Can and should Science be neutral? - By Lloyd Duddridge

Can and should Science be neutral?

We are all taught in our classrooms that science is free from bias. This is mainly because we view a scientist as a sort of superman. The scientist is the modern day monk, free from desire. The scientist is not a human anymore, the scientist once he dons the white coat becomes a camera. It is only thanks to the scientist’s unique ability to shed his skin, that we are able to get objective, unbiased, value free science. This view of science is of course hogwash. I will outline the reasons I feel this below.

The process of selection is in itself biased. A scientist cannot study all observable phenomena. The scientist has to choose what he wants to study. This involves a selection process, a selection process that will inevitably involve value judgements and desires. A simple example of the truth is this can be found in the scientist’s ability to justify his research. When asked why the scientist is studying a certain area rather than another. The camera scientist must merely shrug his shoulders; a camera takes no choice over what it captures. However the majority of scientists could defend their reasoning for a specific area of research, thus their selection contains bias. Given an infinite amount of time, the scientist could indeed become a camera. However the scientist is also finite and thus has to choose what he wants to study.

Now if science is not completely neutral or free of bias. Should that limit the respect we hold for science? I would argue that it should not. First of all it allows us to view the scientist as a human being. He loses his quasi mystical status, but he gains the ability to be a fully realised human being again. Should we be fearful of the selection process? Again I would argue that the answer has to be no. In fact the selection process makes science far more efficient. For the scientist who we view as intelligent people are able to choose the problems that they think is most important. The selection process actually exposes a greater truth that the camera theory of science. It exposes the truth of what the scientist really thinks matters. If we trust scientists then we as human beings also become aware of those problems that we should care about. We gain far more from a selective science than by a neutral science.

I am arguing for a more humane understanding of science. It is one however that requires faith. The faith lies in how we view the scientists. In my understanding of science, trust in the scientist is needed even more. He is no longer a quasi-God or a machine. He is just an intelligent human being trying his best to understand and conquer problems. We must trust that his interests are useful. That his interests help us understand the world and universe we live in with greater clarity. Our faith so far has been justified. The scientists have given us gifts and knowledge that previous ages would have considered miraculous. The scientist however is just a person, but we must trust in people.

By Lloyd Duddridge

Faith is but one of our shields - By St.Zagarus

Faith is but one of our shields

God is not dead! He has merely moved backstage...

  We live in an age of uncertainty. Politics has failed to replace god, and now the people are lost in a consumerist haze, desperately searching for meaning where it cannot be found. It is as if god has been disproved, as if faith and religion has been made useless by the super-swift advance of science and technology. This is all due to a massive misunderstanding.

  Science and Faith can live together side by side, and so they should. Science can observe facts, create machines, cure diseases. Yet none of these things provide people with any greater meaning, with any purpose. To say that science displaces faith is to say that one will no longer eat aubergines because one has found jam! Science and Faith have two completely different functions, and to say that one cancels-out the other is folly. The role of faith in telling people how the physical universe works has come to an end. God is no longer our microscope. However, in the greater context of meaning, and of providing the desperate with hope, God is very much alive and well.

  Granted, we once lived in an era dominated by faith, and it was disastrous for humanity. Faith can be a retarding force on the power of knowledge, it can be misused by authoratative characters to dominate weak minds, it can be dangerous. Yet on the whole, faith does a positive service to humanity; provided it does not get in the way of progress!

Faith inspires magnificent works of art and architecture, poetry and literature. Faith encourages charity, brings together communities; it provides a vital social good which cannot be filled by a secular institution. Why? Why but for the fact that we humans enjoy a bit of mysticism, of 'razzle and/or dazzle' in our lives, a bit of transcendent magic! No secular institution can provide this special appeal to the masses; only the magic of religion can convince certain people to get out of the house to help the needy. Furthermore, a lot of the high and mighty minds have little truck with the 'smaller folk', so busy are they in their intellectual nests writing essays that can be understood by perhaps a dozen people in the world. Faith on the other hand, has always been accessible to everybody, it is easy to grasp and can be distilled into memorable slogans.

  So, should we give up our faith? No, only if we have too high expectations of it. Just because certain religious authorities have been proven wrong time and time again on certain matters (such as the sun orbiting the earth, creation theory, the age of the universe, and so on) it does not mean that the feeling of hope and security provided by faith is affected! If one maintains that the earth is flat because one also wants to hold on to ones faith, then one is a fool. Cut away the gangrenous limb of dead faith and enjoy the good bits, what!

