Post by johnbc on Jul 17, 2020 4:00:23 GMT
The word “science” itself is ambiguous, it has several layers of meaning. Let’s look at some, without pretending to be exhaustive. First, science means the ideal of science as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle formulated it in opposition to doxa, the world of opinion. So science, or episteme, is that knowledge that is demonstrative, that not only affirms something, that not only persuades people, but provides the necessary evidence to know that things cannot be otherwise but in the way that its logical conclusion has led. So, the idea of achieving demonstrative knowledge, apodictic — apo means “no”, it is a negative, and deiksis means “to destroy”, therefore, indestructible — , the idea of an indestructible knowledge is the initial ideal of science.
Aristotle knew perfectly well that this ideal can only be realized in a partial and imperfect way. And yet, it was the same ideal that gave shape and meaning to scientific efforts even if frustrated. Aristotle understood the world of nature as the world where things are constantly changing and, therefore, did not believe in nature, but only in provisional stabilizations — it is much closer to quantum physics than to Newton’s world. And for that very reason, he said that the entire field of natural sciences could not be reduced to science in the strict and perfect sense. There was no episteme of nature: this is fundamental. There was no exact and perfect science of nature, therefore, knowledge of nature would always have to be tentative.
And this is the first layer of meaning of the word “science”: the ideal of science and the awareness that, for almost all domains of reality, this ideal will not be realized, but at the same time, you cannot abdicate it , because it gives the logical form of the effort that you are making. In other words, science approaches its ideal of apodictic knowledge as in an asymptote, a curve that is arriving, but never arrives. At any time, it is impossible to say whether you approached more or less, that is, there is no absolute distance, there is a distance that increases as it decreases. This means that the asymptote is characterized by the paradox. Therefore, science effectively existing has a paradoxical relationship with its ideal. This is what determines the logical way in which we recognize an activity as scientific, it is the measure of scientificity of science and, at the same time, it is the negation of that scientificity. In other words, compared to the ideal of science, no science is science, it is only an attempt to science.
Aristotle’s formulation of the scientific method is the most perfect one anyone has ever given
However, when from the sixteenth century on, a new intellectuality began to form that no longer had a complete scholastic formation, but only the minimum that the people of the nobility received attending some schools for some time, two or three drops of scholastic teaching, and thought they knew scholasticism, Aristotle, etc.
When we read Bacon, for example, he writes all of his work as a criticism of Aristotelianism and an inversion of Aristotelianism, that is what he imagines [to do]. And he says: “Aristotle uses a deductive method in which he starts from general statements and concludes the particular, therefore, he despises the observation and experimentation of nature. And we have to do the exact opposite, we have to use an inductive method; that is, we have to observe the facts and gradually create generalizations”. But observing the facts and gradually creating generalizations was exactly what Aristotle said was the only thing that can be done in the science of nature. In other words, it is the same as saying: Bacon ignored Aristotle’s philosophy totally and deeply, and simply did not understand what he was reading, or else he received false information. In the same way, Descartes also received false information.
Now, if the subject does not know where his activity is located within the historical development of the discipline he is practicing, then he is already out of reality. In other words: the reference he has, the totality of what he knows about what he is studying is placed outside the historical reality of that same activity. And that is already an element of serious alienation, because he does not know what the status quaestionis is. So we can say: all the critics of Aristotle, from the Renaissance onwards, who created modern science, had no idea what Aristotle’s philosophy is.
It was only in the 20th century that scholars discovered that Aristotle’s famous dialectic is the scientific method, after all. Today, among specialized scholars in the field, it is a total consensus. But for four centuries the history of the sciences unfolds in a complacent ignorance of its own place in the history of the development of the scientific method. This shift, this gap, between the content of the sciences and the place they have historically occupied will profoundly affect the content of the sciences themselves. The same so that, for example, you assume that you are Napoleon Bonaparte and begin to act logically on the premise that you are Napoleon Bonaparte, it is absolutely impossible that the falsehood of the premise does not end up introducing itself into the very acts that you are practicing. Science is the same.
