HOW REASONABLE IS SCIENTIFIC REASON?

 

 

The following is part of an interview from cbc radio. The interviewee is Sajay Samuel .

Isn’t scientific knowledge true since it manifestly works? Samuel begins his answer by drawing a distinction he finds in the work of historian of science Peter Dear.

Samuel Sajay: Peter Dear notes that, when we today speak about science, we speak about science in two ways. We refer to bodies of knowledge that tell us something about the world as it is. We also speak about science as an instrument with which to change the world, to improve the world—the vaccine, the bomb, the car.

It has both this instrumental face, to use his language, and a natural, philosophical face—natural philosophy being the study of the way the world works and the way the world is. When you ask, why is science true? Why is a certain theory true?, the tendency is to say, because it works, because the plane flies, because the vaccine prevents disease, because the atom bomb explodes—those stand as proofs of the truth claims of science. If science were false, if the truth claims made by science were false, this vaccine wouldn’t work. If you ask, why does this vaccine work; it’s because the science is true. There’s circularity in this jusࢢficaࢢon; it’s true because it works, and it works because it’s true. Peter Dear calls it an ideology, and he calls it that in part, I think, because it can be falsified. Take the case of radio waves, which is one of his two examples. The predicࢢon of radio waves in 1880, I think it was, by Hertz, based upon a scienࢢfic theory propounded by Maxwell regarding the ether. The atmosphere is composed of ether through which radio waves propagate. Well the radio waves, which is one of his two examples. Well the radio waves were real—the prediction was sound; it worked—but the theory was not: it was utterly false. The other example he gives is of navigators, who, even today, use the old geocentric astronomy rather than the heliocentric astronomy. Again, you can have a perfectly false theory regarding what the world is, and it’s useful. You can get things done. This unquestioned justification—why is something true? Because it works. Why does it work? Because it’s true— can be easily falsified. And yet is held. We don’t tend to question the connection between knowing something and constructivism, knowledge through construction can be understood to be the signature of modernity.

What concerns Samuel is that science, historically speaking, doesn’t just supplement common sense; it displaces it. Scientific knowing becomes the epitome of reason and the paradigm of all proper knowledge. The term “common sense” continues to denote sound judgment, but it also begins to evoke a certain ignorance of how things really are. Typical, in this respect, is Albert Einstein’s often cited remark that “common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudice laid down by the mind in childhood.”

Samuel wants to contest science’s monopoly of reason. He would like to restore the dignity of common sense and restrict the application of science. Two distinctions are crucial to his case: mathematical knowledge must be distinguished from judgment, and experiment must be distinguished from experience.

SS: The distinction between experiment and experience is of the first moment. One has to be clear about this. From Aristotle to Hobbes, experience is understood as the consequence of repeated sensory impressions, which accumulate in memory. Only then can we say we have an experience. It is even today understood that “he’s an experienced man” means that he has gone through something repeatedly. That’s the sense in which we mean “experience”.

“Experiment” can be a one-off event, a single event. Not only can the experiment be a single event, but it requires the staging of nature. You have to interrupt, cut, parcel, change, arrange so that you can study nature, so that you can interrogate it. This is not what is obtained in normal course. Experiment stages nature and then generalizes from that staging as if it were experience and anybody, anywhere, could repeat the procedure. That’s not true. It takes a lot of apparatus to repeat many experiments. These experimental results, which are one off events, single events or events repeated in highly stylized settings, by their very nature are extraordinary. But they are presented to us as evidence of the ordinary course of nature.

I make a distinction between experience and experiment: experience refers to what all of us usually will go through in interacࢢon with nature in its normal course, while experiment is the consequence of the staging of nature, typically producing results that are not ordinarily visible but that are then rhetorically justified as being ordinary.

Samuel tells us that the rhetoric of science tries to persuade us that experiment should count as experience, that we should treat items of scientific knowledge as if they were as if they were as real as what we can taste and touch.

Samuel would like to carefully distinguish between them, and he puts equal weight on a parallel distinction between mathematical demonstration and common-sense judgment.

SS: Numbers give answers in the way a computer does: zero, one; true, false. If I say this table is six feet long, then either it is or it isn’t. There’s only one answer. Even when people talk about statistical variability and so on, there is still one correct answer. We can’t fathom it to the degree of precision that we want, but, nevertheless, there is one correct answer. All numerical measurements are of that character.

There is in Plato, for example, another kind of measurement. It is the measure—and it is a measurement—of too much, too little or just right, but that second class of measurement is an act of unquantifiable judgment. It depends. It depends on the situaࢢon. It depends on the human intenࢢon. It depends on who’s asking the question, for what purpose. The answer is not an unambiguous six and a half inches.

