Dialogic Magazine

By: Thomas Burns On: June 24, 2011

In this chapter from their forthcoming book, Paradoxes of Modernity:  A Convergence of Crises and a Manifesto for Tomorrow, authors Thomas J. Burns and Tom W. Boyd discuss the development of scientific paradigms as a way of understanding the world, and interrogate science’s interaction with the social realm. In the first part, Burns and Boyd showed the rise of the scientific paradigm and its real-world limits. The second part examined the consequences of rigid scientism. This week, they examine the telos of such technocratic thinking and list the limitations of the scientific enterprise.

By Thomas J. Burns
University of Oklahoma Professor of Sociology

and Tom W Boyd
University of Oklahoma David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

The scientific method almost always necessarily isolates phenomena from their surroundings, and that in and of itself is not necessarily a problem.  Yet particularly when one combines that practice with economies of scale that have become the standard in modern societies, the potential hazards and risks go to unprecedented levels.

Seen in this light, the telos of science is not knowledge, but technology, with engineering as the midwife.  And the types of technology that are promulgated tend to be those that survive and thrive in the economic Darwinism of the market.

In any system, there are levels of emergence.  Human beings can be thought of as physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social or cultural entities, for example.  Each of these emergent levels, not necessarily reducible to others, tend to have a discipline to go with them (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, anthropology, etc.).

Intellectuals from a wide array of disciplines have observed and written on this principle of emergence—Simmel (1964) from Sociology and Whitehead (1997) from Philosophy, for example.  One of Whitehead’s principal concepts in Process and Reality is to show that, when there is a sufficient change in degree for a thing or process, it becomes a change in kind. Given such changes, the new “kind” can no longer be explained in terms of the kind that preceded it.

As anything gets bigger it tends to change not only in size but in structure and character.  In human institutions there are tipping points where changes in quantity become changes in kind.  There is a case to be made that we have indeed gone so far beyond tipping points in some areas that we are on the verge now of entirely new tipping points—ones in which, because of the economies of scale and globalization that have come to serve as the backdrop, the stakes are higher than ever before.

Many social problems are a function of overreaction to problems of the past. Meanwhile technologies in the world have moved on to another set of issues.  Overall, collective knowledge and the systems it spawns become more complex, but thinking and ways of seeing the world, even among the most scientistic, do not necessarily reflect this.

In pointing out some of the weaknesses in science as it tends to be practiced, we do not advocate for a Luddite position.  Rather, we would like to see the enterprise of science move in the direction of fulfilling its original vision of increasing knowledge about the natural world.  Yet when that knowledge is disembodied—disconnected or alienated from the natural world of which it is an integral part–the potential for mischief and harm become high.

By almost all accounts, science since the Industrial Revolution has been a success.  And yet it is time for science, if not to give an account of itself, at least to take an account of itself, in view of the consequences of its massive success, particularly in the industrial and “post-industrial” eras.

It bears noting again here that with industrialization, if not since the time of Newton, there has been a rise of science as a way of organizing thought. This, we believe, is central to the modernity project itself, at least from one foundational perspective.   Scientism is the elevation of the scientific orientation to privileged status.  That is, when science holds that nothing can be known beyond what the scientific method allows, we have scientism. (Indeed, what does science know?) It becomes a system of self-drawn boundaries around what can be known. The rest is simply “unknown” and by implication often “unknowable.”  In extreme cases scientism even claims that, in principle, everything worth knowing can be known through scientific processes.

We would like to summarize with the following thoughts on various aspects of the scientific enterprise:

1. A serious weakness of scientism lies in its particular brand of reductionism, or a misuse of parsimony.  That is, science tends to artificially reduce explanation to what the state of measurement and research allows. It denies, or at least collapses, crucial levels of emergence and particularly any level that cannot be measured by scientific means.
2. A perverse complement of over-reduction is extrapolation beyond the scope of what empirical evidence can support. This is standard procedure in much of science, particularly in the social sciences.  In common parlance we call this “over- generalization.”  It might be helpful to reflect on how reductionism and extrapolation are related in scientific method.
3. The possibility of genuine novelty in the science-technology matrix is important to consider.  When technology produces consequences of (1) sufficient magnitude and (2) sufficient speed of change, the whole enterprise undergoes a meta-change—that is, novelty. In brief, technology turns back upon itself by virtue of having created consequences that it can no longer control or eliminate.  An exemplar for this may be the contemporary phenomenon of anthropogenic global environmental change.
4. Much of the faith in science stems from its replicability.  The larger (more comprehensive) our explanations are and the more comprehensive the ecological system of which they are part, the less replicable they become. There is a point at which replicability becomes impossible.  This is a particular concern with novel situations and aspects of the natural ecology and human societies that do not lend themselves to experimentation.
5. Much of science in the contemporary era has morphed into technology, particularly of the commercial variety.  When technology reaches the apogee of no longer being able to comprehend the consequences of its productions, it has lost its primacy as a way of solving related problems.  As Garret Hardin (1968) insists in “The Tragedy of the Commons,” there are problems for which there is no technological solution.  To this we might add that many of those problems were caused in no small part by technological development outrunning the culture’s ability to integrate it fully (for in-depth discussion, see Burns 2011).
6. There is a fundamental disconnect between the rigorous methods of science and the popular imagination. We have produced a science that is largely taken-for-granted among the common folk but also is so profoundly mystifying to the public, that we have created a socio-cultural cleavage that increasingly widens. This is a recipe for social disaster, particularly when considered alongside the largely unmanageable crises of global environmental change.  People are lulled into cultural disengagement, biding their time and attention with vapid entertainment, consumption, and celebrity (Brown 1998).
7. A crucial cultural project would involve wresting science from its own incipient scientism long enough to test its method against what we need to know and what we can actually claim with any degree of assurance.  Yet the scientistic mind has so galvanized its methodology that the very notion of “revising,” let alone “transforming,” it is unthinkable.  One place to begin might be the reflective task of addressing questions of the consequences of being wrong. There is some effort at doing this, but it often is received as unnecessarily alarmist, especially among the “madding crowd” who stroll contentedly into the future.  If this task of reforming scientific method is to be undertaken, who will do this? Further, how might such an enormous task begin?
8. As a number of theorists of science from Karl Popper to William Irwin Thompson and David Bohm to Richard Harvey Brown have pointed out, science has its own myths.  To even suggest that science has become, under some expansive conditions mythological, tends to meet with the most strenuous of objections from many people involved in the day to day business of science.
9. A way of construing modernity itself is as complexification of society and its institutions, as well as the ways of thinking, storing and communicating knowledge.   The current state calls for “a new level” of complexification in science as well.  Put another way, it may be time to revise scientific method itself to account for that which is so often left out of account in scientific work.

