Chapter 100: Interpreting and Misinterpretin g Scientific Knowledge as Political Power

Chapter 100: Interpreting and Misinterpreting Scientific Knowledge as Political Power

By Helen Lauer

INTRODUCTION: MODERN SCIENCE STEADY PROGRESS OR EMPTY PROMISE?

The chapter explores the impact of science on civilization, questioning whether scientific endeavor truly represents human progress. It examines how scientific progress is measured, and if experts' theories genuinely refute predecessors' theories. The author notes that in the 17th century, Francis Bacon suggested judging the New Science by its fruits, leading to confident measurement of scientific progress through engineering and industrial applications. The Industrial Revolution in Europe and America amplified this expectation during the 1800s.

However, the chapter emphasizes a shift in mainstream opinion after the use of nuclear fission during World War II in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This led to a mixture of reverence and reproach toward scientific results, acknowledging the potential for improving life but also the unforeseen anguish caused by scientific applications.

By the end of the 20th century, some philosophers and social critics argued against measuring scientific progress, viewing the notion of 'progress' as an imperialistic construct of industrial capitalist societies, a view termed "radical relativism" in the chapter. The chapter aims to examine why radical relativism is incoherent while also acknowledging why a universal measure of intellectual progress is unattainable. Further, that radical change in scientific knowledge has been misinterpreted as political change. The chapter also suggests that movements in the distribution and application of scientific knowledge can be interpreted as political change.

Radical Relativism and Scientific Revolutions

Part I examines the radical relativist belief that there's no logical way to reconstruct how scientists alter their theories. Relativists argue that shifts in scientific views are due to accidental circumstances and socio-political dynamics, using the metaphor of scientific revolutions to account for theory change. This perspective treats revisions in scientific disciplines as analogous to political upheavals, suggesting theory change cannot be completely objective.

Radical relativists believe measuring the legitimacy of the modern scientific tradition against indigenous folk knowledge is impossible, labeling scientific progress as popular orthodox faith peculiar to secular society and untestable. The reasoning behind why such claims can never be tested is a self-refuting argument, which will be shown in Part I.

Historical Legacy and Political Aspects of Modern Science

Part II briefly presents the historical legacy of modern science, focusing on the post-Reformation's scepticism towards the New Science, yielding the defensive tone of the modern scientific narrative. Experimental science, since Galileo Galilei, represents resistance to authoritarian control over knowledge validation. Francis Bacon highlights science's responsibility to other social institutions.

Conservative Relativism and African Perspectives

Part III explores conservative relativism, which advocates for a variety of contemporaneous knowledge traditions and uses the modern scientific tradition when it offers the best means for pursuing self-determined ends. This perspective is crucial for those planning on behalf of Africans' welfare. The author suggests being wary of modern scientific 'progress' institutions and critically examining public policy-making procedures in Africa.

Despite the impact of 'modernity' on Africa, African intelligentsia and professionals now exhibit 'postmodernity', dismissing universal consensus, recognising rival knowledge traditions, and integrating the best of each to guide public policy. These postmodern features are hallmarks of successful policy planning in Africa. The complexity of multiple knowledge traditions, integrated within African societies, is a familiar feature of affluent classes.

Integrating Modern Science within African Belief Systems

The integration of modern science within African belief systems is not a result of superstitious resistance, but intransigent prejudices indigenous to the modern scientific worldview. Individuals are familiar with the modern scientific narrative through exposure to globalization's effects.

The Received Orthodox View of Modern Scientific Method

To understand the radical relativist's disdain, the received orthodox view of modern scientific method must be understood. Ian Hacking has summarized it more or less as the following list of assumptions:

Ian Hacking's Characterisation of the Orthodox View of Modern Scientific Method

1. Scientific Realism: Science explores one real world, where truths exist regardless of beliefs. A unique, best description exists for any aspect of the world, accessible through modern research methods.

2. Demarcation and Testability: A distinction exists between scientific theories and other speculations. Testability or falsifiability distinguishes scientific hypotheses. Verifiable observation and confirmable theoretical statements exist. Observation reports form a theory-neutral foundation for assessing rival theories. The hypothetico-deductive method tests theories using experimental evidence, known as 'eliminative inductivism'. Crucial tests adjudicate between competing explanatory theories.

