Massimo Pigliucci Thinks Steven Pinker's Embrace of Scientism Is a Bad Move

Massimo Pigliucci, Professor of Philosophy at City University in New York, offers a pretty scathing reply to Steven Pinker's recent defense of scientism that was published in The New Republic.

I wish I had written this article.

Be sure to check out the comments, too, at Rationally Thinking.

Steven Pinker Embraces Scientism; Bad Move, I Think

by Massimo Pigliucci | Rationally Speaking
Monday, August 12, 2013



Steven Pinker has written a long essay in The New Republic embracing scientism. That's really too bad, because this way Pinker joins a disturbingly long list of scientists (and a few philosophers) who confuse a defense of good science with a knee-jerk reaction against sound criticism of science. [For a good, if partial, response to Pinker from the Left look here; for a far less convincing one, from the Right, look here.]

Pinker begins awfully, waxing poetic about how the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment were all scientists, and in particular, cognitive neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists (!!), and social psychologists. Such thinkers include Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, and Smith. All, obviously, philosophers. Yeah, I get it, it was a rhetorical opening gamble. But it is precisely the sort of rhetoric that justly pisses off people in the humanities, so why start an essay that way which ostensibly attempts to reconcile the so-called two cultures?

It immediately gets worse, with Pinker patronizingly fantasizing about going back in time to help out those brilliant minds with a bit of modern scientific knowledge, to see how they would react. Didn't anyone tell him that that would be a flagrant violation of the temporal equivalent of the Prime Directive? Kidding aside, Pinker muses that scholars in the humanities should be delighted at the advances of the sciences and what they can tell them about their own field. Instead, these ungrateful bastards keep whining about something called "scientism." Cue the predictable "scientism is an arbitrary label thrown at things one doesn't like" complaint and you don't need to bother reading the rest of the essay.

So, once again, let's revisit the issue of scientism, this time using a different take, which I hope will help us make some progress. I have begun to think of scientism as in a sense the opposite extreme of pseudoscience: while pseudoscientific notions arise from science badly done (or non-science masquerading as science), scientism is about science overreaching (or science trying to expand into non scientific domains).

Interestingly, the word pseudoscience can also be used to deflect genuine criticism: oh, you are just throwing pseudoscience at me in order to dismiss what I do without argument, says the ufologist (or astrologist, or homeopath, or...). And of course it is perfectly true that both scientism and pseudoscience can indeed be used inappropriately, just like the term science itself can and has been invoked to prop up all sorts of bad doctrines (scientific psychoanalysis, scientific Marxism, phrenology, eugenics, and so forth).

So the problem isn't with the fact that some people misuse a given term, the problem is whether that term actually refers to something worth talking about. Science surely does; and so does pseudoscience. Things are no different for scientism, but we need to talk about concrete examples rather than conceptual generics.

Unfortunately, Pinker's essay is remarkably short on specifics. It reads like one long whining session against the injustices perpetrated on science by unknown and unnamed postmodernists (the favored bugaboo of defenders of scientism) and religious fundamentalists. Indeed, there are only two specific examples throughout the piece of what Pinker thinks are unfair attacks on science: one by historian Jackson Lears, the other by Leon Kass, former G.W. Bush bioethics advisor.

Kass' piece is indeed a religiously (mis-)informed ramble about the evil of materialism (quite a rich accusation, coming from a political party that has made the pursuit of material goods for their self-selected elite a national platform), so Pinker is right in dismissing it. But Lears' target are the writings of Sam Harris, a textbook example of the excesses of scientism if there is any to be found out there! And therein lies the problem: just as in the case of pseudoscience, the devil, so to speak, is in the details. Generic cries of "scientism!" or "pseudoscience!" won't stick, nor should they. But generic dismissals of criticisms of either pseudoscience or scientism shouldn't either. It's just not that simple.

Pinker claims that science couldn't possibly indulge in the excesses that its critics level at it because, you know, the whole process employs a series of safeguards, including open debate, peer review, and double blind experiments. Yes, and when the system works, it works really well. But Pinker seems to ignore much research in the history and sociology of science that shows that sometimes that system goes wrong, occasionally worrisomely wrong (e.g., a lot of medical research on drugs is seriously flawed, particularly - but not only - when the funding for it comes from the pharmaceutical industry). Not to mention that he entirely misses the point of the most frequent cases of scientism: they are not to be found in the technical scientific literature, but rather in popular science writings, when scientists (or people who claim to be interpreting science on behalf of the public) make claims that are simply disproportionate to the evidence (as in many recent instances of neurobabbling).

Science, says Pinker, is committed to two ideals: that the universe is intelligible, and that acquisition of knowledge is hard. Well, I'm not sure why these are "ideals" rather than, say, working assumptions (the first) and acknowledgement of fact (the second). But this is a red herring, of course. Nobody in his right mind is arguing that the universe isn't (to a point, no guarantees!) understandable by us, and certainly nobody is accusing scientists of being lazy. So why bring that up to begin with?

Pinker then moves to another predictable - and, again, largely irrelevant - point: science is under attack by fundamentalist religion, it needs to be defended! Indeed, and many in the humanities (particularly in philosophy) have lent a hand to that defense over the past several years (e.g., in debates about creationism and intelligent design). But bashing once again Stephen Jay Gould's (in)famous idea of two separate magisteria for science and religion, he commits the very same mistake that Gould made: (rational) morality isn't the province of religion, it is a branch of philosophy, and it is philosophers such as myself that have taken to task the scientistic excesses of Harris, Shermer, and co. See? Once again things are more complicated: I am a staunch ally of Pinker when it comes to defending science from religion, but that doesn't mean I cannot raise the issue of scientism when my allies themselves say silly or unsubstantiated things.

Pinker, again predictably, and largely off the topic, goes on to claim that science has contributed enormously to the welfare of humanity, which of course nobody is denying. He also conveniently dismisses or minimizes the problems that science and technology have brought to us: it's ok for science to take credit for vaccines (as it should), but not ok for critics to point out nasty stuff like atomic bombs and biological warfare. See, those aren't really the results of "science," but of bad politicians misusing science. This is such a naive understanding of human power relations, not to mention of the complex social role of science, that it is downright laughable. I keep wondering why serious thinkers like Pinker cannot simply admit science's blunders, graciously acknowledge the criticisms, and genuinely try to forge a better way forward. One would almost suspect that these people are feeling guilty of something.

