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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Presents a powerful narrative that situates the individual within the inescapable framework of social forces
In a world increasingly defined by inequality and existential threats, Sociological Realism: Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment offers a bold reinterpretation of society’s role in shaping the individual. Beginning with the premise that society is a reality sui generis—a unique and formative system—Sal Restivo carefully constructs an argument about how institutions, cultural traditions, and historical processes shape our identities, behaviours, and beliefs. Tracing the development of the sociological imagination from antiquity to the present day, the author introduces foundational thinkers whilst anchoring abstract theory in personal narrative and lived experience.
This distinctive volume—part introductory sociology, part sociobiography—confronts dominant ideas about free will, agency, and the autonomous self. Engaging with contemporary issues including class, race, sex, gender, and mortality, the book explores the metaphorical ”walls” that constrain human potential. It also considers possible ”escape tunnels” as suggested by sociologists such as Peter Berger and Erving Goffman. Through original theories—such as the social construction of the brain, the logic of power and free will, and a social-network approach to creativity— Sociological Realism challenges the myth of individualism and portrays the self as a socially embedded phenomenon. Restivo’s own reflections act as a vivid case study in sociological imagination, enriching the text with immediacy and authenticity.
Challenging readers to reconceptualise the boundaries between mind, self, and society, Sociological Realism: Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment:
- Offers a unique blend of personal memoir and academic reflection to stimulate sociological imagination
- Provides a concise yet comprehensive history of sociological thought from antiquity to the present
- Presents original theories on the social construction of the brain and creativity
- Applies sociological analysis to contemporary topics such as sex, gender, race, and mortality
- Integrates classic and contemporary sociological texts through brief, accessible excerpts
Sociological Realism: Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying sociology, behavioural science, social psychology, or social work. It is an ideal core or supplementary text for courses such as Introduction to Sociology, Social Theory, or Behavioural Science, and fits into degree programmes across the social sciences. It also speaks to general readers seeking insight into how society shapes thought, action, and identity in a rapidly changing world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment
On the Concept of Natural Kinds in Science
The Road to Sociology
Conclusion: On Perspective
Chapter 2: Science and Sociology
Science and Morals
The Ethos of Science
Chapter 3: Founders and Founding Ideas
1
Origins
Intervention on the Study of Culture
Ibn Khaldun Again
The Founding Ideas of the Sociological Imagination
Themes
The Role of Women in the Founding Moments of the Sociological Imagination
Modern Era in Sociology and Anthropology
Chapter 4: Key Literary Moments in My Sociological Biography
Flashback
Intervention: A Note on Numbers and Economics
An Era of Crisis
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Tolstoy's Perspective on Human Being and Conduct
Capturing the Life of a People
Interlude: Physics Intervenes
Tolstoy Again
Free Will
Conclusion
Epilogue: On Power
Chapter 6: Humans Among the Social Species
1
The Decline of Face‐to‐Face as an Existential Threat
Conclusion
Caveat
Epilogue: The Bonobos Natural Experiment
Chapter 7: Gumplowicz and the Myth of the Individual
Morals
Basic Principles of Human Being and Conduct
Rights
Rights and the State
Rights and Morals
Conclusion
Coda
Chapter 8: The Social Origins of God
1
How Can We Know A God Outside of Space and Time?
A Case Study in Christian Philosophy
I Discover God
Moments of Awakening
The Career of the Mythic Hero
Sacred and Profane
Collective Effervescence
The Awakening Continues
Conclusion: Religion, God, and the Sociological Imagination
Chapter 9: The Social Brain
1
Connectomes
Genius, and Social Networks: Einstein and John Coltrane
The Woman in Einstein's Social Brain
The Social Brain
The Sociology of Improvisation: John Coltrane
The Work Itself
Not Anything Goes
Networks of Jazz
The Jazz Machine
Conclusion: Creativity and the Anarchist Brain
Chapter 10: Institutional Walls of Imprisonment
The Concept of Total Institution
A Methodological Intervention: The Ideal Type
Institutions Once More
Society and Survival
Chapter 11: Social Class, Sex, and Gender: Case Studies in Walls of Imprisonment
Social Class
Ragged Dick
Sex and Gender
Are Escape Tunnels Illusions?
Conclusion
Epilogue on Non‐Binary Concepts
Definitions in Common Use
Transgender and Transsexual
Some Terms to Avoid
Chapter 12: Race and Racism: A Case Study in Walls of Imprisonment
Systemic Racism/Institutional Racism
The Credential Society: Education and Social Stratification
The Souls of Black Folk
Intersectionality
Racial Capitalism
Critical Race Theory
Culture Wars
DEI and Affirmative Action
Epilogue: Terms of Reference
Chapter 13: Escape Tunnels in the Walls of Our Imprisonment
The Story of a Wall of Imprisonment
The Great Wall of China
The Lesson of Concrete Walls
Escape Tunnels in the Walls of Our Imprisonment
Chapter 14: The Ultimate Wall: The Sociology of Death and Dying: IT’S a Mystery
Sex and Death: Where Walls of Imprisonment Meet
Growing Old and Facing Death
What is Life?