By St.Zagarus

Dogma, religion and its sometimes contempt for science - By Philip Overal

Dogma, religion and its sometimes contempt for science

  So, this months topic is religion and science. Alone, you could write volumes. I love both these subjects. Taken together, what you get is a history of reaction and spite.

  The issues are that deeply held beliefs spur the religious side to deny science legitimacy. The most notable moment of this was the Copernican revolution. Copernicus, through his theories, challenged the view of the world held by religion. Copernicus avoided the ire of the church, but it fell instead upon Galileo, whose works supported the view that the earth revolves around the sun. Dogma at the time held that the earth was the centre of the universe, and the evidence Galileo offered caused controversy. For this, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest at the order of the church.

  This shows up the main issue. Dogma. In the film of the same name, the 13^th disciple Rufus, notes “he (Jesus) said man kind got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it...you can change an idea, changing a belief is trickier. People die for it, people kill for it”. Dogma and belief, at their most extreme, fight against science.

  Islam and Christianity both have big proponents of biblical and koranic literalism - which is a problem. Once, a priest counted back through the bible, and discovered the world was made in 4004 BC. The earth is 6 billion years old. One of these things doesn't mesh

  Yet the bible, claim some Christians is the literal, infallible word of god. It can't be wrong. Science must be. Science, they claim, is conspiracy, put forth by the devil

  Well, now you have an issue. And this ties in for all things. Where creationist's accept the universe, they deny evolution. They tie themselves in knots to explain the moon, and the flood, and so on, as natural occurring events, attempting to co-opt the scientific paradigm, whilst evading its most important strictures

  What are the structures of the scientific paradigm? Observation, test, result, conclusion. You learned it at school. You start with an aim. Personally, I quite like it when the aim is “I want to see what happened when you apply X to Y” but, alas, the age when you could just do this kind of science is long gone (although the ignoble awards, show productive research that often seems to be of this sort).

  Then you predict something. You don't have to do this. I’m sure a lot of scientists went in not knowing. However, with so much theory about, you can often make a prediction. This means there’s theory backing it up.

  Then you need a method, which is rigorous and fair, perform your experiment, or gather your samples, and then, in your results and conclusion, try to work out what it all means. Good science should go through this whole thing. A lot of time should be spent on method. A lot of time should be spent explaining your conclusions. When you’ve done that, you see how it changes your view of the world. That’s the most important key to the scientific method. It self-corrects. It changes to match the world. Nothing is set in stone, so to speak, only that we should push closer to the truth, and be willing to examine and re examine everything

  So, back to religion. Many religious types feel compelled to try and co-opt this. Science like language offers a veneer or “properness” to something. Add some super script numbers, go ahead and use some solid speeds. Suggest scientific principles are at work. But this is all done with the conclusion written. The aim of the paper is to make sure prediction and conclusion match. Evidence is cherry picked. And dogma is saved

  This paradigm is done for a lot of things. Religious types use it to try and deny evolution, and explain the flood. “God did it” is not good enough. It needs to be more 'sciencey'.

  Homeopaths do it. So do drug companies, probably with an increasing amount of competence in hiding the shallowness of their efforts.

  But whilst drug companies do it to turn a profit, the religious types seem to feel compelled to do so, to prove they are right. Its not enough to believe themselves, everyone else must believe. It must be true. Every logical fallacy, and many non-logical fallacies, are met in this effort. Appeals to authority are common (the authority is often the bible).

  Science can't be true. It challenges god.  The church must be in the science class room. Over the past umpteen years, there has been a bitter fight to get first creationism, and then Intelligent Design, into the science class rooms in the conservative American states.

  This is because evolution (over which there was a court battle in the 1920s) is seen as godless, and wrong. If children are taught it, the literal word of the bible will be challenged. Dogma must be defended. Children must learn only the biblical way.

   And the sad thing is, it needn't be this way. Religion is not for everyone. I am an atheist. But religion is not incompatible with science. God can know things, God can exist in a world of science, being the first cause, knowing everything. This doesn't require one to wash ones hand of the bible. Further more, there is the view that it was divinely inspired, but interpreted by men. Fallible and trapped by limits to their knowledge.

  Science does not preclude faith. It never has. But dogmas pull has tugged many people against science. It was not enough to have faith that god set it up. That gods about in the back ground. You have to prove it to others, lest they challenge you. This kind of fight seems insecure. And its sad to watch.

  Did god make the universe? I don't know. We will never know. Some questions will never get a proper answer. What I do know is that if it did make the universe, it just switched the on button. Its existence did not, can not, invalidate science. And when I'm asked to believe otherwise, I just feel saddened by the lack of reason, (in an enlightenment sense) .

