Yes, Virginia

[Andrew Dinn]

Diana York Blaine writes:

> Critiquing the "hard" sciences is not the same thing as saying we cannot
> manipulate nature (whatever you mean by that term--perhaps a discussion of
> the famous nature/culture dichotomy could be interesting with this group).
> But to ask intuitively is not the same thing, IMHO, as saying "CAN we
> split the atom?" The intuitive question could be, SHOULD we?  Y'all are
> re-reading Gravity's Rainbow, for crying out loud. Isn't this an issue?
> Before they can manifest vast environmental changes some Native American
> tribes hold a "Children's Circle" in which they must sit down and ask each
> other, how will this affect the children and (hence) the future?
> Intuitive thinking?  Sure.  A boon for progress? Not. Isn't one of
> Pynchon's favorite themes the effect of multi-national corporate
> capitalism on all aspects of culture, including science?  Can we really be
> sure there's such a thing as "pure" science, in other words, when the
> first question asked is often "who will reimburse my research?"

Don't want to start a pissing up the wall contest here but I think the
philosophical problems which render `pure science' less than
immaculate are even more serious than the economic/political ones
which challenge the notion of `disinterested' or `objective'
research. I have yet to see any decent defense of the idea that
argument, reasoning and proof in science are `logical' as opposed to
`intuitive'. In fact I don't think either of these two party-tricks is
viable outside of the hothouse of intellectual indulgence. Sure there
are paradigms for both forms of `reasoning' but the practices of
scientific method are grounded in neither paradigm, rather in a
panoply of specialised and domain-specific human activities with a
motley of regulatory processes employed to assuage the daemon god
`objectivity'. Even mathematicians have not managed to reduce
mathematics to cranking the handle of a computing machine, despite all
the efforts of logicians, set theorists and logic programmers. Try
learning any higher mathematics and you will soon realise that the
rigour which is required of a mathematician in producing a proof is as
much to do with credibility, personality and a way with words as it is
to do with the organization of various formal symbols on paper.
Andrew Wiles' on/off, is it/isn't it `proof' of Fermat's Last Theorem
exemplifies this.

In fact the notion of `science' as a mass noun, a uniform whole with
the letters S C I E N C E running all the way through from one end to
another is part of the problem. Where is the continuity between
entomologists cataloguing and accounting for ant behaviour and
particle physicists developing variants on super string theory. They
do entirely different jobs in entirely different ways with entirely
different results. The only overlap seems to be the fact that they
both call themselves `scientists'. And maybe here is where the
politics comes in. The myth of an integral, unified discipline is
responsible for much of the leverage science has in our culture, each
scientific domain profiting by the momentum of the rest of science to
swing itself up into the intellectual firmanent.


Andrew Dinn
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And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.