The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities

In his highly intensive book Gould discusses science and humanities in an immensely articulated fashion that can be hard to follow many times. Yet the book is highly attentive to style as he argues in p.132 " In fact, this explicit denial of importance to modes of communication, unfortunately, engendered a more than merely mild form of philistinism among many scientists who not only view verbal skills as unimportant, but actually discount any fortuitous stylistic acumen among their collegaues as an irrelevant snare, casting suspicion upon the writer's capacity for objectivity in presenting the data of nature. In an almost perverse manner, inarticulateness almost becomes a virtue as a collateral sign of proper attention to nature's raw empirics versus distilled human presentation thereof". Articulate and wellprosed he adds on p. 133 that " This lack of attention to style, combined with an active belief that quality of prose cannot impact the power of an argument, at least confers an admittedly undeserved blessing upon those few scientists who, by rare training or good fortune, happen to write unusually well and persuasively". Well, he writes unusually well eventhough the reader might need to make parallel readings to undertand what he is talking about in the beautifully complex "minding and mending of the gap between science and humanities".

In this posthumous publication, Gould provides a thorough historical overview of the development of scientific thought in various fields. He attempts to bridge the gap between the humanities/social sciences and the traditional idea of science as it finds expression in the natural sciences like astronomy, physics, geology etc. The title refers to hedgehogs that establish themselves so successfully in a particular field that they can forever keep their competitors at a distance, and to foxes that in their turn spread the seed of knowledge through their genius and versatility. The fox and the hedgehog are the models of how the sciences and humanities should interact, because Gould believed that neither single strategy would work. But a fruitful merger of these seemingly polar opposites could, with the necessary goodwill and restraint, be conjoined into a diverse but common enterprise of power and unity. The book is a plea for increased understanding between the humanities and the natural sciences. He encourages natural scientists to improve their communication skills and to read beyond their field of specialty, and he criticizes those in the humanities who have no knowledge or understanding of the natural sciences. This can lead to the embarrassing stupidities so well documented in the book Intellectual Impostures (Fashionable Nonsense) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox is an engaging text and a stimulating read. It is accessible enough for the general reader and although not considered an example of his best writing, definitely worth a read.

E. O. Wilson observed in his classic book, CONSILIENCE (Knopf, 1998, p. 2), "the greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanties." Although he ultimately rejects Wilson's path toward this end, it is this same enterprise paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould undertakes in his final book, THE HEDGEHOG, THE FOX, AND THE MAGISTER'S POX.Employing the fox and the hedgehog as symbols of the "cunning" of science and the "persistence" of the humanities (p. 2), Gould debunks the perceived dichotomy between the two disciplines. Drawing from the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, the false dichotomy between science and the humantities, Gould argues, "probably lies deep within our neurological wiring as an evolved property of mental functioning, once adaptive in distant ancestors with far more limited brain power, but now inhereited as cognitive baggage" (p. 107). For Gould, the humanities and religion are not inferior to science. Rather, he takes a more "integral approach" to find the common ground shared by the two two disciplines (to borrow a phrase from Ken Wilber). "The wonderful and illuminating differences between the sciences and the humanities," he asserts, all serve in the potential service of one wisdom (p. 265). Along the way, it is a truly fascinating spectacle to watch Gould in his attempts to mate a fox and a hedgehog.G. Merritt

Truly enjoy the book, a passionate humanistic scientist in action! However, I do have some problems about the logic and arguments of the book: 1. Gould contributes the initial contention between science and the humanities to the turf battle and the power struggle between the Renaissance humanism and the rise of modern science, more specifically, to the Modern vs. Ancient debate in the 17th & 18th centuries. I suspect the historical accuracy of such analysis and doubt that it has any significant impact on the contention today. Maybe Gould himself commits to a fictional dichotomy which he argues against all along.2. It seems to me that there is a significant inconsistency between chapter 5 in which he reveals the fallacious and fictional dichotomies between science and the humanities and chapter 6 in which he admits of the real tension between scientism and the critic of scientism (see pp. 113-115). It confirms my impression that "science wars" are for real and should be taken seriously, not just extremists' paranoid illusions. 3. What bothers me the most is an apparent paradox between Gould's fundamental assumption of the epistemic status of science (a magisterium about fact or IS) and the humanities (a magisterium about value or OUGHT) on the one hand and his relentless call for integration of these two "non-overlapping magisterial" (in brief, NOMA) as his overarching goal of the book on the other. First of all, if science and the humanities belong to two non-overlapping domains of discussion with logically totally different aims, methods and objects, then how could they be integrated since there is no any commonality between them??? Gould did try to answer this charge in chapter 8 in terms of a metaphor "one from many," but without any success in my humble judgment. Secondly, I believe that the above paradox is due to Gould's beloved separationism between science and the humanities (religion included), i.e., his thesis of NOMA as he defended fiercely in his Rocks of Ages. Ironically, it is the same Gould -- who warns us to guard against any dichotomous oppositions between science and the humanities throughout the book -- who introduces a more dangerous dichotomy between fact and value through the backdoor. As anyone who are familiar with the recent development of Science Studies and comparative studies of science and religion (all start from Thomas Kuhn) already knows, there is no such sharp distinction between fact and value. As Gould himself has admitted from time to time when he dismisses the myth of objectivity (p. 116ff), science is heavily value-laden. So besides the myth of objectivity of science, Gould has to give up his myth of fact/value dichotomy too! Otherwise his "divine" goal of integration between science and the humanities is doomed.