Mr.Samsa wrote: Ignoring the conflation of materialism with science, does Sheldrake's position really pose questions like these:
"Questions for Materialists", questions such as "Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?", "If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?", "How do you explain the placebo response?" and so on.
and expect for there to be some difficulty in answering them? The philosophy behind materialism is quite interesting and there are a number of challenging questions that can be useful to present to materialists (either as an attempt to disprove their position, or to get them to solidify it by strengthening their understanding), but those questions presented aren't challenging or even particularly related to materialism...
Hey Mr Samsa
Probably.
It's a few weeks since I was sent a review copy, and i read it in two days while ill. Essentially he is challenging unquestioned metaphysical assumptions in Science -- but they are of course questioned all the time in the Philosophy of Science. The bit you quote would be a small "summary" snippet at the end of a chapter, not his developed argument. What he does is pose ten "assumptions" of "science" and then poke at them in chapters of unequal weight. In the one chapter where I actually know something about the research, I would say he is every bit as partisan, one sided and biased - indeed more so perhaps - than Richard Wiseman with his equally flawed account in
Paranormality - just in a polar opposite direction. I suspect they are both just tired of rehashing the arguments about psychic dogs. This infuriates me, because we actually can learn an awful lot about science not from whether Jaytee was psychic or not, but from the whole controversy, the spin, the rival camps a,d the contested results, just as many people have pointed out even if Bem's precog results are rubbish, they throw a huge amount of light on flaws common in huge amounts of social science research and much psychology. (Interestingly an early press release for
Paranormality suggested it was to be on just these issues - how psychical research had thrown up a huge amount of what had become important advances in standard psychological research. Alas the final book had little of that - some, but that book is still to be written).
Now Sheldrake likes to pose actual experiments that could falsify his hypotheses, (and then argue negative results are flawed, occasionally with some justification, though I would wander off and create a tighter design, as he did in his work with Prof Chris French and telephone psi.). However his actual writing is clear, and interesting, and while it often pushed my boggle factor it does raise important questions for people who have not read Paul Feyerabend, Alfred Whitehead, Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, or who tend to just accept that science provides an unproblematic description of reality that easily equates to a discovered universal truth. (I think it does part of that, but it is FAR from unproblematic - but I think there is an objective truth, and science approaches it by degrees.) To you or I, there is little new here: but I think many readers of the forum would find the book a hell of a slap, and possibly be incensed, hilariously amused, or outraged, or probably all three by it. Or just bored, as I was at times, but I have a low attention span.
I skipped a few bits on morphic fields and telepathy, because I have read his earlier book on morphic fields now, and have no interest in his ESP stuff really. I was really taken aback by his interest in people who claim to live on air etc, and at times i had to stop and recall just want an incredibly important figure in modern plant biology this guy is, and that he is not just in to this stuff in old age, but has been since the early 70's.
Also he has been badly treated recently by a ludicrous hatchet job by implication in
New Scientist online implying misbehaviour where they was none at all ( discussed here --
http://www.dailygrail.com/Skepticism/20 ... -Sheldrake ) -- and in fact the "hardening of attitudes" they refer to is exactly what is wrong with Scientism, the thing he is attacking in, in that it is completely alien to the spirit of unprejudiced research that underlies good science.
Oh one thing that pleased me greatly, he rejects "Science" in favour of "Sciences", as I do. I think actually almost anyone who is not an English native speaker will prefer "the Sciences" to "science", and a little thought quickly reveals the Continental formulation is actually better in almost every way, removing many of the issues that arise in any attempt to describe a coherent methodology as common to all "Science". A lot of philosophical ink may have been spilled on nothing more than an idiosyncracy of the English language.
Anyway, enough. I may review it some time, if I can build up the enthusiasm, on the forum. We will see. Hopefully these few notes help!
j x