Reflections on Science
The Grand Design: Philosophy is
Dead.
In his book, The Grand Design, Hawking says
that "philosophy has
not kept up with modern discoveries in science, particularly physics." The
amusing bit here is that all scientific inquiry is philosophical. Science makes
certain assumptions in its approach to understanding the world. These
assumptions flow from a philosophical viewpoint. Hawking’s focus on scientific reasoning
is an ideology, a worldview that flows from positivism. No scientist is an
objective machine.
Positivism
Positivism is a simple idea: “Seeing is believing.” Or better yet, like the philosophy of the
Missourian: “Show me.” It’s the idea
that anything worth study can be proven. Without empirical proof, an idea is unworthy
of study and useless. The flight of a
cannon ball is useful. We can learn much by studying the trajectory of a
falling object. Above all it is useful in battle and, as Von Clausewitz put it,
“War is the extension of politics by
other means.” If we are to get what we want on the field of battle, ultimately
it is useful to study the flight of a cannonball.
The flight of a hummingbird or of the human imagination is
another thing entirely. We lack the proper scientific framework to study the
human imagination. In the end, science is not positive that psychology can be
justified. Positivism means being “positive” about something in the sense that
we can be positive that the train will arrive on time. In the end, however,
positivism is an epistemological
assumption, an idea about how we know.
Why should we use science to justify psychology? Why not
first see if psychology justifies science? Perhaps the need to classify and
quantify everything with a view towards its utility is a skewed worldview.
The “labor theory of value,” an idea that has evolved from
John Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx is one that saturates our modern
consciousness. It holds that a thing is valuable according to the labor
invested in it. A tree has value when it is chopped up into firewood. The man
and his ax has added value to the tree, which lone in the forest has no value. But
the same tree, when cut carefully may be used as lumber. It has a higher value
as lumber which may be used to build a house. A finely constructed house has
far more labor invested in it than firewood and is worth more.
In the same way, firewood is valuable. But when the same
wood is finely crafted into a musical instrument, the labor that is invested in
it creates a higher value. This is the idea behind the “labor theory of value.”
The value of a thing increases in proportion to the time and quality of labor that
created it.
In Sanskrit, the word karma
may cover the meaning of labor. So, according to Adam Smith and his
economist disciples, the more karma is invested in something in terms of quality
and quantity, the more valuable that thing becomes. The “labor theory of value” was forwarded by conservative favorite Adam Smith.
Schumacher was an
internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in
Britain, but is best remembered for his book “Small is Beautiful, where
he takes issue with the labor theory of value. While forwarded by Smith, the "labor theory of value was also favored by Karl Marx.
In criticizing the “labor
theory of value, Schumacher points out, “we are estranged from reality and
inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves. Even
the great Dr Marx fell into this devastating error when he formulated the
so-called 'labour theory of value'. Now, we have indeed laboured to make some
of the capital which today helps us to produce -- a large fund of scientific,
technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate physical infrastructure;
innumerable types of sophisticated capital equipment, etc. -- but all this is
but a small part of the total capital we are using. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man -- and
we do not even recognise it as such. This larger part is now being used up at
an alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe,
and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved.”
It is an illusion, argues Schumacher, to think that by
applying karmic energy to the destruction of all natural capital we are creating
wealth. In point of fact, we are destroying wealth. By cutting down the forests
to create housing, we apparently create wealth. By extracting petroleum from
the earth and turning it into fuel for heating those homes we are creating more
wealth. By making giant car factories we create jobs and more wealth. When we
burn gasoline in our cars to speed people to work, we create more wealth.
Unlimited expansion and unbridled economic growth translates into greater
wealth for everyone. But Schumacher
points out that infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an
impossibility.
To believe in impossibility is Quixotic. It was the Quixote
after all who believed in the “impossible dream.” We
have been taught and propagandized to believe in the impossible dream of
absolute scientific progress. Again this is an epistemological assumption.
Science would have us believe that philosophy is dead, that science has
superceded philosophy. But scientism or the belief in science is merely a
different kind of philosophy or epistemological assumption.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do we know what
we know? Before we can investigate
reality we need a framework for organizing our knowledge. We need to know what
questions to ask. If our question is “how to be more productive?” or “what is
the trajectory of a cannonball?” our very questions imply a particular
assumption.
 |
| The Persistance of Time by Salvador Dali. Espistemology involves assumptions |
The question “How to be more productive?” assumes that
production is valuable. Such a question may overlook the cautions implicit in
over-exploitation of natural resources. If I ask “what is the trajectory of a
cannonball?” my question shows that I assume war is a useful tool to advance
the interests of civilization.
