Propaedeutic
“Science is under attack. People are losing confidence in its powers. Pseudo-scientific beliefs thrive. Anti-science speakers win public debates. Industrial firms misuse technology. Legislators curb experiments. Governments slash research funding. Even fellow scholars are becoming sceptical of its claims. And yet, opinion surveys regularly report large majorities in its favour. Science education expands at all levels. Writers and broadcasters enrich public understanding. Exciting discoveries and useful inventions flow out of research laboratories. Vast research instruments are built at public expense. Science has never been so popular or influential.
This is not a contradiction. Science has always been under attack. It is still a newcomer to large areas of our culture. As it extends and become more deeply embedded, it touches upon issues where its competence is more doubtful, and opens itself to well-based criticism. The claims of science are often highly questionable. Strenuous debate on particular points is not a symptom of disease: it signifies mental health and moral vigour.
Blanket hostility to ‘science’ is another matter. Taken literally, that would make no more sense that hostility to ‘law,’ or ‘art,’ or even ‘life’ itself. What such an attitude really indicates is that certain general features of science are thought to be objectionable in principle, or unacceptable in practice. These features are deemed to be so essential to science as such that it is rejected as a whole—typically in favour of some other supposedly holistic system.
The arguments faovouring ‘anti-science’ attitudes may well be misinformed, misconceived and mischievous. Nevertheless, they carry surprising weight in society at large. Those of us who do not share those attitudes have a duty to combat them. But what are the grounds on which science should be defended?
Many supporters of science simply challenge the various specific objections put forward by various schools of anti-science. In doing so, however, they usually assume that the general features in dispute are, indeed, essential to science. They may agree, for example, that scientific knowledge is arcane and elitist, and then they try to show that this need not be a serious disadvantage in practice. The danger of this type of defence is that it accepts without question an analysis which may itself be deeply flawed. In many cases, the objectionable feature is incorrectly attributed to ‘science,’ or is far from essential to it. Dogged defence of every feature of ‘the Legend’—the stereotype of science that idealizes its every aspect—is almost as damaging as the attack it is supposed to be fending off.”—John Ziman, from the opening pages of his book, Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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“[Hilary] Putnam’s denial that there is a unique and complete description of the world in some metaphysically privileged vocabulary (say, the language of the natural sciences) reflects his commitment to conceptual pluralism. For example, a chair can be usefully and truthfully described in the language of physics, of carpentry, of furniture design, or of etiquette without it being the case that these vocabularies are reducible to some favored or fundamental vocabulary.” — From the editors’ Introduction to Putnam’s Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism (Harvard University Press, 2012)
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“After the uncritical rejection of science and the postmodernist (and ill-informed) dismissal of its claims to objective knowledge, there has in recent decades been an equally uncritical embrace of the dubious idea that the natural sciences, particularly the neurosciences, have something important to say about, even have the last word on, art, ethics, politics, the law, economics; that they may transform the study of those topics into a properly grounded discipline; or, more ambitiously, that brain science is, or will be, the key to understanding humanity. Humanities will (at last) come of age as animalities. New interdisciplinary pursuits have emerged prefixed by ‘neuro,’ ‘evolutionary,’ or even ‘neuro-revolutionary,’ embodying the hopes of advancing our understanding of the law, of ethics, of aesthetic experiences.” — Raymond Tallis, Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science (Agenda Publishing, 2020): 21
I am assuming that, like me, most of you are not scientists (no doubt some of you are). Furthermore, you likely have in mind some notion or picture of what science is, leaving aside for now how you arrived at this conception (e.g., testimony, formal and informal learning, ‘authority’ of one kind or another, inferences and speculation, etc.). I am going to conjecture, with all due respect, that what you happen to believe about science—be it tentatively or confidently—is likely, or for the most part, mistaken or at least radically incomplete. One reason for this, I suspect, is owing to ideological conceptions of science that have arisen both spontaneously and deliberately from various quarters and precincts our capitalist and hyper-industrialized society and culture (a topic for another day). One prominent form of such ideology goes by the name “scientism,” which has a religious like faith in the properties, virtue, and power of (especially ‘natural’) science(s) (and technology, for that matter), often viewing physics as exemplifying same, an ideal archetype or model of what science can and should be.
I confess to having the temerity or perhaps chutzpah to propose a list (the number of titles being fairly small as such things go) of works that I have found helpful in sketching what I take to be the best conception(s) of science: what science is and should be. Being neither a scientist nor a philosopher should disqualify me from undertaking such a task, but one of the liabilities of intrinsic to an independent researcher and autodidact* in many fields of intellectual inquiry is that one feels free to question prevailing forms of intellectual and moral expertise and authority, however necessary they remain to our collective coexistence, welfare and well-being. This list is thus owing to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) reading regimen in science and the sciences, including philosophy of science, although it is safe to say that I cannot keep track of the latest literature in this regard, especially insofar as that means academic journal articles for which I often lack the privilege of access.
That said, here is my list of twelve titles I think a “layperson” can read by way of getting a more or less true or better conception of science than the one most of us currently entertain. Our authors of course do not always agree with each other on this or that feature, purpose, or value of science, but these works have strong family resemblance with each other to the extent that the follies and vices of scientism or what John Ziman called “the Legend” are studiously avoided.
- Cartwright, Nancy. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
- Galison, Peter and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996).
- Giere, Ronald. Science without Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
- Giere, Ronald. Scientific Perpectivism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
- Hesse, Mary. Models and Analogies in Science (Sheed and Ward, 1963).
- Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001).
- Kitcher, Philip. Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011).
- Longino, Helen E. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton University Press, 1990).
- Putnam, Hilary. Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism (Harvard University Press, 2012).
- Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Clarendon Press, 2000).
- van Fraassen, Bas C. Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2008).
- Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Further Reading: Please see, first, my Notes on Science and the Sciences, and then the compilation on “Sullied Sciences,” which has an appendix with a much larger list of titles should your appetite be whetted by the material above. An exemplification of science utilized on behalf of both democratic and socialist principles, values, and practices is found in this bibliography: Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity. Finally, a list which I hope to update soon may also be of interest: Ethical Perspectives on the Sciences and Technology. All of these items are freely available for viewing or download on my Academia page.
* I am “self-taught” in the sense that I lack proper credential and academic degrees in the domains I am speaking about. Thus I am not, nor is anyone for that matter, literally “self-taught.”
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