Here at FPiPE we don't just translate Deleuze into Plain English. Given a sufficient number of dangling clauses, scare quotes, and unclear pronoun references, any obscure yet interesting French philosopher can merit the FPiPE treatment. While she's certainly not as opaque as Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers checks all the boxes.
I must have first come across Stengers years ago when she co-wrote Order Out of Chaos with Nobel prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine. I read that in college though, so my memory of it is pretty hazy. My more recent encounter was with her Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (with a hat tip to Steve Shaviro whose Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics made me interested enough in Stengers to want to read her Whitehead tome). Her take on Whitehead really helped illuminate the trajectory of his thought as he moved from math and science into philosophy, and it also touched on the way a number of his ideas influenced Deleuze (who was a big Whitehead fan himself). Unfortunately, her book is so enormous that FPiPEing it would take us much too far afield. Especially since most of it is about Whitehead's magnum opus Process and Reality, a book which, while written in SWE, could easily have a whole blog devoted to translating it into Plain English. So instead, I'm going to tackle an undetermined number of her essays/speeches collected in a shorter book: Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. This preface is also probably the time to thank one of our sponsors -- the Claridge-Chang Lab has been a major supporter of fly philosophy for decades now. May their drosophila breed ever faster!
So, what is the Plain English take away from of her first essay: Toward a Public Intelligence of the Sciences? In short, that scientists' arrogant belief that they own the unquestionable authority over a special type of knowledge is getting them, and all the rest of us, in trouble. She comes down pretty hard on scientists, though this makes sense given that she's trying to convince them to change their practices (knowing that attempting to get their corporate sponsors or political manipulators to change theirs is an exercise in futility). In other words, I don't interpret her as primarily being interested in a question of blame; her point is more pragmatic -- who do we need to convince of what to change the way science is used in our society? Her solution is equally pragmatic -- scientists need to be trained to be more open to intelligent questions about why they choose certain directions of research, about how they know what they know, and about what the usefulness of that knowledge might be in real world situations. Instead of circling the wagons and claiming that Science is Right, then denouncing anyone who questions their conclusions as Irrational, scientists need to focus less on Proof, and more on what they really do have to offer: particular empirical findings relevant to important questions.
The problem here is not that scientists are in error. The problem is arrogance. This is why I called the problem and solution "pragmatic", to distinguish it from "metaphysical". Stengers is not a relativist in the sense of denying that science gets at truth, or objective knowledge, or cold hard facts. She's a pragmatist, in the sense William James made popular -- the truth is whatever works. This little formula may sound simplistic, but there's a wealth of thought behind it. I'm not going to dig into a defense of it now, but I would suggest that if you are tempted to dismiss it out of hand, you should consider that, as Robert Nozick once said in another context, "Someone who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn't understand this question". What really matters for understanding the current essay is just the idea that any truth will be situated in the context of what someone is trying to accomplish by believing it to be true. In short, knowledge always has a context.
For example, we can ask: what is the context of the science surrounding GMOs? And we can answer that scientists have made modifications to the genomes of crops, grown them in their laboratory, measured the resulting yield increases and nutritional differences, and fed the results to rats. And the rats survive. These are all wonderful things to know. This knowledge is true and objective and factual, and whatever other adjectives you'd like to use to convince yourself of its reality. Scientists are not making this stuff up.
Stengers, though, wants us to ask: what was the question? Do these experiments prove the GMOs are "safe"? Safe for who? Safe defined how? She would like us to step back and ask what we were trying to do with this science. In this case, the obvious context is that we were trying to invent safe GMOs in order to feed 11.2 billion people. Our knowledge of GMOs is situated in the context of the question of the best way to feed these people. Notice that "best" here is not actually amendable to scientific definition, nor should scientists expect that their take on the best solution to this problem should get special attention just because it's, you know, science-y. Yet what scientists really do deserve credit for is inventing more productive crops that do not kill rats. That might be a really important part of the best solution (full disclosure: I personally think that it is). Scientists might also be able to contribute other important things as we continue to investigate the question of the best way to feed that many monkeys. But science alone is not going to dictate what we decide to take into account in answering the question. What about the effects of agricultural monoculture at a global scale? What about the way in which the intersection of intellectual property and GMOs could make some people dependent on those who created the GMOs? As in literally, "their life depends on it". Science may be able to help us answer these questions, but science cannot tell us whether they are important to ask or not.
You might think that a scientist confronted with these observations would be able to quickly respond, "sure, sure, science doesn't tell you the best way to handle food production, but that's because science only deals with facts, and what you're asking for is a value judgement. You should never confuse facts and values, is and ought". This is the scientific and philosophic version of the famous, "it's above my pay grade". The idea is that scientists will remain the owners of all the facts but will then let the public make their value judgements. Caveat: so long as the public "understands" the true facts as produced by scientists. Because sometimes (say the scientists) they don't, and then the scientists need to tell them what the facts are, and make sure they understand that all they have is an uninformed opinion, a politics, a value judgement. In a democracy, we may have to listen to that sort of thing, but we can't let irrational and uninformed opinion hold sway in place of the facts, now we can we?
This response that I'm putting into the mouths of scientists is pretty understandable to me. In fact, when I was a science student, I can remember having the same type of response. The division between facts and opinions seems clear as day, right? Isn't that what science is all about, letting the facts "speak for themselves"? Unfortunately, this response totally misses the point. Because facts don't just lie around like stones, and they certainly don't speak -- humans have to manufacture them. This sounds weird and postmodern at first, but is actually completely common sensical. I think the confusion is caused by a missing modifier. Science is not about going out and finding the facts like you were picking up seashells. It's about finding important and relevant facts. What the guys at CERN had for lunch before smashing up the Higgs Boson is a fact. But we don't think it's relevant to particle theory. Notice that the lack of relevance is emphatically not an a priori fact. It's a judgement. It's an opinion. It's not "just" an opinion though. It's not an "arbitrary" opinion. It's based on what you were trying to do by classifying certain things as facts to begin with -- in this case, to reliably predict a bunch of numbers coming out of the measurement devices in the collider. The irrelevance of ham sandwiches to Higgs bosons had to become a fact. Which means that the distinction between fact and opinion is ultimately pragmatic. It cannot be made with talking about what you were trying to accomplish in making it.
Each new situation we investigate is going to begin with a similar process of deciding what the facts are given the question we're interested in. And as we tighten the definition of the situation (moving from, say, I want to know how Nature works, to, say, I want to know when the next eclipse will happen) we will also simultaneously tighten what counts as a fact given the question. Nothing terribly controversial here. This is just stepping back and thinking about what's actually happening a little. I think Stengers top level point is that as science has become bigger, more powerful, and more and institutionalized, scientists have forgotten about the pragmatic backdrop of how new knowledge is always produced. Forgetting this turns them into easy marks for businesses, politicians, or institutions to exploit. Plenty of these people are just waiting for an opportunity to separate a fool from his science.
This was really just sort of a long winded introduction. I'll come back next time with a more detailed look at each of the sections of the first essay. The concept of FPiPE is to stick close to the text, which I haven't done at all here.
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