Critical and cultural Prespectives on Science.

A Course diary by Robert Duffy

April 99

Contents

Introduction

Knowledge is power as Sun Szu said, and as a computer scientist I can appreciate the truth in this saying. All that computers ultimately do is to process information, a form of knowledge. From this basis they have become one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Science in action one could say. As a professional developer I have seen this science in action every day of my career. I have seen jobs being swept away, and seen surviving jobs being altered to the point where a man who has worked in the same job for fifteen years finds that he does not have sufficient knowledge to carry out his job in its new form. Computers are the changing the world.

Being 'in computers' is very much like being a doctor; no one really understands what it is you do, but they know it must be very complicated. There is a never-ending line of friends who wish to ask questions about 'how it all works'. I decided to take this course when I found myself coming to the conclusion that I do not know how it all works. It seems that I am on one side of a divide here, and despite being a scientist I felt that I had a very narrow view of science. I understand computers; I understand how they think. This gives me an enormous advantage in today's society. But it was only after working commercially as a programmer, and therefore seeing how the untrained interact with computers, that I really felt that I understood them. It was only after living abroad that I really felt that I understood something about being Irish. To me this course is letting me look at science from an outside perspective, or at least a more open one. By the end of it I hope to be able to say that I have gained a greater understanding of science.

Life Story

Life Story is a moral fable. The Franklin character uses science as a way to gain order, to understand things better. Crick and Watson use it in order to see the beauty of the universe. "Truth deserves to be pretty" as Watson says at one point. It is an appealing notion. Yet that truth would never have been achieved without the help of Franklin, for all her lack of imagination. She was the one who did all the mundane work that Watson and Crick tried to get around doing. Indeed one could say that the end would have been achieved without Watson and Crick. All they appeared to do was use her work to come to the conclusion quicker than she did. But she would have made the discovery sooner or later; Crick even admitted it himself at one point.

What can we take out of all this? Well anything we wish it seems. My good friend and colleague Gavin Clabby thinks that the film is not an accurate representation, that the real story was different than this. Taking the film on its own merits, most people in the class agreed that Rosalind Franklin was hard done by. I must say I agree. But I think it says more than that. Clearly the characters in the film are very different, but they obviously have the potential to work well together. Their work combined impressively in this film, even if it did combine through a very roundabout route. Merton said that properly scientific community should be communistic. Knowledge should belong to everyone. Franklin, Watson and Crick's knowledge was kept apart in this film, partially through institutional pressures and partially through their own prejudices. I think that it is obvious that they would have worked well together.

As to the type of scientist presented within, I think the scenes where the characters are looking at the DNA molecule are defining. When looking at the molecule Watson and Crick are looking at beauty. They see wonder. Franklin sees order. In science, I think there should be room for both.

Epistemology and Science

Dwight Eisenhower.

Over the last two weeks we have been looking at epistemology, both within and without science. We paid particular attention to philosophy, and in particular positivism. Last semester Kirk introduced us to the philosophy of science. We read about positivism, and then progressed onto some Hume, Hempel, and even some Heidigger. Heidigger is a choice that confused some people. He doesn't generally appear in the literature very much. But I felt that he had something to offer us. His concentration on the concept of being is important. Science likes to try to remove the observer from the observation, something I disagree with. In Heidigger's work I could see an attempt to make us aware that no matter what we do, it is based in who we are. We did quite a lot of work on how science is a culturally based field, and I think that no one in the class disagrees with this now (although there is still much disagreement on the significance of this statement). Rather than rehash this and go into the details of how this affects science's reliability I will try to take a different angle in this journal for the sake of completeness. I will be assuming that the scientific method does produce results with some degree of reliability, which I believe is self-evident from the success science has enjoyed over the last few centuries. This claim is has attracted some criticisms of course, but as a starting point it will suffice.

Philosophy is a subject that I have mixed feelings about, and in this I am not alone in the class. This is partially to do with our experience of last semester. I do not think that the philosophy of science is the most accessible area of philosophy. The mere mention of Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Hempel (God, Hempel) in the first week's lecture was enough to put some people off. But that aside, I find myself pondering on the whole nature of knowledge and what philosophy can bring us.

