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And so it continues.

There is a lot of rational discussion being had about Josh Rosenau's piece on different "ways of knowing" and Jerry Coyne, as usual, is adding nothing to that discussion. His latest is a pep rally for Jason Rosenhouse's post on the subject. But I shouldn't say Coyne has added nothing because I think he has inadvertently revealed one of the real problems here.

First, let me digress and recommend Chris Schoen's entry at u_n_d_e_r_v_e_s_e. Chris, along with making an eloquent case for our being a storytelling species, where we convey and learn knowledge best through the stories we tell each other, discusses Ophelia Benson's and Jason Rosenhouse's posts and notes that they both concede that nonscientific means can lead to "truth." Benson agrees that "[t]elling stories ... can be a great way to convey certain truths about the world" and Rosenhouse relates a story about how a difficult chess match revealed things about himself that he may not have learned otherwise. Both then turn on a dime and declare that those truths are not a result of a "way of knowing," with little or no explanation.

It is at this point that Coyne comes to the "rescue":

This harkens back to a "contest" that Coyne ran to "Name a truth revealed by faith." First Coyne defined truth as something:

Can you see the circularity lurking here? There no "truth" from non-empirical ways of knowing and "truth" is defined by empirical ways of knowing. It is a symptom of circular thinking that you reach a point that, having exhausted the circumnavigation of your circle, you simply restate your starting premise, the way Benson and Rosenhouse do.

Now just because a person's reasoning is circular does not mean they may not have (more or less accidentally) arrived at the truth. Let's take it a step further. Is education a "way of knowing"? After all, how much of the science that Coyne "knows" has he empirically confirmed himself? Has he conducted all the experiments and observations that confirm what he has read in books about atoms and biology and botany and a thousand other "facts"? Does he not "know" these things?

Sure he might be able to empirically confirm all those experiments and observations, if he had the time and means, but then he'd have no time to do any new science. Science education is a "story" told to students, every bit as much as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We can rationally distinguish the "truth-content" of science's story and Buffy's but the process is the same.

But do we empirically confirm the "truths" we learn from great art and literature? Do we test them against "reality"? Yes, we do ... by living life and comparing our experience with what we have leaned from others.

Ultimately, this argument, I think, boils down to a distinction the "science as the only way to knowledge" crowd want to make between "collective" knowledge and "individual" knowledge. But collective knowledge is just the aggregation of our individual knowledge. Can we truly have a "way of knowing" that arises out of something that is, itself, a stranger to knowledge?
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