A few days ago, when I was presenting the article “Media Realism—Looking at Scientific Realism from the Perspective of Media Ontology,” Senior Brother Botian mentioned that, in the final analysis, my position is still one of compromise: according to my line of thought, those contemporary scientific theories that have already succeeded are indeed “real,” and I can only compromise with them, unable to put forward a forceful claim like Teacher Tiansong’s “We Simply Do Not Need Protein.”
Indeed, my position has always been “weak” from beginning to end, and I fully agree. Ever since my undergraduate days I have tried to reflect on science, but I have never thought of rejecting it. Accepting science too, I do so in a different way of acknowledging it—for example, I do not understand the success of science as a struggle against religion, but instead defend science as a distinctive religion (see Science—Seen from the Perspective of Religion, Modern Science and Religion, and so on). Through a renewed defense of science, or, to put it more strongly, a re-grounding, I try to break through science’s narrowness and dogmatism.
My attitude has always been one of “humility”: human beings should be humble before nature, humble before history, humble before our ancestors. But at the same time, modern science, as the summit of wisdom reached by the unremitting explorations of humanity generation after generation, is like any other traditional wisdom that has come down to us to this day; before it as well, we should be humble. Of course you should not, in the name of science, dismiss other traditional wisdom with a light brush, but neither can you lightly cast modern science aside as if it were refuse. This is why I could never, like Tiansong, turn against science.
I once had a head-on exchange with Teacher Tiansong in “Tiansong: Why Does an Animal Like Us Need to Drink the Milk of an Animal Like a Cow?”, and gave his logic a thorough dressing-down. Today I happened to see a notice on the department bulletin board about Teacher Tiansong’s lecture, and I also read that article “We Simply Do Not Need Protein” along the way. So here I’ll write a few more comments—but not with the aim of targeting Teacher Tiansong specifically; rather, I want to use this as a way of speaking about my attitude toward contemporary science.
Teacher Tiansong begins with an imagined scenario:
One day I passed by a square and encountered many strange people. Their bodies were draped in lines of all colors, and beneath the lines were exposed bodies. I asked: “Why aren’t you wearing clothes?” At once someone answered, “Who says we aren’t wearing clothes? Look, this is 76% cotton thread, this is 13% spandex thread; this is 38% yellow thread, this is 25% purple thread. Clothing scholars have already proved that this is the most perfect fiber combination; fashion experts have also proved that this is the most beautiful color combination…” They all began talking at once, and while speaking they picked up the lines draped on their bodies to show me, letting me see the goose bumps beneath their skin. Another person said: “Look, there are buttons too—these are metal buttons, these are plastic buttons; that is also the most perfect combination!”
This scenario is a good one for mocking extreme reductionism. But Teacher Tiansong clearly exaggerates it far too much. In fact, when we acknowledge that “clothing” is not merely a simple aggregation of “threads,” this does not mean that “threads” are not included within “clothing.” Even if clothing is not nothing but thread, we can still say that there “are” threads in clothing; that is the key point. We say that a family is not merely the sum of several individuals, but the individual “I” still “belongs” to some family—“there really is a me in this family.” To say that milk is not simply the sum of a series of nutritional elements does not mean that milk does not contain nutritional elements; we can still say, “There really is protein in milk as one of its nutritional elements.” The whole is greater than the sum of its parts does not mean the whole contains no parts at all.
When a person is wearing no clothes at all, we say he is “bare as a thread”; when we say “one cannot be bare as a thread,” this does not mean you have to find a bunch of threads to hang on your body. That point is indeed obvious. Likewise, when we say “one cannot fail to ingest nutrients,” this does not mean you must find a pile of nutrient tablets and mix them together. But there is indeed some relation between “threads” and “clothing,” and this too cannot be denied.
Teacher Tiansong has a famous line—“the good belongs to science, the bad belongs to the devil”—with which he criticizes scientistic people; but in Teacher Tiansong’s hands, it seems to become “the bad belongs to science, the good belongs to tradition.” He does not try to seek a coherent logic for his argument, but merely hustles people for the sake of persuading them. Teacher Tiansong always says: “So-called explanation is telling a story, telling a story that the listeners can understand and accept.” This is the style of a typical sophisticate, a debater, or a slick operator.
