Phobia
I’ve been thinking about the puzzling (to me anyway) question of where all this automatic hostility to science comes from. This is not the first time I’ve thought about that question, of course; it’s not even the second, or the fifth. I think about it quite often. It is something of an enigma. There are a lot of people out there who do reliably say very dismissive things on the subject, not as if such things were controversial or debatable, but as if they were obvious and taken for granted and incontrovertible. As if it were just common knowledge among all people who pay attention even slightly, that science is root and branch wicked and harmful and to be condemned out of hand. It’s odd.
The question has renewed force because of reading Sandra Harding. She’s a really good example – paradigmatic, one might say – of this kind of thing. Of just assuming from the outset that science is a terrible thing and that everyone who reads her already knows that. She has to be assuming that, because she sure as hell does a crap job of making a case for it. In fact she does no job at all. She just takes that assumption as her starting point. No evidence, no explanation, hardly even any examples. Just earnest cross-eyed science-hatred. Okay, so why?
There are some obvious reasons. It’s powerful and succesful, it’s difficult, capitalism needs it, it can be smelly and/or dirty, we were bad at it in school. That kind of thing. Compelling stuff, needless to say. But there are other reasons, and those are the ones that it’s interesting to think about. (Irritating, but interesting.) The ones that are less explicit, less ‘theoretical’ and rational, less academic; the ones that are more like fear of snakes or spiders, or dislike of people in suede shoes.
Thinking about those reasons of course risks getting into into armchair-Freudianism territory, and that’s not a territory I want to light out for. But I’ll take the chance anyway. Cautiously. Right: I think one of those background reasons is the fact that science doesn’t give a shit. At all. It’s not just that it’s not all that bothered, it’s that it does not care at all. That’s the problem right there: it’s the realm of what just is, no matter what we think about it. Where our wishes, hopes, plans, fears make nothing happen.
Of course that’s true of life anyway, with or without science. It rains or it doesn’t, the volcano erupts or not. In fact science and technology are our best shot at changing obdurate facts about the world that we don’t like – sickness, weather, hunger. But still, science also makes the independence of what is from what we want it to be, systematic and official, and that’s why people hate it, as if it were a bully wandering around stomping on all our little doll houses and acorn tea sets. We feel beside the point next to it. It’s not democratic, or multicultural, or libertarian, or kind; all those words and all words like them are just the wrong category. We feel more at home in the kind-ought-value-want category. So it feels natural to a lot of people to hate science, and they assume not only that it feels natural to everyone but also that that is the right way to feel, the humane, thoughtful, reflective way to feel. At least, that’s my guess. But it’s not a scientific guess, just an armchair one.
[Update: By ‘we’ of course I mean those who fit the description and not those who don’t.]
OB,
Shouldn’t you make a distinction between science and it’s application : technology?
I think a lot of people, including you it seems, lump it all together. But what, I think, disturbs people is that technological “progress” is it’s uncontrollable nature. People like control, even if it is only the semblance of it.
Fryslan,
You bet I should – but I did. I said science when I meant science (even in the bit about capitalism’s depending on it – I did mean science, not technology), and when I meant both I said ‘science and technology’. I definitely don’t lump it all together. But a lot of people do, you’re right; some do it deliberately and on principle, and call it Scitech. But the people I’m talking about here do talk specifically about science, rather than (or in addition to) technology. That is, they hate (or claim to hate) both, and it’s the oddity of hating science itself that I puzzle over. Hating technology is more understandable (though it does usually require a lot of denial, since most people don’t really want to live without it).
I’m sure you’re right about the uncontrollable aspect – and I’m not always crazy about that either. Every time I nearly get run over by some fool talking on a cell phone while driving an SUV, for example.
(Maybe we should do a B&W survey…)
“we were bad at it in school”
I think that’s an important one. One weird thing about dealing with creationists is that they actually don’t hate science — they have an unhappy respect for the authority of science, which is why they are always trying to appropriate it. Look at some of the big-name creationists, like Walt Brown and Kent Hovind and Ken Ham; they all insist that THEY are the real scientists, that science confirms their beliefs, and they all run out and get their little college-by-mail Ph.D.s. They put up “museums” and “research institutes” — the Discovery Institute, for instance, tries desperately hard to ape a scientific institution — and dearly love to quote scientists out of context to back up their claims.
The real problem is that although they envy science, they all suck at it. Science doesn’t give them the answers they want, so they have to put on lab coats and hang up their mail-order diplomas and make stuff up.
