Michael Shermer gives a great brief summary of how the process of science sifts information to arrive at conclusions of increasing accuracy in "The Political Brain" Scientific American July 2006. He writes:
In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
For the scientific process to work to produce adequate scientific results, professional standards have to be observed and findings have to be available to enough independent scrutiny to validate or disconfirm the results.
The scientific process does not and cannot rely on some vague concept of every opinion being equally valid, or "we create our own reality" (the latter a favorite of New Age/esoteric thinking). The late Carl Sagan wrote in his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World, that the famed physicist Robert E. Wood was once asked at a dinner to respond to the toast, "To physics and metaphysics". Sagan relates the conclusion of Wood's response as follows:
The different between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
The second of the three essays in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) is by sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr., "Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook". In 2006, we have many challenges to science and scientific thinking. Christian fundamentalists raise issues from to the morality of a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Concern about the implications of cloning is carcely restricted to Christian fundamentalists. Greens opposing genetically-engineered crops, advocates of alternative medicine and/or quackery attacking "allopathic" or "school" medicine, industry lobbyists "debunking" (in a fake way) global warming to oppose stronger environmental regulations - the list is a long one.
The prominent questions raised about science and it apllications in the US in 1965 tended to focus more on questions like the morality of the arms race, or whether a scientist could morally participated in the development of nuclear weapons. Such questions are by no means obsolete, obviously. The participation of physicists and psychologists in torturing people in the Bush Gulag has raised very similar kinds of questions in an even more pointed way.
Moore's essay addresses some of those concerns by focusing on some notions that raise the question of how values come into play in the scientific field. In the social sciences, is it possible to objectively and accurately analyze a particular political system, for instance, without applying some framework of values? He describes the value-free position as follows:
If the purpose of the state is eliminating Jews, there is nothing more to be said from this conception of a scientific standpoint [in the value-free approach]. The goals of the state are for the political scientist brute facts to be entered in his calculations the way a physicist enters gravity, friction, and the character of metals in his computations. According to this viewpoint, the moment the political scientist steps out of his professional role to assert that killing Jews is morally bad, he enters the realm of "values," loses his aura of professional competence, and becomes no more qualified to give authoritative guidance than any of the rest of us. For one set of "values" is supposedly as valid as any other.
It's tempting to dismiss this concept out of hand. But that is easy only on a abstract level. Every regime in the present-day world - with the possible exception of "failed states" like Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment - performs certain functions like picking up garbage and running sewage plants. If Iran comes up with some innovative sewage-treatment technique, should no one else use it because the practice is tainted by having been developed and applied under a Shi'a Muslim fundamentalist regime?
Moore is a partisan of the scientific method. With the current Republican Party's intellectual and practical jihad against science, in the US adherence to science is becoming more and more a partisan position in the narrowest sense of the term. Moore writes:
[N]o part of science, no conception of science and its methods, and least of all the present one, is permanently above and beyond investigation, criticism, and if need be, fundamental change. Science is tolerant of reason; relentlessly intolerant of unreason and sham. A flickering light in our darkness it is, as Morris Cohen once said, but the only one we have, and woe to him who would put it out. (my emphasis)
In regard to that last observation, we should remember the debt we owe to industry lobbyists and to the Republican Presidency and Congress for years of delay on dealing with the global warming problem.
The distinction Moore makes there is critical to the end goal of tolerance in the exchange of ideas. People need to be able make good judgments about issues like global warming. Freedom of speech and the press necessary to allow the maximum exchange of ideas that will optimize the process of testing ideas that leads to better knowledge and understanding.
Freedom has other intrinsic value in the sense of the "inalienable rights" in our Declaration of Independence. But in the process of science in particular, in determining what is accurate and effective, we have to be "tolerant of reason; relentlessly intolerant of unreason and sham." It's one thing to say that anyone is free to say any dang fool thing they want to without being put in jail for it. But for science to have integrity, the scientists have to observe some basic standards of conduct and procedure. And tolerance as a social value doesn't mean that science should treat any dang fool idea as though it were "science".
But Moore doesn't believe that the allegedly value-free approach as described above to analyzing political and social systems is entirely adequate, even as a scientific approach. To pretend there is no "objective" difference between a state that aims at genocide and ones that aims to enhance the human well-being and freedom of all is not only ridiculous on the face of it. It's ridiculous underneath the surface, as well:
To at least a minority of contemporary thinkers the result [of the value-free approach to social and political analysis] the result seems both paradoxical and monstrous. Detachment and tolerance seem to have run riot and turned upside down.
