Outro: What Does Science Mean to You?

"To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science." - Isaac Newton

"Science never solves a problem without creating ten more." - George Bernard Shaw

We come to the end of our journey through Philosophy of Science and Science, Technology, and Society Studies. We’ve spent time with Realists (Mill, Sokal, Hacking), Positivists (The Vienna circle), Constructionists (Bloor, Forman, Kuhn), Anarchists (Feyerabend) and Skeptics (Popper, Fraassen.) Philosophers, historians, sociologists, and even an anthropologist, a physicist, and literature professors have had their say.


I’ve tried to present a series that would represent a diverse range of views, and show that science really is a philosophically complex and interesting topic. Looking back on it, I can see that we missed some spots that perhaps should have been covered. Realists were not silent through the 60’s and 70’s, and, in retrospect, I think it would have been fairer if I had given them more space. 


I would like to finish the series by asking what science means to you. Is it the sine qua non of rationality, as the Positivists think? Is it socially constructed, as the Sociologists say? What are we to make of scientific theories? Are the laws they describe the hidden structure of the universe, as the Realists think? Or are they human postulates which grapple with the unknown and the unknowable, as the Skeptics think? Does the context of discovery (or invention) meaningfully effect the content of the mature theory, or is it dross which a good theory leaves behind? Last, what is the moral dimension of science, if any? Is it the moral activity par excellence, as the Enlightenment thought, or is it in some way tainted by the lust for power, as the Postmodernists argue? Or does science have nothing to do with morality at all? What should the role of science in our every day lives be, if any? 


What does science mean to you? 


Thanks for your company. The next series will look at methods and philosophy in history. 

An introduction to philosophy of science:
http://www.galilean-library.org/site/index.php/page/index.html/_/essays/introducingphilosophy/6-philosophy-of-science-r23
Also: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/philosophy


Part of a series on Science, Technology, and Society (XX of XX)
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Ian Hacking and the Social Construction of What?

"When someone speaks of the Social Construction of X, you have to ask, X = What?"

Ian Hacking (1936 - ) is a Canadian philosopher, historian of science and an advocate of Scientific Realism.

In The Social Construction of What? (1999), he argued that constructionist accounts of scientific theories tend to lose sight of a basic question: what, exactly, is it that’s supposed to be constructed? If we consider the case of gravity, for instance, we can distinguish at least two different meanings for this word. Gravity can either be (1) that non-verbalized property of reality which is responsible for objects falling down when tossed up, etc., or it can be (2) the verbalized theory of that property advanced by Isaac Newton in 1687. If we ask “is gravity socially constructed?” then the meaning of both the question and the answer depends very much on which definition we are using. If we mean gravity (1) then the answer is almost certainly “no.” If we mean gravity (2) the answer is obviously “yes.” The first criticism is absurd, the second banal. “Is gravity socially constructed?” is, for Hacking, simply a bad question. We need to be more specific.

The theory could have been different if Newton was a different person or if it had been created in a different place, but in so much as competing theories about gravity accurately describe it, they will tend inevitably to converge toward a fixed point. There are many perspectives on reality, but there is only one reality to be described. The process of science is a process of refinement – the better a theory is, the less integral it’s “socially constructed” aspects become. The equations given by Newton describe the real properties of gravity, as they really are, as we really experience them in our daily lives.

This position places Hacking near the middle of the spectrum on philosophy of science, though certainly on the Realist side of it. A thorough-going Realist, who is committed to the literal truth of scientific theories, cannot maintain that (1) and (2) are different in any meaningful way, because if Newton’s theory is correct, then it is nothing other than the verbalization of a property of the universe. To the extent that it is anything else (“constructed” rather than “discovered”) it is a false theory. On the other hand, Hacking regards externalist sociological approaches to the history of science as unduly skeptical. We are justified in believing that the things described by theories really do exist, substantially as described, because we can do things with them. Hume notwithstanding, inference to the best explanation is the best method we have, and we should stick with it.

Hacking’s Website:   http://www.ianhacking.com/

Scientific Realism:  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

Part of a series on Science, Technology, and Society (XIX of XX)

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What is Science? An Essay by George Orwell

 "A scientist's political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman. The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. But a ‘scientist’, as we have just seen, means in practice a specialist in one of the exact sciences. It follows that a chemist or a physicist, as such, is... politically more intelligent than a poet or a lawyer, as such. And, in fact, there are already millions of people who do believe this."

"But is it really true that a ‘scientist’, in this narrower sense, is any likelier than other people to approach non-scientific problems in an objective way?"


The essay. It's short and highly readable.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien

Part of a series on Science, Technology, and Society.
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Alan Sokal and the Science Wars

"Nobody is a social constructionist at 10,000 feet." - Richard Dawkins

"In order to ridicule the claims of humanist upstarts, Sokal and his allies ... must reject the physical theories of some of the founders of their own fields." - Val Dusek

In 1996 a physicist named Alan Sokal decided he had had enough of sociology, relativism, post modernism, and science studies in general. It had been about thirty years since Thomas Kuhn had opened the floodgates, and at times the criticism had become quite intense - often to the point, Sokal thought, of absurdity. Science is useful and it gets things right. By comparison, what is postmodernism good for? No sensible person will try to explain away the useful in terms of the useless. To paraphrase: "if you don't think gravity is real, try walking off a tall building. Otherwise, shut up."