I have heard this called “cargo-cult science” (Feynman?), where people try really hard to imitate the relatively unimportant part of science (white coats, formatting of papers, titles) but completely miss the important part (peer review, experiments, hypothesis testing).
I think it’s some sort of magical thinking (“if we perform the rituals, the Gods will help us”).
OB, I think ‘technoscience’ is their favoured term. Shouldn’t we invent our own terms like that? I like the sound of anthrobollocks.
In the spirit of your admirable not-a-blog I read some of the work of Dr.Harding. I fear that you may be guilty of setting up a straw man here. Much of what she says makes sense and I have found nothing in the material I have read to indicate that she hates science. You will obviously accuse me of selective quotation, but what is wrong with this?
“We need to make sure everyone gets a good science education,.” she said. “As John Dewey pointed out, making democracy
means ensuring that those who bear the consequences of decisions have a fair share in making them. But people who aren’t scientifically literate can’t share in making the decisions about science that will affect them, too.”
Cargo cult, yes, I’ve heard that too. Anthrobollocks good.
Mike,
What of Harding’s have you read? I’m really not setting up a strawman. That’s why I keep saying you have to read her to get the full effect – because she’s actually worse than I can convey via brief quotation, not better. Yes the quotation you give is eminently reasonable. What’s it from?
“which aren’t problems with science per se but the way it is carried out”
Definitely. But that’s the trouble with Harding: she makes it a point of honour to go beyond that, to criticize not only agendas but content. And to do it by fiat rather than by giving any actual examples of bad content.
Who’s this “we” who feel more comfortable with the kind-ought-value- want category? It sure isn’t me – I’m happy with value free “just is” and argument from evidence as the only epistemology for the natural world. And yes, science is value-free – it’s technology (the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes) that gets you into the really messy stuff. For my sins (no doubt) I’m an engineer, knee-deep in the messy stuff every day.
Sorry about the rhetorical we! I’ve been rebuked for that habit before – it’s a bad one. Actually I did hesitate over the ‘we’ while writing the comment, then decided to leave it because that seems like a human sort of foible, even though not a universal one…she said, woollily.
For what it’s worth: Naomi Weisstein, Professor of Psychology at State U.Buffalo, and a feminist, and a defender of basic science, comments on Harding in her article “Power, Resistance, and Science.”
“At first, I was perplexed by these attacks on “Psychology Constructs the Female.” The paper criticized a sexism in psychology that cloaked itself in the authority and grandeur of science. What better way to criticize this pretense than by showing that the psychology was sexist and not at all scientific? But now I understand the postmodernist feminist psychologists’ anti-science attack on “Psychology Constructs the Female.” The attack argued that science was a useless enterprise. And, they argued, even if the science had been perfect, the psychology of women propounded in those days would have been wrong, whether or not it met the criteria of “good science.” I imagined that they imagined me at the most elegant resort in Monaco, where internationally known gangsters were meeting. I am standing outside wearing my science-nerd beanie hat with the airplane propellers on top of it, screwing up my little face, purple with indignation, and yelling, “You guys are not telling the Twuth! You pwomised to tell the Twuth!” As if it mattered. Even if they did tell the truth, they would still be international gangsters. In other words, how could I have been so naive as to think that science could have told us anything useful in the first place? Science, according to such feminist epistemologists as Harding, is a “western,” “bourgeois,” “imperialist,” “androcentric project,” whose knowledge is “embedded in social relations.” (In the old days, we used to call this abuse of power “pig” science (Weisstein, V. Blaisdell, and J. Lemisch, The Godfathers: Freudians, Marxists, and the Scientific and Political Protection Societies (1976)). In short, Harding claims that science describes not ultimate reality but merely the relativist and subjective reality of those who serve it and those whom it serves. . . .
“I think that what Harding and the other feminist critics of science have in mind when they think about science is an archaic, hard-case, narrow endeavor which does not at all fit the realities of how contemporary science is done. It’s easy to hate science if you don’t understand the uncertainty, creativity, subtlety and anxiety about what is true which permeates contemporary scientific investigation. Harding has constructed and attacked a straw scientist, a way of doing science that lives on only in sixth-grade introductions to science. Such ignorance is widespread among leftists and feminists.”
The full article is at http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue22/weisst22.htm
Wasn’t really criticizing your rhetorical “we”, OB, which I think is quite acceptable in context. It just seemed to me that no-one was expressing the point that the value-free, follow-the-evidence-wherever-it-leads idealization of pure science is indeed a very comfortable sort of world, for some minds.
