trey Np 11 ocnotet SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY: A RESPONSE TO ROLLIN PAUL FEYERABEND Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A Professor Rollin, continuing his fight ag: the problem of animal consciousness. He finds that the more popular arguments ‘against it involve philosophies such as positivism and behaviorism which lack ‘empirical suppor, clas with Facts, laws, and principles of successful research and are therefore properly classified as ideologies, not as science. He suggests that even scientific views may have ideological ingredients, As he sees it their proponents occasionally succeed because they "discredit the opposition, press an Alternative, dassle and overwhelm the opposition” and not because they have evidence of convincing arguments at their disposal. Many examples, apart from bbehaviorism, support his suggestion, Thus, in Chance and Necessity Jacques Monod (1972) asserts that “the foundation of scientific method is the postulate of the objectivity of nature"; medical colleges, schools of health, departments of psychology all over this country (the U.S.A.) and abroad reject findings that are contaminated by the nions of either the experimenter or of the subjects ("health”, for example, is defined “objectively”, without considering distinctions made within the culture ‘of those examined); scientists in all fields imitate physics and treat their own. results as premilinary products still in need of reduction to more substantial principles. Crude versions of objectivity and reductionism abound. And yet it vas shown, about half a century ago, that already at the most Fundamental and allegedly most advanced level of research, in elementary particle physics, it i impossible to separate an “objective nature” from the processes used to examine her (complementarity). Or consider the way in which valuable approaches in biology, psychology. medicine, history were discredited after Descartes and. Newton. (Mayr [1982] describes the situation in biology; Zilboorg [1035] analyses some trends in post-16th century psychology, while Reiser (1978) gives 2 fascinating account of later developments in medicine.) The history of the sciences is replete with events where facts and plausible arguments are overruled. by ideology. What are the reasons for this strange situation? ‘One reason is ignorance and/or forgetfulness. Scientists in one subject have ‘only the foggiest idea of what is going on elsewhere. Unable to master the steadily increasing flood of information but trying to stay on top of things they rely on tumors or on crude simplifications. A second reason isthe quite natural tendency to generalise local successes: methods and assumptions that have proved themselves in one area are assumed to be universally valid, Astronomy nst animal experimentation, examines ~ Commentary on B. E Rolin (1985) Animal consciousness and scenic change, Val & No.2 pp. L41-152, 1331 P. Feyerabend and physics got far by using mathematics and by eli anthropomorphic principles, hence the expectation that the humane sciences, too, will profit from. an inhumane approach ‘The third and most important reason, however, is that science as a sholt is founded an ideology. Particular scientific arguments may be free trom it but the {general framework of ideas in which the arguments are embedded ancl sshich §ives them force almost always has ideological ingredients, To show this compare a particular law such as a lw for the free fall of heavy bodies in a resisting medium with the idea, formulated with dramatic effect bs Galileo, that the book of nature is written in (quantitative) mathematical language. ‘The law is examined in a well defined context of experimentation, applied! mathematics and, perhaps. mathematical invention. Difficulties sought out, aken seriously and used to revise it. Galileo's idea is treated in a very different way. It excludes large areas of research (in biology, medicine psychology) and it clashes with our common experience which contains qualities. indivisible wholes such as faces, trees. animals, comedies. life histories, people having memories, feelings. perceptions — all entities that resist quantiuanve treatment. Do the defenders of the idea acknowledge these limitations? Not a chance! They admit that there are entities and entire disciplines which donot conform to Galileo's dictum. They even add that some of these entities have well-defined though quite unpleasant effects, for example, they disturb the steady progress towards an objective truth, but they deny that their reality is ‘comparable tothe reality of Galilean world. There exist, then. according to this view, two domains of entities and, corresponding 10 them, two classes of disciplines, The entities ofthe first domain are “real”. “objective”, “rational” ate the disciplines dealing with them are basic sciences. The entities of the second domain are “apparent”, “subjective”, “irrational” (many other terms may be used to express the dichotomy) and the disciplines dealing with them are of minor importance, secondary, hardly worth the effort. Knowledge, however, deals only with entities of the first kind. So far a sketch of the methods used by scientists and philosophers to uphold points of view of great generality in the face of clear land unambiguous exceptions Note that in describing the methods I do not deny that they may be extremely successful, No sane person would deny the suceries of a quantitative approach, What 1 draw attention to i the way in which the proponents of the appresch deal with failures, The failures are not acknowledged. They are not sed t0 restrict quantification, they are debunked and the events that constitute them are assigned a low and unworthy level of reality (1 aim now speaking about Scientific yealits only — instrumentation is an altogether different business), Besides, not all cultures are fascinated by precision and quantitative success Some prefer harmony, happiness ane ways of living that bring them about. ‘Thus ‘we must admit that even in the best possible circurnstances scientific knowledge isan aid to and a result of