Science and the Quest for Meaning

Alfred I. Tauber is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Zoltan Kohn Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University. The recipient of the 2008 Medal for Science awarded by the University of Bologna for his work on the theoretical development of immunology, Tauber has also published extensively in science studies and bioethics. He is the author or editor of 13 books, including Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility, Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing, and Confessions of a Medicine Man. He lives in Boscawen, New Hampshire.

If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.--Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

Growing up in the Sputnik era during the 1950s, I enjoyed what appears now to have been a unique education. Science assumed an importance hitherto unimagined prior to the Soviet challenge, and to prepare the country for possible assault, beside air raid simulations, I studied "new math" and was enrolled in advanced science courses. Drilled in facts, disciplined in scientific method, and buoyed by the wonder of nature, I saw a future bright with the scientific enterprise. Perhaps I too would become an investigator. In that spirit, an even more important foundation was being set for myself, namely a sense that science offered something close to true knowledge as the technical mastery of nature proceeded with breath-taking achievements. Weren't we about to embark for the moon?

Such mammoth enterprises were undertaken under the banner of truth, and truth was attained through objective methods. It seemed that science defined its own domain, and not only remained insulated from common human foibles, but followed methods that revealed Truth. This "Legend" (Kitcher 1993), simple and distorted as it might be, nevertheless was cherished by its believers. Indeed, every Saturday morning Mr. Wizard appeared on television to elucidate nature's mysteries, and thereby confirm the precepts taught to me. The shades of grey were apparent on the screen; the colors were not. That was the world in which I awakened, one seemingly simpler than today.

Of course, doctrine is fated for refutation, which already had commenced even as I was learning the solar system model of the atom. The philosophy of science that framed my generation's education still promoted a stark nineteenth-century positivism. The term positivism refers to a philosophy of "positive" (objective) knowledge, which means, simply, that valid knowledge is scientific; facts are the currency of knowledge; accordingly, forms of knowledge that do not subscribe to the scientific method cannot be validated. Positivism thus rested, ultimately, on the separation of "facts" from "values."

Values were usually considered a catchall for subjectivity, but of course, epistemic values--those values that made facts, facts (e.g., objectivity, neutrality, coherence, parsimony, predictability)--were integral to the scientific enterprise. And beyond recognizing the diverse values that must be employed to create objective facts, the overlap of so-called "subjective" values in constructing scientific knowledge has increasingly become apparent.

Indeed, much of the scholarship over the past fifty years characterizing scientific practice and theory formation has shown that the relationships between facts and values, even within the narrow confines of laboratory investigations, cannot be neatly divided between "objective" and "subjective" domains. And when the doors of the laboratory are flung open and the applications of research are considered, the complex relationship of facts and values becomes even more convoluted. Factoring out the ever-present commercial aspects of investigations, as well as the various agendas of government-supported research for military or economic gain, the objective/subjective schema simply defies the social and conceptual realities of scientific inquiry.

The irony of science portraying itself as a fantasy--a restful space for logic and rational deliberation as sole determinants of research, one that would achieve some utopian respite from the tribulations of human-derived confusion--is a story which has been told from many points of view. Here I will narrate how the conceptual scaffolding supporting the castle in the sky fell and then offer a summary of the post-Sputnik description that replaced it. Coupled to that dismantling of the Legend, we will survey the cultural war that commenced with the reports of revisionist historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science. Citizen activists joined them under the belief that characterizing (and controlling) science was too important to leave to the self-appraisals (and choices) of scientists alone. This book is about that seismic intellectual and political shift, and perhaps, in a sense, it is a revised narrative about my own youthful naiveté.

Philosophically, the positivist program began to crumble during the early 1950s (Friedman 1999), and with the loss of its intellectual dominance, a critical chorus challenged the authority of a doctrinaire scientific method and its hegemonic form of knowledge. From that dissenting position, science appeared to have spun into its own orbit. Instead of celebrating the polyphonic contributions of all sectors of scholarship, competing science/anti-science camps assembled along academic lines, in which the scientific illiteracy of the literati and the deafness of scientific technocrats precluded meaningful dialogue. C. P. Snow famously described this rift in terms of "Two Cultures," inasmuch as the sociologies and modes of discourse of each group had radically diverged (Snow 1959/1964). A more damning appraisal remained unwritten: because of its success and its independence of the larger philosophical context from which it emerged, science was regarded as an unruly adolescent, full of itself, brimming with confidence and even arrogance, overflowing with its power and promise.