In order to make his point, Sokal wrote an article called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutic of Gravity," which he submitted to a literary journal called Social Text. The article was long on postmodernist jargon and abysmal misunderstandings of science, but deliberately short on coherent and meaningful content. It was, as the Positivists liked to say, "cognitively empty." Social Text published the article (apparently without reading it, or at any rate understanding it), and shortly after Sokal revealed the hoax. "Look at these idiots," his critique went. "They'll publish anything." Defenders of science cheered. Critics seethed. The public laughed. The "Science Wars" had begun.

The Realist defense of science is often expressed in terms of morality. Science is, on this account, the characteristic and most valuable product of the Enlightenment. It's explanatory success fully vindicates its position as the preeminent intellectual activity of our time, and provides an example of rationality that every person can aspire to. Science keeps us honest when we feel tempted to cheat - that's why it's critics don't like it. To understand it as anything other than the rational and correct approach to nature, or to regard it's products as descriptive of anything other than objective facts, is foolish at best, dishonest at worst. It corrodes the foundations of civilization.

The postmodernist attack, too, is often expressed in moral terms: Far from being the characteristic blessing of the Enlightenment, it is it's characteristic problem. Science has long been associated with sexism, racism, imperialism, and in general with the domination of the weak by the strong. It's universal aspirations to explain, and ultimately control, all phenomena, amounts to a war of mankind against nature. Its characteristic attitude is both unnatural and foolish. We are meant to live with nature and with each other in some kind of harmony. To spend all this effort to classify, homogenize, and denature everything human and spontaneous is wrong. Beneath Science's awesome display of methodical precision lurks the sinister and all too human lust for power - not to do anything with, but only for its own sake. (Postmodernism was the subject of an earlier article, here: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=990138267667388&id=986713261343222)



Postmodernists have generally located scientific realism on the right of the political spectrum, and themselves on the left. During the Vietnam era, when it was taking shape, this may have been accurate. However, since the 60s the pendulum has swung. Today it is not liberals, but conservatives, who are feeling the heat. Science is now firmly on the side of gender and race equality, while global warming and evolution threaten traditional conservative goals like keeping taxes and regulations low, and maintaining a religious basis for morals and education. The criticisms of Science that were once heard from the left - that it is a front for sinister interests, that the peer review process is broken, that scientists privilege ideology over evidence, etc. - are now increasingly the property of the right.



The editors of Social Text, writing from the older leftist position, seem to have fallen out of step with the times. The affair is, indeed, best seem as an intra-liberal conflict. Sokal, like Chomsky and (an older) Latour, felt that postmodernism impaired the ability of liberals to mount a rational defense of their values, and paved the way for conservatives to mount an irrational defense of theirs. The time had come, in other words, for leftists to rehabilitate science and deploy it in the struggle against conservatives. That, in turn, meant attacking postmodernism, which had traditionally worked to undermine confidence in science.

Under blistering criticism from scientists and the public alike, the editors of Social Text justified their decision to publish Sokal's nonsense article on several grounds. First, it was not their business to censor other scholars. When a scholar publishes an article, he or she puts their credibility on the line. If they want to make a fool out of themselves, that's their decision. Second, they were not physicists, and could not reasonably be expected to understand how postmodernism should apply to an obscure and difficult (even for physicists) theory like Quantum Gravity. It was not their job to understand physics - it was Sokal's. Third, by deceiving them he damaged his own credibility and that of his colleagues. Mistakes can be overlooked, but bad faith cannot. His article and later comments made it clear that he knew about as much about postmodernism as they did about physics. If it spoke poorly of the editors that they published Sokal's article, what did it say about Sokal that he wrote it? They might have been dupes, but he was a liar.

Spending some time with the Science Wars offers the advantage of seeing the political and moral dimensions of the subject on full display. However, it does so at the risk of caricaturing thoughtful and serious positions. As I've tried to show throughout the series, there are a tremendous variety of perspectives on Science - we do not have to choose between simplistic, reductionist narratives. Sokal's hoax certainly embarrassed the editors of Social Text, but it was not a serious criticism of Science, Technology, and Society Studies. Similarly, postmodernism is not a theory about society or science, but about literature. While "the Science Wars" we're fought largely on the terrain of STS, the debate was not about STS as such, but rather about morality and reason in science. It does demonstrate, however, how central science is to our society, and how thinking about the nature of Science can help us better understand our world.

Another article on Sokal: http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_sokal_hoax/
Sokal Interview: https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=kuKmMyhnG94
Response to Sokal: https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=WR7raJMRxGk
Now you too can Transgress the Boundaries, Deconstruct Hegemonic Normativities, and move Toward a Quantum Hermeneutic of your very own: with Elsewhere's Postmodernist Essay Generator! http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Part of a series on Science, Technology, and Society (XIX of XX)https://www.facebook.com/pages/Modern-Intellectual-History/986713261343222

Clifford Geertz and Anti Anti Relativism

"Like welfare, the media, the bourgeoisie, or the ruling circles, cultural relativism causes everything bad."

