For the past few weeks now, Ken
Weiss and I have been sitting down over coffee to talk about our shared
interest in the ‘philosophy of science’. Our conversation started last fall
when I met Ken after he lectured in the genomics class that I was taking here
at Penn State. I had just finished reading E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology at that time, and I was curious about its legacy in
contemporary science. Ken was nice enough to share his thoughts with me on the
subject and, after exchanging a few emails, we decided that a reading course on
the history and philosophy of this thing called ‘science’ might be useful.
Since then, I have read through
several good introductory books, alongside works from Paul Feyerabend, Ludwick
Fleck, and others that I suspect many MT readers, and those of you who followed
Ken’s Crochets and Quiddities column in Evolutionary Anthropology,
may already know well. Of all the readings that Ken has recommended to me so
far, perhaps none was more insightful, not to mention downright entertaining,
than Paul Feyerabend’s book, Against
Method (AM).
Feyerabend was a radical, and he
knew it. But like any radical worth his salt, he was also too good to dismiss.
In AM, Feyerabend challenges what he sees as our unhealthy fascination with
defining an universal, atemporal scientific method. After taking a long, hard
look at how science had historically been done, Feyerabend concludes that there
is in fact no such thing as one, true, holy, and apostolic way to ‘do science’.
Instead, what he finds is that folks tended to use whichever method worked best
for them to accomplish whatever it was they were attempting to do. To quote, “…there
is only one principle that can be
defended under all circumstances and
in all stages of human development.
It is the principle: anything goes’.
Many have criticized Feyerabend
for being too extreme in his proclamation. And while maybe not ‘anything goes’,
it seems reasonable to point out here that the standards that we use to decide
what counts as science have indeed changed over the years. So then, where does
this leave us? One possibility may be that science is not so much a methodology as it is an ideology.
An approximation of this idea was
first proposed by Ludwick Fleck in the 1930s in his book, The Genesis and Development of Scientific Fact. Fleck’s thesis was
that ideas could only develop in a society if they were styled in such a way
that they conformed to the prevailing norms. New ideas that were accepted by
what Fleck called the ‘thought collective’, were granted the status of ‘facts’.
Ideas that were not, were ignored, dismissed, or outright attacked, often times
alongside their creators. Facts became facts not because they were true, but
because they were popular. There was no logical structure to the history of
scientific knowledge; there was only an idealized average that came about
through the interactions of different thought collectives falling in and out of
vogue across time.
Fleck’s ideas were largely
reiterated some thirty years later by Thomas Kuhn in his now famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Here, Kuhn uses the term ‘paradigms’ rather than ‘thought collectives’ to
describe the conceptual framework on which scientific discoveries are made. In
contrast to Fleck, Kuhn focuses less on the vague accumulation of scientific
knowledge over time, proposing instead that paradigms ‘shift’ at distinct
points in their history, thus giving way to previously unconceivable new ways
of thinking.
Several questions came to mind
after reading the various works mentioned above: How do we decide who gets to
participate in science? Can we anticipate a Kuhnian paradigm shift, or is it
really only observable after the fact? What credentials are required for
membership into a thought collective and how are they awarded? Is there an initiation?
Maybe a password or a secret handshake? I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
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