Moreover, for some reason the accomplishments of science need to be highlighted while at the same time those not attributable to science go acknowledged only parenthetically: "If one were to list the proudest accomplishments of our species (setting aside the removal of obstacles we set in our own path, such as the abolition of slavery and the defeat of fascism), many would be gifts bestowed by science." Yes, let's not count little things like the abolition of slavery and the defeat of fascism, or perhaps the general improvement in human rights, women rights, gay rights, general education, access to health care (as distinct from the science-based quality of that care), and countless other improvements the human race has managed to make without science. Again, this isn't an attack on science, it's simply a matter of pointing out that science has done great goods as well as the more than an occasional evil, and moreover, that much has been accomplished without a lot of help from science. Nuance, people, nuance.

One more example of the oddly slanted view that Pinker presents: "contrary to the widespread canard that technology has created a dystopia of deprivation and violence, every global measure of human flourishing is on the rise." Well, yes, so is the temperature of the planet, just to mention one example, which may very well put a rather abrupt and unpleasant end to that satisfying rise in human flourishing. And climate change is the result of technology, unless you are a denier of the obvious. (Nuance, people, nuance...)

More: "A demonization campaign anachronistically impugns science for crimes that are as old as civilization, including racism, slavery, conquest and genocide." True, science per se is certainly not to blame for those human moral failings. But (some) scientists have actively contributed to the design and production of technological instruments that have made possible the raising of those crimes to never before seen levels. No blame at all? Not even a little tiny bit?

Pinker then goes on to a surreal analysis of the problems faced by the humanities on college campuses these days: downsizing of programs and faculty. Oh sure, he acknowledges that a number of factors is at play, beginning with widespread anti-intellectualism in our culture and continuing with the commercialization of universities. But, really, the damage is also humanists' own fault. You see, the humanities have not yet recovered from the self-inflicted wound of postmodernism, and their insistence in rejecting science is just downright suicidal. I am no defender of postmodernism, as my readers will hopefully well know, but some postmodernists (Foucault, for instance, and before him the pre-postmodernist Feyerabend) have raised serious questions about the social role of science, the unchecked power of scientific institutions, and so forth. Whenever such critiques degenerate into a wholesale rejection of science, the critics themselves need to be called out. But it is foolish to throw out the bathwater without checking whether there is a baby still inside the bathtub (to use one of Pinker's own metaphors).

"Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it's to announce some exciting research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by it's to plead for respect for the way things have always been done."

Seriously? I am a Department Chair, and regularly talk to Deans, Provosts and Presidents. And I have been on both sides of the divide, beginning my career as a scientist and continuing it as a philosopher. And I say, bullshit. To begin with, administrators don't get excited at the prospect of new scientific discoveries. They get excited at the prospect of the millions of dollars that new research grants will bring into the coffers of the university (see Pinker's own comment above about the deplorable commercialization of universities). Second, I certainly don't go to administrators to plead for respect and tradition. I go to point out that universities are supposed to create the next generation of citizens, voters, and critical thinkers, not just cheap and flexible labor for big corporations. I go to remind them that the humanities are crucial for the understanding of vital social debates about the nature of our democratic system, the rights of various groups of people, the concept and implementation of justice, and so forth. And I also go to remind them that philosophy students consistently score higher than pretty much anyone else on a number of tests that are used as gateways for graduate school, medical school, business school, and law school. So there.

Pinker wraps things up by highlighting some areas where the sciences and the humanities should collaborate, rather than fight. Again, some of these are good suggestions, and if scholars in the humanities reject them then they are science-phobic to their own detriment. Other of the suggestions, frankly, leave me quite cold, and again bring to mind the scientistic attitude of wanting to get science's nose sniffing everywhere, regardless of the utility of doing so.

Yes, quantitative methods can (and should) be used by historians, though this will always likely be complementary to, rather than substitutive of, classical historical methods. And yes, the fruitful collaboration between philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists is a shining example of how to bridge the divide between the two cultures. But no, quantitative analyses of Jane Austin novels interpreted in evolutionary psychological key are frankly ridiculous (I've seen it done), and while clearly the study of the physiology of visual or auditory perception are fascinating fields in their own right, they are far less useful to my enjoyment of a Picasso or a Beethoven sonata than knowledge of the history of art or of music.

Pinker really wasted a good chance here. He has the intellectual stature and public visibility to nudge the debate forward in a positive direction. Instead of embracing scientism as a positive label, he should have acknowledged that some criticism of science is well founded and sorely needed. Instead of telling us again platitudes about the benefits of science (while ignoring its darker side) and chastising the humanities for not embracing it whole heartedly, he could have presented a nuanced examination of where science really is useful to the humanities and where the latter are useful to the sciences - not to mention those several areas where the two can safely ignore each other in pursuit of different goals. Oh well, next time, perhaps.

This work is distributed with Creative Commons license Attribution - Non commercial 3.0 Unported.

John Horgan's Postmodern Response to Steven Pinker’s Patronizing “Plea” for Scientism

In his Cross Check column for Scientific American, John Horgan offers his response to Steven Pinker's recent New Republic essay, Science is Not Your Enemy (the article and my comments are here).

Here is a key passage from Horgan's "postmodern response":

Pinker’s idea of engagement seems to be kowtowing to science’s awesomeness. We already have too many prominent Humists serving as shills for science. Take, for example, the philosophers Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, who seem to think that MRI maps of brains are solving the mind-body problem. 

Pinker himself grossly overvalues the contributions of fields such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and neuroscience to our modern understanding of ourselves. And he has insulted the philosopher Thomas Nagel for daring to question whether science in its current form can account for the mysteries of life and consciousness.

I am in total agreement with this assessment - and with Horgan's rejection of scientism:

Attempting rhetorical jujitsu, Pinker suggests that science, because it is such a uniquely self-critical and successful generator of knowledge, deserves all our trust. Hence scientism is justified and we should all embrace it!