When Sir Francis Bacon published New Atlantis in 1626 he did so as propaganda for a belief that science should be based upon experimentation and observation. These ideas have transformed science to the point that it has split from philosophy, its parent, and now has a very different view of what knowledge is. But there is still a link, most notably to the branch of philosophy known as positivism. Positivism believes that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge. Kirk said last semester that positivism is only interested in asking questions that can be answered. This is a contentious position, but it is one that science seems to have adopted. In science only scientific knowledge is true knowledge, the rest is unproved and therefore unusable. But the fact is that people, even scientists, hold a wide range of beliefs that are unproven and indeed some would say unprovable. Are we then to ignore all these areas of human experience?

So I see a problem here. On the one hand I hold a great deal of sympathy for philosophy. It is a discipline that can be used to interrogate any subject. Yet it does so at the price of forsaking the check on observation and experimentation that gives science much of its reliability. I do not believe that science is a superior form of knowledge to philosophy. But I do believe that there are areas of knowledge to which science is better suited to address. Philosophy is a much more abstract discipline, whereas science is concerned with very solid, material things. But the mistake that I think the positivists make is to say that since the knowledge gained from science is more tangible that it is more superior. I do believe than scientific knowledge is more reliable, but that is as much a function of the questions that science asks as to how it goes about answering them. For instance if you got a bunch of philosophers and scientists in a room and asked them to prove or disprove the existence of the soul I think both would produce equally disputable answers. Comparing the two disciplines is like comparing apples and oranges.

So I do not believe in privileged place for science and the scientific method. I do think that society has more use on a day-to-day basis for the type of knowledge that science produces than say philosophy does. Whether that should be so is a matter for another debate. However I still think that there is room for other disciplines, if for no other reason to help us understand science. As I stated in my introduction that is my main reason for taking this module. A study of disciplines and institutions such as philosophy, rhetoric, history, sociology and religion can be helpful in placing science in a wider context.

More than this however there are questions that people need to ask. As I said before, people have a wide range of beliefs that are not based on rationality. We watched a clip in this section of the class concerning a debate between a number of individuals. Among those included were a scientist, a shaman, and a traditional singer. The perceptions of science there interested me. One of the most striking features was when, during the debate, the singer said that he thought science was being represented as 'cold and emotionless'. Earlier on another character had been talking about how to the Eskimos the concept of the big bang was disrespectful to the universe, which they believe is alive. The notion that the universe was born in violence is not something that they think it would appreciate. The two statements point out something characteristic of science. Science is often perceived as a hollow pursuit that gives no emotional fulfillment. The Eskimos no doubt think so. The offhand nature of the way in which science describes the big bang theory, which the Eskimos see as a form of blasphemy, is as offensive as the statement itself. So science is an unfeeling enterprise. But just look at Life Story, look at the passion in that story. That is totally at odds with the picture of science presented here.

I think that science has an image problem, partially of its own making. We have seen that science does not address a large part of the human experience. Yet over and over again we hear science being described as the search for truth. If science is the search for truth, it does not seem to be the search for the whole truth. I do not think that any one discipline has all the answers. The sooner we accept that the sooner the disciplines can learn to live, and work, together.

The Rise of the Repressed in Science

"I think that we should have a woman president. It would be an incredible thing, because there would be no war. Just every 28 days, some intense negotiations!"

Robin Williams.

As I sit here sipping my coffee and looking over my lecture notes I get the distinct feeling that Helena went easy on us this week. Reading over the diaries from last year I see a lot of references to Feminism and its particular theories on science. I read with amusement the entries dealing with the fact that the equation E=mc² is apparently sexist. Our treatment of the topic was a lot calmer. But I have to say that I think we gained a much better sense of scale than last year's lectures. Looking through their diaries a lot of them seem to treat Feminism in science and then deal with race and class issues in science with much less detail. I believe this is a mistake. The tendency to look at people purely as just as one sex or another is itself sexist, and often not a useful overwhelming distinction to make I feel. Women are just one of a number of groups that have been excluded from science.

However science has traditionally been the preserve of a minority class. Western, male, upper class, all these would describe the traditional scientist. Nowadays that is not so true of course. But the legacy of this is still with us in scientific culture. I remember going to a graduation at Trinity College and being highly amused at how pretentious the whole thing was. A lot of old, white haired men, wearing clothes that nobody has worn for over a hundred years, doing their best to speak Latin and not doing very well. The whole thing was so forced and artificial. But they obviously felt the need to appeal to these symbolic representations of their authority; representations based on a culture not shared by many modern scientists.