The Pleasure of Death
Enter Victor Frankl and Bruno Bettelheim
The Medicalization of Dying
When you and Others Die
Tolstoy Redux
Enter Stage Right, David Brooks, 2025
Exit Stage Left, Sal Restivo, 2025
The Meaning of Life
Ernest Becker (1924–1974)
References
PART 1
PART II
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 The School at Athens, a fresco by the Italian Renaissan...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
References
Bibliography
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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Sociological Realism
Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment
Sal Restivo
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Dedicated in memoriam to Dr. Michael J. Lowy, 1944–2025, anthropologist, lawyer, City College of New York classmate, life‐long friend, a credit to a humanity that he served as a reminder of what that species could be in terms of compassion, intelligence, and integrity. Zichrono livracha (לברכה זכרונו).
About the Author
Dr. Sal Restivo retired as Professor of Sociology, Science Studies, and Information Technology from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York on June 30th, 2012; and retired from the Department of Technology, Culture, and Society at New York University in 2017. He is Honorary Special Lecture Professor of Science Studies at Northeastern University in Shenyang, China. He has also held special professorships and endowed chairs in the U.S., Canada, England, Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark. He is a founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science. He is now working as an independent scholar from his home in Ridgewood, NY. The Treachery of Realities (Brill, 2025) is the latest of his many books and articles in the sociology of the sciences.
Acknowledgements
In my 2024 book, Beyond New Atheism and Theism, I spoke too soon when I thanked my teachers, mentors, and educators “one last time.” I thought this was going to be my last book. More books followed, and so I once again have the opportunity to thank them. They made it possible for me to meet the world realistically and navigate its walls of imprisonment. My middle school guide, Mrs. Marie DeLio (“It's not funny, it's sad,” she said about the daily news), my Brooklyn Technical High School mentors Mr. Sanders (who was willing to tell the truth about God, but only in a bar while drinking beer), James Quinn, my electrical engineering mentor (“You won't be able to read the circuit diagrams if your hair is in your eyes”), my City College of New York guides for higher learning; sociologist Bernard Rosenberg who taught me to love sociological theory in the interest of social justice, Leo Hamalian who had to turn to Italian exclamations when he read my essays for his English class, anarchist historian Aaron Noland (“I am a Proudhon man”), and anthropologist Burt Aginsky (who cleared my path to graduate school). My graduate advisor John Useem took a machete to all the obstacles that make graduate school a chore rather than a joy. And I can never forget or fully understand how a street kid from Brooklyn, New York became an intellectual who discussed quantum mechanics and relativity theory in his living room with David Bohm, learned all things about the brain over seven years of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners in Santa Monica with neuroscientist Leslie Brothers, and came to call distinguished scholars like Don Campbell, Milton Rokeach, Joe Needham, Everett Rogers, Mary Douglas, Joe Agassi, and others friends. I am grateful for the friendship and support I received in my science studies career from Steve Woolgar, Karin Knorr‐Cetina, Jean Paul Van Bendegem, Jens Egede Høyrup, Bart Van Kerhove, Rik Pinxten, Karen Francois, Wes Shrum, Daryl Chubin, Susan Cozzens, Marcel LaFollette, Bob Merton, Derek J. DeSolla Price, Lew Peyenson, Hilary Rose, Les Levidow, Jerry Ravetz, Rita Arditti, Elizabeth Fee, and surprisingly many more given my self‐styed status as a loner and non‐schmoozer. I learned a great deal during day‐to‐day interactions with my university friends Linnda Caporael, Ellen Esrock, John Schumacher, David Weick, Shirley Gorenstein, and Audrey Bennett. I was as much a tutor of and tutored by my graduate students: Gil Peach, Jennifer Croissant, Wenda Bauchspies, Colin Beech, Rachel Dowty, Azita Hirsa, Yingfan Zhang, and Monica Mesquita. And in a category all their own, for having made me a better person and kept my feet firmly planted on the ground, my cousin Emily, Natalie DePaolo, Susan Kagan, Marilynn Sue Jones, Lia, Katie, Michelle of Moose Jaw, Laura Earp, and Michelle Pieters (a dream and a nightmare). My sons David and Dan have made me proud with their extraordinary talents and good works. And, above all, the woman whose life has blessed an undeserving humanity with her elegance, poetic imagination, and intelligence, my wife Wen, has been an inspiration coming to me in my eighties.
