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| photo by widdowquinn | via PhotoRee |
Listening to a past Intelligence Squared discussion on whether "Science will have all the answers", or as interpreted by one of the panelist "science is the only route to knowledge." This question lies in the purview of epistemology, the study of the nature of knowledge and the limits of that knowledge. Curiously enough, all this question is ultimately wrapped up in mathematical logic. Taking a step back, consider for a moment when you were first introduced to the scientific method. Hypothesize, predict, and test. It sounds all nice and intuitively rigorous, but where does it come from? Why does it supposed to intrinsically make sense? It turns out that there is nothing really fundamental about this formulation of investigation. My sense of the matter is that people still treat science very superstitiously as if it were some kind of magic or dogma. From grade school on, we were taught the one true answer as to how the natural world works. We revere Galileo and Darwin, and their respective scientific discoveries as if they received the discoveries from the heavens and did not require experimentation, hotly debated peer review, and eventual validation by other work. Moreover, we were taught at least implicitly that these great scientists were never wrong. Their theories never had to be revised or be subject to independent validation. Moreover, it seems as if we think that their theories are and were always the only reasonable answer. There is a kind of survivor's bias in science education. We laugh off Lamarck and others as being so obviously wrong and even as absurd forgetting that they were real scientists too despite not having directly produced the prevailing theory of our time. In fact, I dare say that it would be difficult to say what our understanding of the world would look like today if not for these other scientists upon whose work still contributed to the development of our current understanding of the world. Even the scientific method itself is treated as received knowledge and not as an amalgam of multiple reasonable routes of scientific investigation. Science itself is presented as a winner-takes-all activity.