By Philip Overal

Science and Faith - By Eliza Veretilo

Science and Faith

At first glance, there is nothing more incompatible than these two; but what if I told you that this isn’t the case, and that the only reason why we think that way at first glance is because of the most obvious cases of the Christian church and its opinion on stem cells or whatever it is that they are opposing this week, and that this is fresh in our minds from simply watching the news. History tells us however, that the relationship between science and faith hasn’t always been a dichotomy and it does not need to be so in the ‘modern’ world. Many people criticise the Middle Ages for being a time when in Europe, science was somehow truncated by ‘faith’, I beg to differ, maybe by religion but science was still going on, people were finding out about the periodic table through alchemy, alchemy was a ‘science’ which required faith of a sort. My reason for bringing this example up is for us to stop equating faith with religion, especially established religions. Oh! Talking about established religions and this historical period, I would like to mention that in the Middle East, during the 1500’s under Islam, maths was advancing at a speedy rate, and so were astronomy and physics. Scientists are thus, not always front line atheists, this is a myth of our modern culture which for some bizarre reason, tends to demonise someone or another. For example, it is a well-known fact that Albert Einstein, one of the most quoted scientists of our time, was a religious man (a man of faith in other words) who claimed to be attempting to understand the mysteries of God through the mysteries of the Universe. Front line atheists are disillusioned people, not scientists.

Thus humanly speaking there is nothing more compatible than science and faith, even from their origins, as wonder and faith are the original motors of curiosity and thus science. Here I want to highlight how easy it is for us to psychologically move from faith to science as bearers of answers, but I also want to ask you, do not separate the two or limit your view of the answers to only one source because as I will explain, much of our faith in science is merely that, just faith. The concept of faith itself which brings belief into the table, and when there is belief, there is human spark, a natural desire to understand and reveal our world, thus science. The only reason why science and faith have been made incompatible is because of religious fanatics in all fronts and the infantile presentation of God as a being which we are supposed to fear. I am an absolute advocate of human creativity and genius, and currently it is science which is rocketing with achievements, I’m sure God wouldn’t oppose that.

My dear reader, step back and re-evaluate your current view of science. Science today is a mass of different disciplines, which rarely talk to each other and compete for funding; it is not the homogeneous searcher of truth which once was, here I am not romanticising the past, I am criticising our society’s obsession with ‘specialities’, why can’t a person do various things? We are multi-talented beings. Anyway, each branch focuses on a specific dot but never connects them. And then we hold this image of scientists, as them being very knowledgeable and dare not insult their profession, as it is a pillar to our world, almost like deities we put faith in their discoveries; or rather, on the washed down version of their discoveries that we receive from the media or the TV. Either we accept their evidence or we are too lazy to really look into anything to really understand it and wholeheartedly agree. Thus most of us basically, put our faith on science. Then there is the ‘Scientific Consensus’, which is the canon through which every scientific discovery has to go through to then become ‘socially acceptable’ and has to approve everything we are then fed as gospel, scientists of all sorts follow it, because of fear of losing prestige, jobs or funding. Here we can even draw an analogy with a religious person and say that ‘Scientism’ is a religion in itself, because science seems to require to be grounded on dogma, as religion and faith are.

Thus science today is not as free and fast progressing as we like to think it is, our society, and not only the bogey man of faith, still has barriers on it. Unfortunately most scientists nowadays work for corporations that can pay them, thus they develop new technology, drugs, food additives and others (do some research) whereas only a small percentage work for the real interest of human faith, the nature of reality and how things work. If it was my choice, I would prefer scientists to be researching our vast space not only for governments but as a way of earning a decent living, rather than expanding the battery of an I-pad. I’m not here trying to undermine the work of scientists, but I am saying that their profession like many others today, has been limited for economic purposes. We think faith is the only obstacle of science, think twice, I have presented you another one and here is another real enemy to science: old dogma. Richard Dawkins, who is a well known Philosopher, condemns any new scientific way of viewing reality, why? Doesn’t this only reduce faith on science? Although he claims to go against the dogma of religion, he views anything outside his canon, even different science, with dogmatic eyes. It’s not only faith and ignorance which limit science; false knowledge and dogma also do the job. Can you see how intrinsically linked science and faith actually are? Even in terms of language I have not been able to separate them. Have you ever seen our supposedly neighbouring galaxy Andromeda with your own eyes? I guess you haven’t, thus your knowing of it is almost as having faith in its existence.

