Several recent articles including, Are We Hard-Wired to Doubt Science, which was recently in the NY Times, motivated me to look into the meaning and use of science. I have enjoyed a good career in the field of biological sciences and witnessed more than a few confrontations that revolve around science. Beyond blaming these confrontations purely on the lack education or of basic scientific literacy I have found it useful to see these as conflicts between different ways of knowing. This website does a good job of showing the science as a way of knowing perspective and highlights some of the misconceptions and conflicts.

At a very basic level the complexity in societies reaction to science maybe in part due the many different uses and changes in the historic definition of word science. Wikipedia has a passage on science that does a good job a covering these complexities in few sentences. For the sake of this post I will attempt to remove ambiguousness from that word and use this definition, Science: “the effort to understand how the universe works through the scientific method, with observable evidence as the basis of that understanding; a way of understanding the world through thought and experimentation”

Looking closely at these phrases a few confrontations and the issues emerge. Lets start with “a way of understanding the world”. This implies that there is more than one way to understand the world. Dr. Robert Hazen has a great story to describe multiple ways of understanding the world. In one of his first lectures on the 60 part “The Joy of Science” series he described three baseball umpires, an artist, a scientist, and a psychologist, and how they call pitches in a game. The artist says that he calls them as he sees them; the scientist says that he calls the pitches as they are; and the physiologist says they aren’t nothing till I call them.

The quite proper use of the word “effort” aligns with the notion of science as a continual ongoing process. Even the seemingly unshakable Newton’s Laws of Motion were clearly shown in need of more effort once Einstein brought the world his special theory on relativity. There are countless other examples of where scientific results have been found to be inadequate or, very rarely, completely wrong. There often seems to be misguided notions that pure fact springs from a study because the scientific method was applied and the results were successfully reproduced. The remarkable efforts of science go a really long way in helping us understand and improve our lives but the work is never completed done, questions are rarely completely answered. Dr. Francisco Ayala wrote a good piece on this subject that illustrates examples of where science falls short most noticeable when he stated that despite the fact that that nothing in the world of nature escapes the scientific mode of knowledge, “a scientific view of the world is hopelessly incomplete”.

The word “understanding” via its synonym “knowledge”  necessitates a delve in sciences past home of philosophy. One of the basic problems in philosophy is that of knowledge. Two opposing contemporary schools of thought that directly related to the problem of scientific knowledge are Continental Philosophy, which was heavily influenced by Kant, and Scientism, which I stumbled into sometime ago by reading a book by Richard Dawkins. Scientism hold the idea of natural science as the most authoritative worldview or aspect of human education and that it is superior to all other interpretations of life, while Continental Philosophy argues that science depends upon a “pre-theoretical substrate of experience” (such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history). Michael Faraday’supbringing in a Sandemanian  church is strong case for the case for the correlation of science and culture. His church taught followers a strong sense of the unity of the universe via the unity of God and Nature. It is more than coincidence that this  prepared Faraday to look for unity in his scientific work, which he found between electricity and magnetism when he formed the basis for the electromagnetic field concept.

I won’t dispute that a lack education and also the lack of basic scientific literacy in many of the educated are the fuel for most of the contemporary debates about science. It just seems that the views of Scientism are primarily a reaction to keep these forces of ignorance in check.  Scientism doesn’t hold all the answers rather by finding balance between the ways of knowing and by looking for information to some of the problems in the diverse realms of culture and the arts we maybe find answers with greater utility and deeper meaning.