Clifford Geertz (1926 - 2006) was probably the best known American anthropologist of his generation, famous for his literary approach to ethnography, culture, and religious studies, and his development of the concept of "thick description" (ie emphasis on the meaning of observations as opposed to compiling a catalogue of facts.) Although his 1984 lecture "Anti Anti Relativism" does not directly address philosophy of science, his broad ranging criticism of "Anti Relativism" is certainly a relevant perspective on the debates which have been central to STS since Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Bloor.

"A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying fear," he said - the fear of Relativism, from which "Subjectivism, nihilism, incoherence, Machiavellianism, ethical idiocy, aesthetic blindness, and so on" were supposed to follow. Therefor, the enemies of Relativism maintained, it had to be fought to the death. Geertz named his talk "Anti Anti Relativism" rather than simply "In Defense of Relativism" because, he said, the Anti Relativist polemic had taken on a life of its own, and no longer had anything to do with Relativism as such. Just as in the 50's anti communist rhetoric was not really about communism, but was rather a kind of cultural code meant to ward off the imaginary terrors of liberalism, so Anti Relativism is not actually about Relativism, which it's critics are only dimly aware of as "something bad," but is rather about the need these people have distinguish themselves as anchors of rationality and decency amidst an imaginary storm of nihilistic decadence. So it was not Relativism that needed to be defended, but the vapid posturing of Anti Relativism that needed to be attacked.

Anthropology was perhaps only next to literature in being subjected to Anti Relativist polemic, on the theory that treating other cultures as worthwhile objects of study, on their own terms, was tantamount to damming one's own culture as conditional and irrelevant. Our culture (this criticism goes), in order to be valid, must be understood as universally and unconditionally superior. Because the anthropologist did not adhere to this norm, he was an outsider, dangerous, someone to be feared - a destroyer of culture. Or in short, a Relativist.


 According to Geertz, both Relativism and Anti Relativism were and are responses to the facts revealed by anthropology. The Relativist response is that we should not dismiss difference, lest we find ourselves stuck within a narrow minded provincialism that cannot change or grow. The Anti Relativist response is that our our own culture and way of looking at things is under siege from a bewildering variety of new and old ideas, most of them nonsense, and that, given the success of western culture to date, we would be fools to put it on an equal footing with bizarre tribal rituals from the other side of the planet.

According to Geertz, the mindless, soulless Relativists threatening to destroy civilization with their dimwitted nihilism simply do not exist - or at any rate, they do not exist in the apocalyptic numbers the Anti Relativists fear. But ever since there has been such a thing as anthropology, there have been attempts to vanquish these imaginary barbarian hordes through the discovery of a "human nature" - a kind of "basic, sticker price, no additives" human being who can be decontextualized and studied apart from culture. This universal human would be the real or fundamental type from which all actual humans were merely deviations. That this creature manifestly does not exist (and so fails a basic test of empirical rationality) does not seem to have dimmed enthusiasm for his discovery. Indeed, it ought to make us suspicious that every time the universal human is discovered, he turns out to be a carbon copy of the people who discovered (invented) him. According to Geertz, there is no there there - the quest for a universal human nature is simply an attempt to bring in the scholar's prejudices through the window after kicking them out the front door.

Geertz argued that it is the role of other disciplines to take in the messy variety of lived experience and process it into a bland, homogenous paste called "knowledge" - but it is the business of anthropologists to disrupt the plan, to unsettle, to force confrontation with the strange and different. Perhaps some times the subversive thrill of this activity has led a few immature practitioners into a sophomoric "elsewhere things are different" Relativism that can and should be dismissed as simply irrelevant. But the fear that they provoke in Anti Relativists has been out of all proportion to their numbers. Nihilism is a modern hobgoblin, and it terrifies Anti Relativists for the same reason monsters under the bed terrify little children. Their doomsday scenarios are just so much hyperbole. Meanwhile, amidst all this fulmination, the far more serious danger of provincialism and narrow mindedness goes unchallenged.

If the Anti Relativists really believe that certain kinds of study - that is, the study of difference - are intrinsically dangerous, then their position amounts to a moralizing anti intellectualism - a commandment not to think, because thinking is dangerous. So beneath all their huffing and puffing about reason we find, not critical thought, but it's absence - a mindless conformity to the ancient lore of their tribe, disguised as a defense of reason. When we set off on the quest for knowledge, Geertz said, we need to be prepared for surprises and uncomfortable questions. "If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home."

Biograpgical Information: http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/Geertz.htm
The Original Essay: http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTex…/Anti_Antirelativism.htm
Another discussion of Anti Anti Relativism: https://m.youtube.com/…
Part of a series on Science, Technology, and Society (XVII of XX)https://www.facebook.com/pages/Modern-Intellectual-History/986713261343222

Paul Forman: Quantum Mechanics, Weimar Culture, and the Forman Thesis

"Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic." - Brian Greene

Paul Forman (1937 - ) is a German-American historian of physics and curator at the National Museum of American History. In a series of papers written in the early 70's, he argued that Quantum Mechanics emerged from an "anti-rational" Weimar culture, and that much of its weirdness can be attributed to that "anti-rationalism."
 