Real scientists who seek truth and understanding in science work with faith and marvel to nature, they don’t need the fancy titles and or to be attached to corporations, like so many brains that have been bought into pseudo-scientific work. I say science and faith do go together, in order to work outside the boxes that otherwise suffocate the zest of human enquiry, scientific and philosophical. For today my dear reader, I want to ask you to do something, do a little research into some edge cutting science and research the ‘electric universe’, this new scientific discoveries with regards to the nature of our reality is fun, refreshing, interesting and it definitely requires that you expand, question or work with your: faith.

By Eliza Veretilo

Science or faith? No, science AND Faith - By Martin Prior

Science or faith?  No, science AND Faith

To my mind, these are complementary: science is like building a bicycle, whereas faith is like riding it.

Another comparison, which a statistician might make, says that science applies when you have more observations than there are variables, and faith applies when you have no observations, or at least fewer observations than variables.

Let us start with the observations in the graph opposite: the X axis is income, and the Y axis displays money spent on betting on horses.  It is very clear that the money spent betting on horses goes up with income... indeed we CANNOT REJECT THIS HYPOTHESIS... indeed the hypothesis that betting on horses is a toff’s game, à la David Cameron.

But hang on... it is clear that in formal terms there is a positive correlation, and does indeed suggest that if you have no income you might borrow money to finance this pursuit.  But in the lower cluster there would appear to be a negative correlation.  The less money you have, the more you will bet on the horses.  In the middle-income group it is not totally clear – probably your spending will go down with income, but in the upper-income group, there is a clear positive correlation.

So much for two variables and 17 or so observations.  But if we have only two observations, then we have a good old simultaneous equation scenario.  If we take two at the bottom of income scale, we get the impression that if someone had no income, they are likely to run up serious gambling debts.  Such selectiveness of observations may well ‘prove’ a well-intentioned point, but we are now in a region where faith in the representativeness of our selection is a little dangerous.

But what say we have only one observation: let us say my uncle... there he is.  And I know roughly how much he spends on the horses, and I reckon - indeed I have every faith - that if he had more money he would spend more money on gambling.

So this maroon line goes through the origin: I have every faith in him not running up gambling debts if indeed the thought occurred to me.  However I think it’s a load of rubbish that if he had more money he would feel more secure and actually spend less on gambling.

And finally, what say we don’t have any actual information... doesn’t stop me having an opinion!  Simple! We see all those toffs on Channel Four going to the races.  Clearly it’s a rich man’s pastime, so let us assume that the more money you have the more you will go to the races... and the more you go to the races, the more you will have a ‘wee [or not so wee] flutter’.

We have every faith that our superiors will keep up appearances.  Hence the dark maroon line on the chart opposite.  :]

Now I received a text from the good editor – and I have every faith in his judgment, suggesting that the maroon (on diagrams in previous articles) might be coming back.  Well I have made a good start, with the ‘scientifically arrived at’ line shown in pink, and the ones involving an element of faith in maroon.  Let us bring back that picture which analysed exploitation...

Here the pink represents technological power possibly scientific, blue its abuse, maroon culture – the inner maroon the culture of the exploiting groups and the outer square that of the exploited – and grey where the latter culture is undermined.  So blue is degenerate technology, or perhaps the abuse of science, and grey ‘degenerate’ culture.

Now someone who is anti-religion would associate science with pink and faith with grey, while a devoutly religious person would associate faith with maroon and science with blue.

But both approaches are shown as working within an exploitative framework.  Let us instead offer an alternative, and the diagram opposite might be an approach to socialism:

Here we have the maroons, slightly different, however there are no reds but lots of green.  Note that as well as the outer green of the environment, we have three stages of green: the outer environment, the inner environment surrounding the maroon circle, which relates to things like the environment created by health and education services.  This environment is determined or ‘tamed’ by sciences, technology and other skills.  Or…. (wait for it)… Scientific Socialism.

And then there is another in-between environment, which we create through culture and perhaps faith, which is a necessary environment for sciences, technology and the other skills.  This ‘semi-tamed’ environment is a bit like not dropping litter or other obstacles where people might be riding bicycles.

Another example would be the social environment in which some scientific articles get published and others don’t.  I would know nothing about this, but I am sure the present editor has an excellent understanding.

As I said above, we have not captured socialism by any red colour; rather by the interaction of stages.  The circle [maroon in colour but a little bit reddish] represents economic equality, and the oval a degree of redistribution.

In the first example of a diagrammatic analysis I have tried to show how in certain environments science and faith can each work for good or bad, and really there is a continuum.  In the latter, we have gone a bit utopian, but a utopia in which scientific socialism has a key role.  Faith is a necessary element here, even if it is not explicitly in socialism itself.