So what space is there within this culture for minorities. Happily we are seeing minorities taking an increasing greater part in science. I do believe that science is a field that should be open to anyone. But the argument that excluding these classes has somehow unbalanced scientific knowledge? I'm not really sure what that means? What do these people think has been excluded? Do they think for instance that we would have had more concentration placed upon sciences such as biology if we had more women involved? You could argue that women are attracted towards biology more than men as a consequence of the stereotypes that we are seeking to undermine here, so if those stereotypes had been abolished then that would not necessarily have been true. I find it difficult to appreciate how science would differ in culture. We might not be wearing wigs and trying to speak Latin to try and give ourselves an appearance of authenticity, but would the scientific method be changed? Would peer review have been changed? Is it being changed now that we are including minorities in science?

In my view much of this debate comes down to an ethical issue: Since science has been built upon a prejudiced culture does that not mean that it is in some way tainted? From an epistemological viewpoint I do not think so. I think that including minorities in science is an important issue, but to throw away science because of its past would be throwing away the baby with the bath-water. It is more a cultural issue than an epistemological issue. All of the groupings we discussed in class should have had the opportunity to claim science as part of its cultural issue.

This is of course assuming that these minorities want it in the first place. One of the phrases that came up repeatedly was 'claiming science for [insert name of minority]'. Is this really that much of a burning issue for these minorities as it is for their self-appointed spokespersons? Ecofeminism is a good example here. This course is overwhelming female in composition, only a fifth are male, and all the women that I talked to about the ecofeminism point of view thought that they were going too far. I talked to Helana about this and she agreed. Helana talked about how she wondered how could she make sense of the discipline of philosophy as a woman, when all the figures in it were male and it seemed to be mostly a male culture. I can identify with this, God knows I see very little people from working class Dublin in science, but then it will probably always be like this. Science is a strange endeavor. It involves training yourself to think in a certain way, it involves indoctrination in a sub-culture that will always be somewhat strange to you. Science should be a world-wide endeavor unfettered to any particular culture. In trying to claim a piece of science for every different culture I think that we are in danger of forgetting this.

Marxism and the Pursuit of Truth

The Pet Shop Boys.

The Russian revolution was a chapter of history that fascinated me in school, and Marxism has always had an attraction for me. I have read some of Das Kapital. Unfortunately I was attempting to read it in German while living abroad, so I did not really make the progress that the work deserved. But I did enjoy reading a book on the subject that was written before Marxism gained the connotations it has today with the tyranny produced in Russia and China. Most histories tend to focus on the personality clashes between Stalin and Trotsky for example. The whole purges, the camps, all tend to be explained in terms of Stalin's mania. This is similar to the way in the third Reich is portrayed; everything started with Hitler. But as Primo Levi said, Hitler had millions of accomplices. This is also true of Stalin. What happened in Russia was a much more complex affair than what could be produced by the whim of a madman, however powerful.

The multimedia presentation was very stimulating, and I felt glad to finally be getting a fairer representation of what happened during the revolution. One thing that came through both in this presentation and in all the history I studied at school was that Lenin was a remarkable human being. His concern with the intellectual development of the Proletariat was extremely insightful. His leadership was undoubtedly strong. He seemed possessed of a genuine belief in the validity of his Marxist-based philosophy. More than that he was open-minded. He needed to be. The party he led was an eclectic mix of people ranging from naïve intellectuals to power hungry opportunists. None of them were really equipped to produce a true Marxist state. Indeed, it is debatable as to whether that was the top priority for all of them. Revolution always attracts some people who are there for less than idealistic reasons. But Lenin was not one of these, and while he lived the Soviet Union was an exiting place. Intellectually it must have been fascinating. Everything was being redefined.

Unfortunately Lenin died in 1924, and when he did all the internal conflicts which he had been so skillfully keeping under control erupted. From this chaos Stalin took power and the last hope of a brave new Marxist state was gone. From then on the names Lenin and Marx were used more to gain an aura of respectability than their ideas were used to improve the lot of the people. A tragedy, and a waste. So much more could have been accomplished. Marx said that he did not believe that history was shaped by the actions of great men. It is ironic that the life of one of his greatest students should contradict him: If only Lenin had lived.