10.  In a related vein, it is crucial for scientific practice to take serious account of its externalities.  This concept is most closely associated with economics and what it “leaves out” of its measures.  But it does bear noting that scientific practice affects not only what it studies, but what it willfully ignores.

11.  There are, of course, important value questions as well.  Science cannot by its very nature address, let along redress, values.  As such, it misses crucial parts of the array of the human and planetary condition.  Particularly as science becomes more formalized and rational (in the sense articulated by the sociologist, Max Weber 1978), much of the value becomes collapsed into measurable outcomes such as funding dollars accrued, number of publications and numbers of times they are cited, etc.; or framed in terms of money-driven “technology transfer.”

12.  Science has accrued a significant institutional inertia. As such, it may inadvertently be moving to an accumulation of problems where quantitative change reaches a tipping point into a new qualitative realm.  It is amazing how long our system has survived while doing this.  By keeping projects sufficiently manageable, it is possible to defer indefinitely the larger implications of the vast array that comprise the overall scientific/technological enterprise.  Granted, such global perspective is virtually unimaginable, but this itself is warrant for re-examining the methodology itself.

13.  This, again, calls for the reorientation of science around the massive reach of what is at stake, tempered by the concrete situation in which the earth and its people find ourselves.  In a related vein, this calls for a convergence of consciousness across levels of thinking, perhaps with a more adequate sense of communitas and a spirit of cooperation stemming from it, with a genuine sharing of  perspectives in the interest of actual resolution of dilemmas.

14.  Broader modes of thought are exactly what have been lost in the sea of specializations and relative isolation of endless scientific “projects.”  We do believe this calls for nothing short of a “revolution” in our thinking and especially in what counts as science now and in the future.  Society is rapidly coming to the end of what isolated, monadic ways of doing science can achieve.  Survival requires some alternative avenue—one more ecologically embedded.

Science itself is a social enterprise and, as such, bears questioning by the society of which it is part.  With appreciation and respect for what discoveries science has made thus far, we suggest that it is time to examine the inertia of the scientific method as it has come to be honed by practice over the last several centuries.

References:

Bohm, David.  2002.  Wholeness and the Implicate Order.  London:  Routledge.

Brown, Richard Harvey.  1998.  Toward a Democratic Science:  Scientific Narration and Civic Communication.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

Burns, Thomas J.  2011.  This Side of Eden:  Culture and the Natural Environment in the Modern/Post-Modern World.  Amherst, NY:  Cambria.

Dawkins, Richard.  2008.  The God Delusion.  New York:  Mariner.

Hardin, Garrett.  1968.  The Tragedy of the Commons.  Science, 162 (Dec. 13):1243-48.

Hawthorne, Fran.  2005.  Inside the F.D.A.:  The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat.  New York:  Wiley.

Husserl, Edmund.  1970.  The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.  Evanston, IL:  Northwestern University Press.

Kuhn, Thomas.  1996.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

McCloskey, D.N.  1998.  The Rhetoric of Economics, 2e.  Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press.

Popper, Karl.  2002.  The Logic of Scientific Discoveries.  London:  Routledge.

Prigogine, Ilya.  1984.  Order out of Chaos.  New York:  Bantam.

Schumacher, E.F.  1975.  Small Is Beautiful:  Economics as if People Mattered.  New York:  Harper & Row.

Simmel, Georg.  1964.  Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations.  New York:  Free Press.

Weber, Max.  1978.  Economy and Society:  An Outline of Interpretive Sociology.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

Whitehead, Alfred North.  1997.  Science and the Modern World.  New York:  Free Press.

Tags: religion, science, society and culture

Thomas Burns

Thomas Burns is Professor of Sociology and a faculty member in Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He studies and writes on social institutions from a comparative and historical perspective. His work examines how cultural and organizational systems, such as religion, education and politics develop in relation to one another in light of their comparative and historical contexts, and how those systems have social outcomes in terms of human well being and long-term sustainability.