Chapter 1Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment
Society, wrote sociologist Peter Berger (1963:92) in his classic Invitation to Sociology, “antedates us and it survive us….In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history.” The first half of Berger's book leads the reader to a view of sociology as a “dismal science” that gives us an image of society as a “forbidding prison.” At this point, he feels obliged to ask whether there are some escape tunnels from this “gloomy determinism” (Berger, 1963:93). But before he can explore this possibility, he tells us he must “deepen the gloom a little more.” This suggests that our situation as prisoners is more profound than we can imagine, escape tunnels or not. Unfortunately, while there are escape tunnels, as we will see in Chapter 13, our situation is gloomier than even Berger imagined.
The subtitle of Berger's book is “a humanistic perspective.” This is meant to underscore Berger's understanding that sociology is scientific, but not scientistic. That is, he wants to ensure that we pursue our science of sociology without exaggerating or believing uncritically in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques. Thomas and Znaniecki (1918/1996) introduced humanistic sociology in their classic The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Scientism can blind us to the fact that sociology is ultimately a science of the human condition, a science that touches on the human passions. We are encouraged to draw on all the most sophisticated methodologies, mathematical tools, and research technologies of the sciences, but to use them in a civilized manner that ties sociology to the humanistic tradition of intellectual liberation (Berger, 1963:169). I will depart from Berger in two ways: I will paint a gloomier picture of society as the walls of our imprisonment. At the same time, I will go further than Berger in my commitment to a civilized liberatory science. Berger (1963:176) concludes his book by raising once again the image of society as a puppet theater. He claims that we can unravel the logic of this theater, locate ourselves, and see ourselves as puppets. Unlike real puppets, we can stop our movements, look to see the machinery moving us, and take the first steps to freeing ourselves from the machinery.
Is this true? Can we “perceive the machinery” and free ourselves from the walls of our imprisonment? Although Berger did not have formal theological credentials, his work in defense of Christian ethics and religious studies gave his sociology a theological slant at odds with my understanding of sociology as a fully secular discipline. Berger's theological perspective may help explain why his vision of society, the walls of our imprisonment notwithstanding, was more hopeful than mine.
The basic objective of this book is to tell the story of what the science of sociology has to tell us about who and what we are. We are used to hearing about ourselves, our personalities, our characters from biologists and neuroscientists who understand us in terms of genes and neurons. Psychologists are closely aligned with them, and they are the scientists we listen to most when we go searching for who and what we are. Psychologists study us as individuals, picking us out from the crowd and weighing us, measuring us, and otherwise probing us in accordance with the myth of individualism. Physicists weigh in based on the myth that physics can explain anything and everything. Chemists tell our story in terms of hormones and the chemicals that course through our bodies. And theologians tell us that we have souls – that we are beings made by and in the image of a god. However, since the 1840s, sociology and its cousin sciences anthropology and social psychology have been revealing the role of society in fashioning our behavior, our emotions, and our thoughts. In spite of some resistance to the claims of sociology and to its standing as a science, it has been an academic subject for almost 200 years and is part of the curriculum in most universities and colleges and some high schools in the United States and abroad.
Standard textbooks introduce students to society as a set of standard institutions (e.g. economy, polity, military, family, and religion) and stratified by factors such as race, class, sex, and gender. Students learn how these institutions work and their place in the social structure. The most conservative texts tell you that you should “know your place,” that is, accept your station in life. They might offer an explanation (and perhaps a justification) for why societies are structured the way they are and why you are sexed, gendered, raced, and classed. The more liberal and more radical texts offer critical assessments of social institutions and give you reasons and tools for criticizing, rebelling against, and changing societies characterized by social inequalities and social injustices. My book focuses on what sociology teaches us about the individual, the person reading this book, in the context of a society ruled by social inequalities and social injustices and a world challenged by existential threats.
Sociology is about how society shapes our being and behavior, who and what we are. There are many books, therefore, that deal with this fact about our lives. They overlap with each other, just as physics, chemistry, and biology texts overlap with each other. Each represents the core ideas of its disciplines in slightly different ways. For example, Callero (2023), like me, challenges the assumption that our behaviors are the result of free choices made by free‐willing agents. Callero devotes an entire chapter to how the power of the state shapes our lives in visible and invisible ways. He also treats race and social media and their impacts on our behavior. He discusses the ways in which cultural symbols, group conformity, family, social class, and global capitalism operate as walls of our imprisonment.
