MILLENNIUM CHRISTMAS LECTURE

IMAGES OF SCIENCE FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Professor Michael Redhead, on 15 December 1999

Michael Redhead is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and Director, Centre for Natural and Social Philosophy at LSE. Prof. Redhead is one of the leading philosophers of science and made important contributions to the philosophy of quantum mechanics. He is the author of Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism, a work for which he received the Lakatos Award in 1988, and of From Physics to Metaphysics, the Tarner Lectures which he delivered in Cambridge in 1993. A collection of essays written in his honour by a group of distinguished philosophers of science to mark his retirement, entitled From Physics to Philosophy, was published in January 2000 by Cambridge University Press. This collection is considered as representing the current `state of the art' in the Philosophy of Physics.

Victor Suchar

At the turn of the Millennium different social groups have joined in spirited discussion about the nature of science. These arguments have even been characterised as the Science Wars. In this lecture we shall look at some of the issues that have arisen in this context and how they might be resolved.

1. Attitudes to Science
a) The Scientists, who generally persue the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideal of rationality, truth, progress, a Whig interpretation of history, a Baconian belief that science will deliver Utopia, the unique challenge to superstition, natural magic, hermeticism, irrationalism, the head versus the heart, etc., etc.

b) The public at large, who see science in terms of material progress both for good and for ill.

c) The philosophers of science, who generally stress the fallibility of science, but then divide into two camps:

i) science is nevertheless a rational activity, which essentially makes testable conjectures about an objective physical reality. This broadly was the view of Popper and Lakatos who were realists and rationalists;

ii) science is ultimately an irrational activity — Kuhn, Feyerabend, etc. This tied in with the general anti-Cartesian movement in philosophy, that our cognitive processes do not mirror the world, but rather create a myriad of incommensurable world-views, none of which is more true than any other, compare Nietsche and all his philosophical progeny — the philosophy of extreme relativism. The modern descendants of this view are the continental philosophers of the so-called postmodern persuasion, such as Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, etc. etc.

So what determines scientific belief, if not the way the world is? Enter the social constructivists, the Edinburgh School, the Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge.

d) The historians of science. These views have largely been taken up by the new external history of science. The internal history is neglected, the social and cultural factors are all-important. They have adopted the techniques of the literary theorists. The scientific text has no univocal reading, but is to be deconstructed, like a work of fiction.

e) Science studies have replaced the traditional history and philosophy of science discipline, and largely adopts a postmodern perspective. Hence the so-called Science Wars, the practitioners versus the postmodernists.

2. History of the Science Wars
But the Science Wars is not really a new phenomenon. Mistrust of technology in an economic context makes one think immediately of the early nineteenth-century Luddites. But scientists (or less anachronistically, natural philosophers) themselves have argued and disagreed about the nature of science.
Take the fourteenth-century Franciscan school man, such as Buridan, Oresme and Nicholas of Autrecourt. Human reason could not penetrate beyond the world of appearances. So one could discuss the motion of the earth, not as something that is true but as something God could have arranged — the truth is revealed by Scripture.

With Copernicus and Galileo comes the idea that the truth about such questions can be demonstrated by reason and observation. Hence, a familiar story of Science Wars between science and theology.

But can science really penetrate the ultimate springs and principles as Hume called them? The rise of positivism, conventionalism and instrumentalism in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century attempted to cut down the ambitions of scientific theorising to an economical and convenient ordering of direct experience.

But then came the arguments of Hanson, Popper and others about the theory-ladenness of observation, so everything was just more bits of theory, so how could science ever be anchored in certainty? Despite his claims to rationality Popper was, ironically, seen by many, with his attack on any form of inductivism or of psychologism (the rejection of a bedrock of subjective experience) as leading, if taken quite seriously, back to irrationalism.

So here we have revealed the basic theme of the new scientific wars as Realism and Rationality versus Relativism and Irrationality.