evaluations: itis not only influenced, iis constituted by values The first thinker to produce knowledge in the manner just described was Parmenides. Using only one of the many abilities of human beings, the ability to‘Science and ideoiogy 135 recognize “logos”, he argued that the world, human beings included, is an unchanging and Undivided whole. Parmenides was of course aware that 0 common experience looks different and he even gave a systematic account of deals. But he called the picture so obiained “deceptive”, he ridiculed the “routine based on lots of impressions” provided by the “careless eye and the ‘thundering ear” that had led to it, and he scolded the “undecided masses” who hhad fallen for such an obvious chimaera. Just consider what this means! It means that the personal and social lives of human beings, which are the basis of their existence (and also of the existence of Parmeniddes — how else could he have learned that language in which he expresses his ideas?) are treated as a chinvaers, while the special inventions of a small clique of belligerent intellectuals are imposed as measures of reality. Values, not arguments, create such judgements ‘though the arguments gain in force once the judgements are accepted. Aristotle used precisely this feature of Parmenides’ philosophy to lay the foundations for his own very different world view — he simply inverted Parmenides’ scale of values: real is what plays an important roe in the lives of citizens and not what is dreamt up by logicians Only few modern scientists are that perceptive, however. Most of them simply accept the basic principles of their field and the evaluations that are built into, hem: psychologists prefer tests 10 personal contact; elementary particle physicists ake it for granted that their research deserves more Funds than, say, ethology or peace studies: medical researchers have no doubt that a theoretical approach is preferable by far to any practice of healing — and this without single unbiased examination of comparative successes and failures. Experts dealing with political matters try hard not co fall behind. This is the reason why foreign aid is arranged not in accordance with the “subjective” wishes of the target populations but after an “objective”, Le. scientific, determination of their needs and this is aso one of the major reasons why a balance of terror is now preferred to the suggestions made by the many peace movements all over the world and why these suggestions so often meet with derision and contempt: they are too simple, too ordinary, too different from ways of thinking which are shared by all parties of the cold war and which determine their view of “reality”. Everywhere we run into the same depressing pattern: a “real world” constructed by special interest groups who use their own narrow values (and, of course, their power) to confer unreality on any problem that might be perceived and even solved within a different approach, Now if sciemtific results are not only influenced but even constituded by values, then we must take a new look at the role scientists play in our societies. The ‘common view is that experts give us fact and laws. The facts and laws are value free, We, the citizens of a democracy, accept them and use them as we see fit. Ibis wwe who inject values into the products of scientific research, We can turn them into instruments of destruction, we can use them to build a peaceful and ‘rewarding life. Atany rate, the political and personal decisions we make are not predetermined by the information we receive from experts. According to Professor Rollin this view is incorrect. Science is guided by values which pervade every single scientific statement. Even the simplest and most objective-sounding.15 P. Feyerabend scientific "fact" may contain seeds of inhumanity. Accepting the results of scientific research we may therefore accept values that conflict with some of out riost cherished ideals. And this not at alla new discovery, it is as old as science itself. A look at some early debates will explain what I mean Experts are an ancient institution. Some historians conjecture that they arose with agriculeare and the growth of permanent settlements. Experts became scientists when their practice was supplemented by 2 theoretical foundation — a evelopment desired and to some entent initiated by the Sophists and by Plato An early discussion of the role of experts and of expert knowledge occurred in Greece, inthe fifth and fourth centuries, among the sophists. the comedy writers and then in Plato and Aristotle. Two views emerged from this discussion ‘According to the first view (which is identical with the view just described and found incorrect), experts are people with special skills who produce special knowledge. The knowledge must be taken over by society in the form produced by the experts. In Greece this view became popular only in late antiquity. During the fifth century i was an object of ridicule (Aristophanes: Plato's Apulgy. Fou Euthydemas}. "According to the second view, experts have special skills because they have special interests and special aims” Both resttict their experience. Experts do not study all phenomena but only the phenomena in 2 narrow field and even here they do not examine all aspects but only those that are related to their purpose: they are professional reductionists. Difficulties are defused in the manner described above, by simply calling them unreal, subjective, irrational. Expert knowledge, s0 the view continues, reflects the incompleteness of the expert experience. It would therefore be extremely foolish to simply regard it as true or as expressing reality, And it would be equally foolish couse it asa universal guide ‘without having macle sure that the aims that created it agree with our personal aims andior the aims of the society we live in Plato, who held the view just described, added that the adaptation of expert ideas to the values of society isthe task of superexperts, namely, philosophers: philosophers do not concentrate on special phenomena, they inquire how all phenomena fit into society and the physical world asa