Science Wars Revisited

[campbel2][jungesam] I'm beginning to hate this conversation as much as I hate philosophy. Yet because for some reason I can't stop...

But I have revised my position a bit, in typical Grinnell fashion, from my original polemic. Alot of what you two have say has been quite good, and made me think about it all deeper than I did originally. Sorry that this is so long, but I'm going to try and rephrase what I think the issue is using Kant, simply because it is fresh in my mind, certainly applicable, and also fairly logical, which I think is also appropriate. I'll understand if you guys get bored and fade out, I totally understand why nobody except for me really likes this stuff.

[campbel2] "It seems to me that the goal of any good scientist is to discover the way nature works, and the mode of expression of any scientific discovery is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery." I don't think I agree with the second half. If the nature of the discovery dictated the mode of expression, then it would be a simple, apparent statement that is readily obvious. It would be an analytic statement, such as the famous, "gold is yellow". The expression in quotes is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery. Now, while in a sense, by the mode of "the scientific method" science attempts to maintain "objectivity" (quotes do not indicate irony here), so it is attempting to portray itself as simply an extension of an analytic statement. Thus any person will take the statement that "gold has 79 protons" as an simple, descriptive statement. However, logically, it is not. It is not given to representation as such. No one has ever seen a proton. This does not mean, as many would portray the "post-modern" argument to conclude, that "gold has 79 protons" is false, nor does it mean that the statement can never be proven. The statement is synthetic, because it takes a collection of analytic judgments and synthesizes them together following a logical pattern. In other words, it uses the scientific method. The scientist constructs a well-thoughtout experimental hypothesis, records data, attempts to find any weak point that could cause conflicting data, and at the end of the experiment presents whether s/he believes the hypothesis is proven. If... then... right? If I bombard an element with protons, then the atoms will split into these elements, provided I have understood the sub-atomic structure correctly. And, if the scientist is good (as is almost anyone who has worked in the field long enough to earn qualification) then the experiment will be repeatable, because the logical synthesis given in the hypothesis will logically be true, as a logical expression of the analytically verified end conditions of various supplied beginning analytically verifiable conditions.

My point is that while there is a basis of analytically verifiable conditions behind any fact of nature (we can easily get a consensus that gold is yellow) the fact that an experiment is necessary to verify the truth of scientific claims, not simply an experience, is a signal that a seperate logical process is going on in conjunction with "nature", and it is not simply nature working itself out before our eyes. The proof of this is that we have a scientific method which scientists take very seriously, because that is the only way to maintain "objectivity" in the sense of a consensus of people looking at the logical process of the experiment and concluding that the logical synthesis corresponds not only to analytic data available (e.g. the number of mg of solute that results) but also to the synthetic process of HUMAN logical thought (IF the chromatograph reads 760... THEN the element is... , IF an electron jumps an orbit, THEN the molocule releases a photon... , IF there is an impurity in the crystal, THEN the weight will NOT be indicative of... etc).

And this scientific method is deeply a human condition. Yet, a logical condition that allows us to have such an important thing such as truth. Even if the definition of the atom is evolving, that does not mean that atoms themselves are altered, becuase "atoms themselves" must maintain a static "truth" in order to be conceived as nature, because we cannot see them for ourselves. And you are correct, thanks to the scientific method, we can perceive of a static idea of the "real" atom, because we know that the scientists are using a logical method that means that as much as we have need to interact with things on an atomic level, we will be interacting with them according to a logical pattern (i.e. their true nature as we conceive of it) which is always "approximated based on the best current objective evidence," as you put it (and we create static terms accordingly to use as tools). And so we were able to build the atomic bomb, because we could put our ingenuity to work in nature to build things, to create and destroy (altough the law of thermodynamics prevents it) technology and nature in addition to our conceptions of those cateogories of physical existence.

This gets into what you said, [jungesam] (personally, I think your problem is that you have read "post-moderns" without reading very far into Kant, but I don't really want to get into that). Because our logical construction of the world, although heavily tied to the "world" itself through various perceptive organs, often gets a little ahead of itself, or gets confused. Simply, sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we make a mistake in our logical process, and don't realize it until some perceptual apparatus brings us information which causes us to go back and correct ourselves. Sometimes we perceive something "wrong" and so don't realize that the coat over the chair is not a person until we see that there is no face. Or sometimes we think we understand the way something "works", (antibacterial soaps stop us from getting sick) until we find something intruding upon that understanding (I'm puking because I have a virus, shit I didn't think about that). The problem is not that someone is being illogical, the problem is that their logic has taken a wrong turn. Newton was not wrong when he developed his physics, because it worked. Now that we have more information, we can add and change our logical conception of gravity. Someone who believes in a god is not logically wrong, they have more likely than not experienced what they believe to be evidence that logically proves for them the fact of god. Although in the latter there is obviously no general consensus. But, as we see now, people are finding plenty of "evidence" that evolution is "illogical". One of the things humans are best at is ignoring things and forgetting things. And so our logic, while a very powerful process that guides our complete existence in the world, is so subjectively strong that sometimes it takes turns down strange paths. Let's not forget little gems of history like hydrotherapy, eugenics, and phrenology that at one time had plenty of very logical people believing in their truth.