The distinction between sociology and anthropology is not always clear‐cut. Some university departments are devoted to both disciplines; some treat them in separate departments. It is impossible to separate my own training and education in sociology from my training and education in anthropology. Don't be surprised, then, if you see some anthropologists sprinkled in among the sociologists I introduce in this book. Social psychologists stand astride sociologists and psychologists, some leaning toward one discipline more than the other. Their work may show up here, too.
I may exaggerate the distinctions between sociology and other social sciences in the interest of communicating sociological principles. In practice, these distinctions are easily blurred. Disciplines are more historical accidents than natural kinds. Their subject matters are generally natural kinds. A natural kind is a category of things that reflects the structure of the natural world, rather than human interests. This is a difficult distinction to sustain since our explorations of the natural world are driven by our interests. But the distinction can be sustained if we understand science as a collective historical undertaking rather than one based on individual scientists.
On the Concept of Natural Kinds in Science
Scientists are charged in part with identifying natural kinds and theorizing about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings. We tend to assume that science is often successful in revealing these kinds; it is a corollary of scientific realism that when all goes well, the classifications and taxonomies employed by science correspond to the real kinds in nature. The existence of these real and independent kinds of things is held to justify our scientific inferences and practices. Chemistry provides what are taken by many to be the paradigm examples of natural kinds, the chemical elements. Natural kinds in the social sciences, such as economics or sociology, are more problematic since the changing norms and practices of individuals and societies may also be held to be constitutive factors in kind membership, and these norms and practices may themselves respond to our classification of people and relationships into kinds. These examples are troublesome because there is some tension between the existence of kinds and the mutability of the particulars, which are supposed to fall under those kinds. In the case of atoms or galaxies, the particulars under study are typically long‐lived and only slowly changing; viruses and economic structures, on the other hand, are more dynamic. But dynamics should not be a barrier to defining kinds; sometimes change is an inherent characteristic of a natural kind. This is true to varying degrees across the sciences. The more complex the subject matter of a science, the more dynamic its natural kinds will be. Once we establish that society is a scientific concept (more on this below), the science of society will identify society's natural kinds. The complexity of identifying kinds is increased by the fact that it is human beings in social contexts trying to identify kinds and label, name, and classify them with language and numbers. This suggests that all kinds are socially constructed. And indeed this is the case and explains why we can never know “the thing in itself.”
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that we can only know things as they appear to us, shaped by our senses and the structures of our understanding (like space and time). The “thing‐in‐itself” (Ding an sich) is the underlying reality that exists beyond these limitations, something we can't directly access or know. The sociological version of this philosophy is that our world is socially constructed, and knowledge is a matter of exploring how the nature and limits of our behavior give us hints about the world as it exists independent of our perceptions. We can know reality in practice but not reality in itself. This is a matter of the match between our sensory apparatus and the reality it is able to access. Technological prosthetics (for example, microscopes and telescopes) can expand the range of our access.
The Road to Sociology
The perspective in this book is driven by the forces that led me to sociology. There is a memoir – a sociobiography – that serves as the subtext in this book. It becomes explicit when I introduce my personal reflections on who and what I am, always in the context of my being an exhibit of the sociological imagination in action. Sociology had a profound influence on me as a college student. It helped give meaning to my life and eventually led me to an economically sustaining profession that was not so much work as a way of life, a calling.
Sociologists argue that the following questions are more appropriately addressed by sociologists than by philosophers and psychologists. If they were once the province of philosophy, psychology, and theology that is no longer true, these are now questions for, in the broadest sense, the social sciences. What is a human being, what is “the self,” what role does social life play in shaping our personalities and character, our emotions, the very ways in which we think, and how do genes and neurons, hormones and other chemicals, and physics matter here? The reason these are sociological questions follows from an evolutionary fact: humans arrive on the evolutionary stage as the most radically social of the social species. They are more radically social than their closest relatives, the nonhuman primates, and differently social than bees, ants, and other social insects (Wilson, 2011).
