Title: Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars
Author/Artist: Ziauddin Sardar
Publisher: Icon Books: Postmodern Encounters
Medium: Book
Reviewer: Paul Taylor
An attractive new series of pocket guides has hit the shelves, and includes titles like Heidegger and the Nazis, Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis, and this handy guide to the recent and continuing fuss about the status of science, the coherence of some postmodernist theorizing, and the interconnections between the two domains.
Sardar recounts the history of debates about the philosophy and politics of science and technology, by means of a discussion of Thomas Kuhn's famous 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which itself revolutionized sociological approaches to science. The familiar phrase, "paradigm shift", is Kuhn's, and refers to what happens when the day-to-day work of "normal science" is re-conceived as a result of major theoretical developments, as when Einstein's ideas supplanted Newton's.
It does not take long to notice Sardar's partisan tack on these issues, as in his notes, where he speaks of "the realist attack" (nasty, aggressive) and "the powerful constructionists' defence" (substantial, noble). This bias may distort the history he provides. Take the notorious Velikovsky affair, a heated row over that psychoanalyst's heterodox theories about convulsive changes in planetary orbits, whose disastrous effects on Earth were lost to posterity in a kind of global amnesia. The story could only be revealed, supposedly, by skillful reading of symbols in myths and legends.
Velikovsky's books, like Worlds in Collision (1950), were widely read by a public inclined to favour exciting yarns of this kind, but greatly disliked by scientists because of their misunderstandings of physics and astronomy. Controversy does not seem an unlikely outcome at all, but Sardar posits an ulterior motive:
"A crisis in 'big science', with the cancellation of the big high-energy projects, forced them to conjure up an instant enemy. Fortunately, one was at hand." (p.18)He acknowledges that Velikovsky was (seen to be) a crank, but says that,
"he also predicted various properties of the nearby planets and inner space, which were later confirmed to an embarrassing degree."I don't know what he means here by inner space, and reasons of space prevent him from specifying these predictions. However, Terence Hines, in Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (Prometheus Books, New York, 1988), writes:
"Velikovsky and his followers often claim that his theory made several correct predictions about the nature and characteristics of the planets. One such prediction concerns the temperature of Venus and Mars. Velikovsky said in Worlds in Collision that Venus was hot. Although his precise meaning is unclear, he apparently meant that Venus was giving off more heat to space than it was receiving from the sun. This additional heat was said to come from Venus's cometary travels when it passed close to the sun. Velikovsky also said that Mars gives off more heat than it receives from the sun, heat received when it encountered Venus in its travels. Neither Venus nor Mars radiates more heat than it receives from the sun. In this sense, then, both of Velikovsky's predictions were wrong. When it was discovered in the early 1970s that the surface temperature of Venus was high, about 850 degrees Fahrenheit, Velikovsky and his followers changed the nature of the prediction after the fact and claimed that it was correct. They conveniently forgot the prediction about Mars, which is wrong no matter how one interprets it." (pp.231-232)When he discusses the Edinburgh School's sociology of scientific knowledge, Sardar mentions a consequence of their concept of finitism, which suggests that all scientific terms and concepts are open-ended.
"It is thus conceivable that a shift in our conception of what is science may lead to incorporation of what is currently dismissed as non-science into science: astrology, acupuncture, parapsychology, etc." (p.47)There is no sense here of a recognition of why these activities are dismissed. In the case of parapsychology, it is both the poverty of method -
"The use of the nonfalsifiable hypothesis is permitted in parapsychology to a degree unheard of in any scientific discipline." (Hines, p.103)- and the poverty of results -
"in one hundred years of parapsychological investigations, there has never been a single adequate demonstration of any psi phenomenon."- that explain its exclusion from the scientific fold. It presumably doesn't strike Sardar as being an absurd result of finitism that astrology and acupuncture, or perhaps even Velikovsky's musings, be re-classified as sciences. The same kind of insouciance about what science is like perhaps lies behind his considerations of feminist criticisms of science, where he is noticeably forthright about their status:
"Feminist scholarship of science, which is truly monumental both in terms of quality and quantity, has analysed almost every branch of science. It has shown that the focus on quantitative measures, analysis of variation, impersonal and excessively abstract conceptual schemes, is both a distinctively masculine tendency and also one that serves to hide its own gendered character. And it has revealed that the prioritising of mathematics and abstract thought, standards of objectivity, the construction of scientific method and the instrumental nature of scientific rationality, are all based on the notion of ideal masculinity." (pp.49-50, my emphases)This scholarship has not suggested or argued, it has simply shown and revealed. I was immediately reminded of a passage in Gross and Levitt's Higher Superstition (1998), where they quote from the philosopher Margarita Levin's essay Caring New World (American Scholar, 57, Winter 1988):
"One suspects that feminists themselves sense the emptiness of their enterprise. Those confident of their product do not strain to oversell it, yet much of feminist scholarly writing consists of wildly extravagant praise of other feminists. A's 'brilliant analysis' supplements B's 'revolutionary breakthrough' and C's 'courageous undertaking'. More disconcerting is the penchant of many feminists to praise themselves most fulsomely. Harding ends her book [The Science Question in Feminism] on the following self-congratulatory note:There are two other areas of inconsistency worth looking at, which concern certainty in science, and the relationship between science and technology. Popper, hardly a postmodernist theorist, wrote in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959):'When we began theorizing our experience. . . we knew our task would be a difficult though exciting one. But I doubt that in our wildest dreams we ever imagined we would have to reinvent both science and theorizing itself in order to make sense of women's social experience.'
This megalomania would be disturbing in a Newton or Darwin: in the present context it is merely embarrassing."
"The old scientific ideal of episteme - of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge - has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever." (p.280)Sardar claims that, since Kuhn,
"The old paradigm of science which provided certainty and assurance is no longer valid." (p.63)(Note, by the way, that this is not Kuhn's usage of "paradigm", which applies to particular theoretical frameworks for research rather than to the scientific method as such.) Sardar is referring to what he sees as the uncertainties inherent in science, but seems unsure where they obtain. Earlier (p.57), he writes of the "schizoid self-consciousness of science", whereby, "there is openness and much debate at the research front, but certitude and dogmatism in teaching and propaganda."
He goes on to say that,
"the conventional, old-paradigm normal science may still be valid in situations with low levels of uncertainty and risk, but it is not suitable when either decision stakes or system uncertainties - as for example, in the case of genetic engineering or human cloning - are high. The moral panic of scientists is rooted in this reality - the shifting paradigm that has changed the context of science and brought the uncertainties inherent in complex systems to the fore." (p.63)Again, the concept of the paradigm seems mis-applied here: paradigms in Kuhn's sense are internal to scientific understanding, not things that change the context of science from without. But now the uncertainties are not just in science pedagogy/propaganda, but inherent in studies of complex systems, and here we move onto the second inconsistency, the confusion of science with engineering or with technology. It has been known for a long time that engineering is rife with uncertainties, but this has less to do with supposed deep flaws in scientific method than with the fact that there are so many unknowns in practical situations. Note also that critics of scientific realism are happy enough to inform us about "reality" when it suits their argument.
Sardar approves of more systematic public consultation about the uses of scientific knowledge, but prefers the now-familiar science-bashing options, rather than any actual political argument about changing the structure of democratic government, as if to say that if only scientists were to renounce their preposterous absolutisms, then we could all just decide to get rid of GM foods, or nuclear power. However, the delights of global capitalism may be ascribed to more substantial mechanisms than the ghostly masculinities of abstract algebra.
So, the Science Wars rumble on.