NATS 1700 6.0 COMPUTERS,  INFORMATION  AND  SOCIETY Lecture 5: The Method(s) of Science  V : Conclusions | Previous | Next | Syllabus | Selected References | Home | | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |   Introduction So, do Kunh and Lakatos have the answer to the question of what is science, what is the methodology that distinguishes it from other human activities? No. In fact, to date nobody has been able to provide a satisfactory answer. If anything, there is possibly more division today than there ever was on these issues. Postmodernism and the backlash against it seem to have polarized the debate. For postmodernism, interpretation is of the essence. The very notion of objective reality is questioned and doubted, and is displaced by an emphasis on subjective, concrete, experience. One consequence of such stance is that everything associated with 'high culture,' like the classical arts and science, is discredited and 'fringe and folk culture,' like astrology, magic, etc.--and what is now known as 'alternative' science, medicine, etc.--is given at least equal status. One of the techniques used by postmodernists in carrying out their program is 'deconstruction,' a term introduced by Jacques Derrida in the '60s. To deconstruct a concept or a text means to read between the lines, to expose and to dismantle the theories hidden behind the words, to blur and even eliminate the historical distinctions between truth and falsity, good and bad, being and nothingness. So much so that some postmodernists and deconstructionists are now at a loss to discuss anything, because this would require concepts that they themselves have rendered useless. An interesting survey is offered by Joseph Rouse's article   What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?. An original critique of deconstructionism is provided by Ian Hacking's recent book The Social Construction of What?. Perhaps it may be useful here to state the premises postmodernism rejects. A good summary is provided in Postmodernism, an article by Mary Klages: "There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal--no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form. The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "science," which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower. The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal. The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.). Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power). Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signifier and signified)." By way of (an open) conclusion, please read   The Cell-Phone Scare , an article by Gary Taubes in Technology Review. Taubes argues that not only is science "inherently incapable of achieving perfection, [but] that [it] is incapable of proving a negative." In other words, science can not conclusively establish that a certain phenomenon does not exist.   Topics Thus far we have discussed the methodology of science and some of its interpretations. But what about the object of science? What is the meaning, the validity of the achievements of science? How much trust should we place in the picture of the world that science presents to us? Consider the following statement by Kuhn: "Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all. To understand it we shall need to know the special characteristics of the groups that create and use it." Compare it now to the following statement by Lakatos: "The cognitive value of a theory has nothing to do with its psychological influence on people's mind...The objective, scientific value of a theory...is independent of the human mind which creates it or understands it." The two statements (admittedly taken out of context) seem to point to two profoundly different views of science. Kuhn seems to say that science is a social phenomenon, without meaning outside of a certain social group--the scientific establishment. Lakatos appears to support a notion of science as something that, although made by human beings, reaches well beyond them. These two statements represent the two sides of what has become known as the science wars. To oversimplify, one side--favored mostly by non-scientists--claims that the representation of the world science gives us is at best a human construction, embodying the limitations of our senses, of our beliefs and traditions, of our social institutions, of our history. The other side, championed by many scientists, holds the opposite view: science gives us, more and more precisely, access to the true properties of the world. It offers an objective representation of it. The term war was introduced by the media, always prone to sensationalism, but it underlines an undeniable hostility between the two camps. Sokal and Bricmont, Impostures Intellectuelles A sort of introduction to the hard-sciences side of the science wars is provided by an article by Nobel prize winner and physicist Steven Weinberg in The New York Review of Books, entitled Sokal's Hoax. The rebuttal of this position, together with various replies to Weinberg's article can be found on the same magazine:  Sokal's Hoax: An Exchange. You may find  Alan Sokal's  webpage of considerable interest. Sokal is a theoretical physicist who had become quite annoyed by the postmodernist and deconstructionist attacks against hard science. He thought he could demonstrate the vacuousness of these attacks by creating what has become known as Sokal's Hoax. In 1966 he sent a smartly written, but totally fantastic parody, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to the cultural studies journal Social Text, which published the article. Sokal then publicly revealed the true nature of his article. In the archives of the The Philosophy Magazine you can read an interesting interview with Sokal,  The Abuse of Science: An Interview With Alan Sokal,  which allows you to appreciate the context and the background of the hoax. We thus come to the end of this section of the course. We started by asking 'what is science?' We quickly saw that the common notion that 'science is the discipline that follows the scientific method' is far from being satisfactory. Seemingly self-explanatory notions such as 'observation,' 'fact,' 'hypothesis' quickly reveal a morass of difficulties and contradictions. Other famous alternatives, such as falsificationism, fail to clearify these issues. Even more comprehensive theories, like Kuhn's idea of scientific revolutions, can not fully account for the ways in which science unfolds and evolves. The scientists themselves claim that they do not need any fancy answers to these questions: science is what they do, and the scientific method is a convenient short-hand description of how they tackle their daily problems. This attitude is quite undertstandable, and is not very different from similar claims made by artists: to create their paintings or their music, they don't need to know what art is. Fair enough. However, science--and art too--is also a social, historical and political phenomenon. Our society tends more and more to embrace what Chalmers calls "the ideology of science." That word, science, seems to have the power to legitimize almost any claim, as you can see for example in advertising or even in alternative medicine, and if science claims that it will eventually lead us to the truth, then we are entitled to examine such claim very carefully. This examination, however, turns out to be incredibly difficult, and in fact to involve the very problems that history and philosophy have struggled with since their very beginnings. We do not have a satisfactory, comprehensive answer, yet. Whether we will find one is itself open to question. It would seem the answer lies somewhere among the various accounts we have reviewed. Questions and Exercises Summarize one of the theories about science we have reviewed in the last few weeks. Summarize one example from the history of science that, in your opinion, supports such interpretation of science.   Picture Credit: Éditions Odille Jacob Last Modification Date: 07 July 2008