Re: Science as Culture

Elson Boles Wrote: (my comments follow the <>'s)

<Science can't provide "truth" not only because "facts" and paradigms are always changing, but also because science is a culture or meaning-system in more ways than Thomas Kuhn's idea of "paradigms" expressed. Since it is a culture, I don't agree that the modes of science "are vastly superior to earlier ones." But they seem to be different in one key respect: scientific methods provide a relatively more objective method for gaining (not applying or using) certain kinds of knowledge. (Of course, it's hard to separate the process of obtaining from the applying, since applying is needed to obtain).>

This is an interesting set of remarks; however, let me suggest that, in a very real way, science [alongside the old scientia] can indeed provide at least a very small measure of “truth” otherwise we would not be able to “know” anything [let alone “do” anything with that knowledge].

As to science being a meaning-system or a “culture”, we’ve got to be very careful here. Our scientific concepts and formulations convey knowledge, they aren’t the knowledge or the information or especially the phenomena (I agree); but they can most certainly convey it to one degree or another, and their fit is nice enough that there isn’t the arbitrariness that would exist if we were to say (vis-à-vis the dynamic of thunder and lightning)-> ‘one circle of the cosmos was grinding against another or the outer ether, so that great sparks flew and a tremendous cracking was heard’ or that ‘the gods were engaged in a great battle.’

Ultimately, whether we’d decry it or not, science-as-knowing comes down to epistemology; and epistemology - as it interrelates with its object knowledge - deals with the transforms (“applying” and “using”) of information. We can’t let ourselves get caught in a trap of saying that it is just a way of getting measures, so that later we can conventionally agree on what is or isn’t so (based on how we collectively interpret that data in consensus regardless of what is/isn’t really happening).

“Conventionalist instrumentalism” (as Prugovecki terms it in his “Historical and Epistemological Perspectives” essay (at http://individual.utoronto.ca/prugovecki/EpistemicPerspectives.html)) is not without its problems, and shouldn’t be thought of as being the only legitimate model of scientific inquiry.

As to “SCIENCE AS CULTURE”, I’m not sure it can be completely. “Science” is more solid even in the world of indeterminate quanta than say the “culture” or “civilization” of Late Medieval Europe. Cultures can be no more than meaning-systems; science and epistemology and philosophy as modes of understanding can be since their object is the “other” rather than the self-referencing ideal of “we” as “community” with the values we share.

<However, relatively more objective methods and the knowledge gained therewith are "good" only if groups are interested in having these. To suggest that more objective knowledge of a certain kind is "superior" is to make a moral judgement. And thus it's tautological because it's those who like science (who say it is better, not those who don't. In other words, science is only more objective to those who subscribe to it and thus who give it significance. And this is why science is no less a culture than any other meaning system: practitioners do contend that, if not superior, it is a good, beautiful, serviceable, whatever method for certain means and ends. It is a meaning system, a worldview, through which and within which dominant and subordinate groups contest their circumstances and competing cultural projects (at least according to the results of scientific research).>

The methodology is only one part of SCIENCE, the epistemology is the other part (and both are ultimately subservient to the data, its collection, the process according to which we parallel our tests/their results, and the phenomena itself)(aka, the reality).

As to the science being “superior” thing, it’s superior only insofar as method, epistemology, and the reality (from which we gain the data) will allow us.

This is not a moral judgment, qualitative, yes, but not moral. There is no spectrum of ethos in this case and nothing from which our determination of “value” possibly relates to the moral detriment or benefaction of the person making it or to others. It is quite value-neutral by that criterion, and “good”/”bad” only in a dry, abstract, metaphysical way in the manner of Aristotle’s definitions of “good” and “evil(/bad)”

Culture is self-referential; science is not [or at least it’s more than just self-referential]. It is other-referential, and (hence) a real “worldview” of the [“real”] world. To say anything else makes science into one of the humanities, thereby sealing its intellectual fate in self-referential oblivion.

Luke Rondinaro, Group Facilitator

The Consilience Projects

www.topica.com/lists/consiliencep