3. Justification vs. Discovery: Distinguish the justification of theories from the conditions that provoke their discovery. Separate political and social facts from rational considerations that determine the value of discoveries.

4. Cumulative Progress: Scientific methods build upon previous generations' work, leading to cumulative and increasing scientific knowledge. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity builds upon Newton's classical physics by containing it as a special case.

Scientists can rationally reconstruct reasons received in previous epochs for scientists' holding views. Scientists can also judge whether or not scientific knowledge in a given field has progressed.

CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES

A conceptual scheme or framework is a set of values, beliefs, practices, and conventions shared within a scientific discipline. The radical relativist challenges the orthodox view, especially regarding faith in modern scientific progress. A conceptual scheme encompasses all thoughts and experiences about reality. It includes observation sentences, logic, morality, religion, and civic conventions. The sum total of shared beliefs is contrasted with other people's conceptual schemes.

There is no way to go outside of our conceptual scheme to get a glimpse of reality in the raw. There can be nothing else for us to match it to, nothing for us to talk or to think about 'reality' that would not count as just another postulate on the unending list that comprises our conceptual scheme.

We can only view reality as we understand it today, and there is no scheme-independent reality. 'Reality' is the conceptual scheme by which we organize and understand our experience.

Key sectors of a conceptual scheme are maintained by professionals within a discipline. The content and structure of our modern scientific conceptual scheme comes from individual theorists and experimentalists, throughout the world. They comprise the decision-making membership of funding agencies, appointment boards, prestigious professional and honorary societies, think tanks, judicial investigatory sub-committees, and consultancy teams for governments. They discriminate among the sorts of questions that are posed for study, the problems that are pressing, which research programs are worthwhile to fund, which concerns are best sidelined, and which hypotheses would be a waste of time and resources to pursue.

Scientific training teaches people how to edit experience of the world. The training involves the experimental techniques and inferential methods, the assumptions, aesthetics, values, and ways of judging perceptual stimuli, that are characteristic of their own day. In this sense, all observation statements are theory-laden. Principles of scientific change over time. Training has changed so radically that one cannot compare today's assumptions with those of four hundred years ago. The radical relativist sees each historical epoch of science as having its own 'disciplinary matrix' or 'justificatory discourse of methods and theories. Each historical period's conceptual framework determines what to count as a veridical observation report, which to disregard, which of counterevidence to treat as significant. The radical relativist sees each historical epoch of science as having its own 'disciplinary matrix' or 'justificatory discourse of methods and theories

Chemists of Dalton's time in the late 1800s and of the present day do not share the same set of background assumptions about corrosive liquids. Before Dalton, chemists would not recognize the properties of ionic compounds that allow one element to take electrons away from another element. The modern chemist cannot presume to correct Dalton's statements about acids, and so on in other disciplines and fields.

Alternative theoretical frameworks are not something we can ever know, since we can only think and live and theorize in our own framework, which for us is the only one true reality that there can be. We can only understand arguments that justify our own beliefs within our own conceptual scheme, in accord with our standards of testing validity. When today's chemistry teacher holds up a test-tube during a practical and says 'This liquid is an acid,' it must be held as an open possibility that she means something altogether different from what Dalton meant when he uttered the same sentence 200 years ago.

Progress is not theories proven false moving towards theories likely to be true. The radical relativist attributes extreme conceptual limitations to scientists.

The Radical Relativist Rejects the Notion of Scientific Progress

Radical relativists focus on the incommensurability of beliefs held at different historical moments. Consider the following beliefs that scientific training ensured men in Europe would share 350 years ago:

• All heavenly bodies are perfect spheres moving in perfect circles through the heavenly ether.

• The Earth is flat and the centre of the universe.

• The Sun moves across the sky over the earth.

• A physical vacuum can never exist since it is a logical contradiction.

• Gold can be transmuted from sand.

• Arteries in the body are not connected to veins.

• Fire is caused by releasing a substance called phlogiston from a flammable object.

• Bodies fall to earth at different speeds according to the amount of earth element in their substantial essence.

• Telescopes are suspicious contraptions used by heretics to undermine the authorities.