Humans are always, already, and everywhere social. Primordial humans did not engage in a war of all against all that ended when they agreed to a “social contract.” Humans arrived social through and through. Society and culture shape us into individuals but individuals who never lose their species‐specific social nature. Culture can fracture our evolutionary social heritage and bind us to a myth of individualism that supports illusions about free will and agency. It can undermine compassion and empathy. Cultural evolution has become more important than genes and neurons in shaping who and what we are, a fact increasingly recognized by biological scientists and social scientists. Culture has contradictory dialectics that allows it on the one hand to support our evolutionary socialness via social institutions while at the same time demonstrating a capacity to fracture our socialness. This is a function of culture’s role in complexifying our social relationships and thereby enhancing conflicting and contradictory social forces. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
The reader will encounter the sociological way of thinking progressively. Before we begin our exploration of sociology's essentials, it is important to establish its credibility as a science. While sociology's reputation as a science has been improving, there are still many scholars, intellectuals, and politicians who question its status as a science. However, it is recognized as a science worthy of societal support by the US National Science Foundation and by many private and public funding agencies around the world. There are still skeptics, even in the US Congress, who would like to cut funding for what they see as a pseudo‐science, common sense disguised as science. This offers an overview of the rationale for and plan of the book. Chapter 2 addresses the question “Is sociology a science?” by answering the question, “What is science?” from the perspective of the sociology of science. I introduce the rationale for considering sociology one of the core sciences alongside physics, chemistry, and biology (and arguably economics and psychology). We will then turn to stretching and warm‐up exercises, prior to diving into the details of the sociological imagination. This involves learning the concise history of sociology from its ancient precursors to its founders in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and then to the contributions of some of the key sociologists of our time. This is achieved in Chapters 3 and 4.
Chapter 5 offers an integration of basic concepts introduced in Chapters 3 and 4 by sketching the novelist Leo Tolstoy's logic of power and free will. Tolstoy was not a sociologist, but as a giant literary figure, he possessed a philosophical imagination infused with the social science perspectives emerging in his era. Tolstoy's significance for us is his ability to see through the illusion of the transparency of introspection and the myth of individualism. Our experience of ourselves and the world around us turns out to be a poor guide to matters of fact about reality, including what we believe about the reality of ourselves.
Chapter 6 hammers home the idea that I have been progressively revealing, one of the most important barriers to the sociological imagination: individualism is a myth. Humans are the current endpoint of the evolution of the cooperative principle in evolution, a principle that first revealed itself when evolution unfolded cellular and colonial cooperation as adaptive mechanisms. Colonial cooperation evolved through grouping behavior, sociation, and social networks. Chapter 7 continues to build the sociological rationale for viewing individualism as a myth by introducing the ideas of one of the founding figures of sociology, the Polish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz. Gumplowicz is a sociologist to be conjured with when it comes to issues of free will and agency. Gumplowicz provides a strong sociological foundation for Tolstoy's more philosophical observations.
Having brought individualism, free will, and agency into question, we are now ready in Chapter 8 to see how sociology solves the problem of the nature and origin of belief in gods that do not exist. Chapter 9 breaks down the boundaries between brain/mind/self and introduces the concept of a brain integrated with social and environmental ecologies, a social brain. In Chapter 10, we explore the standard idea of institutions in terms of our theme of walls of imprisonment. We explore how the standard institutions we encounter in our birth to death life cycle constrain us in varying ways and to varying degrees. The emphasis on the walls of imprisonment paints a gloomy picture of society and our machine‐like lives. Chapter 11 looks in depth at two key walls of our institutional imprisonment, social class and sex and gender, and their roles in forming our identities. Chapter 12 explains the nature of race and racism and the evolution of the concept of race from science to ideology. It also discusses what we mean by institutionalized racism and how this is reflected in business, politics, and policing. I also explain the contemporary controversies over DEI and Critical Race Theory.
Chapter 13 explores the question of whether there are escape tunnels, which can allow us to escape the walls of our imprisonment. We need mechanisms like this to explain social change. Finally, in Chapter 14, we encounter the ultimate wall of our imprisonment, the process of dying and death. Peter Berger argued that our lives are shaped by the imminent threat of death. On the one hand, it may appear that humans tend to carry on their everyday lives in denial about death, mourning, and grieving. On the other hand, perhaps there are signs in how we carry out our everyday lives that suggest otherwise. This chapter explores the topic through the lens of the sociological imagination and my own personal experience, as an 85‐year‐old faced with the imminence of death. The References section includes specialty references for the sociology of death and dying (References Part 1 (1), Marx's relevance for today (Part 1 (2)), and the bonobos (Part 1 (3)). A general set of annotated recommendations is included in References Part II, followed by a general bibliography.
Conclusion: On Perspective
This book is about a perspective, a way of seeing. It's designed to stimulate your sociological imagination. It leaves out a lot of the standard details about society and social life you'll find in standard introductory texts in the interest of the goals of perspective and imagination. I have offered many pathways to filling in the details of my more general reflections, especially in the extensive list of references. More generally, the book is a hybrid of narrative introductory sociology and sociobiography – personal reflections on what sociology has meant to me and how it has shaped my being and conduct.
Chapter 2Science and Sociology
I treat sociology as one of the core sciences, with physics, chemistry, and biology. With some caution, we can include economics and psychology in this group. The reason for caution is not to impugn the scientific credibility of economics or psychology. Rather, the reason is that physics, chemistry, biology, and especially physics have grounded our philosophies of science and our understanding of the presumed universality of logic.
