Seems like plate tectonics is a good example of how a scientific revolution should proceed. It was widely debated but not fully accepted at the time Kuhn’s book was published. Did he mention it? I’ve seen someone here on Substack lamenting that the five decades it took to confirm it was just too slow. We need faster science! New theories should be accepted more quickly! Which overlooks that the theory had to wait for the means to test it.
I don’t think he mentioned it (or any debates that were current at the time he was writing), but I may not be remembering correctly.
There will always someone who says a theory was accepted too fast, and someone who says it was accepted too slow. Seems a strange thing to argue about.
I enjoyed this specifically because it helped me think about how bureaucracies function and change. You might think these unrelated to the slow, careful building of scientific consensus, but I find many similarities, particularly how bureaucracies change to eventually embrace new concepts and strategies.
i'm taking your Notes mention as an invitation to continue our debate here.
if i remember correctly, in the original exchange in the comments, i was making a fine distinction between the practical methodology of (good, lowercase-s) science and the ontological project of (reductive-materialist, anthropocentric, ideologically prescriptive, uppercase-S) Science. you seem to be characterizing the discussion as "circular" because, as an insider, you're having a hard time separating the two.
the circularity, from my perspective, comes from your insistence that there is no distinction. from an insiders' perspective, Science is always just an earnest search for the capital-T Truth; its evolution is a product of technical refinement. what we see today is the result of centuries of improving the means of describing the Truth. the scale and complexity of the modern Scientific institution belies the fact that the actual work is no different than Newton observing why the apple falls from the tree: it's the same simple curiosity elaborated to vastly macroscopic and infinitesimally microscopic proportions.
maybe this describes the personal motivation of some individual scientists. but, as you inadvertently point out here, the institution in which they work—the system of carrots and sticks that makes the whole thing go—is a structure of ontological discipline. some things are simply not allowed to exist in order for "progress" to continue. as you say: "What makes a science different is that there is enough evidence to lock everyone into just one agreed picture of what is going on... more precise data or new observations might lead to a new picture, but most of the time the situation is stable, and that stability is essential." i think this bit is particularly salient: "You cannot expect to win millions of dollars in funding for telescopes, particle accelerators and huge laboratory complexes, if no-one can agree on what fire is."
the fundamental question, of course, is *who* gets to define what constitutes "enough evidence to lock everyone in to just one agreed picture of what is going on."
one of the sleight-of-hand tricks that modernity likes to pull is contriving to make this all look like a natural, democratic process. we can see this with Science's modern cousins in economics and philosophy. taken to its ideological extreme—we can find headcases like Ben Shapiro claiming that the success of "Western civilization" is by virtue of its clear superiority. people freely and repeatedly chose "Western civilization" over the alternative because it worked better. never mind all the instances in which "Western civilization" was enforced at gunpoint around the world.
the same kind of self-mythologizing happens with Science: supposedly, the consensus around "evidence to lock everyone in to just one agreed picture" happened earnestly and democratically, driven by nothing but that elemental curiosity to understand why the apple falls. any *ahem* colonial excesses we could point to in Science's history are aberrations; the true Science is a liberating, open-handed process.
this picture is flatly ahistorical and ideologically motivated. for millennia, indigenous people have used the (lowercase-s) scientific method to arrive at conclusions that contradict modern Science's view of reality, and, subsequently, the "Progress" that is possible. it's not that these discoveries are unscientific: they were arrived at through experimentation and deliberate evidence-gathering in exactly the way that Science prescribes. the only issue is that their evidence is deemed invalid. they're excluded from the canon of "evidence to lock everyone in" precisely because that evidence would be troubling for Science's larger ideological project. their conclusions would threaten those millions of dollars in funding, because they might discredit the need for telescopes, particle accelerators and huge laboratory complexes.
if a shaman out in the jungle has equal (or better) access to the big Truths of reality—what justifies all this expenditure of blood and treasure, in the name of the civilizational Progress demanded by Science?
i think i pointed this out in the original exchange, but the pro-Science argument is essentially theological: the directionality of Progress in pursuit of Truth has already been defined, doesn't need to (or can't) be questioned. all that's needed now is diligent adherence to doctrine, matching the evidence to the conclusions and not the other way around. otherwise, everything devolves into a dark chaos of indeterminacy, with everyone claiming that their Science is the One True God.
