[A-List] How "scientific" is science?

["Jurriaan Bendien" <adsl675281@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ha Sabri, you're getting philosophical!

In Dutch, they have a saying "however quick the lie may be, the truth will
catch up with it", which is like the English "the truth will out" or "you
can fool some of the people some of the time, and some people all of the
time, but you cannot fool all people all of the time".

On balance, as a sociological observation, it is really quite remarkable how
*honest* people generally are - it seems that lying, beyond a certain point,
is counterproductive to survival, and that people are on the whole very
resistant to messages which contradict their own life-experience. In one of
his speeches, Leon Trotsky attributed lying to existential contradictions -
thus, the more contradictory people's lives are, the more prone people are
to lying, in order to paper over the contradictions.

Seriously, as far as I am concerned, science can be defined simply as
systematic, sustained inquiry using the tools of logic, rational-critical
dialogue and conscientious experiential, practical or experimental
verification, which assumes among other things respect for truth, honest
record-keeping, a capacity for self-criticism and objectivity, and the
willingness to test hypotheses or theories anew (openness to new evidence).

No easy demarcation of science and non-science is possible however - it is
intrinsic in science, that what is scientifically valid, and what is not, is
open to contestation, and so what is required for scientific progress is the
freedom for this contestation process to occur.

"The scientific method" does not exist, because different objects of inquiry
call for different methods. The real problem is not so much with "science"
as such, but with the utilization of scientific research, and with
scientism. Science can be used for good or for ill, it may give power or
destroy it, and it contains no intrinsic morality other than the internal
standards or code of conduct which a science has, that makes that science
possible.

"Scientism" asserts the superiority of scientific knowledge in general to
any other way of knowing, it attaches a *privileged social status* to
science, but that is rather dubious, because what way of knowing is
appropriate depends on intention, practical requirement, need and purpose.
Science may not help people solve their moral and spiritual problems, and if
science stuffs up people's lives, a revolt against science could be quite
defensible (depending on what kind of revolt it is).

So really, I think your problem does not concern science, but ethics and
power. Yet e.g. Marxism contained no specific ethics other than the
("modernist") imperative to revolt against all conditions that make people
less than they could be (that is what emancipation is about). Commerce
contains no specific ethics either, beyond the obligations necessary to
settle transactions. Hence the need for a complex legal system in bourgeois
society - also riddled with contradictions - to regulate and mediate the
"bella omnes contra omni", enforced by the power of the wealthy classes and
their capital.

Quite possibly, the biggest enemy of science in our epoch is managerialist
mumbo-jumbo, but that mumbo-jumbo exists precisely because managers must
operate in highly contradictory situations, and mediate many different
conflicts, under conditions where there is little shared or consensual
morality underpinning evaluations, and those evaluations themselves are
constantly changing. In his latest book, Frank Furedi indeed observes that
"politics is lost for words" - what you get is a sort of "gobbledygook
newspeak" (for example, "Islamo-fascism").

But behind that gobbledygook is not really a crisis of science, but a moral
crisis, a problem of finding broader justifications and legitimation for
what you do, and why you are right/worng to do it, how to unite people,
within a framework of great social contradictions. People become obsessed
with setting limits for other people. And then the problem is, that science
might not solve anything there. To prove even a small scientific hypothesis
can take a lot of work, yet people want everything "instant" these days
("call somebody on the mobile who knows").

But that is just to say, we happen to live in an epoch of massive, rapid
social change, in which a return to the past is impossible, while the future
is also uncertain. As Elmar Altvater noted, the more you operate with
deregulated, global markets, the more uncertainty, risk and insecurity you
produce, and that - I might add - can create all sorts of conservative
reflexes, a lowering of expectations and a lowering of "horizons of the
possible" - we imagine what we cannot have, or cannot be. It also creates
skepticism about the ability of social sciences to provide insight that is
useful, directly relevant and informative.

If you survey the thinking of the elites, you find that their moral
ideologies are typically drawn from the last time they had to fight
seriously for their own position in a major way, often, World War II - this
is the source of moral absolutes (hence the fascination with the Holocaust,
and so on). Yet, precisely because of the rapidity of change, those old
moralities might not even make much sense anymore, and anyway, most of
today's rulers in rich countries were infants in World War II, they began to
think independently in the course of the long boom of 1947-1973 when
everything seemed to be getting so much better all the time.

As a sign of the times we live in, I have this personal anecdote for you.

I went into an appliance store the other day to have a look at prices for
computer printers, because I discovered that replacing the ink cartridges
for the printer I bought previously cost nearly as much as the whole
printer - quite absurd, if you think about it. I stood there having a look,
and through the intercom blared a Xmas song in bright tempo about how "Jesus
Christ was born on Xmas day" and how this meant we were going to "live
forever". At the same time, a WTO official came on the wide TV screens on
display there, declaring how this round of talks provided a unique
opportunity to improve the lot of the world's poor. There you have it, life
in the early 21st century - a surrealistic mix of science, superstition,
moral malaise and the modern market economy.

Seasons greetings

Jurriaan