This distinction between mathematical measurement and what we call a judgment regarding measure—is there too much or too little?—comes to the fore in what we’re going through or what we’re facing now, for example, in questions of global warming . Global warming is a scientific hypothesis. It’s either true or false. Either the carbon is .2 or it’s .5, but whether that is too much or too little is a matter of judgment. It depends. It depends on the human intention. It depends on human purposes, et cetera. There is no scientific answer to that question.

More deeply, we can ask, should we be understanding nature in this way? Now I’m not speaking just of global warming . Is there too much or too little science or scientific ways of knowing? It’s a perfectly legitimate question, and there is no scientific answer to that. This means, in principle, that experience and judgment are superior to scientific knowledge in rank, because we can always ask of science, is there too much of it going around?, and there is no scientific answer to that question. The muteness, the silence of science when the question of its own legitimacy is posed shows that there is a higher authority in this regard: common sense. I don’t mean mystical authorities, simply common sense. It is this point that I want to underline. Our ideological slavery to the identity between science and reason— scientific reasoning is the only way of reasoning—can be upended by noting this one fundamental flaw: science cannot answer the question of its own legitimacy. This provides a lever by which to free ourselves from our ideological, blind identification of science and reason. Asking about the legitimacy of science is an extremely reasonable way to recognize the muteness of science and thus put it in its place, as it were.

Samuel wants to establish two crucial distinctions: between experiment and experience, and between mathematical demonstration and common-sense judgment.by means of these distinctions, he thinks that science can be, as he says, put in its place. It can be made to stop masquerading as reason itself and made to answer to an authority outside of science. Otherwise, we will turn endlessly in the same circle in which the answer to the problems generated by science is always more science. Why does putting science in its place matter? Well, first of all, because science, in a broad sense, now completely dominates our public and political life, defining both what we think about and what we do.

SS.: What is the subject of political discourse? It’s global warming . It’s Kyoto. It’s cars. It’s economic distribution and unemployment. It’s sex policy. It’s foreign aid. It’s flows of trade, et cetera, et cetera. First, this subject matter of political discourse is constituted by objects made from economic science, biochemistry, et cetera, et cetera. Second, in thinking through these matters, these subjects, the apparatus or forms of thinking that are brought to bear are themselves scientific. Political questions are dealt with through public policies, and public policy is an arm of political science. What passes for politics today—both in its subject matter and in its resolution, if you want—is framed in scientific terms. The polemical way to say this would be that public policy consists of experiments on the polis, scientific management of people.

Modern political life is thus scientific in two senses. First, its contents are framed scienࢡfically. Even an ordinary newscast will refer familiarly to things that might as well be angels or gryphons, as far as most of the audience is concerned: a critical shortage of radioisotopes, let’s say, or an adjustment of so many basis points in the interest rate. Second, people are managed scientifically by the arts of polling, public relations, health promotion, and so on. That’s what state policy now is, in large part, Samuel says.

SS: If you investigate the term “policy,” it comes out of “police” and the sciences of police, which exist to order the political space. It becomes the armature; it becomes the vector through which you manage the political. That’s the role and purpose of public policy. Now, it seems to me, insofar as it is informed by science, social sciences, it is nothing but the scientific experimentation on people.

Aristotle has an interesting understanding.

He says, “Man, by nature, is a political animal,” and he argues that all animals, man included, have voice. Voice gives expression to pleasure and pain. A cat’s meow, when you slap it on the rump for sleeping on your bed, is aggrieved in a way that its meow is not when you feed it. That we share with animals, but only man has speech, and speech is the way in which man expresses his concern for justice and injustice, what is good and what is bad, what is fitting and what is not fitting, what is proper and what is improper.

The scientific management of man—if we agree on what science is—is inhospitable to questions of just and unjust, proper and improper. Those are questions of judgment, requiring you to understand what is too much and too little, what is in the mean. In fact, the scientist himself admits this. He says, that’s the domain of values; but values are utterly irrational, and that’s why I oppose this whole way of setting up the question. The distinction between science and value is false inasmuch as it leaves no room for a reasonable criique of science. Values become a subjective, irrational commitment to decision. Why do I do something? Because I want to, but I have no reason for it.

Coming back to my point, the kind of speech that characterizes the political animal for Aristotle finds no soil in the world of public policy.

Samuel’s response to a politics that uses scientific techniques to manage scientifically framed issues is to turn his back, not out of indifference, nor out of intellectual pride, but because he believes that only by rejecting a politics immune to common sense can true political judgment be reborn.