Perhaps a better definition of scientism (than Horgan's "excessive trust in science") would be an inability to see perspectives outside of the scientific method as having any validity. Scientism is the view that only science can offer us truth and moral guidance - and Pinker seems to be its biggest cheerleader.

Should the Humanities Embrace Scientism? My Postmodern Response to Pinker’s Patronizing “Plea”

By John Horgan | August 14, 2013

Damn you, Gary Stix! I was just about to head off on a vacation when my old Scientific American buddy sent me an email command: “Attack, John!” Gary’s email linked to a New Republic essay by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: “Science is Not Your Enemy,” snidely subtitled, “An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians.”

Psychologist Steven Pinker says humanities scholars should be "delighted" by science's intrusion on their turf.

I like and respect Pinker. But a more accurate title for his condescending essay would have been, “Kicking the Humanities When They’re Down.”

He harangues humanities folks—whom I’ll call Humists–for resenting science’s increasing intrusion into their intellectual territory. According to Pinker, Humists should be “delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences,” which have become “indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.”

Pinker faults Humists for accusing scientists of “scientism,” which could be defined as excessive trust in science. Attempting rhetorical jujitsu, Pinker suggests that science, because it is such a uniquely self-critical and successful generator of knowledge, deserves all our trust. Hence scientism is justified and we should all embrace it!

Now, before I knock Pinker further, let me acknowledge where our views overlap. First, we both believe in the attainability of truth and progress, and we agree that science is by far our most powerful means of understanding and improving our world.

I also get annoyed, like Pinker, when Humists dismiss science out of sheer ignorance. If you want to be taken seriously as an intellectual these days, you should engage with science, including pure and applied science, engineering, medicine and so on. And to engage with science, you should know something about it.

But Pinker’s idea of engagement seems to be kowtowing to science’s awesomeness. We already have too many prominent Humists serving as shills for science. Take, for example, the philosophers Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, who seem to think that MRI maps of brains are solving the mind-body problem.

Pinker himself grossly overvalues the contributions of fields such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and neuroscience to our modern understanding of ourselves. And he has insulted the philosopher Thomas Nagel for daring to question whether science in its current form can account for the mysteries of life and consciousness.

So my advice to Humists is this: By all means engage with science, but engage with it critically, because science—contrary to what Pinker suggests–badly needs tough, informed criticism. As I said in a recent column, “it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever.”

Here’s a more specific suggestion: Just as Pinker proudly, perversely, embraces “scientism,” Humists should embrace the much-maligned term “postmodernism.” Pinker, of course, loathes postmodernism. “The humanities,” he writes, “have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness.”

Pinker never seems to have understood postmodernism. Postmodern scholarship, like science itself, can be done well or badly, but its animating assumption is simple: All truth claims–whether scientific, religious or political—reflect the prejudices and desires of those who make them. Claims that become dominant in a culture often serve the interests of powerful groups.

Social Darwinism and eugenics are two especially egregious examples of pseudo-scientific ideologies that reflected the racism, sexism and classism of proponents. Pinker depicts Social Darwinism and eugenics as historical aberrations that had little or nothing to do with science–even though their central claims keep reappearing in modern scientific trappings.

Moreover, even a casual survey of modern science—and of this blog–reveals the degree to which science continues to serve the interests of powerful groups. The U.S. health care industry delivers lousy service at exorbitant prices, arguably because it ismore concerned with profits than with patients. Modern psychiatry has become little more than a marketing branch of the pharmaceutical industry.

Neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence and other fields are increasingly dependent on military funding. Pinker himself has popularized the hypothesis that war is an instinct, rooted deeply in our evolutionary past, which civilization has helped us overcome. This notion serves as a convenient justification for modern U.S. militarism and imperialism.

Postmodernism is, in a sense, simply another expression of a truism of science journalism: If you want to understand modern debates about climate, energy, genetically modified food, economic equality or military policies, you should follow the money. Money certainly doesn’t explain everything—and just because a group is rich and powerful doesn’t mean that it’s corrupt–but it explains a lot.

It’s probably obvious by now that I’m really asking Humists to become more like science journalists, especially those who view science skeptically. Like the humanities, science journalism is struggling these days, and we need all the help we can get in providing critical evaluations of science. Together, Humists and science journalists can serve as science’s loyal opposition, pointing out how far science often falls short of the idealized portrayals peddled by flakes like Pinker.

Okay, now I’m going to forget about scientism and postmodernism and go for a run on a beach. And Gary, no more emails!

Photo of Pinker speaking at TED Conference: http://www.ted.com.

About the Author: Every week, hockey-playing science writer John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, Horgan is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's, 2012). Follow on Twitter @Horganism.

Alissa Quart - Is Applying Neuroscience to the Study of Literature the Best Way to Read a Novel?

I wonder how my life would have been different if the field of neurohumanities existed when I was in school this first time, getting my master's degree in humanities. At this point I'm not sure how I feel about neuroscience invading literature, poetry, and art.

Adventures in Neurohumanities

Applying neuroscience to the study of literature is fashionable. But is it the best way to read a novel?

Alissa Quart
May 7, 2013 | This article appeared in the May 27, 2013 edition of The Nation.

Brain scan image from Libertas Academica

At Stanford University in 2012, a young literature scholar named Natalie Phillips oversaw a big project: a new way of studying the nineteenth-century novelist Jane Austen. No surprise there—Austen, a superstar of English literature and the inspiration for an endless array of Hollywood and BBC productions based on her work, has been the subject of thousands of scholarly papers.

But the Stanford study was different. Phillips used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to track the blood flow of readers’ brains when they read Mansfield Park. The subjects—mostly graduate students—were asked to skim an excerpt and then read it closely. The results were part of a study on reading and distraction.