Before the first world war German science in general, and physics in particular, was seen as an instrument of national prestige and power. A country with great scientists was cutting edge, modern, and worthy of respect. And in fact during the war German scientists made discoveries (such as artificial nitrate fertilizer and, of course, poison gas) that contributed to the war effort.
 
Because German science held such a prominent place in the pre-war culture, and had contributed so powerfully to it, it could not escape the fall out when the war ended in disaster. German physicists, the argument goes, needed a way to re-establish their prestige, and this meant repudiating their pre-war past in order to make room for an up-to-date theory that would not be tarnished by earlier failures. Nothing had been so characteristic of that past as Newtonian Mechanics, which had always been somewhat suspect in Germany as a product of British materialism. The British were supposed to be a "nation of shop keepers," and their science a dead, artificial, way of looking at the world. The obsession with dissecting, analyzing, and classifying was felt to rob life and the universe of their intrinsic majesty. German literature and philosophy had long stressed the importance of a holistic, intuitive view of life that could explain its mysteries without damaging or dissecting it. After the war a new mania for a romantic "life philosophy," which rejected the mechanical and mechanistic attitudes of the British in favor of an experience-based, intuitive holism became fashionable. The new attitude was "don't question, don't look for purposes - be what you are, and find fulfillment in that." As Nietzsche put it, "love your fate." On this understanding a physicist did not study the universe in order to find a more efficient way of making widgets or for any other crudely instrumental purpose (like the British physicists), but as a form of self fulfillment. In other words, be cause he was a physicist. His activities required no other purpose or explanation, and this was felt to be a healthier attitude toward life.

 
The post war disillusionment gave physicists a powerful motivation to reinvent their theories as a German product, in order to differentiate themselves from the British (who had just starved several hundred thousand German civilians with a naval blockade, and imposed a ruinous peace at Versailles) and from the failures of wartime Germany. The new model, developed in the mid-20's, incorporated the values of a good "life philosophy" by rejecting causality as the principle explanatory mechanism. Instead, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and others, created a new approach to subatomic physics which made probability the essential explanation. On this view, events at the subatomic level do not occur for any particular reason - sometimes a particle decays, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes an electron is here, sometimes it's there. There's no reason for this - there are only probabilities. Similarly, an electron is neither a particle nor a wave until it is observed, but at that moment it becomes one or the other; a cat left in a box for a week is neither alive or dead, but becomes alive or dead when the box is opened. Subatomic particles, like German physicists, simply do what they do. What matters is not why they do it, but how.
 
This new approach re-established the prestige of (some) German scientists by bringing German physics into line with German's conception of themselves as an especially spiritual people. Parallels between the weird acausality of quantum mechanics and the more general culture of Europe just before and after the war are perhaps not difficult to find. In these same decades Freud was undermining the idea of man as a rational and self-determined agent, while Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were abandoning the objective and netural observer view point in literature, and Picasso and Miese were offering fragmented and disorienting perspectives in visual art. Einstein, who resisted Quantum Mechanics all his life, had played his part in the cultural transformation by dethroning Newton. While he thought he had saved absolutes from a subjectivist tide (he once proposed calling his theory "Invariance Theory"), the world disagreed, and turned Relativity into a celebration of subjectivity. Even in mathematics LEJ Brouwer was creating a new approach which rejected a classic tenant of logic, the principle of "the excluded middle." In the first decades of the 20th century the Newtonian order, focused as it was on linear causality in a rational universe, was being fatally undermined by a new mood which emphasized the importance of difference, perspective, and irrationality. While it might be tempting to come to Newton's defense on this count, we would do well to remember that much of our own perspective has been shaped by that transformation. It is not easy to convey the force with which narrow 19th century ideas of nation, class, race, and gender were believed in by, and imposed, upon, the people of that time. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics both have real predictive superiority over Newtonian Mechanics, and that is an irreducible part of the reason why they replaced it.

Viewed in this light, Quantum mechanics is a human product, and cannot be understood apart from the values and motivations of the men who created it. What actually goes on at the subatomic level is unknown and unknowable - what we can know is whether or not our theories yield usable and predictive results. It is not inconsistent to say that a human creation can yield predictive results - we do not have to make a choice between "opinion" and "fact" - only between "useful" and "less useful." Historians of science continue to debate "The Forman thesis" almost fifty years after its original publication. It remains a classic of the sociological approach to the history of science.

http://www.worldscientific.com/…/abs/10.…/9789814293129_0001
SEP: QM http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/
SEP Copenhagen Interpretation: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/#Bac
Neo-Kantianism: http://www.iep.utm.edu/neo-kant/
 
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Robert M Young: Darwinism Is Social

“I came to the conclusion that selection was the principle of change from the study of domesticated productions; and then, reading Malthus, I saw at once how to apply this principle.” – Charles Darwin