Christians have the same problem. it's almost impossible to get the faithful to recognize that monotheism was an ontological choice made by the early Church, rather than a scientific (!) apprehension of objective reality. once that choice was made—once the "evidence to lock everyone in to just one agreed picture of what is going on" was defined—all future work was predicated on erasing the memory of other options. it's *not* that monotheism was a historically-contingent case of zagging instead of zigging. that would undercut the authority of the Church and cast doubt on all of its ontological claims. if monotheism was a (largely political) choice, it would be impossible to justify the collection of tithes, let alone the expenditure of the Magisterium's largesse on a series of war crimes like the Crusades. so it *must* be that the recognition of monotheism was a more refined understanding of the earlier, cruder polytheisms in which people mistakenly believed.
Science (as opposed to science) functions in the same way.
I’m happy to make distinctions between different aspects of science, but we may need more than just two sizes of “s”. Your small “s” science is mostly what I’m talking about. There is a slightly larger “s” that describes the organisation and community and politics of science, and since that’s rife with all of the problems of all human endeavours, critics like to claim that these problems undermine the achievements of small-s science. I disagree, as explained in the article. Your big-S science goes in the other direction, and imbues it with all of the worst features of Western civilisation — or at least the features shouted about by Western civilisation’s most extreme detractors. If we step away from all the polemics and talk about the billions of measurements and observations and details in modern science, I’m curious which of these (which presumably huge collections of these) you think are wrong, and with what evidence they are wrong, and if they are so wrong how it is that we are manipulating scores of measuring apparatus to pretend otherwise. As I said in the article, no-one wanted quantum mechanics. I could add: certainly no-one wanted it or needed it to carry out some vast materialistic colonialist enterprise! People found quantum mechanics, in confusion and against their will, because careful observation forced them to accept it as reality. If they were making up science for greedy political purposes, they would have made up something much simpler!
there's a biased framing in your construction of this: "your big-S science goes in the other direction, and imbues it with all the worst features of Western civilization." this framing puts Science in an innocent, passive state, in which it's being unfairly "imbued" with all these negative characteristics. it reverses the causal direction. what I'm saying is that Science (along with monotheistic dualism, which are two sides of the same coin) is the self-justifying *source* of those moral failures.
as i may have written previously: if we included all the theories for which there is small-s scientific evidence in the corpus of Science—everything typically relegated to "psuedoscience" or "parapsychology"—then it would become something inherently different than what it is. our assumptions about how reality works and our place in the cosmos would perforce be completely transformed. the moral framework we use to make decisions about how to conduct ourselves as a species would need to be radically reevaluated. all of these questions have been sidelined by Western Science for the past several centuries. Science is now busily trying to find solutions for the global crises created by its own moral logic. people are trying to shoehorn "indigenous" wisdom into Western civilization as a panacea for failures and internal contradictions that were set in motion when those same indigenous people, by the logic of rationalism and Western civilization, were put to the sword for standing in the way of "progress." this is not just polemical: it's a direct consequence of the ontological gatekeeping perpetrated since the Enlightenment. pro-Science partisans would prefer this not to be the case, in the same way that Christians would prefer not to be associated with the Inquisition; both try to make an appeal to purity by claiming that these are corruptions of the "true" doctrine, rather than logical outcomes advancing from their own first principles.
the question of which of the "billions of measurements and observations in modern science" are "wrong" is a red herring. the question could just as easily be: how many of the billions of measurements and observations in modern science are superfluous to human flourishing, and only exist to support a manufactured ideal of "progress"?
the quintessential example (which i may have cited before) is the synthesis of ayahuasca. it's an unambiguous fact that the ayahuasca brew—one of the most powerful entheogens ever discovered—can only be synthesized by precise preparation of two plants found in the Amazonian jungle. neither ingredient has any psychoactive effect on its own. the chances of randomly combining these two ingredients in this precise way are astronomically improbable. Western Science would see it as impossible without an understanding of chemical analysis and neurobiology. and yet, somehow, indigenous Amazonians managed to do it—with no modern labs, no formal chemistry, and, presumably, without having any idea of what they were aiming for. if they started mixing plants at random, they were infinitely more likely to produce a hundred varieties of horrible poison, instead of something as radically beneficial as ayahuasca. if you ask them where this knowledge comes from, they'll say the spirits taught their ancestors. the implications of this are massive. it points to a reliable way of accessing and transmitting complex information in a non-material way, which can produce a verifiable result.
