The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [139]
But the argument inspired by the radical interpretation of Kuhn suffered a fatal weakness. The trouble was that the humanist’s version of Kuhn couldn’t explain away the real miracles—the track record of technological successes in science—that neither religion nor the humanities could provide. The only way to explain this difference in successful application between scientific and humanistic “ways of knowing” is to invoke the objectivity of science by contrast with the humanities.
The second broad stratagem for securing the standing of the humanities was to try to make them look more scientific—to turn the humanities into sciences of interpretation. Making commonsense folk psychology into a scientific theory is a tradition that goes all the way back to Sigmund Freud in the late nineteenth century. Freudian psychodynamic theory is just the illusory folk psychology that introspection foists on us, but now pushed into the unconscious part of the brain. According to Freud, conscious introspection is frequently wrong when it tells us what packages of thoughts about our wants and about our circumstances motivate our behavior. The real causes are unconscious packages of different thoughts about ourselves and others. Sometimes all it takes is a Freudian slip to reveal the real thoughts about your mother and father that motivate your conduct toward them. More often, years of daily psychoanalysis are required to figure out what you are really thinking about, to uncover the real meaning of your actions.
Freud’s theory had its share of technical terms—libido, cathexis, superego, transference, repression. These, together with the fact that Freud was a physician, gave it the air of a scientific theory. It had three other features destined to make humanists fond of it: it was easy to understand because it was just a version of the folk psychology they already understood, it was iconoclastic, and it was sexy.
There is another reason that Freud’s theory became fashionable among humanists seeking to reveal the real meaning of actions, works of art, historical epochs, and so on. Over time, the standard folk psychology inherited from Neolithic times wasn’t getting any better at explaining action, while scientific theory was persistently getting better at explaining and predicting phenomena in its domains. Compared to the ever-increasing explanatory precision and predictive power of scientific theory, interpretation in terms of motives just never really got any better from Homer and Thucydides to Hegel and Toynbee.
Chapter 10 made it clear why the blunt instruments used by us conspiracy theorists can’t get any better. They will remain forever fictions useful for navigating social life. Interpretation is the articulation of this useful neural circuitry in introspection. It is without any prospects of providing deepening understanding of human affairs. Humanists were unwilling to give up interpretation. They also recognized that real science secures influence and resources in modern life, in spite of the fact that its theories are hard to understand and getting stranger all the time. This led some humanists to try to imitate the outward appearances of science. They began to frame a succession of increasingly wacky interpretative theories of human affairs, each one replete with technical terms and neologisms that no layperson could understand.
The journey starts with the New Criticism of F. R. Leavis, which rejects the author’s conscious intentions, whether known or not, as irrelevant to the meaning of her or his work. Instead, interpretation required a study of meanings imposed on the author by language—a social force that exists independent of the people who speak