Introducing Philosophy of Science E-Book

Ziauddin Sardar

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 109

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

What do scientists actually do? Is science "value-free"? How has science evolved through history? Where is science leading us? "Introducing Philosophy of Science" is a clear and incisively illustrated map of the big questions underpinning science. It is essential reading for students, the general public, and even scientists themselves.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-980-6

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Nature of the Beast

Is Science “Absolute Objectivity”?

Do We Trust Scientists?

What Do Scientists Actually Do?

Definitions of Science

The Golem of Science

The Contested Territory of Science

Do Scientists Understand Science?

Emergence and Development of Science Studies

Science Studies in the 1960s

Diverse Critical Approaches

A Growth Industry

Conflict within Science Studies

Criticism from the “Low Church”

Comparing the Radical Origins

Why is Science Studies Important?

A Very Short History of Science

Fast Forward to the Renaissance…

The Great March

Heavenly Sparks

Planet of the Apes

Science in the Killing-fields

Environmental Catastrophe

Can Scientists Make Mistakes?

A Question of Paradigms

Fallen Idols

The Vienna Circle: Logical Positivism

The Circle’s Influence

Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” Theory

Against Induction

Thomas Kuhn’s Revolution

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Normal Science

Revolutionary Science

The Enemy of Science

In Opposition to Kuhn

The End of “Dominant Notions”

Is Kuhn a Radical?

The Birth of Big Science

Supporting Big Science

Feyerabend, the Anarchist

Anything Goes

A Free-for-all

Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

The Spirit of Science

The Strong Programme

The Basics of SSK

Science as Social Construction

The Effect of Reality

The Construction of Objectivity

The Science Tribe

Constructionism vs. Strong Programme

Theory-laden Observations

The Context of “Tradition”

Feminist Criticism

Women in Science

The Segregation of Women in Science

The Invisible Woman in the Lab

Androcentric Science

Women as Providers

More Women in Science

Strong Objectivity

Responsible Rationality

Reproductive Labour

Post-colonial Science Criticism

Science and Empire

Imperial Geography

What Happened Under Colonialism?

Empirical History of Islamic Science

Indian and Chinese science

Rediscovery of Civilizational Science

Framework for Islamic Science

Tawheed and Khalifah

Ibadah: Non-violent Contemplation

Rediscovering Indian Science

Walking on Two Legs

The Western View of Nature

Other Views of Nature

Assumption Shape Science

What is Assumed “Efficient”?

Assumptions of Genetic Differences

The Racial Economy of Science

The “Value” of Science

The Myth of Neutrality

Social Epistemology

What Social Epistemology Asks …

Science Communication

Multi-culturalism and Scientific Knowledges

Science Wars

In Defence of Science

Against the “Academic Left”

Enter, Sokal (stage right)

Blitzkrieg on Postmodernism

Beyond the Hoax

The Public Understanding of Science

Publicity vs. Accountability

How Science Has Changed

The Crux of Funding

Corporate Funding of Research

The Profit Motive

What Direction for Science?

What Gets Scientific Attention?

The Focus on “Celebrity Problems”

Population and Poverty

Patenting Knowledge

The Neem Tree

Appropriation of Indigenous Knowledge

Intensified Appropriation

Mode 2 Knowledge

Consequences of Mode 2 Knowledge

Uncertainty in Mode 2

Policy Debates in the Balance

“Mad Cow” Disease

The MMR Scare

Assessing the Bigger Picture

Statistical Errors

The Place of Ignorance

A Choice of Ignorance

“Ignorance-squared”

The End of Doubt

Safety and the Unknowable

Other GM Risks

Increasing the Uncertainty Stakes

Beyond the Normal

Post-Normal Science

Selling the Post-Normal Agenda

PNS vs. Constructionist Analysis

PNS in Action

The Precautionary Principle

Origins of the Precautionary Principle

Community Research Networks

The Community Responds …

Science Shops

Where Now?

The Democratic Solution

Whose Science is It?