“It seems that Malthus legitimized the idea of a law of struggle, impressed Darwin with the intensity of struggle, and provided a convenient natural mechanism for the changes which Darwin was studying in the selection of domesticated varieties. It gave Darwin the analogy he needed to move from artificial to natural selection, and this was the essential step in his reasoning: indefinite variation and natural selection could produce new species.” – Robert Young
 
Robert M Young (1935 – ) is an American-British Marxist, psychologist, and historian of science who is best known for his contextualist approach to the history of Evolution, an early instance of what would later be called Standpoint Theory. In a series of essays written between 1969 and 1973, he argued that scientific theories, like all other products of the human mind, arise out of a specific social context. For this reason theories necessarily incorporate the values and concerns of the people who create them, and can only be understood as an expression of their personality and concerns, which are themselves expressions of their specific historical context. Therefore, if we want to understand Evolution (he argued), we need to understand the history of Victorian England.

In order to do this, we need to look at England a generation or two before Darwin published Origin (1859.) During the 1790’s France was convulsed by revolution, the leaders of which were confident that philosophy had revealed the laws of government. They believed that a perfect society could be created on earth. But in the midst of wars, conspiracies, and repeated frustrations, they turned against each other, and a Terror killed tens of thousands of Frenchmen. Later, French armies led by Napoleon overran most of the continent, leaving Britain virtually alone. In the midst of this war against left-leaning France, Great Britain defined itself as a conservative power. One Briton, Thomas Malthus, wrote an Essay on Population (1798) which undertook to show why French-style plans for “the improvement of mankind” were doomed to failure. His argument was that if the state instituted living-wage laws, workers would get married sooner and have larger families. As a result, there would be even more workers in the next generation, and so more people who would have to be paid an artificial wage. But as the real value of their labor plunged, the net drain on the economy would increase. After a few generations, the population-growth would become unsustainable, leading to a population crash (or “Malthusian catastrophe”) in which nature would forcibly correct the misguided policy of the reformers.

Great Britain rapidly industrialized during the first decades of the 19th century. As workers began to organize in order to press for better working conditions and higher wages, employers sought arguments that could be used to keep wages low. Malthus’ arguments were extremely useful for this purpose, and for generations Britain’s conservatives recast it as “the Iron Law of Wages.” Charles Darwin was descended from wealth on both sides, and, like most people from his background, he was impressed by Malthus’ ideas. He took a copy of Malthus’ essay with him on his voyage, and recorded in his autobiography that he had his insight after reading Malthus’ essay. As Robert Young pointed out, his theory has many other connections to his time and place. Darwin’s emphasis on the importance of competition has some obvious parallels to the laissez faire industrialism of Victorian England. Just as every business owner competes for scarce resources and strives to bring the best product to market in order to secure them, every animal has to compete for scarce food and mating opportunities, and over the generations tends to produce the adaptations best suited to survival. And, just as failed businesses go under and are replaced, failed species go extinct and are replaced by more fit competitors. Indeed, Origin is steeped in the language of not only laissez faire, but also imperialism. The full title of Origin is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” At a time when European states had conquered about 4/5 of the earth’s surface, no educated reader could have possibly doubted which races had been “favored” in the “struggle for life.”

According to Robert Young, the natural thing for people living under a capitalist system is to see the free market as a reflection of natural law. This is how it was in fact interpreted, by theorists such as Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton, who, like Darwin, took it for granted that laissez faire capitalism was the best form of production. However, there are reasons to think that causation actually runs in the other direction. It’s a truism that people often see what they want to see, and the fact that all of us are products of the same type of society as Darwin doesn’t help matters. We have, in other words, a built in bias to see things his way, and this has been powerfully reinforced by Darwin’s addition to the modern pantheon of “great men of science.”

Darwin, a white, male, sexist, imperialist millionaire, was in every way a member of the elite. So it is perhaps unsurprising that he liked to think of nature in terms of competition. After all, competition had worked out very well for him, and this explanation had the pleasant byproduct of transforming his success from an accident of birth to scientifically proven superiority of inheritance. When other biologists took a look at Origins, many of them concluded that while competition in nature was real enough, Darwin had overstressed it. Most of Darwin’s observations took place on the South American coast, where competition is indeed fierce in the densely-packed rain forests. In other environments, such as the frozen plains of Siberia, animals often work together, because the chief danger to their survival does not come from one another, but from a hostile environment. Indeed, as Petr Kropotkin pointed out in Mutual Aid (1902), cooperation, not competition, characterizes much of what goes on in nature – such as symbiosis, social organization of insects like ants and termites, and, indeed, human society. In general the most successful species on the planet are not loners living in ruthless cut-throat competition with one another. They cooperate because groups are often more effective than individuals. That we tend to think of nature as “red in tooth and claw” is, on this reading, a byproduct of the ruthless laissez faire business ethos of Victorian England, not a product of nature itself (which few of us have any prolonged experience with, and so are not really in a position to evaluate.)

http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/
http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper60.html
https://www.marxists.org/subje…/science/essays/kropotkin.htm
http://www.amazon.com/…/o…/ASIN/0521317428/darwinanddarwini/
 
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Leviathan and the Air Pump

"It is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know." 

