Professor Jerry Coyne: Māori academics finally admit that their way of knowing is not science....

Māori academics finally admit that their way of knowing is not science, but asserts that it is better than science because the truth is “both factual and ethically value-laden”

The “Listener letter” appeared in 2021, signed by 7 professors at the University of Auckland (see it here) in New Zealand. It was a response to the drive (still going on) to teach indigenous “ways of knowing”, Mātauranga Māori (MM), as coequal with science in science classes. The letter argued that while MM was of great value in understanding local culture, its nature was fundamentally different from that of modern science, and therefore MM should not inhabit the science classroom. If it did, they argued, this would only confuse New Zealand students about the nature and practice of science. A quote from the letter:

Indigenous knowledge is critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy. However, in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself.

To accept it as the equivalent of science is to patronise and fail indigenous populations; better to ensure that everyone participates in the world’s scientific enterprises. Indigenous knowledge may indeed help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science.

The signers were attacked (and some had their jobs downgraded) by Māori and their allies who argued that MM was indeed equivalent to science—it was just “local science”. Indeed, there are bits of MM that do constitute empirical truths (how and when to harvest food, etc), but these facts are enmeshed in a stew of mythology, religion, legend, superstition, and ethics. That is why, for example the Māori are arguing that, because of an ancient myth involving kinship between kauri trees and whales, the present oomycete blight on kauri trees might be cured by rubbing the trunks with whale oil and whale bone, and chanting prayers to the trees. This endeavor will proceed, funded by New Zealand taxpayers. This is what happens when you mix indigenous myth and science.

Now, a group of people of Māori ancestry (and their allies) at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) have finally admitted that the signers of the Listener letter were right: “Māori knowledge is not science.”

You’d think that would settle the issue, but no: the authors argue, in fact that Māori knowledge seems better than modern science because the latter not only changes over time (as science should) but that the truth “is both factual and ethically value laden.” They argue that this is the right meaning of “truth”, and that every other culture in the world save “Western culture”, which is apparently totally scientific, combines facts and values. In this way the authors fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy (“is” equals “ought”), grossly misunderstanding the difference between science and ethics. The entire article is a justification for changing science education at AUT—and throughout New Zealand—from an education in modern science to an education aimed at rectifying racism and inequities in society. But that is not science, and their mixing of ethics and science just results in a poorly thought-out program with explicit ideological aims. Whatever they propose here, it has nothing to do with modern science.

You can read this new article at PESA Agora, a site discussing philosophy, education, and culture. Click on the screenshot below or get a pdf here.


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The authors first describe the updated Bachelor of Science curriculum at AUT, which has two new courses about indigenous knowledge. They note that “student feedback on the new courses has been mostly favourable,” but student reaction is no way to design a curriculum. And these courses, it seems, are not science courses, but are designed to give students “cultural competence,” which apparently means fixing inequities in society. Excerpts from the article are indented below, while all bolding is mine:

The updated BSc has catalysed lively discussions among the academic staff of the School of Science. In this context, reference to the word or idea of ‘racism’ is like a bomb going off: dangerous and causes lots of collateral damage. Views of non-Māori/Pasifika academic and teaching staff in the school range widely, from those who are active allies, to those with entrenched oppositional beliefs to the effect that science is a-contextual and therefore a-cultural. This latter view holds that science is ‘pure’ knowledge and not responsible for social problems. Of course ‘science’ is not directly responsible for social problems, but as ethical science educators we cannot ignore inequities in our outcomes. Why not consider what we could do to ameliorate those inequities?

The requirement for academics to demonstrate cultural competence has encouraged many staff to seek support from the Māori and Pasifika staff of the school, who have held workshops for teaching staff, plus many one-to-one meetings to support individual academics. In these ways, the burden of attempting to overcome the effects of a history of Eurocentrism in science and the university falls back on the staff who represent social groups harmed by those effects.

Of course this has nothing to do with science; it is part of an ideological program to rectify what they see as ongoing racism in science (i.e., the lack of inclusion of indigenous “ways of knowing”) by redefining “knowledge” as a combination of facts and values. There’s a fair amount of science-dissing in the rest of the piece:

Lack of knowledge of the philosophy of science as well as lack of knowledge of Māori/Indigenous knowledges combine to cause difficulty for some people in considering Indigenous knowledges as complex knowledge systems. An understanding of philosophy and history of science would mean scientists were aware of the always hypothetical, possibly transient nature of scientific theory. We are mindful that we cannot raise up Māori knowledge by denigrating science. It is important for Māori/Pasifika commentators not to speak about science in the highly-publicised ways that some scientists and academics have spoken about Māori/Indigenous knowledge. This observation crystallizes the purpose of establishing a discussion group on respectful relations between science and Māori/Indigenous knowledge. We are interested in engaging teaching staff whose views on these matters are undecided, or in the middle of the spectrum, in an attempt to facilitate and build more reasoned and collegial discussion of these topics.

They clearly have realized that denigrating science (which they then proceed to do) can’t elevate MM, and apparently hold MM as superior to science because its “truths” are eternal. But the ephemerality of “truth” is a feature of science, not a bug. Any assertion beyond disproof is not scientific.

