Science is a methodology, an idea set, and a social enterprise. Importantly, its societal utility is conferred much more readily by having people think of it in terms of the former two senses than in the latter. Its image as objective and divorced from wider society, as being “independent” from social factors that so transparently compromise the credibility of other institutions, serves to lend credence to political and other claims that can be “backed up” scientifically, for it casts them in a veneer of disinterestedness, as being “rationally based”. Science is afforded enormous prestige in our society, and we can expect the powerful to try to co-opt it for their own interests (they might, as individuals, come to internalise certain claims whereby they are cast as the rightful holders of their social posts, but that isn’t what I have in mind here. I am referring to the institutional imperative of power centres to give themselves legitimacy through the control of ideas. Whether the individuals that comprise those power centres believe in their own propaganda is undoubtedly an interesting and worthwhile question in its own right). Indeed, as the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky has often said, it would be surprising if the powerful were not defending their interests by attempting to co-opt institutions. It isn’t only the powerful that have a stake in jumping onto the science bandwagon, though. This, too, should not be surprising, for few people would want to make open claims that are self-admittedly contrary to science or at least the spirit of it, for fear of being seen as irrational and primitive. Young Earth Creationists, for example, who literally believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that a global flood actually took place, claim to be upholding science when they denounce evolutionary theory and complain that it isn’t “really” scientific but is instead motivated and driven by a nefarious secular humanist (read atheist) ideology bent on imposing naturalistic scientism.

Ironically, largely because science has attracted the attention of so many elements that would strong-arm it as a prop for their own ends, there is now a type of cynicism that has set in across much of the Western world against science. People will often say that they “just don’t know what to believe anymore.” This is lamentable but entirely understandable, for people realise that corporations, governments, religious lobbies and others are striving primarily to achieve goals congruent with a narrow and parochial range of objectives; being rule-of-thumb statisticians, human beings associate correlative phenomena and equate them as causally intertwined. Science comes to be seen as just another means for achieving institutional imperatives (it might well be enlightening to interpret the popularity of pop mysticism and conspiracy theories as manifestations of a general distrust by the populace of the words propounded by various power centres and interest groups). This cynicism about science has occurred alongside a cynicism about politics. Many feel that the political arena has become a cesspool of intrigue that systematically excludes the public from major decision-making. Politicians are seen as managers of public opinion. I can’t help thinking that this is in fact something beneficial to governments because it effectively reinforces an unspoken but ever-present message: consume, enjoy your own life, and don’t get involved in anything that might rock the boat. Even in democratic societies, the public are regarded as spectators rather than participants in almost every important decision made by states, and much of the public has acquiesced to this perception (or rather, prescription). It is easy to see how people would eventually become so cynical about this arrangement that they would feel compelled to simply leave politics to the politicians, while they get on with their own lives. With the political spectrum reeking of so much hypocrisy, one “might as well” just enjoy one’s life and look out for one’s own interests. Science becomes another item to be either embraced or rejected when it suits, for indeed, people don’t know what to believe anymore.

Let us consider whether science, in spite of all the above, has any proper claim to providing us with, if not the definitive account of reality outside of our minds, at least the best account that we can reasonably hope to attain. I believe it does, for I think it is clear that science is the most powerful method we have for interrogating nature, and it isn’t for nothing that this interrogation gets results. As the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, science is also a creative enterprise. It draws forth the energies of a great multitude of workers, each of whom would love to be the harbinger of some major breakthrough in our understanding of the world. Only a relative handful will ever achieve this, but more pedestrian workers can still contribute in important ways.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has described science as a complex adaptive system – that is, a system that evolves and/or learns by using acquired information (1994). Science produces outputs in the form of experimental results, and uses those results as inputs for the further refinement of theories, adjusting them as the evidence warrants. Over time, a sophisticated edifice is built up in which a vast suite of observations about the world are interrelated with one another. Science is a sort of dynamic machine, then, that grows and changes, with its body composed of threads tying together otherwise disparate facts. For this machine to operate smoothly, certain features must be in place, both in the broader society in which science is to operate – like a social order that at least tolerates some degree of inquiry into the world of the kind that science is supposed to be expert at – and within the very bodies that carry out its pursuit – like an ethos (Merton, 1968), a reward system, a way of discouraging fraud, and so forth.