Having assumed a unique place in the academic pantheon, science pursued its own agenda with confidence and little concern for relating to its "distant relations." This division was well underway by the mid-nineteenth century, when the twin forces of professionalization and positivism drove the scientist to distant lands, where he learned new languages, adopted peculiar mores, and cultivated particular industries. As Wilfrid Sellars noted (writing as a philosopher):

The scientific picture of the world replaces the common-sense picture... the scientific account of "what there is" supersedes the descriptive ontology of everyday life.... [I]n the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not. (Sellers 1997, 82-83; emphasis in original)

Here, "common-sense" is a placeholder for all those modes of knowing eclipsed by the triumph of science's worldview.

Humanists feared an imbalance in two domains. The first was intellectual: Humanists viewed science as assuming imperialistic ambitions in the attempts to apply its methods and logic in arenas where heretofore it had not ventured. This so-called scientism (the belief that virtually anything worth knowing or understanding may be approached scientifically and given scientific explanation) had been on the positivists' agenda for over a century, but by mid-twentieth century, humanists actively charged that such scientistic claims were by their very nature fallible, since radical objectivity had repeatedly been deflated by showing how pernicious cultural determinants influenced scientific inquiry and interpretation. Despite its failures, the positivism that dominated the natural and social sciences asserted a rigid factuality to what constituted knowledge, and that standard, broadly applied, would devalue other forms of inquiry. Thus, as a purely intellectual conflict, most scientists and humanists found themselves on different sides of the demarcation lines outlined by the positivist program.

The political and social domain was the second area where science posed a threat to the humanities. Despite the technical achievements of science, humanists rightly feared the imbalanced influence of the science "lobby," whose authority rested on the economic bounty indebted to scientific advances. The Two Culture divide was, consequently, also an expression of how science, largely as a result of its material successes, increasingly dominated public policy decisions and educational resources. The social apparatus that supported the scientific enterprise ranged from the educational reform stimulated by the Sputnik challenge to scientific industries promoting their vested interests. Beyond the technology sold domestically in the West, these industries were prominently energized by what Eisenhower menacingly described as a military-industrial complex, which prominently displayed its products in Vietnam and later in Iraq. Many were troubled by the danger of misplaced applications (like nuclear power) and, even more, by a kind of political arrogance that seemed to accompany the power of unbridled technology. These matters, while germane, are not our subject. Here, suffice it to note that by the end of the 1950s, science education dominated other forms of knowing, so that a gentle species of scientism seeped into the schools educating the Baby Boomers. Dissenting voices, of course, attempted to find the humane within the scientific enterprise (Conant 1953; Bronowski 1956), but with nuclear war threatening civilization on the one hand, and the recent conquest of polio on the other, science (albeit, a particular positivist vision of it) and derivative technologies were grabbing all the headlines--and the money.

As science assumed a new degree of independence based on its ever-increasing authority, the disciplines of history and philosophy of science morphed into a new species. They filled a gaping hole. After all, as Thomas Kuhn noted, scientists generally are not interested in their own histories, much less the philosophy undergirding their discipline (Kuhn 1962, 1970). But beyond this professional separation, the respective ways of thinking seemed foreign to each other, thus cross-fertilization had become increasingly barren. Ironically then, coincident with Snow's critique, the original cultural divide began to mend in an unpredictable way as interdisciplinary studies of science achieved new sophistication. Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science pursued an ambitious program to characterize the laboratory as an intellectual and cultural activity devoid of positivist conceits. No longer was science allowed to perform insulated from outside scrutiny. Consequently, the Two Cultures mentality that Snow and others had so recently identified quickly collapsed as critics of science asserted challenging interpretations of what scientists did, what philosophical structures they employed, and how they conducted themselves. Today, much of what serves as debate about what science is and what it does may be reduced to those who seek to demarcate the various kinds of truth claims arising from different intellectual cultures from those who seek to bridge the apparent chasm between them.

Indeed, science was wrenched back from its isolated status, and the Two Cultures were melded back to one with a vengeance. Paul Feyerabend in Against Method (1975) attacked the sacrosanct status of scientific rationality; Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) rejected claims to orderly scientific progress; and Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (1962) offered a more omprehensive appreciation of scientific thinking than that proffered by positivist philosophies of science. These works marked the beginning of a new movement to study science in a broadened humanistic and sociological context, which employed analytic tools quite alien to the then current "internal" approaches that followed the positivist line without dissent.

While the boundary between science and nonscience served as a critical nexus of positivist thought, the post-Kuhnian critique opened a schism for all to see. Indeed, the self-confident posture of the "scientific" suffered from these radical criticisms, and although the work of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Polanyi took a generation to take hold, their cardinal lessons have gained legitimacy in hard fought debates. After all, scientific knowledge has increasingly defined natural realities, and, in the process, such knowledge, putatively objective and neutral, had assumed secularism's closest approximation to truth. Facts are sacred. Debate might ensue as to what those facts mean and how we might apply them to social and economic policy, but such circumspection only highlights how interpretation, undergirded by a vast array of values, determines the use of knowledge in the political realm. That insight and the caution it has generated, date, at least, to the early part of the twentieth century. However, something new emerged during the twentieth century's closing decades.