This is just as true in any social science as it is in hard science. Any philosopher is attempting to logically argue a point. Even someone as poetic as Irigaray, even someone as verbose as Guattari. I don't think that either of them fail logically. I can follow their logic perfectly well. What they may fail at is expressing their logical pathways and syntheses in a way that can convince a consensus of people of their validity. Which, according to the scientific method, would make them not true (not untrue, just not true). I would not agree, Sam, that physics does not have a choice about its use of jargon, whereas philosophy does. I think that physics presents its universally logical statements in a way that makes the impact of the statements only useful to people who are in a small circle. On the other hand, philosophy's universal statements are directed in the context of having a wide, world-changing impact, and so there seems, at least to you, to be some expectation of preparing a discourse for the masses. The problem however, as I see it, is that the discourse of the masses is precisely the problem in a large number of cases. Take race for example. You and I both know (and scientists have proved, for that matter) that race is not real. However, for billions of people it is, and in all different ways. Therefore, how do you objectively discuss something that is not objectively real? This is why alot of sociology is not very useful, in my opinion. So there is going to be some disconnect in a discourse that is attempting to logically argue something directed at people who in a contrary logical context (cf. Marxism's history as a discourse...). Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that Guattari is justified in breaking the dictionary twice a sentence, but it does mean that there are going to have to be alot of new ideas and new terms that are quite unfamiliar to the common person, and its going to be a difficult adjustment for anyone picking up the text, perhaps even from the last book they read. Although philosophy maintains a grounding in the "world", alot of its material comes from within the logical processes itself. Continuing to use Kant as an example, I don't think there is a person that could argue that the First Critique is not logical. It is perhaps the most logically argued and thoughtout book I have ever read. Yet it uses less than 10 real world examples in the entire text. That is because its focus is on the way we think, not on anything in the "world". That is its whole point, its "Copernican Turn", and why it has been so influential for so long. By deeply critiquing our understanding of how we think, he describes a new way of thinking on the basis of how we already think, despite how complex the idea and the actual substance of the book are.

Now, sticking with Kant, the reason he wrote the book was to answer the problems of the Rationalists and the Empiricists. One relied upon god's order to maintain the truth of the world, the other believed that there was no truth at all beyond individual experience. Kant's middle ground was basically the ideas I've been articulating here (although remember, I didn't do too well in the course!!!). The result was that we could trust scientists like Newton while still being able to continue experimenting. I've mentioned Husserl's critique of naturalism a couple of times. What this is about is basically reminding us about Kant. Naturalism is what happens when science forgets that objectivity is a logical process, and not a world that exists, waiting for us to uncover it. It is not normally a terrible problem, except when it prevents logical progress in science because by the failure in the scientific method of objectivity (As I started, Charlie, which is above all NOT derived from nature but occurring in our own logical processes) to imagine the possibility that its entire process is guiding it not towards the buried truth, but towards a fake, idealized truth that is getting us further and further from the actual problem we are concerned with. Husserl was mainly concerned with perception, which opens a whole other can of worms that would require me to rephrase everything I've said so far (Merleau-Ponty says it better than I ever could in Phenom. of Percept anyway), but just as a quick example, take Heidegger, Husserl's student. Heidegger became so obsessed by his pursuit of metaphysics as the true Dasein that he allowed himself to believe that the Nazi regime was the path towards it. Even apart from the horrible consequences of the Nazi's Heidegger soon became disappointed in the academic future of the 3rd Reich because he misunderstood that this movement was fascist, and constituted largely on anti-semitism. It simply did not occur to him that the "triumph of the will" was not actually about the metaphysical destiny of nations, and that it was actually about hatred and social control. And of course, we know that Heidegger had forgotten his Kant, after Being in Time that is... (god I'm a nerd with no life).

This is what I see the problem being. I think that in tossing aside philosophy science forgets that it is a philosophy, a philosophy of nature. Important in that philosophy is the self-critique that comes in every philosophy, whether it is in the context of post-structuralism or the scientific method. That's what "post-modernism" is, after all, a backlash of critique, albeit often immature and poorly organized, directed at the forces of modernism that allowed society to head down such poor logical pathways in the last century because it was so convinced of its truth that it didn't stop to consider its truth might be horrible error. This doesn't mean that "post-modernism" is correct above all, and that it doesn't have its own considerable logical errors. But a conservative retreat of science to the modern trends will not solve the problem, it will only continue the cycle. I really think that philosophers and scientists need to work together on this, and people like Sokal and Dawkins only widen the rift.