What I object to here is not the claim that “explanation is telling stories,” which is not wrong. Explanation is, in a certain specific context, telling a story, or performing a set of actions, rather than displaying some ready-made truth. What I object to is an attitude that gives up the pursuit of truth. I do not mean that one should take some rock-solid truth and smash it down in front of the audience; such dogmatism is not the pursuit of truth either. By pursuing truth I mean that the primary aim is self-understanding: first comes the inquiry arising from oneself; first is that I myself need to seek an explanation, to seek a kind of understanding, rather than starting out merely for the sake of persuading others.
This is the fundamental difference between the so-called “path of truth” and the “path of opinion.” Teacher Tiansong has always had only “opinion,” namely: “milk is a bad thing—do not drink milk.” Everything that follows by way of “explanation” is nothing more than trying every possible means to convey this opinion so that the listeners will accept it. Therefore he need not care about the internal coherence of the things on which these explanations rely. Whatever statements from traditional wisdom are useful to him, he will quote them; and the affirmations of milk’s effects in classical Chinese medical texts, he can completely ignore. Likewise, he can also draw on modern science when it favors him, and attack it fiercely when it does not.
But the lover of wisdom is absolutely not satisfied with such hustling; he must pursue repeated reflection on the grounds, not only needing to find reasons to support his opinion, but also to reflect on those reasons, dig to the roots of the matter, and sort out coherent explanations. The lover of wisdom does not communicate with others merely in order to make others accept his opinion, because “opinion” is fundamentally unimportant.
When selecting evidence, Teacher Tiansong often selectively ignores certain things. In fact, nutritionists do not entirely ignore the wholeness of milk either. For example, we often hear it said that “the protein in milk is easiest to digest and absorb,” and that is clearly not just a matter of milk’s nutritional elements. On the other hand, the traditional wisdom so fondly invoked by Tiansong does not exclude concepts resembling “nutrition” either; and of course no traditional wisdom, through theoretical discourse, has ever denied the benefits of milk.
Teacher Tiansong writes at the end:
According to historical grounds, according to our traditional discourse, without using terms like protein and vitamins, we can likewise know what we should eat and what we should not eat.
But the problem is that he has never clearly stated how these so-called “traditional discourses” actually use concepts.
I looked up some “traditional discourse” on Baidu Baike:
Sun Simiao: “Cow’s milk is beneficial when cooked and eaten by the elderly.” “For post-illness deficiency and all illnesses of weakness and fatigue: one sheng of yellow cow’s milk. Add four sheng of water and boil down to one sheng. If one is hungry, drink it little by little, but not too much.”
Compendium of Materia Medica: Treats hot retching from reversed stomach qi, replenishes deficiency and damage, moistens the large intestine, treats qi dysentery, removes jaundice; it is especially suitable for the elderly when cooked into porridge.
Expanded Commentary on the Materia Medica: “Cow’s milk is transformed from the blood and fluids of the cow; its flavor is sweet, and its qi is mildly cold and non-toxic. Sweet and cold can nourish the vessels and moisten the five viscera; therefore it is used to supplement deficiency and fatigue, and to stop thirst.”
Recipe for Diet According to Seasonal Living: “It is good for treating blood deficiency and dry stools, reversed stomach qi and blockage in the throat and diaphragm; it is suitable for the elderly with exuberant fire.”
Supplemented Records: “It supplements deficiency and emaciation, stops thirst, and descends qi.”
Materia Medica of Yunnan: Water buffalo milk supplements weakness, stops thirst, nourishes heart blood, treats reversed stomach qi, and benefits the large intestine.
There is indeed no reductionist pattern in the traditional discourse system; food’s benefits are not explained in terms of particles or elements. But traditional discourse still uses certain theoretical and abstract concepts to explain them, such as supplementing qi, nourishing blood, generating fluids, nourishing yin, strengthening yang, and so on.
Whether one says “supplement protein” or says “supplement qi,” one faces a similar problem: Why do we need protein? Why can milk supplement protein? Why do we need to supplement qi? Why can milk supplement qi?