SS: There is a first step, it seems to me, in recognizing the inhospitability of what passes for politics today to what is properly considered political speech—namely, questions of justice and injustice, what is appropriate and what is not. That first step, recognizing the inhospitability, is to establish some distance and to refuse to engage with questions that are posed in purely scientific terms. We have to ask whether or not there is too much science and scientific ways of talking and speaking in politics—that’s our first strep—rather than what we’re invited to do now, which is simply to take sides on so-called political questions. Either you’re for GMO(Genetically Modified Organisms) or against GMO; either you’re for global warming or you’re against global warming; either you’re for outsourcing or you’re against outsourcing. Your credentials as a so-called political animal are given by this blind decision as to which side of the debate you’re going to come down on. But this is done in perfect incomprehension. We can’t understand or comprehend these questions in a commonsensical way. We take on faith, at the end, the truths regarding these questions. Rather than engaging in what, traditionally speaking, is no more than apolitical noisemaking—beating our drums, standing in lines, fighting for or against this or that—I would suggest that we first ask whether we can we step back and get rid of a type of speech which does not lend itself to what is primarily political—namely, quesࢢons of justice and injustice—and that does not allow us to make a judgment as to whether something is too much or too little?

To make it concrete, I can’t get into the discussion about climate change —and I’ve read quite a bit, though nowhere close to what is perhaps necessary. I don’t want to deny for one minute tha tman has despoiled his home where we live. We shit in our own backyard. There is no question of this. However, the conundrum we face is the following: as this becomes a scientific reality, the solution is going to be scientific and will entail the scientific management of people, whether it is through pollution credits, whether it’s through increased gas prices, whether it is through redesigned urban spaces—whatever. The idea that man has gone too far with industrialization, which is the proximate cause today for all of these troubles, was understood long before and without any science. The solution then was also nonscientific and commonsensical: saying, this is too much. There is no need for this. We are going too far. The routine disregard for common sense and privileging of science is precisely what has led us here. I think there is no way out except through a return to common sense. Otherwise you end up with more scientific management. You don’t end up anywhere else than where we are already.

Samuel’s reticence vis-à-vis climate change as a political issue has two foundations. The first is reluctance to assume the distanced point of view of the climate modeller, who surveys the earth, as it were, from a great height, abstracting from every weather and encompassing every age of the earth. The second is his feeling that the discussion of climate.

change is not usually about the proper limits to human acࢡvity, about how far we ought to go in our exploitaࢡon of nature, but almost always about how far the biosphere can be safely pushed before it pushes back—in other words, about what we can get away with.

SS: Let us ask, what is the purpose of engaging in these climate change models? Mind you, I have no doubt—and I want to underscore this fact–that the earth has been despoiled through industrialization. All I have to do is to walk in my home in India, for example, and take a breath of what passes for air. It’s manifest. It’s common sense. I’m not questioning that. Let’s go back to the issue: why these climate change models? It seems to me that the question that is being posed is, how far can we despoil the earth before it takes its revenge? It’s an eminently practical question. How much can we continue to destroy before the earth bites back? But it seems to me that the prior question to ask is, are there natural thresholds that even those of the meanest capacities can see should not be crossed? The moment you exceed what you are capable of, the moment you move from a bicycle to a car, you’ve broken a certain natural threshold. In breaking that threshold or limit, not only is it likely that you will despoil the earth, but, more importantly, it is likely that you will lose the centre from which you can see that you’re despoiling the earth. I think that is terribly important. The more credence we give to the necessity of posing questions scientifically and eliciting scientific answers, the more we buy into the necessity of being scientifically managed.

What politics should be about is what every citizen can understand and experience. Otherwise, Samuel says, only the expert is enࢡtled to an opinion, and people are deprived of any opportunity to exercise judgment. How many citizens are competent to judge the appropriate atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide? When technical quesࢡons dominate public discussion, the majority is disenfranchised. In consequence, ignorance and incompetence intensify along with expertise.

SS: In the Age of Reason, Enlightenment, techno-scientific rationalism, this apogee no civilizaࢢon has reached in the history of man, there are many varieties of ignorance. Marc Augé, the French anthropologist, notes that Americans are finding other Americans as strange as once the British found the Indians and the French found the North Africans. Americans have begun to do anthropology on themselves, so what was once reserved for the strange savage is now being applied at home. There seems to be a certain obscurity among Americans regarding themselves. Not to speak of another variety of ignorance that is expressed in identity politics and the search for identity: I don’t know myself, I’m going to figure out who I am—a certain obscurity regarding oneself, even. More than that, we’re surrounded by techno-scientific objects which, strictly speaking, have constructed for us a world of magic, where things work but the cause is occult or hidden. I go to the ATM, I put in a card. I punch in a certain secret code, and it spits out money. How and why, I have no idea. I was in France, and it happened there, too. I call my mother, and even though, somebody tells me, there are no wires, there is nothing, it just bounces off the air somewhere, yet she hears my voice. It seems that we’re living in an age of magic in the strict sense, surrounded by objects that work but whose causes are occult. There’s a certain obscurity in how things work.