The authors’ solution is to say that modern science is deficient because its facts aren’t attached to values:

We need a new narrative about science that is more open and inclusive to people and other knowledge systems. It will take courage to admit that science and the other disciplines historically excluded Indigenous knowledges in order to consolidate themselves. This process was completed in the 18th century in the establishment of the academic disciplines (Herrnstein Smith, 2005). It will take the courage of humility to admit that science is only as good as the people who dare to call themselves scientists, and that examples abound of bad science, where people have sold out to greed and profitmaking (Marks, 2017; Proctor, 2012). It will take personal courage to think deeply about the ethnic inequities for Māori and Pasifika students in the courses we teach and about our own responses to these inequities.

Well, teaching science is one thing, but they’re talking about a “new narrative about science”, with the specification that this “narrative” has to be taught to science students. In other words, you don’t get a dose of science without a dose of both ideology and ethics—bt clearly the postmodern ethical views of the authors that conform to the oppressor/oppressed narrative.

A critical aspect of the ‘pure knowledge’ claim of science originates in the fact/value dichotomy where, in the 18th century, the bifurcation of fact from value was used to separate science (fact) from literature (fiction), in the process freeing science from ethical responsibility for its effects (Proctor, 1991; Putnam, 2004; Richardson, 1990). This move allowed science to claim control of truth. Science is extremely specialist, so each scientist has a small domain of expertise, which helps dilute the ethical significance of their work. But so far as we know, no other culture except the modern Western culture, influenced by science, separates facts from values. Māori (and Indigenous) ethical concepts are both facts and values at the same time. This means that truth according to Māori (Indigenous) worldviews is both factual and ethically value-laden. This is one way to explain why Māori knowledge is not science.

At last—the admission that the Listener authors were right is in the last sentence. But the rest is balderdash. First of all, science is not a “culture” in the sense of an ethnic culture like that of indigenous people or “Europeans”. Science is simply a toolkit for gleaning truths about the universe, truths that, of course, have been responsible for vast improvements in health and well-being of society, as well as producing wonder about the universe. And of course “modern Western culture” includes both facts and values (the values vary across populations), but so what? The practice of science, or rather, the truths that it produces, are designed to be unpolluted by values. Truly, I am not sure what the authors are talking about here. Sadly, they give not one example of a Māori truth that is both factually accurate and at the same time “ethically value laden”. But the lack of supporting examples is chaeracteristic of this type of polemic from New Zealand.

But wait! There’s more!

The concept of ‘mana ōrite’ (equal mana) is a useful rendering in te reo Māori (the Māori language) of what we mean by ‘respectful relations’ between science and Mātauranga Māori. A call for equal mana is a call for the ending of the denigration of Māori knowledge in mainstream discourses. Knowledge of those discourses, as well as of the history and philosophy of science, makes it clear why we might want to talk about ending the disrespect of Māori knowledge (Stewart, 2023). But as a result of the specialist nature of science, few if any scientists have even a basic working knowledge of either the philosophy of science or of Māori knowledge. Hence many scientists display intensely negative reactions to any suggestion that Māori knowledge is of any scientific value. The debate has been cast as a simplistic, yes-no question: Is Māori knowledge science? But the wide brief of both science and Māori knowledge make this question meaningless: a provocation or conundrum, not a question with an answer in the ‘scientific’ sense (Stewart, 2019).

Of course any knowledge that is intimately attached to ethics will not be accepted by modern scientists as “of scientific value”. Only the facts that are cleanly stripped of ethics fit in to modern science. Furthe, I’ve seen no examples of “Western” scientists rejecting facts discovered by the Māori simply because they were discovered by Māori. What we can say is basing a cure for kauri blight on ancient legend that is palpably false (whales and kauri trees do not share a modern ancestor and were not “created” by a divine being), is not a path we want to travel.

As I’ve said repeatedly, some of MM indeed does count as scientific knowledge, but most doesn’t. And yes, the entirety of MM can be taught as sociology and anthropology, for, as the Listener letter argued, “Indigenous knowledge is critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy.” I agree, yet add that different tribes of Māori have different conceptions of MM. But I also agree that MM is not science, should not be taught as science, and that ideological programs should not be injected into science education. What the authors are trying to do, as far as I can see, is make a new argument that indigenous knowledge is vital to science because it includes ethics, and that scientists should adopt “indigenous knowledge” precisely because of its ethics—an ethics aimed at creating social equity, which is not the same as creating equal opportunity. The whole mishigass is confected simply to remedy what the authors see as inequity based on ethnicity.

As the anonymous Kiwi who sent me this article said:

What they say about the fact/value dichotomy is bollocks. I don’t know whether they don’t understand this dichotomy (i.e., you can’t extract an ‘ought’ from an ‘is), or they deliberately misrepresent it. . . . They rely almost completely on the woke idea that because they’re “oppressed” and that “Western” scientists are speaking from “privilege and power”, all of us are obliged to accept their statements at face value. I think people are starting to tire of this sort of ideological bullying.

 

In the end we have the admission, as the Listener letter signers argued, that indigenous knowledge is not science. But one comes away with the impression that it is better than science because it blends facts with values. But research tied to conceptions about what is “good” is not only unscientific, but an impediment to true scientific progress.

Professor Jerry Coyne is an American biologist known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design, a prolific scientist and author. This article was first published HERE