In their 1985 collaboration, Leviathan and the Air Pump, Steven Shappin and Simon Schaffer argued that the contest between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over the nature of vacuums, the origins of the experimental method, and the politics of restoration England were inextricably linked.

To put the argument as briefly as possible, the country had just emerged from a generation of civil war (Cromwell, Charles I, Puritanism, etc) and no one wanted to go back to that. How to best organize a polity in order to prevent chaos was a major concern, which led directly to Hobbe's treatise on Absolutism.

According to Boyle the best method in natural philosophy (and politics) was experiment and observation. Free consent freely arrived at would ensure both philosophic truth and political order by allowing room for disagreement, and thereby containing it. By extension, any proposition which could not be established through experiment was no philosophic proposition at all, and as such unanswerable. The method was inductive and eliminative - the goal was not to establish truth, but to eliminate falsehood, and this could only be done by observing actual events as they actually occurred. As proof of his method Boyle offered the air pump, an instrument intended to produce a vacuum, inside which various experiments on could be performed, which would allow philosophers to reasone about air, vacuum, fire, etc., with the benefit of observation.

Hobbes disagreed. He believed that observation could never displace deduction as a form of reasoning because observation always admitted of multiple explanations, and without rigorous definitions there was no way to decide between them. Boyle was thus wrong to eschew metaphysics - no number of experiments with air pumps could establish whether a vacuum was present or not unless Boyle could define what vacuum, air, etc., were. Boyle had not specified any criteria for evaluation, and was thus free to impose whatever interpretation he wished on the results of his experiments. Hobbes further argued that the experiments were cases of circular reasoning because the definition of a working air pump (at the time a fragile and complicated device that had to be made by hand) was that it replicated Boyle's experimental results. How, then, could results of experiments that took place within it independently verify those of the original, or of each other? He who calibrates the instrument, Hobbes argued, controls the experimental result. For Hobbes the ideal philosophic community, like the ideal political community, was ruled by force - that is, the force of deductive reaaon. In philosophy no less than in politics, the absence of force led inevitably to the collapse of consensus, chaos and war. After a generation of ideologically driven war, England could not take the risk.

Boyle's argument obviously prevailed, but according to the authors Hobbe's critiques are still relevant. have Their further claim is that politics and science are inseparable, as this (and by extension, other) episodes demonstrate. There's much more to this work that it would be fun to get into, but those are I think the main points. 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0691150206/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/177-8510862-3911319

Part of a series on Science Technology and Society (XIV of XX)

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Evelyn Fox Keller and Feminism in Science

“Science, it would seem, is not sexless: he is a man, a father and infected too” Virginia Woolf

“This is not about women doing science differently than men. It is about everyone doing science differently when the gender ideology shifts.” Evelyn Fox Keller

Although it might seem a bit silly at first, if we (those of us who are men, at any rate) can step outside our gender for a moment and reflect on the language of science, it’s not hard to see that it is permeated with a great deal of oddly sexual and masculine language. Scientists choose subjects that are “wide open” for exploration, “probe” “fertile territory,” ask the “hard” questions, arrive at “penetrating” insights,” and reach conclusions that are “pregnant with meaning.” Hopefully, if their arguments are “strong,” they will “erect” a “dominant” theory, which will "expose" the “laws” that “govern” nature. A reasonable observer might well wonder whether science is some kind of oedipal rape fantasy directed against “mother nature.”

According to Evelyn Fox Keller (1936 – ), an American bio-mathematician and historian of science who pioneered the study of gender and science, this language is no accident. In Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), she argued that, to an astonishing degree, the origins of science are steeped in weirdly gendered language. Francis Bacon, for instance, wrote an essay called “the masculine birth of time” (c. 1605), frequently spoke of “dominating nature,” and famously declared that “knowledge is power.” In this same essay he said “I am come in very truth to lead you to Nature with all her children, to bind her to your service and to make her your slave.” This imagery was hardly atypical. For generations the Baconian conception of science competed against another, quite different tradition, which had its origins in the alchemical writings of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. Agrippa wrote an essay on “The Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex,” in which he frankly praised women’s superiority, while Paracelsus thought of nature as a combination of masculine and feminine elements, and held up the image of a pregnant mother as the appropriate metaphor of discovery. What kind of science, she wondered, might have emerged from the tradition of Agrippa and Paracelsus, if it had been pursued with as much vigor as the Baconian program?