On the other hand, on one occasion during witness training, I was classified by the trainer as “the most evidence-driven person she had ever met”. So I’m not claiming to be typical…
Thanks for that article, MD, I posted it in Flashback.
Brian, and the trainer’s tone was not entirely admiring when she said that, was it. I’m just guessing…
She had a PhD in something with the word “Epistemology” in it, so I’m guessing she thought it a bit limiting!
Oh, it’s limiting all right! God damn evidence!
brian rothwell–
What is witness training?
On the main subject, I think a lot of the hostility grows out of the common perception that “science is what is in the textbooks and it makes no real sense in the everyday world–I mean, who makes this stuff up?” How many people really understand the experiences of scientific researchers? Struggling with the data, the bolt from the blue that explains everything (until you get into the lab,where it doesn’t work), and all the rest that never makes it into the admiring little TV shows.
OB, the quotation is from ‘Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking
From Women’s Lives.’
My point was not that Harding is a good writer, although, amusingly, she is on record as saying that she is; but rather that she does not hate science. She questions the management of science rather than the method.
I think the fact that she is being discussed as ‘anti-science’ is evidence that her writing is singularly unhelpful in advancing her project, which seems to me to be the management of science to improve the lives of the less advantaged rather than to further enrich the rich.
Sorry to everyone else for taking up space on something very much a side-bar, but wmr (like me) doesn’t give an e-mail address for me to respond directly.
“Witness training” aims to help benighted techies like me to understand that not everyone sees the world as we do, and accordingly to present arguments, in legal and quasi-legal (e.g. regulatory) environments, in ways that would be convincing to a wider spectrum of world views. What matters is “How broadly convincing are your truth-claims”, not “What is the truth?” It reminds us that scientists are (allegedly) trained to seek the truth, while lawyers are trained to win arguments.
(Very) incidentally, the above-mentioned trainer did a terrific job.
Mike, yeah, I have to agree with PM. Harding is pretty explicit about the fact that she is indeed criticizing the method of science as well as the management. Consider the endless reiteration of the phrases ‘conventional epistemology’ and ‘science-as-usual’ – not to mention the argument (or rather ‘argument’) of WSWK as a whole. Standpoint epistemology is all about criticizing the method of science. Maybe I’ll give a few more quotations…
Brian, that’s not such a sidebar; it’s quite interesting, and relevant. The difference between truth-seeking and persuasion is crucial to all this stuff.
Oh and MD, I take it back, I was wrong, Harding does say (WSWK p 49) she is arguing for a ‘postmodernist standpoint approach’. Beg pardon for correcting you when you were right!
No apology needed. I tend to conflate some feminist philosophising [Is that a word?] with postmodernism, so any external corrections to that tendency are welcome. Obviously, there is cross-pollination between postmodernism and some feminist ideologies, so I’m often careless in that respect. In any case, I am not keen to get involved in internal feminist debates; I can’t keep up with them, I don’t know the politics, I don’t really understand them, and, in any case, I’m male. It’s not my bailiwick.
Oh, well, males can be interested in feminism though.
Yeah, there is cross-pollination. In a way postmodernism is sort of a necessary first step to enable people to make the kind of bizarro claims that Harding does make. But one can be both a feminist and a philosopher (or scientist); neither one requires people to make deranged assertions about standpoint epistemology. (Pardon me while I thump the table for emphasis.)
brian rothwell–
Thanks for the response and I agree with OB that this has interesting implications. Was there a text or reading list for this course? Note that for this comment, I have included an e-mail address.
In my limited reading, I have come across some feminists (Nussbaum, McKinnon, Haack, Weisstein) who don’t take kindly to postmodernism. Postmodernists sometimes claim feminism as their first-born, but apparently some feminists don’t reciprocate those tender sentiments.
Oh, that’s for sure. Haack is among the best critics of feminist epistemology, as are Janet Radcliffe Richards and Cassandra Pinnick. (See our Articles section for Pinnick.) Susan Moller Okin is (well, was, alas) a critic of multiculturalism, and Nussbaum is a critic of (some) feminist criticisms of liberalism.
Let’s be clear here. The reason why people who hate science hate it is because it’s too hard for them and they don’t understand it. Why do we keep pussy-footing around this fact? The number of people who can actually understand science and don’t like it is pretty close to zero. They’re scared that they aren’t able to control it so (a) they want to control the people who are good at it and (b) they want to trivialise it and minimise its perceived importance and value.