3. How then can we rescue Realism and Rationality?
In my view by following a Popperian line, but not taken to an ultimate extreme - that some bedrock of subjective experience does ultimately anchor the whole scheme, that Inference to the Best Explanation allows us to infer the objective truth or approximate truth of our best theories, that some principle of `clustering' does licence a limited form of instance confirmation in the Carnapian sense, so that we are justified in believing that the next aeroplane will continue to fly, the next time we jump from the Eiffel Tower we will fall and not float to the ground! But all of this taken with a strong salting of Popperian fallibility of high-level theory, the importance of criticizability and of novel predictions in the context of justification (or of Popperian corroboration).

There is one important caveat we must enter. Science aims at the simplest theoretical structure that will cover, that is to say unify, the largest area of empirical discourses. But is simplicity a guide to truth? Maybe electrons are moved about by invisible gremlins. But if the gremlin hypothesis is not independently testable then the scientist will dispense with this idle additional machinery. But
that does not prove that gremlins don't exist, just that it is not consonant with scientific methodology that they should enter into a scientific theory. Similar remarks could be made about creationism. Science does not prove that creationism is false, rather that it is inconsistent with a `scientific' account of how the world and living creatures came into existence. Popper himself justifies simplicity by his criterion of testability, but since he does not believe that theories are true, or even probably true, the problem of linking simplicity with truth does not arise for him.

So to resist the relativist and the postmodernist we have, not just to appeal dogmatically to an eighteenth-century mechanical world-view, which is what typical biologists and chemists tend to do, but to enter the nitty-gritty of the philosophical arena in defence of the neo-Popperian line I have tried to sketch.

4. The case of modern theoretical physics
But what of modern theoretical physics? Can this be given a realist interpretation? This is a topic I have written about at length elsewhere.

In my Tarner Lectures I attacked subjective readings of statistical mechanics, relativity and quantum mechanics, the three major pillars of modern theoretical physics. The most difficult case is quantum mechanics, but the anti-realist arguments of Bell's theorem can be resisted in terms of an appropriate ontological contextualism of a non-local kind.

It is true that the Copenhagen interpretation led to some obscure doctrines that might even be argued to support a form of relativism, under the guise of what is sometimes referred to as perspectivalism. But the Copenhagen hegemony is now largely broken down, and I don't think quantum mechanics can lend any sort of support to the postmodernists.

That is not to say that I am not myself critical of some of the recent developments in theoretical physics, such as string theory and quantum gravity, where the theory has pretty well forgotten its empirical roots and become a purely mathematical intellectual exercise.

5. Scientism
In defending science, one should also be careful not to defend scientism, the extension of a scientific methodology of precise unified quantitative laws into inappropriate contexts, for example trying to explain the subjective content of human experience, or indeed to expect that we can successfully ape the methods of the physical sciences in the human and social sciences generally. Dilthey's distinction between verstehen in the Geisterwissenschaften and erklären in the Naturwissenschaften may be an unbridgeable divide.

Moreover, the quasi-scientific jargon of some of the postmodernist authors, with many examples described in Sokal and Bricmont's book Intellectual Impostures, is another aspect of a regrettable tendency in the scientistic direction.

6. Conclusion
The scientists who seek to defend science should chose their ground carefully and not attempt to fight twentieth- or twenty-first-century wars with eighteenth-century weapons.

A retreat to a structuralist account of scientific knowledge, in which the search for the intrinsic nature of matter, force, energy, etc. is replaced by a more limited objective of how the elements of reality are fitted together, for example reflecting abstract mathematical structures in the case of the highly-developed sciences such as physics, may prove to provide the best characterisation of science for the new Millennium.

Michael Redhead

Further Reading
P. Gross and N. Levitt: Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science,1994

P. Gross, N. Levitt & M.Lewis (eds.): The Flight from Science and Reason, N.Y. Academy of Sciences, 1996

G. Holton: Science and Anti-Science, 1993

M. Redhead: Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Realism: a Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, 1987

M Redhead: From Physics to Metaphysics, 1995

A. Sokal and J. Bricmont: Impostures Intellectuelles, 1997. Translated as Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science, 1998

`The Science Wars' in Andrew Ross (ed); Social Text, 1996 (Cultural Studies Journal)

- includes article by Alan Sokal `Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', revealed as a hoax in the journal Lingua Franca a couple of weeks later.