It is Our Science

Further Reading

About the Author and Artist

Acknowledgements

Index

The Nature of the Beast

Our world is shaped and driven by science. Almost every benefit of modern life – from antibiotics to computers, our understanding of human evolution to our ability to land a satellite on Saturn – is a product of science. For most people, progress is simply another term for advances in scientific knowledge and benefits derived from new discoveries of science.

But what exactly is this perpetual engine of progress? While the benefits of science are easy to see, science itself is anything but easy to define.

Is Science “Absolute Objectivity”?

Until quite recently, Western tradition saw science as the quest for objective knowledge of nature and reality. Scientists were regarded as quasi-religious supermen, heroically battling against all odds to discover the truth.

And the truths they wrestled out of nature were said to be absolute … … objective, value-free and universal.

As one sociologist in the 1940s described it, science reflects the character of nature itself: “The stars have no sentiments, the atoms no anxieties which have to be taken into account. Observation is objective with little effort on the part of the scientist to make it so.”

Or, as J.D. Bernal (1901–71), the radical historian of science, put it …

Science is all about rationality, universalism and disinterestedness.

Do We Trust Scientists?

But this picture of truth-loving and truth-seeking scientists working for the benefit of humanity is rather at odds with the public conception of science and scientists. Most people are not “anti-science”. We recognize the potential that science has for making our lives healthier and easier.

But recent research has shown that most people do not trust scientists and are concerned with potential harmful side-effects of science. Scientists are seen by the public not as disinterested “truth-seekers” but as narrow-minded compulsives concerned with their own fame and fortune.

The view of the scientists we find in popular literature and film is even more scathing.

Dr Henry Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is not the monster, but …

… a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image – without reckoning upon Gad.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Jekyll is a restless young scientist who discovers a concoction that turns him into his alter ego …

… the repellent and murderous and murderous Mr Hyde.

In H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), a scientist develops mutant life-forms that live in pain and misery …

… we violently revolt against out creator.

In the classic film Dr Strangelove (1964), the title character, played by Peter Sellers, is a paraplegic Nazi scientist …

… who is miraculously cured once the world has been plunged into a nuclear Armageddon.

The Boys from Brazil (1978) shows scientists as evil Nazis hell-bent on recreating a race of Hitlers.

In Batman and Robin (1997), both villains are scientists:

…the evil Mr Freeze… …and the misguided Miss Poison Ivy.

Why do the popular perceptions of science and scientists differ so radically from the scientists’ own self-image as brilliant pioneers deserving of admiration, funding and blind trust? Perhaps because, apart from bringing benefits, science has also posed serious threats to humanity.

Science has given us the bomb, as well as biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. It introduced the spectre of eugenics and has brought us to the brink of human cloning.

The by-products of science, such as nuclear waste and chemical pollution, are destroying ecosystems on local, regional and global scales. So, science brings us benefits as well as costs. Perhaps it was in an effort to present a more deflated image of science that the Nobel Prize physicist Lord Rutherford (1871–1937) said:

Science is what scientists do.

What Do Scientists Actually Do?

Here are some examples of the negative things that scientists actually do, as reported by the media.

The Independent newspaper, Section 2, 26 January 1995, “They Shoot Pigs Don’t They?” reported:

In Parton Down research establishment in England, scientists have been using live animals to test body armour. The animals were strapped on to trolleys and subjected to blasts at either 600 or 750mm from the mouth of the explosively driven shock tube. Initially, monkeys were used in these experiments, but scientists later switched to shooting pigs. The animals were shot just above the eye to investigate the effects of high-velocity missiles on brain tissue.

Hold still … This won’t hurt a bit.

Time magazine, January 1994; also Chip Brown, “The Science Club Serves its Country”, Esquire, December 1994 reported:

In the United States in the late 1940s, teenage boys were fed radioactive breakfast cereal, middle-aged mothers were injected with radioactive plutonium and prisoners had their testicles irradiated – all in the name of science, progress and national security. These experiments were conducted through to the 1970s.