If we regard science as an enterprise that generates truth claims about the world, we would presume that, when those claims form part of the basis for some practical application, they must “confront” the world through that application’s effects. The degree to which they conform to reality as it actually is would presumably be gauged by the extent to which they work; one expects an underlying symmetry of logic between reality and the theory if this is the case. For example, the space-based Global Positioning System (GPS) must “incorporate” (in the form of a logical informational structure) Einstein’s theory of general relativity; without it, the system would give inaccurate coordinates. This does not mean that GTR has to be explicitly coded into the computers aboard the satellites in the exact form of Einstein’s equations, but the functional equivalent of this knowledge is present in those computers. That knowledge – that formal codification that utilises symbols, quantities and their relations – is taken to represent something about the world. Nature herself can produce theories about the world by building systems that utilise this kind of “informational equivalence”. When a child throws an object into the air and catches it, she is not consciously solving parabolic functions in her head, but the neural circuitry in her brain, “engineered” by eons of natural selection, does something that is equivalent to this.

However, some would deny the above symmetry, and I believe they are at least partially right in doing so. Yes, they say, science provides useful models of the world (as does evolution), but this gives us no warrant to suppose that it provides even an approximation of the world as it actually is (or what Immanuel Kant called the “noumenal world”). Models of the world that are not even approximately true can still be successful (Laudan, 2003). Peter Godfrey-Smith (2003) relates an example often used by Laudan to illustrate how a theory can be wrong about the things it posits and still be successful. Sadi Carnot, the famous 19th century thermodynamicist, thought of heat as a fluid. “Despite” this, he accurately formulated some of the founding principles of thermodynamics, owing to his model’s use of “good structural features”. However, I think it is precisely these features that show how critics of realism might be missing the point (or at least what I take to be the point). Structural features are not any more “trivial” than “actual things”. While heat wasn’t a fluid either in Carnot’s time or now (notwithstanding what some of the more extreme statements in philosophy of science might imply about ideas “creating” the world), it still entails phenomena that are importantly similar to a fluid (judged by virtue of its behaving in certain ways). Those phenomena can be realised in future models, with the novel features of the latter replacing the now defunct features of the outgoing theory/model. Science is largely a process of keeping what works and rejecting what doesn’t; that is profound enough. As we test hypotheses and reformulate or reject theories accordingly, we get a more comprehensive set of working statements, and in the process, we get a more detailed picture of the world’s interrelationships. Perhaps we can’t ever hope to know what really lies at the base of it all; there could well be things that our minds are cognitively ill-equipped to ever come to terms with (this is why some physicists recommend that we stop worrying about what quantum mechanics “really means” and simply go with what the maths tells us; significantly, quantum mechanics is notorious for not lending itself to understanding with the help of everyday analogies), but surely we have gained insight into at least part of the world. To return to the Carnot example, fluids act in certain ways that can be measured, quantified and modelled mathematically, and these might happen to be shared with other domains; if the two are conflated in some inappropriately literalist sense, then that sense may later be rectified, and hopefully no significant harm would have been done. But the good structural features are clearly still of importance. In a way, Cardot’s belief in heat literally being a fluid is what’s trivial. We now reject his delusion, but we borrow from his good points. We don’t know what else we will end up rejecting in the future; perhaps something that is currently reified will tomorrow be understood as an interrelation, but we would still retain important features we had picked up along the way. Perhaps Carnot was working with an intuitive model of heat when he said it was a fluid; it seemed to “stand to reason”. He would then have been working according to a cognitive approximation. In actuality, though, most concepts in science are approximations anyway, because most systems are simply too complicated to represent in their entirety. It is the discernment of patterns that is of greatest import, because from them we can insinuate the existence of underlying processes, which should themselves yield testable predictions, and from that we can chip away further until we run out of analogies and we find ourselves knocking on the door of the unfathomable. Importantly, along the way, we might see that a pattern was better explained by another process. This suggests that all our current theories that purport to explain or describe various phenomena could be just as competently be accounted for by some other theory. This is the problem of “undetetermination”, and I believe it poses the greatest threat to the view I am defending here. However, I think there are three interconnected points raised by Godfrey-Smith (2003) that might serve to blunt its force. The first is that we have some idea of the types of avenues of inquiry that have been fruitful in the past, and we can see whether our current pursuits are incorporating enough of their features. Secondly, the line between those aspects of the world that science can reasonably be thought to tell us something about as opposed to those that science cannot are not clear cut; they are blurred, with new phenomena being brought to the fore all the time. Many things that had previously been only indirectly implied are now more or less directly observable; they have been corroborated by coming to the surface, so to speak (and vindicating our prior confidence that we were on the right track). Thirdly, if we accept that we are evolved beings, we can come to know something about our cognitive constraints and biases, and this can serve as a basis for knowing how it is that we interact with the physical world and how information is delivered to us via our sensory apparatus (Godfrey-Smith, 2003):

From the outside, we can never establish with complete certainty what lies behind a particular sensory input. But looking at ourselves from “sideways-on”, from the point of view taken by biology and psychology, we can establish regular principles concerning how our perceptual machinery responds to objects and events distant from us. We can work out how our perceptual machinery helps us navigate the world.

