Science produces the firmest truths we have, not because its methods provide us the best access to reality, but rather because it is the most social approach to truth that humankind has devised.
By “most social” I mean that the scientific ethic includes (at least) three ideals friendly to the establishment of shared sense of reality among the members of a community:
- Science pursues universal agreement about a world understood as a universe: an out-there world, shared by all people, about which universal agreement is possible.
- Participants in science expect to (and are expected to) communicate their findings to the larger scientific community, and to respond to challenges and criticism from that community, and to accept the larger community as referee of the proceedings.
- The process of sharing truth is mediated by empirical phenomena and logic, which, of our myriad modes of understanding (sense-making of the world), are the most universally accessible.
Each of these ideals can be attacked, and the attacks are in fact valid ones. However, the social consequences of these attacks are dire:
- Whether or not a universe of the kind assumed by science exists or not, and whether or not it can be proven finally to exist, the concept of universe is conducive to pursuit of agreement. (One source of anxiety over relativism is the abandonment of pursuit of agreement, and its political consequences.)
- Whether the larger community is in fact always an unbiased, competent and univocal referee is debatable, but its assumed legitimacy and respect for its office is essential to the scale of scientific collaboration. The community must be taken to be one’s jury of peers and not a litigant against whom one is appealing to some higher judge — most often some political or religious faction, or a vindicating, enlightened future more receptive to one’s own version of the truth. In science, contempt of court is punishable by excommunication (in every sense of the word, including deprivation of any intellectual afterlife).
- Since the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions the philosophical world has become increasingly sensitive to the roles modes of understanding outside simple empiricism and rational thought play in science. Prior to Kuhn, even the staunches advocates of such extra-rational/empirical modes of understanding tended to exclude them from the realm of science. After Kuhn, the line between natural and social sciences appeared blurrier. However, as important as these other modes of understanding are — the practical consequence of taking empiricism and rationalism as not only absolute but supreme places emphasis on what is most sharable gives science its universalist trajectory.
Notice, every point I’m posing here supports science, but not from an epistemological foundation, but a social and pragmatist angle.
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For fun: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=293&act=3