Author: geoff

Dan Kaplan pointed me at Wright’s response to Dennett’s complaint about his piece in Beliefnet. I don’t see that Wright gets himself off the hook. Leaving aside the validity of the argument, the ethics just stink. To reduce it to bare bones:
– Dennett said A and B
– Later on, Dennett said C
– After the interview, Wright concludes that C can be interpreted as if A then not B
– Wright therefore concludes, and announces to the world, that Dennett believes not B
Now before taking this last step, a reasonable person would have noted that this conclusion meant that Dennett had claimed B and not B. Moreover, all of Dennett’s previous statements had been consistent with B. There seem to be three possibilities:
– Dennett believes both B and not B.
– Dennett has changed his mind and now believes not B.
– Dennett still believes B; there is an error somewhere in the chain of reasoning – an equivocation, or a misunderstanding, or a subtle ambiguity.
Common sense suggests that the last of these is the most likely: in spoken (as opposed to written) discussion, such miscommunication occurs quite often. It certainly is more likely than someone changing a deeply-held belief.
So what does Wright do? Does he contact Dennett to double-check what was said and the conclusion that he’s drawn, or does he publish without checking? The first approach is most likely to lead to a true reporting of the exchange. The second has the better “Gotcha!” potential, even though it’s likely to lead to an acrimonious follow-up. (Like this.)
Maybe Wright got carried away, and thought this was a political debate in which zingers were more important than getting at the truth. That would seem to be a lousy way to practice philosophy.
UPDATE:I think I understand why Wright might have behaved in this way. If you watch the whole interview between Dennett and Wright, from about 30:00 through 45:00, you can see Dennett absolutely destroying Wright’s incoherent notion of epiphenomenalism. (I guess I should commend Wright for being honest enough to publish the interview even though he comes off so badly in it, trying to “defend indefensible positions” as he put it, but I can’t imagine that he was happy.)

Yesterday I wrote of Robert Wright’s dishonest piece about Daniel Dennett in BeliefNet. After watching the video of the Wright-Dennett interview again, and re-reading Wright’s piece, I sent the following email to Wright, cc: Dennett.
I read the piece “Planet with a purpose” and then watched your interview with Dennett. I have to say that I find your triumphal announcement that:
> I have some bad news for Dennett’s many atheist devotees.
> He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a
> higher purpose. Worse still, he did it on videotape, during an
> interview for my website meaningoflife.tv. (You can watch the
> relevant clip here, though I recommend reading a bit further
> first so you’ll have enough background to follow the logic.)
to be wholly unjustified, based on the video interview. You attempt to couple Dennett’s agreement with your hypothetical (“to the extent that… it would support …”) with earlier elements in the discussion in order to draw the conclusion that you were seeking. I don’t find that this argument works – the earlier discussion does not support your assertion that “He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties”. Furthermore you don’t even have the courtesy to ask Dennett whether or not he agrees with the conclusion that you draw. In a discussion full of analogy, hypotheticals, and probabilities, the likelihood of inadvertent or intentional equivocation is extremely high. The upshot is that your written piece smacks of “Gotcha!”, rather than reasoned argument.
Even more important, earlier in the interview Dennett spells out very clearly an alternative (“natural selections happens because it can”) which is wholly inconsistent with your “higher purpose” conclusion. Unless you believe that Dennett is supporting two inconsistent positions, this should have caused you to question whether you had drawn a valid conclusion from the discussion as a whole. Yet you completely ignored Dennett’s naturalistic position when you came to write your Beliefnet story. This seems dishonest.
For myself, I find the attempt to apply the language of evolution, or natural selection, to “the system of the planet” is unhelpful and misleading. Natural selection, as you mention in the interview, arises from a combination of differentiated replication and scarce resources. The “system of the planet” is not obviously replicating, differentiating, or competing with anything else. To treat an aggregation of planetary phenomena, living and inert, as a “system” is one thing; it certainly helps us understand things like the salinity of the oceans and the recycling of atmospheric gases. To go from “system” to “organism” is at best a metaphor of limited value, and at worst a sentimental distraction.
As you may know, at least one commentator (Andrew Sullivan) read your story and interpreted it as “An Atheist Recants”. While in most cases it is the journalist who misleads with a simplifying headline, here I believe that he accurately summarized your – wholly unjustified – conclusion.
Geoff Arnold

I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog (yes, I know he’s infuriating, but he’s such an entertaining contrarian – and at least he doesn’t have Christopher Hitchens’ vicious streak), and I came across a little piece that I’ll reproduce in full:
AN ATHEIST RECANTS: Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of the influential 1995 book, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” now says he sees a higher purpose in the universe. Bob Wright breaks the news.
Now anyone seeing that headline would naturally conclude that Dennett had “recanted” his atheism – that he now believed in God. Puzzled, I read the piece by Robert Wright that Sullivan linked to. And Wright certainly launches into the topic with enthusiasm, asserting:
I have some bad news for Dennett’s many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.
So what is this “higher purpose”? We’re meant to assume that it is “God”, obviously. Yet here’s the money quote, later in the piece:
1) Dennett’s climactic concession may not sound dramatic. He just agrees reluctantly with my assertion that “to the extent that evolution on this planet” has properties “comparable” to those of an organism’s maturation—in particular “directional movement toward functionality”—then the possibility that natural selection is a product of design gets more plausible. But remember: He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties. Ergo: By Dennett’s own analysis, there is at least some evidence that natural selection is a product of design. (And this from a guy who early in the interview says he’s an atheist.)
[Interjection: Note the assumption that “directionality” implies (not merely “is compatible with”) “design”, and that “design” implies a divine, non-natural designer – otherwise how is this incompatible with atheism? Sloppy. Back to Wright:]
2) Again: to say that natural selection may be a product of design isn’t to say that the designer is a god, or even a thinking being in any conventional sense. Conceivably, the designer could be some kind of natural-selection-type process (on a really cosmic scale). So Dennett might object to my using the term “higher purpose” in the first paragraph of this piece, since for many people that term implies a divine purpose. But “higher purpose” can be defined more neutrally.
So now “higher purpose” may just be an emergent property of a higher-level natural system – for example, natural selection applied to a many-worlds cosmology. I don’t see anything that Dennett has said that is incompatible with atheism.
Wright’s agenda is all too clear, as his closing paragraph shows:
Still, one could mount an argument that evolution on this planet has at least some of the hallmarks of the divine—a directionality that is in some ways moral, even (in some carefully delineated sense of the word) spiritual. In fact, I’ve mounted such an argument in the last chapter of my book Nonzero. But Dennett hasn’t signed on to that one. Yet.
And having read most of Nonzero, I’m reasonably confident that Dennett wouldn’t sign on to it. While there are some very interesting ideas in the first half of the book, the last chapter is full of equivocation, particularly around the notions of “design”, “purpose”, and “divine”. It’s nowhere near as good as Wright’s earlier The Moral Animal.