My perspective on science reflects the fact that my specialty in sociology has been the study of scientific practice. I contributed to the development of the ethnography of science in the 1970s and 1980s and did original work in the sociology of mathematics and logic. I came to sociology from electrical engineering, theoretical physics, and mathematics and was predisposed to thinking of sociology as a scientific discipline.
We basically have three paradigmatic ways to learn about the world: theological, philosophical (inclusive of the humanities and arts), and scientific. Based on my experiences as a sociologist and general scholar, my conclusion is that science, properly understood, stands alone as the only reliable and valid source of knowledge about how the world works. What do I mean by “science properly understood”? I stand on the ground of the sciences, understood broadly as the disciplined but open‐ended application of the methodologies, theories, and technologies of the classic physical, natural, and social sciences in their twenty‐first century manifestations. These, in turn, are grounded in the basic human capacity to reason. Our ability to reason has three aspects: our ability to form “if A then B” statements; our ability to reason through trial and error; and our ability to use the first two forms of reason as the bases for predicting what will happen at some future date. Every day reasoning is oriented to the near and immediate future and is thus notoriously bad at grasping the future possibilities of our actions. Science offers us tools for expanding our view of the future implications of our current actions.
The sciences in this sense give us access to the facts of the matter of our existence in presumptive, corrigible, and fallible forms that are not subject, in principle, to absolute belief or conviction. These facts of the matter, from gravity to friction, from sex to reproduction, from carbon atoms to water, from rituals to social organizations exist on continua of open and closed systems. At the closed end, facts of the matter reach essentially absolute certainty, the basic shape of the earth for example. That it is not flat is certain in the sense that there is no reason any longer to consider this possibility. Skepticism approaches its limit in such cases. The most important scaffolding in this framework by comparison to traditional scientific thinking is social science and, in particular, sociology/anthropology, which I stand on as a robust two‐pronged science.
Social rituals are a key to much of the substantive and theoretical ways sociology unravels the social causes of our behavior. Social rituals explain the roots of rationality in normally invisible non‐rationalities and are the key to understanding the human origins of belief in God. On this foundation, Collins (1992) demonstrates that many features of human life, which seem to be outside the limits of what science can explain fall under the explanatory power of sociological reasoning – power, crime, sex, love, and gender politics for example. He understood long before the revolution in artificial intelligence science and technology over the past decade that AI cannot hope to approximate human intelligence and creativity without a sociological theory of ritual interactions and emotions.
Furthermore, I understand science as a collective generational phenomenon of scientists by various labels across history and cultures intersubjectively testing claims and establishing facts of the matter. Science in this sense includes people testing and settling on recipes in their kitchens; bodybuilders testing the consequences of using certain exercises, technologies, diets, and drugs; as well as scientists working with more rigorous standards and under more rigorous conditions in their laboratories.
As scientists, we are obliged to press ever forward. As this process unfolds across time and cultures, some facts will go to the closed ends of the continua of facticity. The earth is an oblate spheroid wobbling in precession; it is not flat, end of story. Gravity, by contrast, is more open to continuing inquiry into its nature. Notice that what we can say with essentially absolute certainty is that the earth is not flat and that it is wobbling in precession. It is possible that some future cosmological discovery will revolutionize our understanding of what our globe is in its cosmic setting. It's also important that we keep the entire continuum of facticity bathed in skepticism as a fail‐safe position.
Science and Morals
Philosophers of science and scholars in general have uncritically accepted the “truism” that science cannot give us answers to questions about morals, values, and ethics. This is often if not universally paired with the assumption that science doesn't imply or entail specific morals, values, or ethics. But science is a communal activity, a sub‐culture, a form of life and “norms of science” have long been identified as endemic to science. Only a conception of a science alienated from humans could give rise to the “truism” that it tells us nothing, implies nothing, about morality.
Imagine constructing a culture of science. What would we build into such a culture in terms of values and morals? Sociologists of science have tried to clarify and codify the values and norms associated with the practice of science.
The pre‐eminent sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) identified four norms: communism or communalism (common ownership and public sharing); universalism (science is independent of personal and culturally prescribed characteristics); disinterestedness (scientists work for the benefit of science, not for personal gains); and organized skepticism (scientific work should be accepted on the basis of its contribution, objectivity, and rigor but always under skeptical scrutiny). Later writers suggested additional norms, including replication, originality, rationality, utilitarianism, individualism, progress, and meliorism These norms were not determined empirically, so it was inevitable that criticisms would be raised about their relevance to the actual practice of science. Further considerations on norms by Merton and empirical studies of science in practice led to the notion of counter‐norms. All groups are characterized, to varying degrees depending on their complexity, by the dynamics of norms and counter‐norms.