To say that milk “contains” protein is like saying that milk “can” nourish the blood. First, it implies a possibility: that if we examine or decompose milk in some particular way, we “can” obtain protein. If you dismantle a piece of clothing by certain means, you can always obtain a pile of threads; and if you “analyze” milk, you can always obtain protein. The “means” of taking apart clothes and analyzing milk are not arbitrary: burning clothes will not yield threads from the clothes, and without certain specific technological methods, you cannot obtain protein from milk. But after all, milk really does have the possibility of having protein extracted from it (in a certain sense, media realism will understand reality as possibility).
If we are not satisfied with a mere opinion—milk is good, or milk is bad—but want to ask further why milk is beneficial or harmful, we need to cite certain theories as grounds. Although when we invoke theories we are always targeted and theories are always contextual, this does not prevent one fact: the “generality” of theory.
When speaking of generality, of course I do not mean that it should be universally and invariably valid. We are not talking about anything already present-at-hand, but about “pursuit.” When I invoke certain grounds to support certain opinions, I must at any moment continue to investigate those grounds; these theories should possess generality, meaning that they can “make sense,” can be connected with other issues in other respects, and are not merely specially devised just to support this one opinion.
If we say that milk is beneficial because milk contains protein, or say that because milk supplements qi and nourishes blood it is beneficial, both are forms of theorization or generalization. We are not saying that milk is beneficial because it is beneficial, but that because of XX it is beneficial; then the basis of this XX should not be limited only to milk, but should always be pushed toward more general situations. That is to say, since milk is beneficial because of protein, then other things that likewise contain protein should, in theory, also be beneficial. This does not mean that we have suddenly produced an absolute rule: everything containing protein is beneficial. Obviously, we must also allow that under other circumstances, things containing protein can be harmful. But we may still be able to find other reasons to explain why those things are harmful. Of course, although it is impossible to find once and for all some universal iron laws, at least we should not be patching one wall to mend another, but instead should persistently refine and connect the relevant theories with some degree of consistency; that is what pursuing truth is. We care about what counts as pursuing truth, and never care about what counts as possessing truth.
Seeking a more general basis to explain things often requires treating things in a certain way—for example, by using certain means to analyze them—rather than merely taking milk as milk; one must always inquire into the situation of “milk as …” Only through such expansion by way of “as” is it possible to move toward generality. This “as” can be a categorical determination, such as “milk as a dairy product,” and dairy products are often tasty, so milk is tasty too. But if one merely invokes some ready-made classification, it is hard to provide much explanatory power. In scientific research, clearly one cannot be satisfied with determining a thing’s “as” merely with a dictionary; one must also use certain operational means to investigate it, such as experimental or analytical methods.
Even the most ordinary determinations always require that things be approached through certain specific media. For example, we say that milk is white, milk is sweet, and so on. Although color and taste are very intuitive sensory properties, they still need to be presented on the basis of some particular relation: milk only presents itself as “white” under specific conditions (for example, a glass, suitable lighting, sufficient thickness, good preservation, and a linguistic-cultural background that can recognize milk and its whiteness, and so on). And those more abstract determinations about milk require even more specific routes to be revealed—for example, “containing protein” can only be presented in a specific experimental environment, through appropriate analytical means and under a corresponding theoretical background, whereas “being cold in nature” or “supplementing qi” must be presented in other medical contexts.
Through skill, through induction and adjustment, we gradually establish connections between certain determinations of things and others. Milk is sweet—that knowledge is itself a kind of connection. In fact, this connection is established under a certain technical environment; it is related to the rearing of dairy cows, the collection and processing of milk, the methods of preservation, and so on. If the environment on one side is inappropriate, milk may not present itself as sweet. Even the very concept of milk presupposes the existence of certain cultural and technical environments. But in any case, the judgment “milk is sweet” does indeed have a certain objectivity; it is indeed correct. Whereas saying that milk is bitter is incorrect. Although one can imagine a social environment in which, through different feed and processing methods, milk would present a bitter taste in most circumstances rather than a sweet one, in the present context, milk really is sweet.
