Re: [Marxism] RE: Science and Society [was: Challenge...]

["Mike Friedman" <mikedf@xxxxxxxx>]

... Supposed to, but really doesn't. Here?s my sketchy and incomplete
view: for more details, see, for example, Levins and Lewontin's The
Dialectical Biologist. Not even all of biological science uses the
"Scientific
Method" as your textbook description outlines it. The ?nomothetic?
approach to research, as described in our biology textbooks, seeks to
elaborate natural laws based on hypothesis-?prediction?testing, as you
note. This is an adequate description of sciences described as
?experimental,? but not ?historical.? It presupposes the predictive power
of hypotheses and the existence of populations of data that can be sampled
and contain information regarding degrees of uncertainty. In historical
sciences, however, such as paleontology or stratigraphy, you are not
testing a prediction based on a hypothesis, and, in many fields, you
cannot even analyze your data statistically. As S.J. Gould noted in The
Panda's Thumb, P. 28:

"Hypothesis, predictions, experiments, and answers:  the scientific
method.  But many sciences do not and can not work this way.  As a
paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, my trade is the reconstruction
of history.  History is unique and complex.  It cannot be reproduced in a
flask.  Scientists who study history, particularly an ancient and
unobservable history not recorded in human or geological chronicles, must
use inferential rather than experimental methods."

Ernst Mayr pointed out (Scientific American, July 2000): "Evolutionary
biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science -
the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have
already taken place.  Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques
for the explication of such events and processes.  Instead one constructs
an historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the
particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain."

But, the problem is deeper than this. Lying at the heart of the scientific
method is bourgeois (western -- Cartesian) rationalism:

?A rationality was transformed into Rationality; a way of knowing was
transformed into Science, a procedure for knowing became the Scientific
Method. The vast enterprise of dominating the world in a few centuries was
sufficient argument to demonstrate the imposition of European reason as a
universal and necessary development? (Gutierrez, 1974, cited in Levins and
Lewontin, 1985, Pp. 227).

It?s not that there is no ?objective reality,? but that the ?tools?
(senses and higher-order processing) we use to perceive and analyze it are
socially conditioned. Even what constitutes a ?datum? is socially
conditioned.

The scientific method relies on the existence of clearly separable
relations of cause and effect, but systems may not be amenable to this
approach. Again, for detais, see the section titled "Conclusion:
Dialectics" in L. and L.?s book. Just to mention, if you can't separate
independent and dependent variables, or if your conception of them as
separate is false, then the nomothetic "scientific method" is not useful
for studying the phenomenon.

Part of the problem ? which doesn?t really contradict what you said, but
does stipulate one fallacy of the ?scientific method? was spelled out by
Levins and Lewontin: ?The demand for objectivity, the separation of
observation and reporting from the researchers? wishes, which is so
essential for the development of science, becomes the demand for
separation of thinking from feeling. This promotes moral detachment in
scientists, which ? allows them to work on all sorts of dangerous and
harmful projects with indifference to the human consequences? (Pp. 225-6).

>
> Message: 15
> Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:15:19 -0400 (EDT)
> From: La Sainte <lasainte@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] RE: Science and Society [was: Challenge...]
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Mark Lause <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>Sent: Aug 30, 2006 7:39 PM
>>To: 'Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition'
>> <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>Subject: [Marxism] RE: Science and Society [was: Challenge...]
>>Science starts with observations and data, attempts a generalized
hypothesis, then
tests that hypothesis with experiments that addresses
>> the
>>problem of variables or its offers mathematical or other proofs.  There
>> is a
>>social and cultural context to science, but the scientific method is
supposed
to--and largely does--cut across those distinctions.
>
>




Michael Friedman
Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior
City University of New York

Molecular Systematics Laboratory
Department of Invertebrate Zoology
American Museum of Natural History
79th Street and Central Park West
New York, NY 10024

Office: 212-313-8721




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