The Ethos of Science
We now have a rationale for considering what might constitute the values, ethics, and moral foundations of science (the ethos of science for short). Building on the norms literature, the ethos of science would include investing findings with belief or trust at a level commensurate with the conviction warranted by the evidence. Ethical behavior implies moral integrity, not as a matter of individual will and behavior but as a collectively grounded and enforced orientation humans to humans and humans to nature. This would entail adherence to valuing goodness, kindness, generosity, a concern with quality, and virtue. The ethos of science demands reporting results with an allegiance to authenticity and a commitment to communicating all the information relevant to a particular research outcome. That ethos also requires scientists to treat living subjects and the constituents of ecological niches with an appreciation for the integrity of subjects and the contributions of ecological systems to a sustainable human community and planet. Furthermore, this ethos must be free from institutional dictates coming from other sectors of society, such as the government, religious institutions, or the military. These are ideals to strive for. We cannot assume that they can be features of real everyday scientific practice in today's world. One thing we could do now is to generalize the medical ethos, “above all, do no harm” to the sciences.
Imagine a culture at large and the scientific community organized according to the humanitarian principles of a social order that could be variously described as democratic, socialist, communist, or anarchist. In that case, we would not expect scientists or laypersons to be driven by a lust for fame, recognition, greed, or monetary rewards. Nor should they be expected to express values that reflect, sustain, and encourage social injustices and inequalities. Some might argue that science, along with other creative endeavors, represents the dignity and integrity of the human being, of humanity. A consciousness of these issues and a critique of classical ideas about distancing the scientist from ethics, values, and morality will help to focus all our attentions on the requirements for a sustainable natural environment and a humane and sustainable human environment. Thus, the relevance of biodiversity studies does not lie in the province of pure science, but in valuing the sciences of an ethical and moral people.
These are ideals we must somehow raise to the level of routine practices across the sciences. We need to think about the “intrinsic” values of science, such as objectivity, rationality, honesty, and accuracy differently. We should understand them not as complements to humanitarian values such as empathy, compassion, and kindness but as integrally synthesized with them. There is a scientistic version of this view defended by scientists like B.F. Skinner and E.O. Wilson, who claim that the facts of evolution mean that all morality can be reduced to classic science. Scientism claims in a very strict sense that science, especially as we know it in physics, is the one and only way to gain knowledge about how the world works, what reality is. I do claim that science is our only path to such knowledge, but I have a more open‐ended concept of what this means. It certainly doesn't mean that physics holds the answers to all our questions about life, the universe, and everything or that biology determines our morals.
I am not advocating scientific imperialism or scientism, which are in any case imbued with their own systems of morals, values, and ethics. Second, I am not arguing that we have fool‐proof grounds for establishing the values, morals, and ethics conducive to survival and sustainability. I do claim, however, that a culture oriented to the well‐being of humanity and the planet will generate a scientific system with the same orientation and thus values, morals, and ethics conducive to survival and sustainability. Scientists and engineers do not announce findings, inventions, and discoveries with guarantees attached to them regarding their potential for promoting or obstructing survival and sustainability. As the experiential knowledge base in a democratic‐anarchistic culture expands over time, however, probabilities are going to favor (but not determine) outcomes that are more likely to promote social equality, social justice, and ecological sustainability than not.
I have begun alluding to a political economy of science and society using the terms democratic and anarchism. These terms signal my commitment to issues of social justice and social equality and will be explained in more detail later in the book.
Some philosophers allow their free‐wheeling willy‐nilly logical and linguistic gymnastics to lead them to propose that maybe cultures that promote smoking will turn out to have better survival potential than those that ban smoking. This begins to sound like the kind of irrational skepticism that drives out rational skepticism.
If you went to college or studied philosophy on your own you likely came across the claim by William Thompson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), that knowledge comes from measuring things and expressing the measurements in numbers. If you can't measure and assign a number to an object, event, or process, you may be at the beginning of knowledge, but you have not yet reached the stage of science. Most of us probably associate numbers with precision. But a more sophisticated way to think about numbers and measurements is to understand quantification as a reduction of uncertainty based on collectively identified and organized observations, experiences, and experiments. Individual experience, as we will soon see, is a poor guide to truth. We depend on the cumulation of corroborated collective experiences to establish the truth of a proposition. The cumulation of experiences in the context of networks of communication can lead to the reduction of uncertainty in qualitative terms not associated with assigning numbers. The individual will experience this in the case of objects or events as a more or less robust sense that given things are more likely than not. We should be suspicious of the “truism” that we don't know what comes after death because no one who has died has come back to inform us, and scientists have not assigned this idea a probability. The cumulation of experiences and evidence over thousands of years should have persuaded people as it has persuaded me that we do in fact know what comes after death – nothingness. Be careful because the “we” is not all of humanity, but a section of humanity prepared to accept the findings of science without assigning absolute certainty to those findings.