The “neuro novel” story was quickly picked up by the mainstream media, from NPR to The New York Times. But the Austen project wasn’t merely a clever one-off—the brainchild, so to speak, of one imaginatively interdisciplinary scholar. And it wasn’t just the result of ambitious academics crossing brain science with “the marriage plot” in unholy matrimony simply to grab headlines. The Stanford study reflects a real trend in the humanities. At Yale University, Lisa Zunshine, now a literature scholar at the University of Kentucky, was part of a research team that studied modernist authors using fMRI, also in order to better understand reading. Rather than a cramped office or library carrel, the researchers got to use the Haskins Laboratory in New Haven, with funding by the Teagle Foundation, to carry out their project, in which twelve participants were given texts with higher and lower levels of complexity and had their brains monitored.

Duke and Vanderbilt universities now have neuroscience centers with specialties in humanities hybrids, from “neurolaw” onward: Duke has a Neurohumanities Research Group and even a neurohumanities abroad program. The money is serious as well. Semir Zeki, a neuroaesthetics specialist—that is, neuroscience applied to the study of visual art—was the recipient of a £1 million grant in the United Kingdom. And there are conferences aplenty: in 2012, you could have attended the aptly named Neuro-Humanities Entanglement Conference at Georgia Tech.

Neurohumanities has been positioned as a savior of today’s liberal arts. The Times is able to ask “Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities?” because of the assumption that literary study has descended into cultural irrelevance. Neurohumanities, then, is an attempt to provide the supposedly loosey-goosey art and lit crowds with the metal spines of hard science.

The forces driving this phenomenon are many. Sure, it’s the result of scientific advancement. It’s also part of an interdisciplinary push into what is broadly termed the digital humanities, and it can be seen as offering an end run around intensifying funding challenges in the humanities. As Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley wrote in 2009, the historic gulf between funding for science and engineering on the one hand and the humanities on the other is “neither new nor surprising. What is troubling is that the humanities, in fact, are falling farther and farther behind other areas of scholarship.”

Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities. It may also be a bid to give more authority to disciplines that are more qualitative and thus are construed, in today’s scientized and digitalized world, as less desirable or powerful. Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a Temple University postdoctoral fellow in psychology, wrote a 2008 paper titled “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” in which she argued that the language of neuroscience affected nonexperts’ judgment, impressing them so much that they became convinced that illogical explanations actually made sense. Similarly, combining neuroscience with, say, the study of art nowadays can seem to offer an instant sheen of credibility.

But neurohumanities is also the result of something else. Neuroscience appears to be filling a vacuum where a single dominant mode of thought and criticism once existed. That plinth has been held in the American academy by critical theory, neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis. Alva Noë, a University of California, Berkeley, philosopher who might be called a “neuro doubter,” sees neurohumanities as a reaction to the previous postmodern moment. “The pre-eminence of neuroscience” has legitimated an “anti-theory stance” within the humanities, says Noë, the author of Out of Our Heads.

Noë argues that neurohumanities is the ultimate response to—and rejection of—critical theory, a mixture of literary theory, linguistics and anthropology that dominated the American humanities through the 1990s. Critical theory’s current decline was somewhat inevitable, as all intellectual movements erode over time. This was exemplified by the so-called Sokal affair in 1996, in which a physics professor named Alan Sokal submitted a hoax theoretical paper on science to Social Text, only to unmask himself and lambaste the theorists who accepted and published his piece as not understanding the science. Another clear public repudiation was the harsh Times obituary in 2004 of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who was dubbed an “abstruse theorist”—in the obit’s headline, no less. But as critical theory’s power—along with that of Marxism and Freudianism—fades within the humanities, neurohumanities and literary Darwinism are stepping up, ready to explain how we live, love art and read a novel (or rather, how the cortex absorbs text). And while much was gained as “the brain” replaced “individual psychology” or social class readings, much has also been lost.

Critical theory offered us the fantasy that we have no control, making a fetish of haze and ambiguity and exhibiting what Noë terms “an allergy to anything essentialist.” In neurohumanities, by contrast, we do have mastery and concrete, empirical ends, which has proved more appealing, even as (or perhaps because) it is highly reductive. At least since George H.W. Bush declared the 1990s the decade of the brain, the media have been flooded with simplistic empirical answers to many of life’s questions. Neuroscience is now the favored method for explaining almost every element of human behavior. President Obama recently proposed an initiative called Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN, to be modeled on the Human Genome Project. The aim is to create the first full model of brain circuitry and function. Scientists are hoping that BRAIN will be as successful (and as well funded) as the Human Genome Project turned out to be.

* * *

There are things that neuroscience is useful for, in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.

Literary studies before the advent of the neurohumanities tended to rest on murkier categories than science likes—categories such as subjectivity and interpretation. In a novel like Mansfield Park, for instance, the heroine Fanny Price is cornered into servility by both her social class and her feminine role. The judgmental Fanny smiles upon conservative social formations and condemns most others. This has led to vastly different interpretations. Lionel Trilling famously wrote that the novel’s “praise is not for social freedom, but for social stasis,” but it has also been read as feminist: a “bitter parody of conservative fiction,” in the words of Princeton University Austen scholar Claudia Johnson.

That is not to say that all neurohumanities scholars are insensitive to nuance and ambiguity. Some, like Lisa Zunshine, combine neuroscience with original interpretations of consciousness and multiple points of view in modernist novels. But other neuroaestheticians offer blunt accounts of areas of study that have long been appreciated for their complexity, such as the meaning of art or aesthetics as a means of transmitting politics and interpretation. In other words, some underlying principles of neuroscience are useful when applied to the humanities, but it needs to understand its limits.

Neuroaesthetics, an au courant mix of art history and cognitive science, asks whether our brains are structured so that paintings and precious objects move us in one way or another: one neuroimaging study, conducted at University College, London, set out to explain how we experience beauty in visual art. Ten people were shown 300 paintings while their heads were in an fMRI machine. They were asked to label the paintings as neutral, beautiful or ugly. The paintings they thought were beautiful led to increased activity in their frontal cortex, while the ugly paintings led to a similar increase in their motor cortex.

Professor Semir Zeki at UCL was responsible for this study, which he conducted through the Institute of Neuroesthetics in London and UC Berkeley. The center sets out a bold claim on its website: “the artist is, in a sense, a neuroscientist exploring the potentials and capacities of the brain, though with different tools.” Zeki’s latest paper? “The Neural Sources of Salvador Dali’s Ambiguity.”