Finally—and I find this parࢢcularly telling—the production of science has gotten so complicated that one scientist, or one class of scientists, doesn’t know what the other guys are doing. This came to a head for me, when David Ruelle reported in Chance and Chaos that the solution, or the purported proof, to the so-called four-colour theorem occupied five thousand pages, and no one mathematician could comprehend it—and obscurity even at the heart of mathematics. That is to say, rationalism has reached a stage where ignorance seems to be rife. If that is not a call to rediscover or to find out a reasonable critique of techno-scientific civilization, I don’t know what is. In this civilization, which enjoys what are considered to be the highest and most prolific fruits of reason—the byword of the Age of Reason was “dare to know”—we have reached, three hundred years later, an almost systemic ignorance. Nobody knows very much. Everything seems to be working. We are more and more made to behave irrationally. When I ask, how does the ATM work? Why does this work? Why does that happen?, answers are very hard to come by, and yet I’m expected to act. I’m expected to sign up, do things. We’re in the midst of a world where action is based on unreason.

Science, Samuel keeps stressing, cannot judge itself, cannot find its own proper limits, cannot tell us what is enough. For him, it is folly to answer each failure of science by calling only for a more subtle or a more comprehensive version of the same thing. What we urgently need is a language in which all citizens can discuss the questions of what is good for us. He proposes to revive an account of reason that can bring science under common judgment. But how can this even be imagined? Our public and private lives teem with scientific objects, and our speech is full of half-understood migrants from the sciences. How is a return to common sense conceivable? His answer appealed to what Canadian philosopher George Grant once called “intimations of deprival,” the feeling that something is missing in the modern, something we might rediscover were we to bracket our constant recourse to science.

SS: One way to distance from scientific terms and certain taken-for-granted terms, certain words, is to begin to undertake the exercise of finding out what they displaced. In attempting that work, I rediscover a residue, a remnant, a “rest”, something le[ over, that allows me to express, however incoherently, however gropingly, dissatisfaction with the scientific terms, recognition that they don’t quite address what we are asking. There is a gap between what the term purports to say and our acknowledgment that it doesn’t quite say it, and that gap provides the fillip, the inducement, to undertake the necessary historical investigation. What is lost through our being saturated in these scientific terms? I think the best way I can say this is through a quotation. The book I’m quoting from is Hermeneutics as Politics, by Stanley Rosen. He writes, “if knowledge is enlightenment and science is knowledge, it follows that to be enlightened is either to endure self-ignorance or to undergo reification.” If knowledge is enlightenment and science is knowledge—this is that equation we spoke of earlier—then to be enlightened is to suffer self-ignorance, because science cannot reach me, or to become an object, undergo reification. Why does it matter, you ask, that we are saturated in scientific terms? If it is through scientific terms that we understand ourselves, then we treat ourselves as objects. Or, if we recognize that scientific terms cannot help us understand ourselves, then we are forever obscure to ourselves, we are ignorant. Insofar as that scientific milieu does not change, we are condemned to ignorance. Man, the rational animal, finally has become an animal. This is why the stakes are, it seems to me, so high.

At the beginning Samuel pointed out that science denatures our senses. It shows us a world that is not what we sense it to be. Consequently, it is in a return to our senses that he sees the way out of the dilemma he has just described: under the rule of science, we must either come to see ourselves as objects or remain forever obscure to ourselves. It is through our senses that we belong to the world and the world to us.

SS: If it is through our senses that we apprehend the world, the senses are also the way we are tethered to what is given, and we cannot find our nature unless we acknowledge our naturalness, which is shared with the world around us. Unless we remain tied to the world, our fingers, as it were, plunged into the soil, we will forever mistake our nature. Why does common sense matter? Common sense is the gateway that links the world to my mind from the outside in. If I speak of natural thresholds as limits, this tethering is central or key. I have to remain tethered to the soil to know, to recognize a natural threshold. It is precisely because we’ve been uprooted and freely floating, for the most part, that we don’t grasp anymore, in a carnal, sensible way, the difference between walking and cycling and being FedExed. When you get into a car, you are made into a FedEx package, just as I am. The fact that we think of walking and driving as no more than alternative modes of transportaࢢon is an index, is a clue to how far we have come untethered, how uncommonsensical we have become.

Even if I can’t do anything, to think right, to attempt to think right, to study, to work, to clarify is a form of doing. To rediscover what it has taken three hundred years to uproot can’t be done in a day.