But Marxism, at least in its original form, was somewhat naïve. I was glad to see Helana point out that the worldwide revolution that Marx predicted did actually come close to happening. But when they did happen they were largely ill organized, under-funded and without proper direction. Faced with an well-organized and armed capitalist state it was inevitable that they would fail. I could never understand how Marx failed to properly account for this eventually.

Nevertheless Marxism has been tremendously influential. It has a fine tradition in Ireland actually. It has influenced the thinking of many of our heroes, Larkin and Connelly to name but two. One of the most impressive parts of Marxism for me is the importance it places on viewing a thing within its socioeconomic context. Nowadays this seems like an obvious statement to make. This just proves how much Marxist ideas have been appropriated into the mainstream, because at the time this was a radical statement to make. The Science Wars have erupted in part over the application of this principle to science, and as we will see from the debate in week seven it has proved ultimately useful to science.

But it is the concept of ideology that I find the most interesting and in particular the version of it put forward by Gramsci. I liked the idea of ideology as a practice that all parts of society take part in. It makes sense. Women often complain that society reduces them to objects. They claim that society produces a false ideal of womanhood that they feel compelled to live up to. This is true to an extent, but quick read of magazines such as Woman's Own or Cosmopolitan will show that women take part in this process, and buy into these false myths of beauty. Worse still, they judge others by them. At any week, at least one of the women's magazines will be running a story about how Kate Moss has put on weight, or how Jewel is a fashion victim. I once read a headline criticizing Princess Diana for wearing the same dress twice! Women wrote all of these. You could as easily find examples in areas other than sexism. Yet at the same time Gramsci allows for the possibility of resistance, and that someday another ideology will replace the on dominant at the moment. I find myself thanking here of Kuhn's idea about paradigms, and how in the end one paradigm is replaced by another. These ideas provide the tools to analyze many great moments in science, for example the rise of Baconian experimentalist. By giving us the notion of ideology, Marxism has allowed a greater understanding of science, and how our imperfect human natures affect our attempt to conduct perfect science.

The Science Wars

"In a free society one has the ability, if not altogether to escape bias, to at least choose the bias one is attracted to"

Primo Levi

Feyerabend was a large and looming presence in this debate, personified in Elsa. During the debate I found myself wondering whether she actually believes in his arguments as much as she seemed to during the debate, or whether she was just playing devils advocate. His presence was fitting though, as relativism, a concept he was much concerned with, lies at the heart of the Science Wars debate. Put briefly Feyerabend believes that any type of knowledge is produced within a larger structure, which provides a cultural, social and economic context for the knowledge, and that the knowledge produced by this structure is only really valid within this structure. So as he said ‘anything goes’, as long as you obey the rules of whichever particular game you are playing then you are fine. This is far from a useless idea, and very useful when dealing with man’s concept of abstract, intangible things like truth, love, beauty and law. Here he is perfectly right. All of these concepts change from culture to culture and it is largely true that when in Rome you must do as the Romans do. Of course there are exceptions, for instance the whole child porn industry in Thailand is perfectly acceptable to many of the Thai people, but a westerner would likely insist that something such as this is innately wrong, no matter the culture that surrounds it. Feyerabend’s relativism would seem to uphold the Thai view. Of course one can argue against this by saying that morality is a function of human nature, which is universal and therefore we can have moral absolutes.

But we are here to think of relativism as it applies to science. In my view the problem with relativism is that science is a form of interaction between scientists and the material world. To put it bluntly, materiality is not relativistic. It is not the case that gravity works in France and not in China. The SSK says that scientific knowledge must be examined in terms of the context in which it was produced, and I do agree with it. But it must be remembered that no matter the culture that examines the material world it stays the same; it is only our perceptions that change. Because of this I do believe that scientific knowledge, produced and checked against observable material facts, is a superior form of knowledge in some respects. Yes human beings are by nature subjective and biased, but science uses reference to nature as a way to check this. Yes I am aware that our biases as human beings make these checks far from infallible, but they do succeed to some extent. How else do you explain the success of the scientific method over the past few centuries? As I have written above though, I do not think that this necessarily gives science a sacred position.