Beyond active public debate over the direction of scientific inquiry, the new critics challenged doctrine--the very notion that one could defend a method of scientific inquiry built on a firm demarcation of facts and values. No longer were facts simply facts. What might appear as a fact in one context might be revealed as only a factoid, or perhaps not even a reliable claim or report. But a more fundamental issue appeared in discussions about objectivity and the character of facts: facts are always processed--interpreted, placed into some over-arching context--whether in debate about a scientific theory or an argument about social policy. Inextricable from context, facts must assume their meaning from a universe of other valued facts. When applied to scientific methods and the logic that governs investigation, the traditional orthodox method, which promised hard, neutral facts and derivative truths, revealed an Emperor disrobed. In that scandal, the credibility of scientific testimony became contentious. Scientific facts, which hitherto had been thought of as neutral, were now recognized as taking on different meanings depending on factors far removed from a narrow construal of their placement in a model or theory. Thus the neutrality of the facts that framed the issue in question became suspect, and so the fight over the significance of scientific findings took place not only in traditionally prescribed professional circles, but in the courts and legislatures as experts pitched themselves in service to one socio-political position or another.

Despite the reiterated disavowals of a value-laden science, critics have exposed the neutrality of science as a useful conceit. Increasingly, citizens are maintaining a vigilant watch over science's aspirations and successes. Such activists no longer accept as dogma the claims and promises of a growing scientific lobby. For instance, in 1993, critics successfully halted the superconducting collider project, the exemplar of Big Science, in what some regarded as antiscientific conservatism (threatening United States leadership in elementary particle physics), and others saw as appropriate constraint of a ravenously imperialistic venture. This debate seems to have generated a different kind of activism than that of the previous attacks on what had been perceived as unbridled technology (e.g., nuclear power or environmental pollutants). The distinction between science and its product, technology, traditionally afforded scientists the space to pursue their research in the interests of advancing knowledge, leaving its application to another public forum. However, in recent decades the notion of science in the pursuit of knowledge, research for the pursuit of truth, has been challenged by a ravenous technology that has come to dominate science, reversing the historical relationship between basic investigation and its application (Forman 2007). On this view, science no longer enjoys such latitude in its enterprise and can no longer be regarded as some colony of its motherland, protected from intruders that might invade its sanctioned ways and profitably tap its resources. Indeed, a contemporary portrait of science must account for its social character in a complex calculus, where science is understood as subject to powerful economic and political interests, and, in turn, pursues its own agenda for its own particular gain. This understanding rests on a multi-layered cultural and intellectual history.

How science is understood determines how its knowledge is applied. If the positivist program asserts that such and such is the case, and if the public relies on the certainty of such claims, then the authority of scientific knowledge achieves high standing. If, on the other hand, scientific knowledge is regarded as always fallible and its methods always in question, then scientific claims will be viewed with more circumspection. Following Kuhn and Feyerabend, a deluge of sociologically oriented critics looking at what scientists actually did, as opposed to the idealized philosophical claims made on their behalf, brought science well within the fold of other forms of truth seeking. Science-studies philosophers, historians, and sociologists converged on depicting scientific practice on a pragmatically based epistemology (replacing reified method and verification). Consequently, the insularity of the laboratory and the truth claims made under its mantle were increasingly called into question. These reassessments rallied "defenders" of science to protect the perceived assaults on objectivity and rational discourse made by "postmodern enemies of the Enlightenment." The resulting "Science Wars" of the 1990s brought to climax conflicts that had simmered for decades.

The intellectual studies of science complemented social forces that opened science, as an institution, to new kinds of scrutiny. As a result, science lost its privileged state: its epistemological authority lacks its former sacrosanct status; its practice no longer commands the awe enjoyed before World War II; and the queries of concerned citizens can no longer be dismissed as the ramblings of the naive. The political chorus has become more brazen in its effrontery, stopping certain kinds of science and directing others through more rigorous administrative control. A unified culture, where scientists and activists meet on equal footing, has developed in the world of public policy, but not necessarily with salutary results for utopian-minded science enthusiasts, who sought a more complete independence and authority. The Science Wars may have formally been declared in the 1990s, but the skirmishes had been passionately fought since the end of World War II. And with the recent radical politicization of science, from the global warming "debate" to public financing of stem cell research, the battles over science have achieved a feverish pitch. I choose not to argue over the specifics of these polemics, but rather to highlight how the doors of the laboratory were flung open and ponder some of the consequences of science reassessed.