These claims seem quaint and silly to modern thinkers because contemporary scientists don't understand what the statements really meant to the thinkers that posited them. If understood in the framework used four centuries ago, the statements would still be believed. Because one cannot be sure what statements mean (because scientists within their matrix cannot be sure), one cannot presume to judge ancient beliefs. The radical relativist is claiming that we cannot be sure whether our beliefs about planetary motion actually do contradict Ptolemy's strange beliefs since we can only interpet Ptolemy in our post-Newtonian framework.

Ptolemy thought the stars to be something like tiny pinprick-sized holes in the vault covering the earth, through which the heavenly light gleams while constantly flooding the whole of the heavens above the visible vault of the sky. The sun travels through this vault by day, filling it with light. This view is now called mythical.

Thinking in a framework radically different from Ptolemy's is not conceptually accessible now. It is conjectured that Ptolemy thought the stars to be something like tiny pinprick-sized holes in the vault covering the earth. The sun travels through this vault by day, filling it with light. The concepts in the sky', 'Sun moving' that contemporary scientists use now cannot be projected back with any warranty. Nor can contemporary scientists reliably project onto an alternative contemporary belief system, such as African traditional religious beliefs

The radical relativist thinks that the only way to get outside our conceptual framework and understand reality as Ptolemy did would be to imagine ourselves as Greek sages and to embrace wholesale their conceptual scheme. However, imaginative exercises are not testable they are just idle flights of fancy.

The modern scientific community knows that stars produce their own energy radiating toward us as light, this contradicts Ptolemy's claim. This contradiction hinges on shared meanings of what the scientists meant by 'Sun' and 'Moon'. Given successive stages of science and different cultures, scientists probably address different problems and have no way of knowing if they are working o the same problem. Scientific progress cannot be measured since there is no way to tell when in our own modern scientific beliefs we have replaced a false belief from long ago or from far away with another that contradicts it.

The radical relativist concludes that theory change is not a rational process, but a politically determined shift in the allegiance of a knowledge community. Rather, the old framework gradually has become unattractive or unpopular due to accidental circumstances or manoeuvring of their rivals.

Conceptual schemes can be changed due to the development of new achievements (e.g. the telescope, genetic engineering, etc.). We, as scientists, are justified to suppose that in past conceptual frameworks even the basic relation between observation and hypothesis may have been different from what it is now, just as the repertoire of measuring instruments and the scope of observation statements have changed. We cannot sit down to explain why scientists made the rational choices they did about their theories in their time. So there is no point in contrasting whether our current theories explain nature better than previous theories satisfied scientists in past conceptual frameworks. And therefore scientific progress cannot be traced.

The Radical Relativist's Claim is Self-Refuting

The trouble with radical relativism is that the modern scientific community cannot have any idea of a conceptual framework other than our own. And otherwise they would not comprehend understand the relativist's point of view. By suggesting that we are stuck in one reality, more than one substantive, full-blown is referenced. Therefore it is possible to imagine more than one world-concept.

Reason for rejecting the orthodox view is intelligible; at first glance it may even seem plausible. So it must be false. Not only is his thesis intelligible, but in many respects contemporary scientists learn about scientific method from his supporting arguments; specifically, these are the arguments presented in the received literature under the name of holism, which challenge the standard method for testing empirical hypothesis.

The radical relativist cannot talk substantively about an alternative description of reality without actually describing reality to some degree in that alternative way. The problem for the radical relativist is as follows, according to the text: If one can see that there is a substantive contrast of views, they have all of the conceptual equipment to show why scientists believe one set and not the other. This understanding, coupled with one's ability to envision multiple realities, disproves radical relativism.

Political Aspects of Modern Science in 17th Century Europe

Contemptuous distrust of modern scientific method is not new. The 19th century Romantic Age, and the Counter Reformation of the 17th century met detractors of it. In the first few decades of the 1600s Francis Bacon helped to defend 'The New Science' in response to this scepticism.

Outstanding practice in the modern scientific tradition has never been a matter of doing what one is told by authorities with vested interests. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), an early practitioner of modern science, was regarded by the political establishment of his day as an iconoclastic heretic. Essentially, Galileo was resisting to the dictates and doctrines of sanctioned, received knowledge. He was put on trial and his very life was literally threatened by the ruling authorities. Galileo set the precedent for thinking of intellectual rigour through treating his own experimental results as the ultimate tribunal.