* * *

But are multiple—and politically minded—meanings possible in the land of the neuro novel or neuro-aesthetics? Is neurohumanities, like “neuromarketing,” simply trying to help us understand and then produce cultural artifacts that will have the best effect for readers, writers and artists—political and historical context be damned?

The response to this question depends on whom you ask. Some are suspicious of what has been called “neuro-reductionism.” Jonathan Kramnick, a Rutgers University English professor who wrote a provocative essay, “Against Literary Darwinism,” for the journal Critical Inquiry, notes the rise of books with titles like The Art Instinct. “There’s an attention to the fine grain of a text that neuroscience can’t get at,” he says.

“Humanists are unwilling or unable to evaluate the science, so we just take scientists’ word for it, without following up on the evidence or knowing these claims are highly contested within their community,” says Todd Cronan, a professor of art history at Emory University. “‘Mirror neurons’ are highly debatable, yet art historians now just apply them to artworks. I think it’s worrying. And when there’s a ‘call for collaboration’ between art scholars and neuroscientists, we just marshal the scientists’ evidence.”

Jennifer Ashton, an English professor at the University of Illinois, wrote a takedown of neuroaesthetics in the academic journal Nonsite in 2011. She put it like this: “How your brain is firing won’t tell you if something is ironic, metaphorical or meaningful or if it is not.”

What does it mean, Cronan wonders, “if Matisse uses a lot of red and a neuro person says, ‘Red produced neuronal firing’?”

Literary Darwinism, another route by which the language and analytical frame of science has entered the humanities, can have an even more formulaic aspect. In one study, Jonathan Gottschall, an evolutionary lit scholar, compared 1,440 folktales from nearly fifty cultures in order to counter feminist critics and the assumption “that European tales reflect and perpetuate the arbitrary gender norms of western patriarchal societies.” His finding: there are biosocial norms that all cultures perpetuate—i.e., the feminists are wrong.

Critics also point out that neurohumanities scholars prefer formally conservative artists. Such artists are more likely to help them make general points about beauty or the act of reading: Austen or Michelangelo, for instance, were both animated by classical values like order and symmetry. And while neuroimaging may help us understand what our mind does when we read quickly or with a more careful attention, these data sets tell us next to nothing about the actual literature, nor do they give us a political understanding of a text.

It’s not hard to imagine a future when neurohumanities and neuroaesthetics have become so adulated that they rise up and out of the academy. Soon enough, they may seep into writers’ colonies and artists’ studios, where “culture producers” confronting a sagging economy and a distracted audience will embrace “Neuro Art” as their new selling point. Will writers start creating characters and plots designed to trigger the “right” neuronal responses in their readers and finally sell 20,000 copies rather than 3,000? Will artists, and advertisers who use artists, employ the lessons of neuroaestheticism to sharpen their neuromarketing techniques? After all, Robert T. Knight, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Berkeley, is already the science adviser for NeuroFocus, a neuromarketing company that follows the engagement and attention of potential shoppers. When neuroaesthetics is fully put to use in these ways, it may do as Alva Noë said: “reduce people and culture to ends, simply to be manipulated or made marketable.”

And he has a point. Today, there’s the sudden dominance of so many ways to quantify things that used to be amorphous and that we imagined were merely expressive or personal: Big Data, Facebook, ubiquitous surveillance, the growing use of pharmaceuticals to control our moods and minds. In other words, neurohumanities is not just a change in how we see paintings or read nineteenth-century novels. It’s a small part of the change in what we think it means to be human.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s broadside against Darwinism and materialism is mostly an instrument of mischief, wrote Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in “Do You Only Have a Brain?” (Oct. 22, 2012).

Adrien Belew is a guitarist's guitarist - he takes the instrument to new and unexplored realms of sound and texture. He has played with Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and Nine Inch Nails (to name a few) and is probably best known for his work with King Crimson.

Open Culture posted this article about Belew's talk at the Chicago Humanities Festival on the Fine Art of Making Guitar Noise - Past, Present, and Future.

As a special bonus, here is a preview video of Belew playing "Variations of Wave Pressure," recorded for the first time in Bimhuis, Amsterdam for Vrije Geluiden.

Adrien Belew Presents the Fine Art of Making Guitar Noise — Past, Present, and Future

March 18th, 2013



Since 1989, the Chicago Humanities Festival has been “devoted to making the humanities a vital and vibrant ingredient of daily life.” A quick perusal of their site should convince you of their seriousness. The most recent lineup features a lecture on Josephine Baker and Eva Peron, a history of the banjo, and three University of Illinois professors discussing the first book-length academic study of Mad Men.

But while the focus of CHF may be scholarly, the festival is not all lecture-based. In the summer of 2011, guitarist Adrian Belew appeared on a panel entitled “The History and Future of Guitar Noise.” Musicians out there will likely know Belew’s name, but for those who don’t, he was an integral part of prog-rock giants King Crimson, played with Frank Zappa, the Talking Heads, David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, and has made a name for himself as one of the most unique electric players of the past several decades (reference his solo below, for example, at 2:20, in a 1978 live performance of Bowie’s “Jean Genie”).



In the video at the top of the page, see Belew in conversation with host Stuart Flack and a live audience. He talks the history of Fender guitars—his instruments of choice until he started playing the Parker Fly he holds on stage. He discusses his current effects setup, and the influence of effects pioneer Jimi Hendrix on his playing. But more than just guitar noise, Belew talks about, and demonstrates, the physicality of his playing, and the ways that he adapted the instrument as an extension of his body.

Belew’s physical ownership of the guitar makes him a fascinating player to watch, and listen to. He respects the shredders who practice sixteen hours a day in their bedrooms, and yet Belew’s affection lies with players like Jeff Beck, “the guys who make it sound like a voice.” Whomever he’s played with, and whatever tech he uses, Belew makes guitars sing, in weird electric tones no voice could match. The conversation above is a treat, but if you’re anxious to hear what Belew sounds like lately, watch his instrumental performance of “Drive” (below), a composition built of layers upon layers of looped “noise” and Belew’s individual chordal phrasing, bends, finger tapping, and vibrato.




~ Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

“The Value of Culture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg

Via Open Culture, this is a cool 5-part series on the value of culture, including the power of culture to create change (1), the two cultures debate between science and art (3), the rise of mass culture (4), and the value and meaning of culture today (5) - links to the five available episodes are below.

“The Value of Culture” Revealed in a New BBC Radio Series by Melvyn Bragg

January 8th, 2013

Your presence here indicates that you have an interest in culture. But what, exactly is culture? I’ve long addressed that perhaps too-broad question with a simple working definition: if Melvyn Bragg broadcasts about it, it’s probably culture. You may remember the English writer, presenter, and House of Lords member from our posts on his documentaries on Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon, or from the mention of his long-running BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time. But while that show certainly has covered scientific topics — evolutionary psychology, genetic mutation, the neutrino — Bragg and his panels of experts spend even more airtime discussing subjects claimed by the humanities. Some of its most interesting moments happen at the crossover, with scientific angles on the humanistic and vice versa; “Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment” comes to mind, to name but one example. Where conversations like those can arise, I daresay we have culture at its most robust.

But I merely circle around the issue. Bragg’s five-part Radio 4 series The Value of the Culture deals with the question of culture’s nature head-on. Need we call culture anything more specific than the body of things that mankind makes? Does culture work as a force for good? What does culture look like from an anthropological perspective? Must works reach a certain standard, or display certain qualities, to count as culture? What does the gap between the sciences and the humanities mean for culture? How did “mass culture” come about, as opposed to “high culture”? And what does all this say about the culture we have today? Assembling his typically impressive range of luminaries from across the British intellectual landscape, Bragg asks these questions and many more besides, using as a point of departure ninetheenth-century poet, critic, and school inspector Matthew Arnold’s description of culture as “the best which has been thought and said” which provides life its “sweetness and light.” But much has changed in how we regard culture since the nineteenth century, and here we have just the program to get us thinking harder than ever about it.

All episodes of The Value of Culture: Culture and Anarchy (above),Culture and the Anthropologists, Two Cultures, Mass Culture, What’s the Value of Culture Today?

Related content:

• Watch Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock, the 1987 Documentary Narrated by Melvyn Bragg
• Francis Bacon on the South Bank Show: A Singular Profile of the Singular Painter

~ Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

1. Culture and Anarchy
1/5 Melvyn Bragg explores Matthew Arnold's ideas about culture being a powerful force for good
FIRST BROADCAST: 31 Dec 2012 

Listen now

2. Culture and the Anthropologists
2/5 Melvyn Bragg considers the importance of culture to the discipline of anthropology.
FIRST BROADCAST: 01 Jan 2013

Listen now

3. Two Cultures
3/5 Melvyn Bragg looks back at 150 years of dialogue between the arts and sciences.
FIRST BROADCAST: 02 Jan 2013

Listen now

4. Mass Culture
4/5 Melvyn Bragg charts the rise of mass culture in the 20th century.
FIRST BROADCAST: 03 Jan 2013

Listen now

5. What's the Value of Culture Today?
5/5 Melvyn Bragg and his guests debate the meaning and value of culture today.
FIRST BROADCAST: 04 Jan 2013

Listen now

Harold Bloom: Criticism and Self-Influence

Harold Bloom is one of the two or three greatest living literary critics, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

FORA.tv hosted a two-part lecture from Harold Bloom called "Criticism and Self-Influence."

Part One:





Part Two:

Summary
The Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature is proud to announce the launch of its series Critical Theory Today with two major talks by preeminent literary scholar and critic Harold Bloom. Professor Bloom, who is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, will deliver lectures on two consecutive Mondays, March 19 and March 26.

Titled "Criticism and Self-Influence," focusing on his readings of Whitman in his first lecture and of Shakespeare in his second, these lectures are contributions to Bloom's intellectual biography. They will give a sense of how Harold Bloom reads, what stirs his mind, what he looks for, and what he projects on a text. With so impressive a list of works to his credit, Bloom will assess not only his impact on the world of literary criticism, but also his vision as a man of letters who has taught us how to think about that one subject that will always challenge our ability to think: art.

Humanities in the Digital Age: Alison Byerly & Steven Pinker

Nice discussion, courtesy of MIT World: Distributed Intelligence.

There are many conservatives (in name only - a true conservative would never advocate for this) who would love to see the humanities no longer taught in colleges in universities, or at least not in those that are publicly funded.

They would love to see university education focused on career paths, not on providing a well-rounded liberal arts education. Maybe it's that word, liberal. Or maybe it's that well-educated people tend to be more independent thinkers and less likely to be knee-jerk reactionaries (i.e., fundamentalist conservatives).

Humanities in the Digital Age

Reports of the demise of the humanities are exaggerated, suggest these panelists, but there may be reason to fear its loss of relevance. Three scholars whose work touches a variety of disciplines and with wide knowledge of the worlds of academia and publishing ponder the meaning and mission of the humanities in the digital age.

Getting a handle on the term itself proves somewhat elusive. Alison Byerly invokes those fields involved with “pondering the deep questions of humanity,” such as languages, the arts, literature, philosophy and religion. Steven Pinker boils it down to “the study of the products of the human mind.” Moderator David Thorburn wonders if the humanities are those endeavors that rely on interpretive rather than empirical research, but both panelists vigorously make the case that the liberal arts offer increasing opportunities for data-based analysis.

Technology is opening up new avenues for humanities scholars. In general, Byerly notes, humanities “tend to privilege individual texts or products of the human mind, rather than collective wisdom or data.” More recently, online collections or data bases of text, art and music make possible wholly different frameworks for study. Pinker cites his own use of automated text analysis in Google books to research the history of violence, tracing the rise and fall of such words as “glorious” and “honorable” -- connected in times past with nations’ war-making. Humanities scholars could routinely deploy tools like this to strengthen argument and interpretation, says Pinker, allowing them “to say things are warranted, true, coherent.”