All questions imply values. Epistemology examines how we
know and what can be known? It would be a waste of time to ask questions about
what cannot be known. So, philosophy helps us to narrow our search by helping
us to frame our questions. In narrowing the purview of our questions, we
determine what can be thought and what cannot be thought. Those who value the
positivist world which asks only “useful” questions would limit our power to
ask. One such philosopher was Kant.
Kant attempted to limit metaphysical questions, adopting the
attitude that whle philosophy was really a theory of knowledge it should apply
itself to useful questions. Instead of taking interest in the great cosmic
problems, he tried to stop centuries of philosophical thought by reframing the
problem of what can be known to fit his critique of reason.
Kant reframes reason
Of course, in another sense, as Nietzsche would point out
later, all philosophy is really a game of dialectics. In mathematics we use
numbers to frame questions and create formulas. In philosophy, we use words.
Philosophy according to Nietzsche and later Wittgenstein is really nothing more
than sophisticated word games meant to justify a world view already held. Kant’s
agnostic world view fueled his destruction of metaphysical arguments. His “big”
question was “How are synthetic judgments possible a priori?” He
concluded that philosophy is unable to answer metaphysical questions. The
business of philosophy should be to support the hard sciences, especially physics. Philosophy
after Kant’s tends to avoid the difficult questions. Having abdicated this area
of thinking, philosophy appears to have died, at least academically. Philosophy ceded its inquisitiveness to
science. And science, as we have seen, rests its point of view on positivism.
The positivist paradigm promoted today focuses on useful truths that can be
proven experimentally and used by technology to improve production by
intensifying the karmic exploitation of material nature.
José Ortega y Gasset: Not so fast
José Ortega y Gasset´s Perspectivism was a reaction to
Kant. Perspectivism is the position that one's access to the world through
perception, experience, and reason is possible only through one's own
perspective and interpretation. It rejects both the idea of a perspective-free
or an interpretation-free objective reality. Ortega y Gasset´s Perspectivism is
useful in developing a reaction to Kant. Ortega y Gasset tries to keep
metaphysics alive by point out that all empiric evidence is finally subject to
interpretation through the senses and mind. Since sensual and mental experience
is subjective, there is no absolute objective reality. A subjective metaphysics
may still be contemplated in order to balance our so-called objective world.
Philosophy is still necessary and not quite dead.
In his work, What is Philosophy? Ortega y Gasset tries to make sense of the
impact of Kant and later Nietzche on subsequent worldviews. He observes that
the post-Darwinian 19th century radically changed epistemology. By the turn of the century society had witnessed
a sea-change in how science pretends to know. Physics, which now dominated
philosophy, having done away with metaphysics was no longer the only “hard
science.”
With Neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology, life-sciences were
no longer “soft sciences.” Biology and was no longer based merely classification
and taxonomy, it was science with mathematical rigor. A way of knowing in
medicine based on a wholistic understanding of the patient, or generalizations
based on clinical practice and a lifetime of experience would no longer be
permitted. They were to give way to
mathematical models as cold as the science governing the path of machine gun
bullets.
New Ways of Knowing: Positivism
As the Victorian Age became the Lost Generation of World War
I, science changed the lives of our grandparents. Electricity revolutionized life.
Superstition was finished. Patent medicines appeared with radioactive beverages
that promised newfound health. Coca-cola contained enough cocaine to give
people a real boost. Dogmas were left behind. New worlds were discovered. The
epistemological models changed. There was no need to question the motives of
scientism.
The new way of knowing would be “objective” and “pragmatic,”
based on mathematical models. The sort of science that involved precise
deductions, sensory observation, and experimental knowledge was the rage. The
idea was that there was a scientific method that would combine pure reasoning
by which we arrive at logical conclusions and pure experimental perception,
confirming the conclusions of pure theory. This method of knowing that moved by
instinct and hunches, imagination and creativity, the old 19th century method
of science of railroads and horseshoes would be left behind. The new science ushered
in advances in physics that would be the intellectual marvel of the 20th
Century and lead to the domination of the atom.
Practical and useful truths
Ortega y Gasset, being a philosopher, wasn’t so convinced.
He pointed out that the positivist method itself wasn’t the only impetus to
move the science of physics to its incredible triumphs. Pure logic and simple
objective perception alone did not alone create the scientific paradigm that
would carry human society forward to such advances. The first two sides of the
triangle, logic and perception were powerful. But there is a third which gives
its power to the paradigm: Practical utility. And as epistemology, practical
utility is suspect. It serves not knowledge, but exploitation.
