3
Just a bit more. Because I promised, and because there are more that are too good not to share.
…it is perhaps worth drawing an analogy between the demarcation lines in science and the borders between hierarchical taste cultures – high, middlebrow, and popular – that cultural critics and other experts involved in the business of culture have long had the vocational function of supervising. In both cases, we find the same need for experts to police the borders with their criteria of inclusion and exclusion…[F]alsifiability is often put forward as a criterion for evaluating scientific authenticity…But such a yardstick is no more objectively adequate and no less mythical a criterion than appeals to, say, aesthetic complexity have been in the history of cultural criticism. Falsifiability is a self-referential concept in science, inasmuch as it appeals to those normative codes of science that favor objective authentification of evidence by a supposedly dispassionate observer.
Isn’t that lovely? There’s so much in it. It’s like a big ol’ treasure chest. That ‘it is perhaps worth drawing’ – more of that caginess our sharp-eyed readers have noticed. Sure, ‘perhaps’ – that’s safe to say. Then again perhaps not. And ‘worth’? Well, that depends what you mean by ‘worth’. If you mean in the sense of ‘worth because likely to produce interesting, true, useful lines of thought,’ then no. If you just mean ‘more fun than having your teeth cleaned,’ possibly. Okay and then ‘demarcation lines’. Right. That’s what science is all right, it’s kind of like a football field. And then borders. He has a bit of an obsession with borders, Ross does. He seems to think that every distinction and every value judgement (except the ones he makes) equates to establishing and patrolling borders in a peculiarly compulsive, anal, property-hugging, pedantic way. And then ‘supervising’ to underline the point. Right – people who pay attention to culture (slightly more perspicuous attention than Ross pays, one hopes) spend all their time supervising borders; that’s what ‘culture’ is all about. And then, skipping lightly over several more lovely items (experts, police the borders, criteria, inclusion and exclusion) we come to that loopy phrase about falsifiability. Put forward? Scientific authenticity? Oh never mind. And then all the rest of it, all that bilge about normative codes and ‘a self-referential concept’ and ‘objective’ and ‘authentification’ (he seems to have science confused with stamp-collecting) and ‘supposedly’. I’m exhausted now.
But just a little more, because there is one very sly item.
A more exhaustive treatment would take account of the local, qualifying differences between the realm of cultural taste and that of science –
Oh it would! It would notice those differences would it? Well that is a relief!
– science, but it would run up, finally, against the stand-off between the empiricist’s claim that non-context-dependent beliefs exist and that they can be true, and the culturalist’s claim that beliefs are only socially accepted as true.
There, that’s the one. That’s what Susan Haack calls the ‘passes for’ fallacy. That’s that rhetorical trick where epistemic relativists substitute the word ‘beliefs’ for words like ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ and hope we won’t notice. And he follows that up with our last sentence for today.
Ultimately, the power of science rests upon making and maintaining that distinction, and we ought to recognize that science’s anxiety about authenticating its belief in truths is, in the truly Foucauldian sense, a question of power.
There you have it – the making of a celebrity cultural critic.
[bows deeply, falls over]
Thenk you, thenk you, MD.
I’ve been listening to ‘Forty Years On’ on BBC 7 and I think I’m channeling Alan Bennett.
Very true. What a profound consolation it is that Ross was one of the editors of Social Text when Sokal played his little prank. When I’m feeling a little blue and melancholy and nauseated, I remember that fact and feel much better.
Actually, Ross is entirely wrong about at least one thing in the long quote. He writes that “Falsifiability is a self-referential concept in science, inasmuch as it appeals to those normative codes of science that favor objective authentification of evidence by a supposedly dispassionate observer.” The power of scientific discourse is that it does not depend on a dispassionate observer; actually, the more hostile the observer, the better. The only things that we have to agree on in a scientific discussion is that the world is real and that data matters. Unless by ‘dispassionate observer’ he means the mechanical methods of measurement which we use to collect data…. in which case, do Christian spectrometers produce different results than Muslim ones?
If I were grading this guy’s writing as a piece of undergraduate writing, I would give him a C+, B- tops. And that would be generosity on my part.
How academic career advancement works, with examples like this, remains a mystery to me.
Also, only because I happened to be reading it as part of my OU course yesterday, I happen to recognise Ross’s piece as a re-write of Janet Woolff – so he’s a plagiarist as well!
Could one of you people much more versed in formal logic than I enlighten me as to whether an unfalsifiable proposition can ever have any predictive power? The point of science is robust prediction of how the natural world will behave.
P.S. I don’t mind if your enlightenment involves equations!
Indeed – in fact the requirement is that the results be replicable by anybody and everybody else. If they’re ‘special’ so that only certain kinds of people can replicate them, then that’s not good enough. Time to phone the border patrol.
Along the same vein, the latest post on conservativegradstudent.blogspot.com is interesting.
Hey Chris Wh – which OU course are you studying? How are you finding it?
According to Ross, it seems, orthodox science should not be preferred to (or “privileged over”) new age and alternative science.
When orthodoxy says that it is supported by experimental evidence and that its rival is not, Ross does not question the truth of this claim. Instead he questions its relevance and significance. The desire that beliefs should be supported by evidence is in itself merely an arbitrary cultural construct.
At this point one wonders what Ross’s daily life is like. There are two possibilities. Either in his everyday life Ross behaves in a way that is completely inconsistent with what he writes, or else his life must veer constantly between comedy and tragedy. If his local minicab firm let him down three times running, would he look for another firm? If his child has a severe allergic reaction to peanuts and nearly died, would he make sure that in future the child was on a nut-free diet?
The point is that “scientific rationalist” isn’t an exotic western cultural construct. It’s just one instance of rationality in general. And rationality isn’t something that was invented by Aristotle in order to persecute women, black people, and other disadvantaged groups. Rationality is simply what you need in order to survive in a world full of predators that want to eat you and big heavy objects that are in danger of failling on top of you.
Just so. As for instance Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont point out in Fashionable Nonsense and Susan Haack does in Defending Science and quite a few other people do in other places.
I wonder about the daily life question myself. Perhaps Ross is in a constant state of suspense? Always thinking – ‘Maybe this time gravity will do something different and I’ll float away, maybe this time the bus won’t go where it always has but go somewhere quite quite different despite what the schedule says, maybe this time the supermarket will contain not tonight’s dinner but a pack of hungry tigers, maybe this time when I step into the ocean it will turn out to be made of acid, maybe’ etc.