After establishing such relational judgments, we can further combine them into some inferences or arguments. For example: “Because milk is sweet, it is palatable.” This is not an absolute logical structure, but it does, by means of a logical connection, strengthen the force of the argument—compared with the bare judgment “milk is simply palatable,” the set of judgments “because milk is sweet, it is palatable” in fact increases the “relativity,” or rather the “relationality” and “contextuality,” of the judgment. Compared with the simple statement “milk is palatable,” “milk is palatable because it is sweet” points to more contexts—the technical and cultural context that links milk with sweetness, and the cultural context that regards sweetness as palatable (one can imagine that perhaps, under some special form of cultivation and training, adults might instead come to dislike sweetness). Compared with a single dogmatic assertion, this set of “reasoning” reveals more context, stands in relation to more things, and involves more “relations.” But at the same time, a more “relative” inference is also more explanatory than a more “absolute” assertion.
More complex judgments such as “milk is rich in protein” and “protein is essential to the body” are in fact also linked to certain specific environments—for example, modern scientific theory and experimental technique. These contexts are, rather than being more general, more special. To say straightforwardly that “milk is good for the body” is actually a more general context. But here, generality and specificity are one thing, and universality or special pleading are quite another. The pursuit of universality lies precisely in continually clarifying where the limits are.
The more special and the more relative the context brought out by an argument, the more likely it is to fail (to break down at some link), but once it does make sense, the more effective it is. Yet any effective argument does not exclude other possibilities. For example, we can say “milk is palatable because it is sweet,” or we can say “the composition of milk is close to human milk, and human milk is palatable, so milk is palatable”; we might also use a social survey to examine people’s reactions after drinking milk in order to prove that milk is palatable. Different chains of argument may be tied to entirely different perspectives and theories. They may also arrive at the same judgment, and their “explanatory power” is hard to compare side by side. Therefore, when arguments grounded in completely different contexts come into conflict, it is difficult to simply use one argument to refute another. To refute “because milk is bitter, milk is not palatable,” one cannot simply use “because most people who drink milk react well, milk is palatable” as a refutation. Unless one refutes the former argument in the form of: “because most people who drink milk react well, and these people do not like bitter things, milk cannot be bitter.” Of course, some people will say that the truth is only one: since other arguments have already shown that milk is palatable, then the argument leading to the conclusion that it is not palatable must of course be wrong. But the problem is, why must one set of arguments occupy priority? Why is it this set of arguments that refutes that set rather than the other way around? If the so-called “the truth is only one” means the simple assertion “milk really is palatable,” then that is again a complete abandonment of the effort of argumentation, a return from the path of truth to the path of opinion. On the path of truth, a mere opinion—even if it seems very intuitive—is not enough to refute an argument, just as actual walking back and forth cannot refute Zeno’s argument.
You may say that in discussing whether milk is palatable, there is no need at all to introduce the judgment of whether milk is sweet. But even if you truly do not care whether milk is sweet, that does not thereby negate the argument “milk is sweet, therefore it is palatable.”
Indeed, a certain obsession with nutrition science is awful: in people’s eyes there are no longer vivid foods, but only tables of nutritional elements. But in any theory, excessive obsession is no good thing; not being obsessed with certain theories does not mean one should discard those theories. We say that clothing is not merely a pile of threads, but this does not exclude looking at clothing as an aggregate of threads. The issue is only that we should not always regard clothing as a pile of threads; yet within a certain context, it is indeed reasonable and rational for us to regard clothing as a pile of threads. For example, when we are making clothes; when, say, we are recycling old clothes, taking them apart and weaving them anew; when we try to define the nature of clothing through the materials of threads (cotton-thread trousers, woolen sweaters, plush wool shirts, and the like), then we are regarding clothing as an aggregate of threads; we are looking at clothing through threads. Going out draped in a pile of threads is of course absurd, but to say that a sweater contains no wool, or that thread pants have no thread—wouldn’t that also be sophistry?
In certain contexts, of course, we can use the properties of something after it has been dismantled in a certain way to explain the properties of the whole thing. For example, we say that this piece of clothing cannot be washed in hot water because it contains wool; we say that this piece of clothing is very soft because it contains silk; and we can also say: this drink can nourish the body because it is rich in protein.
The thinking of people like Teacher Tiansong has from beginning to end been absolutist; they have never truly engaged the contextuality within argumentation. Just like traditional scientistic people, these anti-science advocates likewise take the contextuality or relativity in argumentation to be something wholly negative and harmful. So they only know how to use contextuality or relativity to attack science, without knowing that relativity is precisely what makes the constructive work of the path of truth possible.
March 10 to 14, 2011
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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