Reason and Science, those flowers of mankind

Scoff at all knowledge and despise
reason and science, those flowers of mankind.
Let the father of all lies
with dazzling necromancy make you blind,
then I will have you unconditionally.
Gothe, Faust

I have been reading and thinking about the relationship that both the Left and the Right have with science, Reason and the Enlightenment and have a few words to say. This post will lack even the caustic fun that torture and proto-fascism seems to bring out in me, so I apologize ahead of time. On the other hand, this is an important topic to me and reflects real problems that exist both in and out of academia.

The relationship that society as a whole, and The Academy in particular has with the general box of thinking known as Science has been changing over the past few decades. This is significant to me for many reasons. For myself, the impartial questioning and rationalism represented by Science exists as the single most powerful weapon against the ever present tide of authoritarianism (and the Irrational which it represents). Since the time of the Enlightenment, there has been a constant tension between the good old days of godhead kings, and the dorks who want to make this planet covered in smelly apes just another dirty ball of rocks circling just another mid-size sun.

This is the classic conflict that most people think of with Religion vs. Science. It is well understood and has been described in some gruesome detail by people both smarter and more articulate than myself. We move on.

Likewise, the maddening influence of politics in the current generation of scientists has been gone over in some detail - for example by Chris Mooney's "The Republican War on Science." The term 'war' here is not a misnomer and can accurately be used to describe the current relationship. The tension between the two sides here is absolutely natural given that fact based thinking is antithetical to most ideological systems. I shall reluctantly put down that knife as well.

So what remains?

There exists today a growing hostility from both the left and the right within academia toward foundational science. The orchestrated movement against science and rationality is described in a book that I have been reading - "The Flight from Science and Reason", edited by Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt and Martin W. Lewis. There are two significant thrusts described in the book (which is a thick collection of articles and presentations).

The first is a direct criticism of the idea of a meaningful value for the scientific method and impartial observations and facts. They just simply don't exist. The second is pseudoscience. What I mean by this is the sad state of affairs where you get fuzzy ideas dressed up under the guise of real science. Hahahaha!! There, I said it.

The very idea that facts are contextually embedded within some sort of social construction seems to me to be a definitive case of philosophical negligence. It can be fun in that creative philosophy paper writing sort of way, but when it comes to deciding if the speeding car is going to clear the intersection before I go through, the burden of proof needs to be a little more reality based. I suspect that even the most die-hard anti positivist looks both ways before they cross the street.

In a nearly unrelated note, my personal favorite example of things going quite wrong for the social constructivest's is the Sokal Affair. Stealing directly from wikipedia:

The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."^[1]

The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"^[2], was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by humanities academics.

This is getting too long so I need to just get to my point...

There are real consequences for Science caused by this growing anti-rational movement. While the academic popularity of postmodernism seems to be waining, the seeds of dissent from an intellectual foundation which is reality based grow on and on.

An interesting example (abet somewhat dated), is the initial draft for the National Science Education Standards from 1991. In an appendix designed to clarify contemporary views on the philosophy of science, we find the following:

Two competing paradigms of science have been the focus of disageement among historians, philosophers and sociologists. The older, referred to as logical positivism, is characterized by arguments for the objectivity of scientific observation and the truth of scientific knowledge. A more contemporary approach, often called postmodernism, questions the objectivity of observation and the truth of scientific knowledge.

After the assertion that science is "the mental representation constructed by the individual", the section ends with the following:

The National Science Educational Standards are based on the postmodernist view of the nature of science.

The section was removed when the reviewing commitie freaked out with some members resigning in disgust, but the same social constructivist view seems to be prevelent in the document even after editing. Acording to Holton (as I have not read the document myself!)

Nowhere appeared a statement that scientists seek to find regularities in nature, or to discover and explain new phenomena or laws, or to reach sharable and testable insights about the lawfulness and order in the natural world. By these proposed standards, Marie Curie did not discover radium, she "constructed" it.

I could go on and on, but I will stop now. As I see it, this is just another step away from a social order based on rational discussion and order of law. I will continue this argument at some later post since this is already far longer than any sane person would read.