Students who attended the Wed., Jan. 28 (3:45 p.m.) forum on religion and science asked some great questions. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before faculty had a chance to jump into the discussion. Here, I’d like to make a few remarks about Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s talk. This is important, because Dr. Nasr made many assertions regarding the nature and practice of science with a tone of complete authority; but his claims are quite controversial, and several misrepresent ‘accepted wisdom’ in contemporary philosophy of science. I will mention only three points:
First: Dr. Nasr claimed that there is no such thing as “scientific method,” since scientists do not follow a particular method while first coming up with their ideas. They might be in the shower, playing tennis, playing the cello (Dr. Nasr’s example), or walking the dog when the creative cognitive sparks start flying.
But no philosopher of science since at least the ’60s has expected scientists to follow a ‘method’ when coming up with their ideas; method comes into the picture once they start testing and refining ideas. That is, the fact that scientists don’t follow rules when creating initial hypotheses does not imply that there is no such thing as scientific method; the fact that scientists do subject those hypotheses to rigorous, systematic testing should make us at least open to the idea that there is such a thing (or a collection of defined practices) as scientific method.
Second: Dr. Nasr referred several times to Kuhn’s view that scientific work takes place against the background of a largely unquestioned “paradigm,” and that major new developments in science are accompanied by “paradigm shifts.” Dr. Nasr referred to Kuhn’s theory as established fact. Certainly anyone who works in the history or philosophy of science has been profoundly influenced by Kuhn’s view; but it isn’t the only game in town. Much work has been done in those fields since Kuhn’s revolutionary book was published (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Even those theorists most sympathetic to Kuhn’s view of science find it somewhat oversimplified. And – here’s the key point – even if true, it does not imply that there is no such thing as scientific method.
Third: Dr. Nasr was highly critical of reductionism, and implied that reductionism is central to contemporary science. Although I share both Dr. Nasr’s rejection of reductionism and his view that reductionist tendencies are at least partly to blame for Western society’s exploitative attitude toward the environment (and human beings), I would urge you not to accept his blanket characterization of science as reductionist. Reductionism is not a view internal to the sciences at all: it is a “meta-level” view often discussed in the humanities (and other areas of academics, I’m sure), and is often apparent, in a simplified form, in the sweeping confidence, prevalent in contemporary science, that science “proves” its “truths” with full authority, and can explain all there is to explain (this cultural attitude is called “scientism”).
The physical reductionist claims that all things really are ‘”nothing but” the particles described by physics, and all processes are “nothing but” the behavior of those particles. On that view, all that is true ultimately could be described in the language of physics (although that would take a long time); anything to which that language does not explicitly refer is not “really real.” That claim obviously could not be tested in a lab or in the field; one cannot do an experiment to show that things one’s experiment could not detect do not exist. Many scientists reject reductionism; it would imply that biologists and geologists, for example, cannot discover or explain anything special to their fields, because there is nothing special to their fields. Their hypotheses and theories are just shorthand for hypotheses and theories about electrons (or quarks, or whatever the “most basic” item is currently thought to be). Some scientists do accept reductionism; but their adherence to it does not constitute a scientific position.
I teach a feminist philosophy of science course (IDS 418/PHIL 350: Science, Sex and Nature), which many would consider to be quite critical of science. But even I bristle at Nasr’s extremely unfair, sweeping dismissal of the value and integrity of science. I do not embrace scientism; I do not believe that science is always unbiased or disinterested; I do believe that science never “proves” anything; I do believe that some science is sometimes put to socially and environmentally destructive use (and I know scientists who would agree with me in each of these points). I also believe that, when the damage caused by the misuse of science is “repaired” (if that is possible), scientists are at the forefront of that effort.