It is the case that science can be polluted with human biases and ideologies. Take the case of particle-wave duality. Newton originally said that light was a particle. Later young came along and showed proof that light had wave-like characteristics. But despite his clear proof this idea was not immediately accepted. If you explain this episode in terms of Gramsci’s teachings on ideology I think that it best explains my point. The dominant ideology at the time worshipped Newton. He was hailed as the man who had established rationalism in science. To go against him was seen as being in some way anti-science. But Young's idea’s were able to gain a following because it could be plainly seen that what he said was happening was actually happening. In Gramsci’s terms Young’s idea’s composed an ideological resistance to the dominant ideology, and were eventually able to overcome it. This is what gives science much of its objective nature in my estimation. Yes human bias and ideology can make science more subjective. But in the end, whether it is the case of Copernican Vs heliocentric astrology or whether light is a particle, wave or both, the nature of the material world is there for all to see. If a dominant ideology disagrees with nature resistance will occur within that ideology, because some members will always be able to see that they are contradicting nature. In the end, I do believe that truth will out.

Are Religion and Science Compatible or Contradictory?

What most disappointed me though was that we the debate fell into the same old trap of discussing what to do when science confronts religion over a specific issue. We can argue about Copernicus or about evolution v creationism until the cows come home. This is arguing about the symptoms, not the disease. Where was the consideration for what makes science and religion such enemies? We briefly touched upon how people need to believe in something, and that science has gained a slice of the market from religion in this area. But I still feel that the debate in general focussed too much upon epistemology. We focussed on whether scientific facts are really unquestionable, on why religion does not try to prove its claims; in other words the usual points that are brought up. But science and religion have more sides to the than that. They are both a way of seeing the world and produce a certain mindset in their followers. They are also both social edifices that come in conflict with each other on fronts other than epistemological ones. I think that there could have been room in the debate for these factors. But on the day we had too narrow a focus.

I was also disappointed specifically with myself. I do not think that I gave a good account of my position. I have no problem with spirituality and the belief in a God, or indeed Gods. My point was simply that modern religion tends to set itself up against science, because it does not accept that man has a right to question spiritual authority. This is against science, as science believes that everything should be questioned. I do not feel that I got that point across, rather I thought I came across as just being anti-religious in general. So if you are out there God, it’s nothing personal. I have nothing against you. I just think you are hanging around with a bad crowd.

Conclusion

I started off this module hoping to further my knowledge of science, to gain an idea of how it is grounded in our modern society. I do feel that this has been a success. It strikes me though, that much of the work was done not by learning new facts but rather by further going over material that we already covered in the science and society module of the first semester. I believe that this is an important role, because we covered so much material in that module, and given the stressful nature in which we were learning it coming back to the material after we have had time to digest it at our leisure is very useful. Having a link between this module and the one covered in Armagh is very useful. We already had quite a lot of useful knowledge when we entered this module. What we needed was someone to help us make sense of what we knew. This was accomplished in my opinion.

That having been said it would be glib of me to say we saw nothing new this semester. The lectures on Marxism were particularly fascinating. As a subject, it is hard to come by good quality material on it. Helana’s presentation was especially impressive, and as a general note in fact I must applaud her use of technology in teaching this course. It was used well and always for a reason, never gratuitously. But my point I think debate was the most rewarding part of this module. Whenever we had to discuss and trash out a topic I think we all came away feeling that we had learned much more than passively sitting down to a presentation could ever teach us. I definitely think that the two debates we had helped everyone think out their position on the issue.

I think there was more room for debate on a week-to-week basis though. In most classes the second half of the class fizzled out a bit. Partially this is due to the room; it is a computer lab, and when sitting down at your desk you cannot see most of the rest of the class. This stifles debate. But also I think there is a need for a more formal mechanism to get people talking. Even something as simple as asking people one-by-one what they thought of the issues raised. Actually a better idea might simply be to move the whole class to the Slipper for the remainder of the class and have a talk about it over coffee (perhaps even something stronger). Whatever the format, I feel there is a need for a mechanism to promote debate in the latter half of the class.

This observation notwithstanding the last eight weeks have been very rewarding for me. I have been able to get an appreciation of how science fits into a wider context, and I think that through debate and presentation I have been able to refine my thinking on the matter to where I can now appreciate some of its limits. If given the opportunity, I would definitely be encouraged from this module to study these topics further.