Assignment #5
Topic: What sort of knowledge does science offer us? And what does it leave out?
Readings:
1. Re-read O’Hear, Chapter 5, pp. 97-105. Even if you read this before, it’s a good idea to read it again, as it provides a useful lead-in to the issues of Chapter 6.
2. O’Hear, Chapters 6, 8, and 9.
3. Below
are links to some articles that illustrate the kind of thinking that O'Hear discusses
in Chapter 9 under the labels "strong program in the sociology of science
(pp. 210 and 214) and "contemporary feminist and other radical criticisms
of science" (p. 226). I've listed
them in order of difficulty, easiest first.
Read at least the first three.
Nessa McHugh, “Women’s Stories” at http://www.radmid.demon.co.uk/stories.htm
Dinshaw K. Dadahanji, "The Cultural
Challenge to Scientific Knowledge” at http://members.tripod.com/~ScienceWars/cult.html
Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Defenses of
Value-Laden Inquiry” at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/#valinq
Helen Longino, “Social Dimensions of
Scientific Knowledge” at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-knowledge-social/
(Section 3 “Social, Cultural, and Feminist Studies of Science” is especially relevant.)
Mary Klages, “Postmodernism” at http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html
Alvin Goldman, “Social Epistemology” Section 3 “Anti-Classical Approaches” at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/#3
4. Below are some Web resources for Schrodinger’s cat, quantum physics, and other science relevant to O’Hear’s discussion of ‘realism’ in Chapter 6. These sites will be especially helpful to those who know little or nothing about modern physics. If the references to quantum physics in O’Hear confuse you, take a look at these:
Science Net: http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/phys/quantummechanics/p00087d.html
Simple physics overview: http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/tech.html
Quantum theory: http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/node143.html
Newton’s laws: http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/node19.html
A more elaborate physics site with lots of cute diagrams and java applet illustrations from the University of Colorado: http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/quantumzone/index.html
(Both the U. of Colorado site and the U. of Winnipeg site lead you through a linked series of pages. Just keep clicking “Next” for the next page. Or use the table of contents to find a specific topic. )
5. (Optional) Steven Weinberg, “Can Science Explain Everything, Anything?” New York Review of Books, May 31, 2001, at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14263
This unit has two goals:
1. First, to consider what sort of knowledge science can and can not deliver. Suppose that science is as successful in describing and explaining the nature of things as scientists like Steven Weinberg think that it is. How far does this get us? Do scientific theories tell us what the world is really like? Or are they just ‘useful fictions’ for predicting and manipulating things? (O’Hear, Chapter 6) Can scientists show us that our everyday ways of understanding ourselves are mistaken and that ‘really’ our behavior and experiences are produced by physical causes? If psychology can be reduced to physiology, and physiology to chemistry, must we then conclude, for example, that love is ‘nothing but’ the operation of hormones and pheromones? Or that the physiological explanation of why we do what we do is ‘truer’ than our common sense explanations? (O’Hear, Chapter 8) What sorts of questions (if any) are beyond the scope of science? (O’Hear, Chapter, 9)
2. Second, to consider some challenges to the claim that science is successful in the way its defenders believe it is. Fans of science tend to insist that science is (perhaps uniquely) a rational and objective mode of inquiry. Some critics challenge the claim that science is rational and objective. Other critics challenge the assumption that it is good to be rational and objective. Do any of these critics have a valid point? (O’Hear, Chapter 9 and the articles by McHugh, Dadahanji, Anderson, Klages, Goldman, and Longino)
Some notes on the readings (with writing assignments in
bold type):
1. In Chapter 6 O’Hear guides his reader through a debate between two views of the nature of scientific knowledge. According to ‘positivism’ scientific theories are like tools for predicting and manipulating observable phenomena. However successful those theories may be at generating correct predictions, we have no good reason to think that they give us a correct picture of the underlying structure of things. (For example, just because atomic physics enables us to predict the behavior of uranium well enough to build an atomic bomb, this does not give us a good reason to believe that the various particles and forces postulated by atomic physics – atoms, electrons, neutrons, etc – actually exist. All we really know is that uranium and other substances behave as if atoms, electrons, neutrons, etc. exist.)
