Leading Horses to Water
Ancient Greeks began the way of
thinking originally known as natural philosophy but which we now call
science. Science emerged as we know it during the Renaissance, in
an age dominated by fear, superstition, injustice, and brutality.
In other words, pretty much like the present. These musings are
aimed at explaining how science works, and how science can serve even
nonscientists in their efforts to make sense of the world. I can
try to explain things but it’s up to you to decide whether or not you
wish to drink from these waters.
#27 - Science and Postmodernism
American Heathen: aired: 19 January 2013
Postmodernism
is a philosophical position that holds there is no objective reality
because everything we experience is via our brain’s interpretation of
sensory input. This idea was the basis for several scenes in the
first Matrix movie.
The basic principle in that movie is that if sensory input is
controlled by ‘the matrix’ (a machine intelligence), it would be
impossible to tell the difference. It’s a variant on the old
sophomoric question “What is reality?” Of course, in the movie,
the hero Neo somehow is able to sense that something is wrong with the
world created for him by the machines and so joins the “underground”
opposition comprising people who are free from the control of ‘the
matrix’.
Postmodernism sees science as an activity that’s a completely social
construct with no firm basis. This viewpoint can also be
understood as a form of scientific relativism.
If an objective reality exists, in this view, we would have no way to
be certain of it. Hence, science is a completely relative thing,
conditioned on the social context from which it has emerged.
Among other things, postmodernism has been used to justify the notion
of ‘feminist science’
that proposes the difference between the cognitive styles of men and
women allows for distinctly difference science to develop between the
genders. If science has no basis in an objective reality, it
seems plausible that science thereby would depend strongly on its
social, human context. A wide diversity of distinct forms of
science would be possible, perhaps up to one for every human being on
Earth.
I probably won’t convince any postmodernists out there, but I believe
this to be a bunch of sophomoric philosophy that flies in the face of
our actual experience. I’ll be attempting to dispel this notion
in what follows.
There can be no doubt that science is done by human beings, with all of
the baggage that humans carry with them. Amidst that baggage
train are cultural and societal biases and beliefs. If the
history of science is followed as it emerged from the Dark Ages, we can
look backward and recognize that at any moment in the past, various
prejudices affected the scientific consensus about specific scientific
topics. If you are raised in a world where virtually everyone
believes in a flat Earth, it can be very difficult to have that
implicit assumption not contaminate your attempts to understand the
natural world. In the original Cosmos series,
Carl Saga describes how 17th century astronomer (and astrologer!)
Johannes Kepler labored long at trying to fit the astronomical data to
a concept known as the ‘music of the spheres’ – a futile attempt to impose a social construct on the reality of the observations.
In his book “The Mismeasure of Man” – an exploration of how cultural
prejudices produced the erroneous notion that intelligence could be
established with a single measure – Stephen Jay Gould
says “I criticize the myth that science is an objective enterprise,
done properly only when scientists can shuck the constraints of their
culture and view the world as it really is.”
I say that all of us – every last one – views the world through a
filter each of us has developed for ourselves. This filter is
unique to individuals, but may share many elements with the filters of
other people. We began work on this filter from the moment of our
birth. It has been shaped by our experiences but it, in turn,
influences us in how we see the world, and what we deem to be either
important or important … to us as individuals. All of us are
blind to much of the factual reality that surrounds us. It’s
there in front of us, but we simply don’t see it. It’s only by
some process that is hard to understand that some of us can finally get
a glimpse beyond our self-imposed blinders and recognize something no
one else has ever seen before. Kepler went through many failed
attempts to impose his conceptual model on the astronomical data he had
but, in a flash of insight, he at last divined an elegant way to match
the data that eventually made Kepler a famous figure in the history of
science. When that insight comes, it apparently emerges from the
subconscious, which may be more open to new thoughts than our conscious
minds. Humans continue to be far from a thorough understanding of how our minds work!
I’ve had this experience myself in my research and it’s amazing how you
suddenly can see something so clearly that has been there all along but
no one took notice before you.
The point is quite simple, actually: to be a scientist, you must
assume there’s a factual reality! We’ll never understand it
completely, but science demands that we test our understanding of that
reality using evidence
(data). If a concept comes along that fits the data better than
any previous notion, it becomes the basis for a revised
understanding. We cannot escape the social context in which we’re
embedded, but science proceeds on the very pragmatic idea that we
accept only concepts that fit the evidence. When new evidence is
collected, old ideas must be examined courageously against the new
evidence – if the ideas don’t fit, they must be discarded no matter how
much we may cherish them. There can be no such things as
‘feminist science’ or ‘conservative science’ or ‘presbyterian science’
– there is only science.
Because we’re human, science is always incomplete and flawed, always
contaminated by the implicit assumptions of our time and place, never
totally objective. The process, however, is one of continuing
self-examination and self-correction when errors or misconceptions are
found, inevitably driven by evidence. To the extent that our
scientific understanding of the natural world seems to be quite
successful when applied to solving practical problems is strong
evidence in its own right that our assumed factual reality is actually
out there. No matter how limited our comprehension of that
reality has been along the path of science, we scientists (who come
from all cultural backgrounds and all types of humans) have been
demonstrating that we’re all engaged in the same process:
science! The postmodernists and scientific relativists are demonstrably wrong.
Science
is not a religion but rather a tool for those who wish to think for
themselves about the natural world. Its primary characteristic is
its willingness to entertain questions from those who wish to obtain
believable answers.