Practical Utility
Ortega y Gasset observed that apart from the ideal of pure
logic and the hope of objective perception, it is practical utility for
materialistic human society that has really driven the paradigm of scientism
that governs scientific achievement and discovery. The Spanish Philosopher points out that
“practical utility” is an inadequate framework for scientific inquiry:
Utility is not a virtue
“The third characteristic of science [after objective
perception and pure logic], its practical utility for man’s dominion over
matter, is not exactly a virtue or a test of the perfection of physics as a
theory and a form of knowledge.” (What is Philosophy, José Ortega y Gasset,
p.41) In Greece, this utilitarian fruitfulness would not have won a decisive
influence over every mind, but in Europe it coincided with the predominance of
a type of man--the so-called bourgeois wanted to settle himself comfortably in
the world, and for his comfort to intervene in it, to modify it for his own
pleasure. Therefore, the bourgeois age is honored most of all for the triumph
of industrialization, and in general, for those techniques which are useful to
life--medicine, economics, administration.
Prestige of Physics
Physics acquired a peerless prestige because out of it came
both medicine and the machine. The masses of the middle class became interested
in it not out of intellectual curiosity, but through their material interests.
It was in such an atmosphere that what we might call the “imperialism of
physics” was produced.”
“Born and educated as we are in an age which shares this mode
of feeling, it seems to us a very naturally thing that first place among the
various kinds of knowledge should be granted to that which, whatever its
standing in theory, gives us domination over matter. But a new cycle is
beginning within us; for no sooner do we see that this form of supremacy makes
practical utility appear to be a norm of truth than we cease to be content. We
begin to realize that this skill in dominating matter and making it conform to
our wishes, this enthusiasm for comfort is, if one makes of it a principle, as
open to argument as any other. Alerted by this suspicions, we begin to see that
comfort is merely a subjective predilection, or to put it bluntly, a capricious
desire which Western peoples have exercised for two hundred years, but which
does not in itself reveal any superiority of character....the urge for the comfortable and the convenient
which is the ultimate reason for a preference for physics is in now ay an index
of superiority.”
Search for Comfort and Convenience
Here, Ortega y Gasset, who is writing in the Jazz Age of the
1920s has defined the motif of the Twentieth Century: The search for the comfortable and the convenient defines our way of
life.
This search for the comfortable and convenient is entwined with our worldview; it is baked
into our epistemology. The practical knowledge of how to exploit this world, or
how to have a convenient life is not the same as wisdom. A little knowledge is
a dangerous thing. And yet science passes for wisdom. If a child is playing
with matches we react. We take away the matches and scold the child: “Fire is not
a toy.” If we see the same child with a
cell-phone, we think, “She’s so advanced.”
Technology impresses us as the ultimate wisdom. The symbol
of technology is fire. Prometheus was chained to a rock where vultures rip his
entrails for giving the fire of the gods to man. It seems an unfair punishment.
And yet now we have nuclear fire and are equipped to destroy our planet. Were
the gods so wrong for punishing Prometheus? Or at the least, might we not have
a philosophy that questions the limits of what is “practical and useful?” Is
nuclear fire “practical and useful?” Is wisdom the absolute application of all
technology for maximum exploitation? Or does wisdom move in the opposite
direction. And shouldn’t philosophy be an attempt at wisdom? As Schumacher puts
it, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a
touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
A working knowledge of how to manipulate material elements
may be “practical and useful” in creating convenience and comfort. But this
convenience and comfort are only temporary. An advanced society must go beyond
the basic concepts of the “labor theory of value,” to consider the greater
good, not only of human society, but also for the planet itself. Wholesale slaughter of animals is not convenient
for the cows and bulls, the sheep and pigs who are turned into hamburgers.
Wholesale destruction of cultures and languages around the world may suit the Hollywood
consumption model, or the capitalist one, but it is not convenient for the
native and indigenous peoples whose traditions are disappearing. The
international tourist industry gobbles up rainforest and coral reef to create
luxury hotels, ruining wildlife habitats and wetlands forever. This is neither
convenient nor comfortable for the inhabitants of the rainforest. In the end,
having indulged in rampant consumerism at the expense of future generations,
the “practical and useful truths” of positivism are neither practical nor
useful. As birds and mammal species become extinct we may find that the human
species also becomes endangered. The economic model based on exploitation and
positivistic science is not sustainable. Practical knowledge, the ability to
make a fire, and wisdom, the understanding of fire are not equivalent.
The modern view of wisdom is whatever makes us comfortable.
The search for comfort and convenience informs our epistemology, the idea of “knowledge”
that drives science. Wisdom, we are told is being “street-smart,” wisdom is what
is “practical,” is what is “useful,” what makes us comfortable. By eliminating
“impractical” questions, we can arrive at the practical and useful. In this
way, by restricting the questions that may be asked our way of knowledge is
defined by the comfortable, informed by materialism and pragmatism. But is this
really wisdom?
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