TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

[Joseph Tracy]

On Jun 16, 2013, at 10:42 PM, Monte Davis wrote:

> KFL >Ain't modern science - and I'm talking here about hard, or, as Paul Mackin puts it, "real science" - a self-referential functional system completely unreachable for something as old-fashioned as values of the "real, important human" kind?
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> Two angles of vision on this: one is via the is-ought problem or  fact-value distinction. That came up in philosophy and ethics independent of (in fact, long before before) discussions of science and values. There simply is no agreement on how to derive prescriptive, “human values” statements of the form “this is what we ought to do (or not do) in the world”  from normative statements of the form  “this is the way the world is,” or even “this is the way we humans are.” The values have to come from authority, tradition/imitation (culture), intuition, revelation.
Often the values people exhibit  proceed from the efficacy of other organizing forces: profit motives, violence, deceit, organized racism, nationalism, etc.  

> They(values) are not to be found in facts, or in the principles we come up with to organize and distill our understanding of facts.
Values are never to be found in the principles we use to organize and distill  our understanding of facts?   Really? What are some of the principles we use to organize and distill our understanding of facts? 
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> NB that this applies to *all* knowledge – but in my experience, scientists live more comfortably with that, and are readier to acknowledge it, than others.
Quite a few scientists are also comfortable with working as hired killers or for those other unmentioned sources of values like  the practical survival skills of "profit motives, violence...."
> That may appear bloodless and “value-free;” it isn’t. They’re every bit as likely to care, think and feel strongly about “what we ought to do (or not do) in the world;” but to the extent they’re honest scientists, they’re actually less likely to claim that “the facts” dictate this or that ethical (i.e. value-loaded) choice than others are.

Who in the world thinks that facts can dictate anything? 

Virtually all climate scientists agree that greenhouse gases are causing global warming and that  atmospheric carbon is causing ocean acidification. The rate of temperature rise has been revised upward several times.  But scientists are not allowed to be neutral observers and reporters of data in this situation because they are fully integrated into the fossil fuel based civilization,  because their children will live with the consequences of the choices made, and because there is no choice if we want to live on a hospitable planet other than reducing carbon emissions or playing    a risky game with an entire planet of 'maybe this'll work.'  

I'm glad that science is giving us a wake up call. But the implications of that wake up call do, if heeded, call for a revision of how and why science is done and perhaps even what science means.  Because if science really does remain unreachable by human values it will  continue to be readily used as a tool of inhuman values.  
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> Second angle: Many aspects of scientific method and protocol “exclude human values” as prophylaxis against letting the researcher’s preferences (conscious or unconscious) distort the choice of what data to collect and how to interpret it. As you know well, much of statistics serves that purpose: we don’t trust our “feelings” about what’s an adequate sample size, or how far from the null hypothesis the results need to be to establish significance at what confidence level, because there’s a long, sorry history of bad science done without statistical care. We’re all too prone to see what we want to see and stop looking as soon as it’s “confirmed” to our satisfaction. And a scientist taking precautions against that, like (say) a journalist following her own profession’s protocols to cover a story as completely and objectively as possible, is likely – again – to look cold-bloodedly methodical and “value-free” to a more passionate or pre-committed observer. Again, I disagree: I think the scientists are just as likely as anyone else to cherish and to and act on “human values” … they’re just more concerned than others to doubt, test, and be clear about what they know (and don’t know) before deciding what to do.  
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> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2013 6:19 AM
> To: Monte Davis; pynchon -l
> Subject: Re: TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)
> 
> 
> On 13.06.2013 00:38, Monte Davis wrote:
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> Is it possible that at the same time he is suspicious and minatory and worried about science and technology (and he is, like so many other writers),  he is also (like very few others in literary fiction) really interested in it? Attracted to it? Even fascinated by it? Concerned to show us some real, important human values that come to us through, evenbecause of, math and science and technology?
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> How math, science and technology can bring us "real, important human values", I do not see. I'm not saying this polemically, and there are certainly good things - antibiotics have been mentioned - about scientific modernity. Or, as Jesse says when Walter shows him how to cook up the shit right: "WOW ... Science!"  But "values"? How? We do not have to come to a consent on this. But I really would like to hear - and please note that I'm not Alice - from you a detail or two on the criticism on science one can doubtlessly find in Pynchon. The thing is that he's not simply "worried about science and technology ... like so many other writers"; to Pynchon the pitfalls of science-based control are a key issue. I don't find this in, say, Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy. It's plausible to say that Pynchon's attitude towards modern science's war against ambivalence became more relaxed in the second phase of his work, but in the first three novels the theme is central, imo. Pointsman makes his points, Schoenmaker finds his clients. And Dr. Hilarious can continue his concentration camp experiments under civil conditions in context of MK Ultra. These motives - all based in the real history of the 20th century - do unfold a fundamental criticism regarding modern science and its lack of values. I'm not discussing here - though we might come to this - whether the loss of human values is a necessary product of social differentiation, as Luhmann ("Modernity has more advantages and more disadvantages than any other society before") puts it, or whether this could be avoided by different forms of political organization. Just that much: "Keep cool and care!" won't do. That Pynchon is "attracted" to modern science is certainly right; even after the successful publication of V he wanted to complete his scientific education with a math grade from Berkeley. But, as already said, how to get from Pynchon's fascination by science to any kind of 'scientific value generation' to be found in the texts themselves, is not clear to me. What I find instead, especially in Gravity's Rainbow, is the tendency to connect the progress of science to deadly war technology. Not only in the case of rockets or nuclear weapons, yet regarding modern science as such. "There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement for at least two centuries --- since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air" (GR, p. 407). It's not really "the German mind", it's science ---
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