In other words, when we let ourselves be impressed, for example, with what people say: “Ah, but how do you say this if science made interplanetary rockets, did the internet, did this, plus that?” Well, first of all: all these achievements, each one is just a technological application, there is no technological application that can be reduced entirely to a scientific explanation. Every technique consists of fusing heterogeneous knowledge, irreducible to a common explanatory principle, and to give them a bodily existence, to give this heterogeneity of causal lines a bodily existence. Which means, the effectiveness of any technique never proves any science. There is an abyss between the two. For example: if I decide to kill you and hit you in the head with a hammer, this is technologically brutal, literally lethal. Does it depend on whether I know the whole physiology of death? No. I can ignore this entirely.
So, any technological product can never depend on a scientific principle alone, that is absolutely impossible. For example, the principles that explain rocket propulsion cannot by themselves explain the greater or lesser resistance of the metals that the rocket is made up of, it depends on another line of scientific explanation that has nothing to do with propulsion, and so on. Imagine the amount of different materials and different technical elements needed to build a rocket; reduce them all to a common scientific principle. It’s not possible. We can never confuse the successes of technology with the ability that science would have to give a real explanation of the phenomena. One thing has nothing to do with the other, absolutely nothing. So don’t be impressed by these things. We will judge science not by the side effects it has had through its fusion with technology, but by its stated ambition to give us a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon.
So, we have the first layer of meaning: the ideal of science;
Second layer: the difficulty, the tension that exists between science and, if possible, its ideal;
Third layer: the whole set of historically existing observations and theories, including the wrong ones; that is, it is science as a vastly varied set of knowledge, not only in its content, but in its level of validity;
Fourth layer: science as a socially existing activity, as a profession, which implies the existence of entities, subsidies, a series of political elements that make their existence possible;
Fifth layer: the idea of science as a social authority, as that instance that, before the people, is able to separate the true from the false;
Sixth layer: science as an alleged foundation of certain general philosophical beliefs, such as naturalism.
When you talk about “science”, you talk about these six senses at the same time. So this is enough for you to understand that the word “science”, when used in a debate, is not a rigorous concept, it is a figure of speech that compacts things enormously separated from each other. And often, when in a debate a person claims the authority of science, he is claiming the authority of an overall impression created by all this. And to complicate matters further, the history of the scientific method is composed of an inaugural falsehood that is committed by Bacon, Galileo and who knows how many, with regard to aristotelian scholastic thought: they created a false rupture. That is, from extremely deficient knowledge, not to say totally false, of what ancient scholastic science was, they believed they were creating something new, when they weren’t: they were simply repeating the same thing. And how is it that such an important activity, which has so much authority over society, can be so ignorant of its own history and, therefore, of the sources of that same authority?
Aristotle knew perfectly well that this ideal can only be realized in a partial and imperfect way. And yet, it was the same ideal that gave shape and meaning to scientific efforts even if frustrated. Aristotle understood the world of nature as the world where things are constantly changing and, therefore, did not believe in nature, but only in provisional stabilizations — it is much closer to quantum physics than to Newton’s world. And for that very reason, he said that the entire field of natural sciences could not be reduced to science in the strict and perfect sense. There was no episteme of nature: this is fundamental. There was no exact and perfect science of nature, therefore, knowledge of nature would always have to be tentative.
And this is the first layer of meaning of the word “science”: the ideal of science and the awareness that, for almost all domains of reality, this ideal will not be realized, but at the same time, you cannot abdicate it , because it gives the logical form of the effort that you are making. In other words, science approaches its ideal of apodictic knowledge as in an asymptote, a curve that is arriving, but never arrives. At any time, it is impossible to say whether you approached more or less, that is, there is no absolute distance, there is a distance that increases as it decreases. This means that the asymptote is characterized by the paradox. Therefore, science effectively existing has a paradoxical relationship with its ideal. This is what determines the logical way in which we recognize an activity as scientific, it is the measure of scientificity of science and, at the same time, it is the negation of that scientificity. In other words, compared to the ideal of science, no science is science, it is only an attempt to science.
Aristotle’s formulation of the scientific method is the most perfect one anyone has ever given
However, when from the sixteenth century on, a new intellectuality began to form that no longer had a complete scholastic formation, but only the minimum that the people of the nobility received attending some schools for some time, two or three drops of scholastic teaching, and thought they knew scholasticism, Aristotle, etc.