She insisted, from her own labratory experience, that male colleagues frequently held to male gendered biological theories (such as the "pacemaker" explanation for the growth of slime molds, or the "central controller" model of cellular growth, despite persistent failure to locate the theorized structures. On the other hand, explanations offered by female scientists, such as Barbara McClintock (one of the 20th century's most distinguished cellular biologists), which laid more emphasis on holistic interactions, were routinely ignored. If problems of gender and its influence on research were squarely faced, she argued, science as a whole would benefit. The main thing, after all, is supposed to be the quality of the ideas - not the qualities of the people who propose them.
In The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture (2010), Keller argued that this seemingly eternal dispute is actually an invention of nineteenth century biologists like Charles Darwin and Francis Galton on the one hand, and sociologists like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx on the other. Both sides had definite political motivations for drawing the distinction. Darwin and Galton were imperialist, conservative millionaires, who wanted to believe that traits were inherited in order to refute reformers who thought social reform could improve living conditions for the working poor. Comte and Marx were revolutionaries committed to the violent overthrow of existing governments, on the assumption that the only thing holding the people back was the intransigence of conservatives who profited from their systematic exploitation.

According to Keller, recent discoveries, such as epigenetics and a diet-based treatment for the IQ-lowering genetic protein deficiency called PKU, make it clear that the terms of the debate make no sense. A gene cannot and does not act independently of an environment, and neither is there a human environment independent of genes. Further, she argued that many studies of heritability and environment fail to clearly distinguish a multitude of meanings that can hide beneath a single, over-stretched term. As a result, they tend to assume too much on the basis of the evidence they actually discuss. It is not, therefor, a question of deciding one way or another between nature and nurture, or even finding a synthesis between two opposed approaches. Rather, the debate should simply be abolished as intrinsically absurd.

Evelyn Fox Keller is a leader among a generation of feminist scholars interested in questions of gender and science. Some of the other leaders of this movement, which emerged after the Port Huron Statement (1962), include Sandra Harding (1935 – ), who linked feminism to post colonialism and the study of various oppressed (or “subaltern”) social groups; Lorraine Code (1935 – ), who argued for the validity of a uniquely feminine heuristic; and Elizabeth Anderson (1959 – ), who has integrated feminist critiques of science with moral and political theories of democracy. Although feminist philosophy (etc.) of science is a complex and controversial field, and these scholars frequently disagree among themselves as to what changes are desirable or realistically attainable, in general they share a commitment to broadening the scope of science so that it does not (as they argue it has and does) devalue feminine perspectives as a kind of structural principle. There is nothing particularly masculine, they argue, about advancing the cause of human knowledge - it is an activity that should be open to anyone with the intelligence and dedication to contribute. .

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eandersn/hownotreview.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-science/

(Part of a series on Science, Technology, and Society, XIII of XX)
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Bas van Fraassen and Constructive Empiricism

"What we represent to ourselves behind experiences exists only in our understanding."

Bas van Fraassen (1941 - ) is a Dutch-American philosopher of science at Princeton University, famous for a unique form of scientific agnosticism called Constructive Empiricism, meant to steer a middle course between Constructionism and Realism.

The Constructionist account of science emphasizes context at the ...expense of theory, while the Realist account takes the opposite approach. For Constructionists a theory is a useful story about experience - that we have one theory and not another is the product of a historically contingent process. Just as three different people who witness the same event can tell three very different stories about it, three different societies can tell three different stories about experience. These stories can be very different, yet all offer an adequate account of the evidence. Therefor theories describe the context in which they were created at least as much as they do anything real about the universe. Because every theory emerged from some context and some dry of values, one cannot be separated from the other. For Constructionists, they are invented, not discovered.

Realists, on the other hand, regard Scientific theories as actual descriptions of actual reality, exclusive and contradictory to alternative models. Belief in their literal truth is the only possible outcome of a rational inquiry into their nature. Context does not create theories - theories are successful precisely when they transcend their context of creation in order to describe the universe as it really is. If the scientific revolution had occurred in MIng China instead of Bourbon Europe, we would still have the same laws of motion that Newton discovered, only they would not be called "Newtown's" laws. Context is trivial, explanatory success profound. Theories are discovered, not invented.

In the Scientific Image (1980) and Laws and Symmetry (1989), Bas van Fraassen offered a different approach. Perhaps surprisingly, he did so by reviving aspects of the Positivist program. Philosophy of Science should, he held, be regarded as the clarification of relationships between Theory and Observation, Language and Logic. A commitment to the utility of a theory does not, on Fraassen's account, imply a commitment to its status as truth - only to its correspondence to observation. In other words, a successful theory should be regarded "empirically adequate," a more practical standard than "literal truth."

Knowledge stops with the unaided human senses. Objects or processes that cannot be directly observed, but only "detected" with instruments, cannot be empirically known, because the senses, as such, do not and cannot observe them. Rather, the instrument does, and the senses observe what the instrument observes. Inference to the best explanation is valid in the former case but not the latter. For instance, if you hear scratching in the walls, squealing and scurrying at night, and you notice your cheese has gone missing, you might reasonably infer the presence of a mouse. You can know it, because, even if you haven't seen the mouse, you could in principle, and if you wait long enough you probably will. On the other hand, if you run a large hadron collider and detect subatomic debris consistent with the theory that calls for the existence of the highs boson, you cannot know that the boson actually exists, because you have not and cannot see it. What you can know is whether or not your theory is "empirically adequate."