The opposing view is ‘realism’. According to realism, the ability of a theory to make correct predictions gives us sufficient reason to believe that the theory is true and that the unobservable entities and forces postulated by the theory really exist. The empirical and technological success of atomic physics means that, in all probability, there are such things as electrons, neutrons, etc. The realist believes that the world has an underlying structure and that scientific inquiry attempts to map or model this structure. Moreover, the realist is inclined to think that, however different our starting points may be, all rational inquirers will eventually arrive at the same picture (map, model) of that structure. (Realists are not relativists.) If there were Martians, they might have a very different physiology and different sensory apparatus than ours. They might not see the same colors we do. They might not see at all. But their physics and our physics (eventually) would converge on the same conception of the underlying structure of matter. (See pp. 130-136 on ‘the absolute view of the world’.)
Answer the following questions:
a. Why does O’Hear think that the line between what is observable
and what is not observable shifts over time? (Pp.113-114)
b. How does this create a problem for the positivist?
c. How can a positivist deal with this problem? (Pp.114-118)
d. Why, on the other hand, is it a problem for realists that
“Explanations that were once successful have come and gone”? (Pp.120-123)
e. Why does O’Hear think that we should be skeptical of our ability
to arrive at an absolute conception of the world? (Pp.134-136)
f. Why should the problem of Schrodinger’s cat “make us wary of
thinking that we are close to an absolute picture of the world”? (Pp. 136-143)
2. In Chapter 8 O’Hear discusses the nature and significance of scientific ‘reductions’. One science is ‘reduced’ to another when the phenomena described by the first are redescribed and explained by the second. It sometimes seems that a reduction gives us a deeper and truer understanding of things. For example, many people are inclined to think that we have a deeper and truer understanding of people’s feelings when we understand their biochemical or neurophysiological basis. But it is not clear that this kind of reduction will ever completely succeed. It may be that some of the behavior of living things is inexplicable in terms of chemistry. And it may be that some of the behavior of conscious persons is inexplicable in terms of physiology. Even if we are materialists, who think that physical stuff is the only kind of stuff there is, we might still think that physical stuff has surprising (emergent) properties or characteristics when it is arranged in structures of sufficient complexity. If so, then psychology will not (ever) be reduced to biology and biology will not (ever ) be reduced to physics.
The payoff
of this discussion doesn’t really come until Chapter 9, when O’Hear argues that
the doctrine he calls ‘eliminative materialism’ is a prejudice, not demanded by
science. Eliminative materialism says
that our ordinary ways of understanding and explaining our behavior and
feelings are primitive and inadequate and that the real causes of these things
are physiological. Explain briefly
why O’Hear thinks that eliminative materialism is more myth than science. (Pp. 204-210) What are you inclined to think
about this?
3. In the rest of Chapter 9, O’Hear considers several criticisms leveled against science: that it is not as objective as it pretends, that it is responsible for dangerous and destructive technologies, and that it is destructive of human values. You will find more thorough explanations of some of these criticisms in the articles by McHugh, Dadahanji, Anderson, Klages, Goldman, and Longino.
a. Explain why O’Hear thinks that science, though surely influenced
by ‘extra-scientific’ (political, ideological, social) factors “is not
completely circumscribed by these factors” (p. 214) and is therefore capable of
being “value-free and objective.” What
do you think about this?
b. Why does O’Hear think that science cannot be blamed for any
problems arising from the use or abuse of technology?
c. Why do some feminists think that inquiry should not be ‘value-free’?
(See especially the article by Elizabeth Anderson.) Why does O’Hear think these critics are wrong? (Pp. 223-232) What do you think about this matter? Why does O’Hear say that science itself
cannot answer questions of value because it is “unsuited to examining the lived
texture of human existence”? (P. 231)