By Martin Prior

Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge of Science - By Patrick Ainley

Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge of Science

Introduction

Personal Knowledge sounds like a contradiction in terms. How can true knowledge about something that exists independently of those who agree upon it (such as Jupiter’s moons, dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the Higg’s boson) rest upon a personal commitment? And yet this was what Michael Polanyi made the basis of his 1958 philosophy of science. It is a philosophy that is worth returning to after so much confusion between then and now for it endorses; ‘The intuitive view that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective.’ (as Paul Boghossian writes (2006, 130).

Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge

The most concise introduction to Polanyi’s ideas are the 1962 lectures recently republished as The Tacit Dimension. They start from ‘the fact that we know more than we can tell’ (4), drawing upon Gestalt psychology to place explicit and tacit knowledge (‘knowing what’ and ‘knowing how’ in Ryle’s 1949 distinction) into a complementary relation. ‘These two aspects of knowing have a similar structure and neither is ever present without the other,’ says Polanyi (7). So there is no knowledge without skill and no skill without knowledge.

In an act of tacit knowing, Polanyi explains, we attend from something in order to attend to something else. For example, from the features of a face to recognise someone we know, without – as a computer would – cross-checking nose, eyes, ears etc. against a database. In the same way, Polanyi argues, skilful performance ‘combines elementary muscular acts which are not identifiable, according to relations that we cannot define’ (8).

Polanyi gives examples of tool use, hammering a nail for example, when we focus on the nail for which our handling of the hammer becomes subsidiary. ‘We are attending from these elementary movements to the achievement of their joint purpose’ (10). ‘This is their meaning to us’ (11) so that ‘an interpretative effort transposes meaningless feelings into meaningful ones’ (12–13) ‘by a process of learning, which can be laborious’ (15) and which can be reversed; for example, if you start focussing on the hammer, you are likely to hit your thumb! Or, in Polanyi’s example of riding a bicycle, fall off if you try to work out how you are doing it.

For Polanyi, all knowledge derives from the solution to a problem. As he says, ‘It is a commonplace that all research must start from a problem’ (21) since ‘to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars.’ (21). This intimation is a scientist’s starting point. S/he is convinced that something is the case and proves the strength of that conviction through investigation and experiment, not through falsification but through justification.

‘Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous… into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of the knowledge.’

This rejects ‘the ideal of scientific detachment… [that] true knowledge is universally established and objective.’ But it does not thereby open the door to anything-goes relativism. As Polanyi’s preface to Personal Knowledge also says, ‘the seeming contradiction is resolved by modifying the concept of knowing’ (p.2).

Polanyi’s main target in advocating Personal Knowledge was what he called objectivism, the idea that objects in the real world had merely to be discovered and described to correspond with knowledge constructed by scientific experiment. That knowledge was also personal, based on intuition and ultimately faith, what he called ‘the fiduciary principle’, not only rejected objectivism but went beyond the pragmatic idea that what works must also be true and, while accepting that hunches or more logical commitments had to be proven, also allowed back in social and psychological conflicts to the apparently detached realms of ‘pure science’.

With detailed historical examples, Polanyi showed that in experimental and other situations clear cut distinctions could not necessarily be made between discovery and verification / falsification and that ‘evidence’ was often ignored for quite extraneous reasons. Polanyi thus opened the way to a real history and sociology of science and also to a similar history of artistic and technological creativity and their preservation and development in craft, apprenticeship and pedagogy. These were all included in his grand evolutionary scheme which grounded human focal awareness (shaped by the use of tools, including language) in the tacit knowledge shared with other animals.

Conclusion

That knowledge corresponds to phenomena objectively out there in the physical world, as well as that it is constructed to be differentially distributed amongst social actors whose intentions towards ‘truth’ are universalised by scientific method, affords a way out not only of cultural determinism but from pragmatism and the postmodern morass by indicating ‘a meaning of universal doubt which is free from self-contradiction’ (PK 295). For, as Polanyi says (ibid),

‘We may imagine an indefinite extension of the process of abandoning hitherto accepted systems of articulation, together with the theories formulated in these terms or implied in our use of them. This kind of doubt might eventually lead to the relinquishing, without compensation, of all… concepts which those idioms conveyed. Our articulate intellectual life, which operates by the handling of denotable concepts, would thus be reduced to abeyance…’

Arguably, this is what happened to the human sciences after their linguistic turn! Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge returns science to the roots of its knowing.

References

Boghossian, P. (2006) fear of knowledge, against relativism and constructivism,Oxford UP.

Polanyi, M. (2009) The Tacit Dimension, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge, towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.

By Patrick Ainley