the humanities have always existed and against this background it is difficult to see in how far anti-scientism can be said to challenge intelligibility as Pinker did. Instead it seems, Pinker ignores these age-old debates about the limits of the sciences.

One of the most eloquent critiques of scientism has been developed by discourse theory. The scholars associated with it, namely Juergen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, argue that scientism is represented by a science oblivious of the context it depends on. It destabilise the context it emerges from because the researchers interact strategically with the social context and instrumentally with the natural environment. Obviously, this problem is particularly pertinent in the social sciences because of the ongoing, communicative relationship of these disciplines with their objects of study. This is also behind Giddens’ term “double hermeneutics”, which states that social researchers first have to understand (interpret) their object (subjects) since these develop their own understanding of the world around them. Secondly, social theory feeds back to society constituting a second hermeneutic loop. Such ontological distinctions constitute more social theories including Luhmann’s social system theory. Translating this to the natural scientist, one could say that social scientist maintain that the feedback-loop between interacting humans revolves quicker than the one between human systems and the natural environment. (This does claim feedback-loops in both spheres!)

Scientism is therefore characterised by theories, methods and methodologies that ignore the ontological difference between the social and the natural world not so much because of using different forms of explanations but because they ignore the ongoing challenge of and, at times, struggle for successful social reproduction.