whole. They havea sense Of perspective and, above all, they know what harms and what heals human beings. The issue between Galileo and the Church was precisely about this point Galileo insisted that his ideas be accepted without change, while the Church reserved for self the sole right of determining their content and their us. According to Protagoras, who also held the second view, the checking and reinterpreting of scientific knowledge is the task of all citizens, not only of philosophers. ‘The citizens are not ignorant. Living in a society where formation freely passes from person to person they acquire a large amount of Knowledge. They acquire this knowledge not by special instruction but by human contact including the civic duties whieh are imposed upon them (and remember that the Athenian citizens were invited to judge not only political ‘events, oF the consluct of experts such as generals, navigators, physicians, but labo the products of some of the greatest tragedians — they judged and gave prizes to Aischylos, Euripides, Aristophanes and others). According to Protagor-Science and ideology a as the knowledge that arises in this rather unstructured way suffices to judge all claims, even those that apparently go beyond it “Today the ideas of Protagoras form an important part of our civic lives. The embers of a jury in a modern trial by jury are laypersons: and yet they are the final judges of the validity of expert testimony. The members of citizens inidatives may be experts, but they need not be — and vet, having «1 more comprehensive view than experts judging the same situation, they can and often do find holes in expert testimony. (Two books make this point in a field which more than others would seem to need the skills of experts to be mastered: Jung [1977] and Meehan [1984], both dealing with atomic power:) The most important Protagorean feature of modern political life, however i the existence of societies whose busie values are determined by a constitution ‘combined sith a public will (and provisions for change by public initiatives) and not by special interest groups. Societies ofthis kind take great care to separate the state from religions and non-religious ideologies. Now we have seen that scientists are not neutral fact providers, but a special interest group which kas succeeded in imposing its values under the guise of knowledge and value- neutrality. Hence science too must be separated from the state oF else we mst take care that scientific research and the results that emerge from it are subjected 10 strict public controls. Applied to the problem that concerns Professor Rollin this means that animal rights groups must be given more substantial rights than they possess today. ‘Let me add, in conclusion, that the picture of science I just deseribed is no longer entirely corvect. It persists in large and well financed institutions such as in some schools of health, political research institutes, departments of psycholo- 43: it guides the lobbying of the American Medical Assockation and the ideology Df cancer research laboratories itis the picture that underlies science instruction, atall levels, advanced science seminars included. But this picture is being slowly ‘eroded from its very basis, from mathematics, astronomy, the physical sciences, aswell as from the top. by attempts to unite the sciences and the humanities and in this wav to:return to an old and respectable tradition of science itself. There exist entire mathematical disciplines such as topology which are essentially qualitative. They were furthered by and in turn contribute wo decisive evelopments in mechanics and astronomy. In astronomy the n-body problem ‘was first attacked by series expansions, Le. by quantitative methods. Poincaré then found that the customary series developments diverged while Bruns discovered that no quantitative methods other than series expansions could resolve the body problem, This was the end of the quantitative period in celestial mechanics. (Historical information in Moser (1973).) More recent approaches such as catastrophe theory, synergetics (which goes back to suggestive remarks macle by James Clerk Maxwell in connection with his attempt to find a mathematical formulation for Faraday's conceptual innovations) ‘open-systems thermodynamics also diverge from the picture of science discussed inthis short note, while a Nobel Prize winning ethologist, Konrad Lorenz (1983, pp. 120) emphasizes that “it must be made clear in a convincing way that our subjective experiences have the same degree of reality as everything that ean be1s . Feyerabend expressed in the terms of the exact natural sciences” (the title of the book, in English, means literally “the building down”, as opposed to a building up. “of ‘what is human"). Wolfgang Paul, one of the leading physicists of the heroic time of relativity and quantum mechanics, long ago warned scientisis that crude ‘objecivizing procedures were not in agreement with the structure of the world Gand of humanity) as suggested by research in physics, psychology, and anthropology. Thuis itis clear that the forefront of research has moved away from the objectivistic ideology of 19th century science. This ideology has lost the intellectual power it once possessed. Yet its administrative, politcal al financial power has increased beyond measure. Its up (0 us, the citizens of a free society to change the situation, o give the new ideas 2 chance and to put the obstacles into the only place where they rightfully belong. namely into our history books. REFERENC Jongh R. (1977) Der Atomsaat. Munich Lorenz K. (1983) Der Abba des Menschichen. Munich Mayr E1982) The goth of olga! nought Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres. Meehan R. (1084) The Atom andthe foul. Cambridge, MA: M.LT. Press Monod J. (1972) Chance and neces: New York: Vinge. Moser (1979) Annal of Mathemaul Studies. 77, Princeton: Princeton Universi Pres. Reiser 8}. (178) Modine and the reign of techwology. Cambridge, MA’ Harvard University “iboorg G, (1985) The medical man and the natch, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press