Because many, if not most, of the things with which Science has to deal cannot be directly observed, the central question of science is not "what is the truth about nature?" but "what counts as an empirically adequate explanation?" This in turn is largely a question of context. Rather than ask, like the Constructionists, "who created this theory, and for what purpose?" we should ask "who is going to use this theory, and for what purpose?" In this respect, an explanation is like a tool: a good hammer is not much use for washing clothes, nor a washing machine for driving nails. Similarly, Quantum Mechanics is not a good explanation for time dilation, nor is Relativity for the weak nuclear force.

Philosophically, the pay off for this view is that it allows the philosopher to handle scientific theories without committing himself to their literal truth, which can be undesirable for reasons we've already seen. Similarly, it makes room for Constructionism and Realism within the same framework. The cost is that it treats as uncertain the existence of some things, like the Higgs Boson, about which scientists are reasonable certain, and for which we have good evidence. Science and philosophy of science are not entirely reconciled, but neither is Fraassen engaged in a radical and far-reaching critique like the Constructionists.

Fraassen's home page: http://www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/cv/index.htm

SEP: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constructive-empiricism/

Part of a series on Science, Technology, and Society (XII of XX)
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David Bloor and the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge

"The aim of physiology is to explain the organism in health and disease; the aim of mechanics is to understand machines which work and machines which fail; bridges which stand as well as those which fall. Similarly the sociologist seeks theories which explain the beliefs which are in fact found, regardless of how the investigator evaluates them."

David Bloor (1942 – ) is a sociologist at the Univ...ersity of Edinburgh and founder of the Edinburgh School in the field of Science Technology and Society (STS.) In Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976) he continued the Scottish tradition pf philosophical skepticism and defined a new and controversial approach to the Sociology of Knowledge, called the Strong Programme.

According to David Bloor, sociologists in the past confined their investigations to the explanation of false beliefs. True beliefs were either self-evident or arose out of a rational process of discovery, and therefor required no explanation. Or, put another way, their truth was their explanation. This habit of deference amounted to a structural lack of nerve within sociology, which he called the Weak Programme. Bloor challenged his colleagues to explain true as well as false beliefs in terms of the same social processes. Just as natural scientists investigate all corners of the physical world, and do not admit that any kind of physical phenomena is beyond their powers of investigation, so too the scientists of society (sociologists) should be willing to investigate the origins of all kinds of beliefs, whether true and false – especially the hitherto forbidden realm of scientific knowledge.

 Bloor defined knowledge as beliefs which people confidently hold to and live by, and the goal of Sociology of Knowledge as the discovery of the causes which produce it. Scientific knowledge, like any other kind, has a social origin. That is to say, it arises out of a particular context, and that context is demonstrably a product of contingent historical and social factors. It follows, then, that scientific theories cannot be understood in separation from that context, any more than a work of literature, art, or music can be.

In consequence, both scientists and philosophers of science misunderstand the nature of scientific knowledge when they attribute the success (or failure) of a theory to its value (or lack thereof) as a descriptor of objective reality. This practice amounts to a Teleology of nature (i.e. a faith that it contains a special purpose for man, and that this purpose can be treated as a causal factor in history.) Because teleological explanations are always invalid in science (if not necessarily in philosophy), these kinds of explanations can and should be rejected out of hand.

Having dispensed with “The Weak Programme,” Bloor went on to outline his own, “Strong” alternative. A scientific (that is, sociological) theory of knowledge should adhere to four principles: (1) Causality: the sociologist is concerned to explain how and why beliefs gain currency; (2) Impartiality: he does not attempt to distinguish between true and false beliefs – instead of arbitrating truth claims, he investigates their origins and function in society; (3) Symmetry: he applies the same causes to true and false beliefs - the same causal mechanisms will explain the success of true and false beliefs alike, just as the same mathematical principles explain the stability or instability of a bridge, and the same physiological principles explain the health and disease of the organism; (4) Reflexivity: he applies the same analytical tools to himself and to his work. These tenants were cast in the manner of methodological assumptions which did not have to be proven before they could be used. Rather, just as in physics, the validity of the approach would be demonstrated retroactively, by evaluating the practical results it produced.

Whereas Thomas Kuhn had suggested that science might not be an entirely rational activity, and Paul Feyerabend had drawn certain philosophical and political conclusions from a rather more strident belief, David Bloor was the first scholar to offer a methodological approach for systematic study. Rather than taking the claims of science for granted, and adopting an internalist view of science that either sought to justify its results or prescribe better practices, Bloor argued for an approach that ignores the truth status of scientific theories and instead concentrates on their social context of production. Needless to say, the idea that truth claims arising out of science can be ignored at all, let alone as a systematic methodological principle, was and is controversial. Between Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Bloor, the anti-realist and critical posture known to its opponents as “relativism” emerged as a serious position within the academy. Attempts to hash out the issues raised by these three, and to incorporate them in some way with the philosophy and actual practice of science, led to the establishment of Science, Technology, and Society departments across the United States in the 1960’s and 70’s. It remains a vibrant, multi-disciplinary field of inquiry today.
http://faculty.washington.edu/lynnhank/Bloor.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5niwyPoMw4
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-knowledge-social/

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