werner@aecom.YU.EDU (Robert N. Berlinger) (05/15/88)
What follows is an excerpt from a recent Stephen Jay Gould essay
in Natural History. (I've got to start typing in the reference along with
the quote. Not only that, this section was wholely tangential to the
essay as a whole, but I live for tangents.)
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Popular misunderstanding of science and its history centers upon
the vexatious notion of scientific progress -- a concept embraced by all
practitioners and boosters, but assailed, or at least mistrusted, by
those suspicious of science and its power to improve our lives. The
enemy of resolution, here as nearly always, is that old devil Dichotomy.
We take a subtle and interesting issue, with a real resolution embracing
aspects of all basic positions, and we divide ourselves into two holy
armies, each with a brightly colored cardboard mythology as its flag of
struggle.
The cardboard banner of scientific boosterism is an extreme form
of realism, the notion that science progresses because it discovers more
and more about an objective material reality out there in the universe.
The extreme version holds that science is an utterly objective enterprise
(and therefore superior to other human activities), that scientists read
reality directly by invoking the scientific method to free their minds of
cultural superstition, and that the history of science is a march toward
Truth, mediated by increasing knowledge of the external world.
The cardboard banner of the opposition is an equally extreme
form of relativism, the idea that truth has no objective meaning and can
only be assessed by the variable standards of different communities and
cultures. The extreme version holds that scientific consensus is no
different from any other arbitrary set of social conventions, say the
rules for Chinese handball set by my old crowd on 63rd Avenue. Science
is ideology, and scientific "progress" is no improving map of external
reality, but only a derivative expression of cultural change.
These positions are so sharply defined that they can only elicit
howls of disbelief from the opposition. How can relativists deny that
science discovers external truth, say the realists. Cro-Magnon people
could draw a horse as beautifully as any artist now alive, but they could
not resolve the structure of DNA or photograph the moons of Uranus. How,
reply the relativists, can anyone deny the social character of science
when Darwin needed Adam Smith more than Galapagos tortoises, and when
Linnaeus matched his taxonomy to prevailing views of divine order.
These extreme positions, of course, are embraced by very few
thinkers. They are caricatures constructed by the opposition to enhance
the rhetorical advantages of dichotomy. They are not really held by
anyone, but partisans THINK that their opponents are this foolish, thus
fanning the zealousness of their own advocacy. The possibility for
consensus drowns in a sea of charges.
The central claim of each side is correct, and no inconsistency
attends the marriage once we drop the peripheral extremities of each
attitude. Science is, and must be, culturally embedded; what else could
the product of human passion be? Science is also progressive because it
discovers and masters more and more (yet ever so little in toto) of a
complex external reality. Culture is not the enemy of objectivity but a
matrix that can either aid or retard advancing knowledge. Science is not a
linear march to truth but a tortuous road with blind alleys and a
rubbernecking delay every mile or two. Our road map is not objective
reality but the patterns of human thoughts and theories.
--
Craig Werner (future MD/PhD, 3.5 years down, 3.5 to go)
werner@aecom.YU.EDU -- Albert Einstein College of Medicine
(1935-14E Eastchester Rd., Bronx NY 10461, 212-931-2517)
"It doesn't even have to be a Pelvis."