Hold still … This won’t hurt a bit.

Ron Rosenbaum, “Even the Wife of the President of the United States Sometime Had to Stand Naked”, The Independent, 21 January 1995 – a reprint of a New York Times story – reported:

During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, it was mandatory for all new students of both sexes at Harvard, Yale and other elite universities of the United States to have themselves photographed naked for a huge project designed to demonstrate that “a person’s body, measured and analysed, could tell much about intelligence, temperament, moral worth and probable future achievements”. The inspiration came from the founder of Social Darwinism, Francis Galton (1822–1911), who had proposed such a photo archive for the British population. The accumulated data was to be used for a proposal to “control and limit the production of inferior and useless organisms”. “Some of the latter would be penalized for reproducing … or would be sterilized. But the real solution is enforced better breeding – getting those Exeter and Harvard men together with their corresponding Wellesley, Vasser and Radcliffe girls.” The biologist responsible for the project, W.H. Sheldon of Harvard, used the photographs to publish the Atlas of Men.

Smile … you’re on candid camera.

These revelations cast science in a radically different perspective.

What scientists actually do has been extensively dissected by historians of science, examined by sociologists and anthropologists of science, analysed by philosophers of science, and scrutinized by feminist and non-Western scholars.

This work has produced a different set of definitions and explanations for science … One that challenges the scientists’ own view of science as an objective adventure that stands above all concerns of culture and values.

Definitions of Science

Most critics now see science as an organized, institutionalized and industrialized venture. It requires huge funding, large, sophisticated and expensive equipment and hundreds of scientists working on minute problems.

The prospects for technological application – usually for profit – determine the choices of which scientific projects and fields will be funded … … and which will be starved.

As knowledge and power have coalesced, knowledge itself has been corrupted and become an instrument of social control and corporate domination.

Here are some other definitions of science.

Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology, Warwick University

Science is the systematic pursuit of knowledge, regardless of subject matter. What is sociologically most interesting about science is that it sets the standard by which the rest of society is legitimated. This standard often goes by the name of “rationality”, “objectivity”, or simply “truth”. When we use these words, we imply that the standard of legitimation is, at least in principle, available to everyone in society. This is simply not the case. The opposite of science is not ideology or technology, but expertise and intellectual property which imply that knowledge is privatised to a select group of knowledge-producers and owners.

Science is a sexist and chauvinist enterprise that promotes the values of white, middle-class moles.

Sandra Harding, feminist scholar of science

The Golem of Science

Science is a golem. A golem is a creature of Jewish mythology. It is a humanoid mode by man from clay and water, with incantations and spells. It is powerful. It grows a little more powerful every day. It will follow orders, do your work, and protect you from the ever threatening enemy. But it is clumsy and dangerous. Without control, a golem may destroy its masters with its foiling vigour … since we are using a golem as a metaphor for science, it is also worth noting that in the mediaeval tradition the creature of clay was animated by having the Hebrew word “EMETH”, meaning truth, inscribed on its forehead – it is truth that drives it on. But this does not mean it understands the truth – for from it.

Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, sociologists of science

The Contested Territory of Science

Science is a theology of violence. It performs violence against the subject of knowledge, against the abject of knowledge, against the beneficiary of knowledge and against knowledge itself.

Ashis Nandy, Indian cultural theorist

Science is the new entrenched state religion in America.

Vine Deloria Jr., Lakota Indian activist and Professor of American Indian Studies, University of Colorado

All of these different definitions and perceptions of science tell us one thing for certain:

Science is a contested territory.

The various claims and counter-claims about the nature of science – all containing some aspect of truth – reveal science to be a highly complex and multi-layered activity. No single and simple description of science can reveal its basic nature. No romantic ideal can describe its real character. No sweeping generalization can uncover its real dimensions.

Do Scientists Understand Science?

Until now, scientists have had little or no understanding of how science actually works in practice. Scientists have misunderstood science in a number of important ways.