Science encourages us not to assign absolute certainties in principle, but we in fact assign absolute certainties in practice. Facts that appear toward the closed end of the open‐to‐closed system of continua approach absolute certainty as a practical matter; for example, “the earth is not flat” can be considered absolutely certain for all practical purposes without undermining rational skepticism. Notice that while discoveries are ultimately confirmed at the collective level, individuals in those collective networks internalize those discoveries as knowledge. That knowledge is always tentative, corrigible, fragile, and cloaked in reasoned skepticism. However, all knowledge comes with greater and lesser degrees of closure. If we think of this as a spectrum, the fact that the earth is flat is sufficiently closed and no longer requires criticism or interrogation of any kind. At the other end of the spectrum, our understanding of gravity is much more open, still being interrogated and still undergoing changes. I put our understanding of the finality of death at the closed end of the spectrum.
Humans have devised all sorts of mechanisms to protect themselves from this conclusion. Some propositions, such as a life after death in heaven or hell are clearly earthly inventions and totally without redeeming facticity, intuitive, or scientific. Some are scientifically interesting but in ways that do not leave us with consciousness after death. For example, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder asks us to think of ourselves when we die as a drop of ink that falls into the ocean of the universe. As a drop, we will spread in the universe, become unrecognizable, but never disappear. We could also think of ourselves as star stuff; all the “stuff” we are made of at the atomic level was manufactured inside stars. Death eventually returns our “stuff” to the stars.
We can know things quantitatively and qualitatively. Measuring and numbering seem to offer transparent credibility. This is an illusion. The sociology of mathematics has helped us understand the cultural contexts and limits of numbers. If we can reach a consensus on what the numbers are telling us about a phenomenon, that's a pretty good test of their credibility within the confines of our linguistic and proof culture. How do we establish credibility in the case of qualitative data and assessments? We can do this in several ways. We can use several sources and methods of data collection and analysis (triangulation); we can give participants a say in the research process (member checking); we can enlist the help of other researchers to review and provide feedback on our methods and findings (peer debriefing); we can provide detailed descriptions of context and subjects (thick description); we can examine our predispositions, preferences, and perspectives – our biases – and their actual and potential impacts on our problem formulation, our methods, our findings, and our theories (reflexivity); be as thorough as possible in our data collection to the point of diminishing returns (saturation); we can extend peer debriefing by inviting independent parties to evaluate all stages of our research in terms of ethics, transparency, and normal standards of research (external audits).
The quantitative–qualitative distinction is not a strict dichotomy. Furthermore, we can also reduce uncertainty by consilience of evidences and an ensemble of probabilities. Consilience of evidences, also known as convergence or concordance of evidences, is the idea that multiple sources of evidence can lead to a strong conclusion, even if each source alone is not particularly strong. It's a principle used in science and history to support established knowledge (another way to describe triangulation). An “ensemble of probabilities” as evidence refers to a collection of different probability distributions, each representing a potential outcome or scenario, used collectively to provide a more robust and comprehensive picture of the likelihood of a specific event happening, essentially acting as a stronger piece of evidence compared to relying on a single probability estimate.
Some readers will argue that my view of science, despite my caveats, is simply scientism or scientific imperialism by other means. They will argue that seeing the world through the “single” lens of science, no matter how complex that lens is, blinds us to the enchantment of our world, the awe it inspires with its mountain vistas, rainbows, majestic waterfalls, romance, love, the ineffableness of sex and reproduction, the birth of a child. I have certainly known such feelings. But it is too easy to let enchantment and awe veil the way the world really is, the way life, the universe, and everything work. Enchantment and awe can inspire poetry and music and art but so can critical reason, so can science. Our survival depends on seeing the world realistically. Enchantment and awe should not be banished from our experience, but they should not be allowed to blind us to how the world is to the extent that we can know it in practice. As an opposition to science, awe and enchantment in their classical forms can leave us speechless even as it prepares us to express ourselves creatively. We cannot afford to be quiet in the world as we can know it even for a moment. That's probably too harsh. We are going to have our enchantment and awe‐inspiring moments that are not generated by our scientific inquiries and discoveries. We must learn to tame those experiences and look to the enchantment and awe inspired by science for the kind of enlightenment that enhances our chances to survive in our world. These ideas about science will continue to reverberate and evolve throughout the text as it unfolds.
Chapter 3Founders and Founding Ideas 1
I