When we read Bacon, for example, he writes all of his work as a criticism of Aristotelianism and an inversion of Aristotelianism, that is what he imagines [to do]. And he says: “Aristotle uses a deductive method in which he starts from general statements and concludes the particular, therefore, he despises the observation and experimentation of nature. And we have to do the exact opposite, we have to use an inductive method; that is, we have to observe the facts and gradually create generalizations”. But observing the facts and gradually creating generalizations was exactly what Aristotle said was the only thing that can be done in the science of nature. In other words, it is the same as saying: Bacon ignored Aristotle’s philosophy totally and deeply, and simply did not understand what he was reading, or else he received false information. In the same way, Descartes also received false information.
Now, if the subject does not know where his activity is located within the historical development of the discipline he is practicing, then he is already out of reality. In other words: the reference he has, the totality of what he knows about what he is studying is placed outside the historical reality of that same activity. And that is already an element of serious alienation, because he does not know what the status quaestionis is. So we can say: all the critics of Aristotle, from the Renaissance onwards, who created modern science, had no idea what Aristotle’s philosophy is.
It was only in the 20th century that scholars discovered that Aristotle’s famous dialectic is the scientific method, after all. Today, among specialized scholars in the field, it is a total consensus. But for four centuries the history of the sciences unfolds in a complacent ignorance of its own place in the history of the development of the scientific method. This shift, this gap, between the content of the sciences and the place they have historically occupied will profoundly affect the content of the sciences themselves. The same so that, for example, you assume that you are Napoleon Bonaparte and begin to act logically on the premise that you are Napoleon Bonaparte, it is absolutely impossible that the falsehood of the premise does not end up introducing itself into the very acts that you are practicing. Science is the same.
In other words, when we let ourselves be impressed, for example, with what people say: “Ah, but how do you say this if science made interplanetary rockets, did the internet, did this, plus that?” Well, first of all: all these achievements, each one is just a technological application, there is no technological application that can be reduced entirely to a scientific explanation. Every technique consists of fusing heterogeneous knowledge, irreducible to a common explanatory principle, and to give them a bodily existence, to give this heterogeneity of causal lines a bodily existence. Which means, the effectiveness of any technique never proves any science. There is an abyss between the two. For example: if I decide to kill you and hit you in the head with a hammer, this is technologically brutal, literally lethal. Does it depend on whether I know the whole physiology of death? No. I can ignore this entirely.
So, any technological product can never depend on a scientific principle alone, that is absolutely impossible. For example, the principles that explain rocket propulsion cannot by themselves explain the greater or lesser resistance of the metals that the rocket is made up of, it depends on another line of scientific explanation that has nothing to do with propulsion, and so on. Imagine the amount of different materials and different technical elements needed to build a rocket; reduce them all to a common scientific principle. It’s not possible. We can never confuse the successes of technology with the ability that science would have to give a real explanation of the phenomena. One thing has nothing to do with the other, absolutely nothing. So don’t be impressed by these things. We will judge science not by the side effects it has had through its fusion with technology, but by its stated ambition to give us a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon.
So, we have the first layer of meaning: the ideal of science;
Second layer: the difficulty, the tension that exists between science and, if possible, its ideal;
Third layer: the whole set of historically existing observations and theories, including the wrong ones; that is, it is science as a vastly varied set of knowledge, not only in its content, but in its level of validity;
Fourth layer: science as a socially existing activity, as a profession, which implies the existence of entities, subsidies, a series of political elements that make their existence possible;
Fifth layer: the idea of science as a social authority, as that instance that, before the people, is able to separate the true from the false;
Sixth layer: science as an alleged foundation of certain general philosophical beliefs, such as naturalism.
When you talk about “science”, you talk about these six senses at the same time. So this is enough for you to understand that the word “science”, when used in a debate, is not a rigorous concept, it is a figure of speech that compacts things enormously separated from each other. And often, when in a debate a person claims the authority of science, he is claiming the authority of an overall impression created by all this. And to complicate matters further, the history of the scientific method is composed of an inaugural falsehood that is committed by Bacon, Galileo and who knows how many, with regard to aristotelian scholastic thought: they created a false rupture. That is, from extremely deficient knowledge, not to say totally false, of what ancient scholastic science was, they believed they were creating something new, when they weren’t: they were simply repeating the same thing. And how is it that such an important activity, which has so much authority over society, can be so ignorant of its own history and, therefore, of the sources of that same authority?