Humanists are adopting new tools and methods for teaching and publishing as well. Byerly describes the freedom afforded her as a professor of Victorian literature when she can direct students to specific interactive websites for historical and cultural background, allowing her to focus on a specific novel in class. As Middlebury provost, she has been broadening the concept of publication to include work in different media online. However, as Pinker notes, the process for publishing articles in scholarly journals remains painfully slow: in experimental psychology, a “six year lag from having an idea to seeing it in print.” He suggests a “second look” at the process of peer review, perhaps publishing everything online, “and stuff that’s crummy sinks to the bottom as no one links to or reads it.” Pinker looks forward to a future where he no longer has to spend a “lot of time leafing through thick books” looking for text strings, or flipping to and from footnotes. “We could love books as much as we always have, but not necessarily confine ourselves to their limitations, which are just historical artifacts,” he says.

Such changes in the humanities may not come a moment too soon. In spite of relatively stable numbers of graduates in the U.S., the liberal arts may be increasingly endangered. Byerly sees “an inherent aura of remoteness about humanities: It studies the past, and distant past. At a time when technology seems to be speeding things up, bringing information to us faster, humanities’ pace doesn’t seem in tune with the times.” Pinker’s “nightmare scenario” is the “disaggregation of practical aspects of undergraduate education of students, and humanities,” akin to the way newspapers lost classified advertising. Humanities faculty, who tend not to bring in grants the way science faculty do, may prove an irresistible target for budget cutters. To protect these fields, Pinker proposes, integrate them with social sciences: connect English literature to the sciences of human nature, for instance, or music theory to auditory perception. “Make humanities’ faculty indispensable,” he urges.

Moderator

David Thorburn - MIT Professor of Literature
MacVicar Faculty Fellow Director, MIT Communications Forum

More on David Thorburn

Speakers

Alison Byerly - Professor of English & American Literatures, Middlebury College

Byerly's Middlebury website

Steven Pinker - Harvard College Professor, and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology

Pinker at Harvard | Department of Psychology Faculty Bio

Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists

Tags: humanities, education, culture, Philosophy, Humanities in the Digital Age, Alison Byerly, Steven Pinker, MIT World, David Thorburn, literature, arts, technology, liberal arts

Michael Bérubé - The Science Wars Redux

The current issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Michael Bérubé looks at the new science wars - The Science Wars Redux. This time it's not the liberals waging a war on science (hardcore postmodernist theory views science as only one perspective among many, not the final and only truth), it's the conservatives who now argue that science is not on objectively true version of reality - it's only one perspective (and their Christian perspective is equally, or more true).

The Sokal Hoax refers to physicist Alan Sokal's experiment during the 1990s in composing and publishing a completely nonsensical "scientific" article in order prove the that contemporary humanities (postmodern theory) and its critique of science was lamesauce.

He then placed a big red bow on the package, titling the essay “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The result was a very weird essay, a heady mix–and a shot heard ’round the world. For Sokal decided to submit it to the journal Social Text, where it wound up in a special issue edited by Ross and Aronowitz on . . . the “Science Wars.” Yes, that’s right: Social Text accepted an essay chock-full of nonsense and proceeded to publish it in a special issue that was designed to answer the critics of science studies–especially, but not exclusively, Gross and Levitt. It was more than a great hoax on Sokal’s part; it was also, on the part of Social Text, one of the great own-foot-shootings in the history of self-inflicted injury.

The fallout from this experiment was considerable. The left split between social issues (wealth, oppression, class struggle) and more academic issues (feminism, gender, language) - with many people painting Sokal and his supporters (mostly liberal) as “left conservatives.”

Anyway, this is a very engaging article - here is some more:

In his Lingua Franca essay, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," he wrote, “the results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy.” At the very least, indeed: for Sokal claimed that his hoax proved much more. He had proven, he wrote, that in the realm of theory, "Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors, and puns substitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre.” And then he threw down the gauntlet. Sokal was not, as he explained, trying to embarrass Social Text; his broader aim was political, for he believed–and he was not alone–that postmodernism and theory were bad for the left, and that the academic wing of the left was aggressively undermining the foundations of progressive politics:

For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful–not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of many “progressive” or “leftist” academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique.

Sokal’s own left credentials were quite strong; as he noted, he spent part of the 1980s teaching math in Sandinist Nicaragua. But here was an argument worth having, particularly with regard to the phrase “objective reality (both natural and social),” which makes the terrible mistake of conflating two different things, and of suggesting that the analysis of social reality should proceed like the analysis of physical reality–as if the pursuit of social justice is a matter of discovering the physical properties of the universe. Of all the contemporaneous responses–and there were hundreds–only Village Voice writer and cultural critic Ellen Willis honed in on this notion, arguing that the idea that “the left” should see politics in Sokal’s terms was thoroughly self-defeating, inasmuch as the belief that morality and justice are a matter of immutable natural law is far more congenial to conservatism than to a movement trying to imagine that another world is possible. More, Sokal’s essay spoke to a strain of leftist thought, Willis wrote, in which “cultural analysis is a waste of time.”

Now, over the years since Sokal's article and its fallout, the conservative right is making the same arguments he made in his article - that objective science is not the final arbiter of reality. They have built a creationist museum of young-Earth "science," they promote the teaching of mythology as science is school textbooks, they refute the data on climate change, and the list goes on.

That one, alas, has held up very well, for it turns out that the critique of scientific “objectivity” and the insistence on the inevitable “partiality” of knowledge can serve the purposes of climate-change deniers and young-Earth creationists quite nicely. That’s not because there was something fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical anti-foundationalism (whose leading American exponent, Richard Rorty, remained a progressive Democrat all his life), but it might very well have had something to do with the cloistered nature of the academic left. It was as if we had tacitly assumed, all along, that we were speaking only to one another, so that whenever we championed Jean-François Lyotard’s defense of the “hetereogeneity of language games” and spat on Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of a conversation oriented toward “consensus,” we assumed a strong consensus among us that anyone on the side of heterogeneity was on the side of the angels.

But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists, just as I predicted–and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of “experts” and “professionals” and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research. For example, when Andrew Ross asked in Strange Weather, “How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called ‘scientists’?,” everyone was supposed to understand that he was referring to alternative medicine, and that his critique of “scientists” was meant to bring power to the people. The countercultural account of “metaphysical life theories” that gives people a sense of dignity in the face of scientific authority sounds good–until one substitutes “astrology” or “homeopathy” or “creationism” (all of which are certainly taken seriously by millions) in its place.

