“WHAT SCIENCE IS” (EPILOGUE)
In the nine preceeding chapters of this volume, I have succeeded in objectively and conclusively showing the careful reader exactly how it is that science gets hooked onto the real, by which I mean the really fucking robustly real, world, while non-science does not, or does so only by happy accident, (to be later verified, clarified and set straight by our newly disciplined scientific methodology). Now you’re ready to get out there and tell us who are the scientists and who are just “frontin’”, and who should therefore “step off”.
But wait! Before you fire up the Science Detector (see chapter 5) and get out there in the field to tell everyone what’s what, make sure it’s calibrated so that creationism, roughly the notion that some facts of the world are explainable only by appeal to agency outside of natural causation, doesn’t count as a scientific theory. That would be embarassing! This calibration is straightforward, in fact I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the scientifically “queer” entities in a soft lavender hue. You’d be surprised how many people neglect this simple procedure!
In this brief epilogue to my momentous contribution to intellectual history, I will discuss this blog post by John Wilkins, and share with you my uninformed and ill-considered thoughts about science and postmodernism. I’ve earned it!
First, I have to jump on the fact that he discusses modernism, in the sense of a precursor to post-modernism, while seemingly unaware of fact that it’s the name of a kind of literature. Here are some of it’s attributes. In particular, the first and fourth point are suggestive of certain qualitities often described as “post-modern.”
Perspectivism: the locating of meaning from the viewpoint of the individual; the use of narrators located within the action of the fiction, experiencing from a personal, particular (as opposed to an omniscient, ‘objective’) perspective; the use of many voices, contrasts and contestations of perspective; the consequent disappearance of the omniscient narrator, especially as ’spokesperson’ for the author; the author retires from the scene of representation, files her or his fingernails (says Joyce).
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Language is no longer seen as transparent, something if used correctly allows us to ’see through’ to reality: rather language is seen as a complex, nuanced site of our construction of the ‘real’; language is ‘thick’, its multiple meanings and varied connotative forces are essential to our elusive, multiple, complex sense of and cultural construction of reality.
It’s easy to see the seeds of what is now called postmodernism in these literary developments, especially the attitude toward language and narrative as something to be played with, something non-representational, something with a life and structure all it’s own. When Wilkins, going on the working assumption that postmodernism is an outgrowth of modernism in architecture and fashion, says “[p]ostmodernism began, I suppose, on the assumption that buildings and styles need to be livable,” my top-hat literally flew off and began twirling around in the air a foot above my head. Literally!
Here’s another list, by the same professor, of some attributes of post-modernist literature, and showing roughly how it treated its ancestor, (very roughly indeed). Generalize these attributes from “literature” to all texts, including science, philosophy and math texts, and everything else under the sun; one gets, (in my almost totally uninformed opinion), a pretty recognizable picture of what people mean when they call an attitude “postmodern,” and also what people who see the pursuit of timeless truths as the only respectable intellectual endeaver find threatening. See, in particular,
- a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience
- parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form
- the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society
- a crossing or dissolving of borders — between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture
- a sense that the world is a world made up of rhetoric — of language and cultural constructs and images and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity
And so on. It’s not hard for me to get into Wilkins’ head and see how a “research programme” on the basis of these principles looks pretty ridiculous, like children playing a game of pretend, aping the jargon of real scientists doing real hard work uncovering totally goddamn true truths. It’s like working in an office where someone always just blatantly fucks around surfing web porn all day, but still keeps collecting pay and getting promotions, while you work your ass off like a good boy. The sense of being taken for granted that a lot of scientific researchers and hangers-on feel is similar but less justified, and not just because, hey, you could jerk off all day too if you wanted. They, (scientists and their philosophical cheerleading squad), resent the fact that they are tested by the world and become hard by it, while postmodernism allows “a sheltered workshop for intellectuals who did not want to engage science.” I don’t particularly see a problem with having shelters for unscientific intellectuals. Personally, I don’t blame them, the actual activity of doing science is extremely boring and tedious, and as a genre of literature, (as science is to the philosopher of science and other outside interpreters), it’s an acquired taste.
Postmodernism, as it’s hinted at above, would indeed be a devastating and absurd perspective from which to run a laboratory, or to accept in the dialogue of the professional scientist in the act of getting his science on. Postmodernism is not a way of pursuing consensus about the character of the natural world. In fact, it often rejects the very motivation behind seeking such consensus. It’s not a scientific theory. To say on the basis of this, as Wilkin’s does, that it is therefore “anti-science,” and categorize it with creationism, is obscene.
Creationists, and anti-science advocates of any kind, fail to appreciate [that science exceeds individuals]. To them, science is some corpus of beliefs that an individual has to accept, the way one has to accept the tenets of capitalism or the religion of humanism or whatever is their bête noir. They do not see that one can be a node in the scientific enterprise even if they do not share any beliefs with their fellows, so long as they treat evidence and inference the same way. One cannot do theology unless one accepts the core beliefs of that discipline. One can do science no matter what one believes.
Well, it’s not true that one can do science no matter what one believes. For example, if you’re a creationist who believes that truth and explanation consists in appeal to scripture and supernatural agency, you are barred from doing science. Rightfully so. Scientists are interested in theories which make predictions, which are then used to create devices for reliably controlling, and sometimes exploding, some feature of our environment. Scientists go about understanding the natural world by observing the results of controlled interactions, interpreting data, talking to other scientists in a community, making predictions, observing results, in an endlessly self-refining cycle. As soon as the creationist decides to admit observation as providing better evidence for truth than divine revelation, he can again take part in scientific activity.
Anyone can “do science” in the sense of making predictions and testing them on the basis of some model or theory, whatever one believes, true enough. Claiming this as the only worthwhile intellectual pursuit, the only way of getting at the really truly objective truth of the matter, is exactly the sort of pomposity that post-modernism was designed to ridicule. Postmodernists, while engaged in whatever activity this label suggests, have little interest in “treating evidence and inference the same way” as scientists.