Yet he rejects attempts to get around the problem by rejecting the possibility of any kind of objectively scientific approach to social phenonema. Marxists have been known to argue that a class perspective is necessary even in the most objective scientific endeavor. Greens, esoterics and religious fundamentalists may insist on some kind of overriding spiritual/supernatural consideration that should simply overrule the scientific perspective.
Moore's suggestion is that all religious and metaphysical considerations be discarded altogether. He argues for a secular, philosophically materialist outlooks as the basis for addressing the "values" issue:
The attempt to derive legitimacy for any set of values from some source external to living humans - and history is external insofar as the past confronts us with a world we never made—seems to me both doomed to frustration and unnecessary.
It is doomed to frustration because no alternative to rationality, no call to faith no matter how disguised, can in the end withstand the corrosive effects of rational inquiry. This is true even if the secular outlook suffers a more than partial eclipse for many long years to come. Furthermore is it not time to throw away the metaphysical crutch and walk on our own two legs? Rather than attempt to revive a dubious ontology and epistemology I would urge that we recognize that God and his metaphysical surrogates are dead, and learn to take the consequences.
If men wish to make others suffer or even to destroy civilization itself, there is nothing outside of man himself to which one can appeal in order to assert that such actions deserve condemnation.
You can almost hear the screeches from the Christian Right just reading such an appeal to a non-religious viewpoint. Even the less strictly devout may freak out at the suggestion, put in that way.
But Moore puts his finger here on the bridge between the strictly secular and the more metaphysical or spiritual outlooks. Everyone needs to be occasionally reminded, it seems, that religion is by no means necessary for values, ethics and standards of personality morality. If that seems to religious believers like a terribly insecure basis for such things, it's worth remembering that basing common values on a supernatural God is a frightening prospect to nonbelievers. For that matters, for Presbyterians or Episcopalians, it might seem even more frightening to have to rely on the "values" outlook of Southern Baptists or Pentecostals, and vice versa. The same goes for Protestants and Catholics.
Moore discusses ways in which a particular kind of government and social structure can be evaluated in terms of the degree to which they promote the well-being of humanity. And, in fact, he emphasizes that the materialist-realist approach to social values eliminates any argument that differing religious or philosophical bases for values can't be used as an excuse that there is no objective, secular basis for recognizing such values:
A real distinction exists ... between scientific humility and the vageness that coms from moral and intellectual cowardice. There are situtions ... where judiciousness become the last refuge of the scoundrel.
In considering whether there are objective standards of social and political truth, Moore makes a vital distinction between significant truths and trivial ones. One way of distinguishing between the two, he writes, is:
... simultaneously pragmatic and political. Men seek truths that will contribute to their own advantage in the contest with nature and other men. There is often a strong destructive component in this search. Let those who urge that "the truth" or "true" philosophy is always life-enhancing, in order to criticize the destructive consequences of modern physical science, recall that even Archimedes worked for the war industry of his day. This destructive component may or may not be unavoidable, a situation that varies from case to case. We must not allow it to disappear from sight simply because of alleged or even real benefits. One criterion for distinguishing significant from trivial truth is therefore the amount of benefit or harm that comes from its discovery.
He also argues for an "aesthetic" criterion, by which he seems to refer to whether or not a new piece of knowledge fits sensibly and rationally into well-established frameworks.
Moore believes that critical thinking is a vital and central part of scientific thinking, including thinking about political and social questions:
Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner [To understand everything is to pardon everything] is one of those catchy phrases that often enough turn out to be sloppy half-truths. For a clear understanding of how any society really works is likely to be the first step toward condemnation because it enables men to see not only the seamy side, to penetrate behind the glorifications and equivocations, but also to realize possibilities for improvement. The notion that a scientific attitude toward human society necessarily induces a conservative tolerance of the existing order, or that it deprives thinkers of insight into the important issues of the past and the present seems to me totally absurd. These things do happen and on a very wide scale, but constitute a failure to live up to the requirements and implications of the scientific outlook. (my emphasis in bold)
I find several things in Moore's essay especially relevant to our current situation. A wide-ranging debate is necessary to determine what is right and wrong in political and social questions. And an intellectual attitude of tolerance for new ideas, including and especially discordant ones, is vital.
At the same time, sensible judgments have to applied. The importance of this becomes stronger all the time as the Information Revolution bombards us with more and more information all the time. Critical thinking and judgment to distinguish the sensible and worthwhile from the trivial and the false are indispensable skills.
Finally, a rational and sensible approach to political and social questions requires some sense of humility. But at the same time, the limits of knowledge and understanding should never become an alibi for failing to deal with important problems, e.g., global warming. Or, as the popular saying goes, we should always be open-minded; but being open-minded is not the same as letting your brain roll out onto the floor.
Other posts in the series:
1. Are there problems with tolerance?
2. Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"
4. Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy
5. Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance
6. The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form
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