Please take the time to read the whole article - it's worth the time - he makes some very important points in understanding how the conservative right has now adopted the arguments of the postmodern left (whom they abhor) to further their own agenda.

Tags: Science, humanities, postmodernism, Philosophy, relativism, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Michael Bérubé The Science Wars Redux, Alan Sokal, Sokal Hoax, Social Text, conservatives, right wing, Creation science, climate change, objective reality

John Landy - In Defense of Humanities

It's insane to me that educators feel a need to fight for the existence of the humanities. The university was founded on the study of the humanities. I have a masters degree in humanities that gave me a more rounded education that if I had specialized in literature or writing.

Our educational system has become too focused on turning out employees rather than educated people. In AZ, where we have a 1.2 billion dollar state budget deficit, higher education is always the first thing to get cut - and when the cuts come, humanities classes/programs are often first to go. Meanwhile, the dumbass governor wants to cut taxes even more . . . which means more education cuts.

A well-rounded education is once again becoming something only available to the wealthy.

John Landy - In Defense of Humanities - via Stanford University.

As universities across the country question the need for humanities education, John Landy, co-director of Stanford's Philosophy and Literature Initiative comes to the defense of literature. "Spending time in the presence of works of great beauty can powerfully change your life," he says.

Related story:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/de...

Tags: Philosophy, education, humanities, culture, John Landy, In Defense of Humanities, Stanford University, Literature, art

Liz Else - Biosemiotics: Searching for meanings in a meadow

Interesting article - someone posted this on Facebook (sorry, I don't remember who, so I can't give you a plug) - and I have finally gotten around to reading it.

Biosemiotics: Searching for meanings in a meadow

• 23 August 2010 by Liz Else
• For similar stories, visit the The Big Idea Topic Guide

Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making

EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can't identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely?

That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists and other scholars from all over the world gathered to discuss some revolutionary ideas for developing the hitherto obscure field of biosemiotics.

Unlike most revolutionaries, it soon became clear that this group's goal was not to overturn the established order. They don't attack the current way of doing science- they see its value plainly- but they do believe that for biology to become a more fully explanatory science, it needs a more encompassing framework. This framework needs to be able to explain an under-studied aspect of all living organisms: the capacity to navigate their environments through the processing of signs.

Biology, of course, already concerns itself with information: cell signalling, the genetic code, pheromones and human language, for example. What biosemiotics aims to do is to weave these disparate strands into a single coherent theory of biological meaning.

At first glance, the group seems to have chosen an unfortunate and incomprehensible name for its activity- semiotics is the study of signs and symbols that is most commonly associated with linguistic philosophers such as Ferdinand de Saussure. "Biosemiotics", then, might sound like the name of some arcane mix of biological science and linguistic philosophy. Luckily, though, the true message of biosemiotics is clear: we may do better to stop thinking about the biological world solely in terms of its physical and chemical properties, but see it also as a world made up of biological signs and "meanings".

One of the nascent field's leading lights, Donald Favareau of the National University of Singapore, provides a definition on the group's website. "Biosemiotics is the study of the myriad forms of communications... observable both within and between living systems. It is thus the study of representation, meaning, sense, and the biological significance of sign processes- from intracellular signalling processes to animal display behaviour to human... artefacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought."

To get a better sense of what this means, it is best to go back to the field's roots. Biosemiotics traces its earliest influences to the independent efforts of an Estonian-born biologist in the early 20th century and an American philosopher of the 19th century, who wrote much of his work hidden in an attic to avoid his creditors.

Estonian-born Jakob von Uexküll was an animal physiologist whose 1934 book A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A picture book of invisible worlds - and later works - inspired Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who then went on to win a Nobel prize in 1973 for their studies in animal behaviour, or ethology.

Von Uexküll wrote: "If we stand before a meadow covered with flowers, full of buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, darting dragonflies, grasshoppers jumping over blades of grass, mice scurrying, and snails crawling about, we would be inclined to ask ourselves the unintended question: Does the meadow present the same view to the eyes of so many various animals as it does to ours?"

Read the rest of this cool article.

The International Society for Biosemiotic Studies offers a lot more information for the curious. here is a little more from the main page article offering a definition of biosemiotics.

What is Biosemiotics?

Biosemiotics is an interdisciplinary research agenda investigating the myriad forms of communication and signification found in and between living systems. It is thus the study of representation, meaning, sense, and the biological significance of codes and sign processes, from genetic code sequences to intercellular signaling processes to animal display behavior to human semiotic artifacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought.

Such sign processes appear ubiquitously in the literature on biological systems. Up until very recently, however, it had been implicitly assumed that the use of such terms as "message" "signal" "code" and "sign" was ultimately metaphoric, and that such terms could someday effectively be reduced to the mere chemical and physical interactions underlying such processes. As the prospects for such a reduction become increasingly untenable, even in theory, the interdisciplinary research project of biosemiotics is attempting to re-open the dialogue across the life sciences - as well as between the life sciences and the humanities - regarding what, precisely, such ineliminable terms as "meaning" and "significance" might refer to in the context of living, complex adaptive systems.

The purpose of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) is to constitute an organizational framework for the collaboration among scholars dedicated to biosemiotic studies, and to propagate knowledge of this field of study to researchers in related areas, as well as to the public in general. Towards this end, the Society will assure the organization of regular meetings on research into the semiotics of nature, as well as to promote the publication of scholarly work on the semiotics of life processes.

Most fundamentally, the Society considers that one of its most important purposes is the promotion of a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas between researchers who are actively studying any of the myriad forms of organismic sign use found throughout the natural and cultural world. ISBS thus welcomes the membership and collaboration of scholars from all relevant disciplines, including biology, philosophy, ethology, cognitive science, anthropology, and semiotics.

Tags: International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, Biosemiotics, New Scientist, interdisciplinary research, representation, meaning, sense, biological significance, codes, sign processes, biology, philosophy, ethology, cognitive science, anthropology, neuroscience, humanities, Science, Psychology, ecology, interdisciplinary