Experimentalists had empiricism concerns to legitimate, in the 17th century. Since then the modern scientific tradition has had this effort to secure legitimacy-hence its emphasis on precision measurement, testability, and predictive power. The New Scientists were obliged to distinguish themselves from the flurry of soothsayers, alchemists, magicians, astrologers, fakirs and prophets who advised kings ostensibly without adequate foundation. The proponents of this New Science campaigned for their methods in an intellectual climate of severely skeptical resistance to anything "New" on offer. The wary scepticism of intellectual circles in 17th century France and England was a fallout of the successful Reformation of the 1500s.

The discussion highlights that it is necessary to be aware of the social and political context of celebrated methods and personnel in the receiving cannon of science.

Intellectual Humility and Social Service

Francis Bacon proposed the methods of a New Science precisely to offset the negative effects of familiar fallibilities and least attractive character traits that impede the successful pursuit of truth. He analyzed these foibles of human nature in a famous passage from one of his best-known works. This analysis is referred to as Bacon's "Four Idols."

The Idols

• Idols of the Cave: The individual to favor his or her own intuitions and subjective experience over everyone else's. Distorting due to education, habituated conditioning, accidental circumstances, and social status.

• Idols of the Tribe: Characteristics that all humans share in common, which also interrupt clarity of experience, include sloth, pride, vanity, gullibility, the desire for a sense of security and control, the biological need to quell the stress of uncertainty.

• Idols of the Theatre: Preconceptions accrued through reading "the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration."

• Idols of the Marketplace: Obscurities and vagueness of expressions that plague communication among men, due to the inherent confusions of ill and unfit choice of words. Rendered philosophy sophistical and inactive.

Bacon has believed we could overcome these liabilities of human character and human sense experience by being aware of them and consciously training the mind to systematically avoid their pitfalls.

Bacon stressed the need to follow special disciplines and to qualify every conjecture:

Pragmatic Rules of Thumb

• Turn away from established authority figures and dogma; avoid consulting politically powerful experts and traditional or received wisdom; adopt a try-it-and see for yourself approach to discovery.

• Rely upon first-hand investigation, accumulate such systematically acquired first-person experience and make tentatively several competing proposals on the basis of it.

• Strive for degrees or grades of certainty.

• Reject absolutist claims to inviolable knowledge; rely ultimately on mathematical representations to ensure clarity and precision of expression.

Adherence to this regime was not regarded as a virtue in itself. Good science was neither detached from worldly and practical concerns nor disinterested in civil society.

Bacon urged that the institutions of the New Science should be broadly political and civic organs of partnership between entrepreneurs, scholars, and the ruling elite in the interest of promoting social welfare. The methods of the New Science should be judged by their observable results in the advancement of social welfare. Bacon published his views about the social responsibility and obligations of theoreticians and experimentalists to assist in the good governance of society. He was very explicit in his suggestions about how these civic duties should be carried out.

Bacon's vision inspired the founding of The Royal Society of London in 1661, 35 years after his death.

In his New Atlantis (1624) Bacon described his ideal of a society where scientists are the chief administrators controlling state policy. In many ways Bacon's utopia anticipated the mannerisms and protocols of modern research institutions today and some of the ideals and norms of contemporary technocratic cultures.

POLITICAL ASPECTS OF POST-MODERN SCIENCE IN 21ST CENTURY AFRICA

Part one of this chapter dispensed with the illusion that there is any logical barrier to synthesizing the best of characteristically distinct conceptual schemes. Yet there remain practical and strategical obstacles to incorporating the modern scientific conceptual scheme within any cultural traditions that are indigenous to Africa. The ideology dominating the current mainstream scientific literature sustains the arcane conviction that Africans require foreign direction and expertise in the development of research applications within their own societies.

African economies cannot afford the luxuries of quality libraries, nor up-to-date textbooks and curricula, electricity, medical infrastructure, food security, sanitary urban development, or natural disaster management. The dominant development of science and technology in formerly colonized regions of Africa remains hindered by economic interests and cultural preoccupations of affluent communities elsewhere. There are forces to collude inadvertently with this reality. These are examples of what can compromise quality in formerly occupied countries.

The attitude of colonial past is over and done with, and denying its relevance to explain contemporary problems, conspires to reinforce a vision of a backward Africa, where present dilemmas have no history other than placeless African tradition. The very discourse of science invalidates the historical and socio-political aspects of 'natural' (i.e. 'environmental' or 'biological') processes.