Another reason I think it might be wrong to argue that science has no business even claiming to provide an approximation of reality is that the models it produces lead onto further useful models, which lead onto yet more useful models, and so on. Furthermore, they get more useful in different ways. All these situations provide opportunities for failure; very often, this doesn’t happen. One could say that science is an interlocking web of usefulness, where the ideas and formulations in one field have applicability in others. Knowledge about physics has implications for knowledge about chemistry, which informs our understanding of biology, which spurs new hypotheses in psychology, and so forth (the simple bottom-up picture I am invoking here is not meant as an endorsement of “greedy reductionism”, to use Daniel Dennett’s term. I simply mean to capture the idea that different branches of science have something to say to one another, and that this is also precisely what we should expect if science does capture something real about the world beyond ourselves. Perhaps it is a naïve perception, but the astonishing interlocking parsimony of modern science is what leads me to suspect that it blows everything else out of the water in terms of having a rightful claim to truth. I happen to agree with Richard Dawkins when he writes “Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite.” (Dawkins, 1995)).

To come back to the socio-political realm, a claim that has often been made of science is that, since the human mind might be incapable of grasping certain deep truths, it follows that we are justified in regarding other avenues of inquiry apart from science as being on a par with it; it’s just that they address questions that the latter “doesn’t deal with”. But even if we concede that science is severely compromised by societal influences and human limitations, this by itself would not mean that other avenues of thought have a legitimate claim to be on an equal footing with it. These other institutions make even more use of folk psychology; their content is often barely a step removed from it. If we take science down from its podium, then all the more should we cast a sceptical eye on, for example, religion.

I mentioned earlier that the powerful have an interest in co-opting science for their own ends. There is also a case to be made for them having an interest in allowing science a genuine degree of autonomy. It is clearly useful to encourage innovation when it might lead to some novel product or strategy. Corporations love to stress how innovative they are. They perpetually project an image of “cutting edge solutions” being provided to clients. This isn’t propaganda; the utility function of the corporation, in a competitive market place, really does compel it to invest a substantial amount of its energies into innovation (or, for that matter, to steal another corporation’s work when it can get away with it). To achieve this, science must be allowed to operate relatively unfettered. Corporations and governments often have their own “skunk works” divisions, special branches that are relatively unhampered by bureaucracy. One can’t develop an F-22 stealth fighter jet with an accountant breathing down one’s neck.

There is one final issue that has been framed in social constructivist terms that I would like to address. This is the claim that one cannot speak objectively of science’s role in society as a “progressive” one, especially with the advent of such things as nuclear weapons. Here I agree, though I hasten to add that my own conception of progress does very much incorporate science. Any notion of progress will of course depend on the person in question’s conception of what constitutes change for the better. But there is another, perhaps more interesting, point to be made here. It is that we have no other worlds to compare this one to. While it seems stale to blame all our failings on “human nature” (it seems that whenever a political or religious doctrine fails, its supporters are apt to blame human nature for it, as though there were any other context in which that doctrine was going to operate other than in a society of human beings), it most emphatically does not follow that we should therefore apportion equal blame to science as we might to dogmatic systems of irrationality. The latter set up the conditions in which the former was used for questionable and even reprehensible ends. Yet we don’t know whether or not we might have wiped ourselves out if we had never had science. Or perhaps, maybe, it’s science that has saved us, despite the threat posed through the frightful weapons afforded by it. We’ll never know.

References

Dawkins, Richard (1996). River out of Eden, p37. Phoenix, London

Gell-Mann, Murray (1994). The Quark and the Jaguar, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York

Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2003). Theory and Reality, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London

Laudan, Larry (1981). A confutation of convergent realism, Philosophy of Science, 48, 19-49.s

Merton, Robert (1968). Science and Democratic Social Structure, in Social Theory and Social Structure, p604-615, New York Free Press