unfortunately, Science doesn't believe in "spirits," so this revelation is either dismissed as unremarkable or explained away as some form of coincidence or cultural cryptomnesia—because the alternative is hugely problematic for Science specifically, and Western civilization generally. it would mean that there is no correlation between knowledge and education, or class status, or literacy, or billion-dollar investments in telescopes and particle accelerators and research labs and all the rest. if an illiterate shaman in the jungle can learn how to synthesize one of the most complex chemicals in human history by listening to the plants—what the fuck is all the rest of this for? and, more importantly, what other knowledge have we ignored or discredited by casting out (or enslaving, or killing) the shaman in favor of the "educated" Westerner in the lab coat?
so this is the self-justifying exercise that Science is now engaged in: "if you can talk to spirits, come over to the lab and show us." i can't talk to spirits in a lab. they don't like it in there. and more importantly, why? "so we can prove that spirits are real." i don't need proof that spirits are real. i know they're real. "right, but we need to prove it to everybody else." who's everybody else? "all the people who don't believe in spirits." the people who don't believe in spirits are a tiny global minority. 99% of humans throughout history have recognized the existence of spirits. and the only reason the remaining 1% doesn't believe in spirits is because Science claimed they weren't real. "right, but wouldn't it be great to have proof? wouldn't that be a benefit to the storehouse of human knowledge?" no, it would be completely superfluous: spirits exist, whether or not they meet the evidentiary burden that Science has artificially erected—again, oftentimes for political and ideological reasons, which are inimical to the development of actual human understanding.
and if Science does come up with some form of proof for psi or non-corporeal intelligence, it's a case of vaticinium ex eventu, in which Science claims that its verification was needed for something people had recognized for thousands of years, which had informed the cultures and the ways of relating to the world that were stamped out in the name of "progress," made possible by Science's ontological offensive under the banner of Western civilization. if there's now a risk of the planet becoming uninhabitable, it's because we spent the past several centuries listening to the Scientists instead of the plants—and were told by the Scientists that the two were mutually exclusive.
If you say something is real, and I say that it's not, and we have no common basis on which to evaluate evidence, then we are at an impasse. That's a pity.
sure. but you're the one who's losing out, not me. you're on the side of diminished human capacity. every scrap of poetry or life-affirming beauty you find in science is taken from my side of the fence. there is no way to rationalize imagination or inspiration. if you're prepared to take "evidence" to its logical conclusion, you're left with nihilism, stuck in an indifferent universe, without love or beauty, trapped in a decaying body, waiting to die.
you can't have it both ways: either you leave the door open for the Big Mystery that transcends evidence, rationality, and logical proofs, which can never and should never be explained—should rightly include the sociocultural technologies of firsthand experience that people have developed for tens of thousands of years, including gods and spirits and psi and all the rest—or you deny the source of our shared humanity. there is no middle ground.
it would be one thing if Science was a kind of anchorite monasticism whose adherents were content to live and die quietly in their little grid world. but what makes it so monstrous is the sustained effort to deny other people access to that wider reality. Science has gone bulldozing around the entire globe, telling people they have no choice but to live in the universe it describes, unless they're willing to submit their experiences to its own self-interested standards of evidence. nothing can be sacred without proof, according to its very particular construction of logic and morality. and so the whole world is at the mercy of the self-appointed experts who decide what counts as evidence and what doesn't. we can all see how well that's going.
on a personal basis, it makes no difference to me. i won't be denied anything because of a lack of evidence for the things i recognize as real. one more or one less picture of a galaxy won't move the needle for me. if we catch a bad break with climate change—if Science fails to live up to its billing by preventing the catastrophic global consequences of its dominance—i'm fully prepared to live without it, just as people did for thousands of years before. "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," broadly understood. i'm not sure the same can be said of the faithful who believe that a diligent adherence to the doctrines of Science would necessarily produce a better world.
and if somebody does conjure up some cold fusion and prevent the ice caps from melting—wonderful. i still get to live in a more beautiful world than the people who insist on "evidence" for everything, with the added benefit of knowing that my grandchildren will get a chance to live on a habitable planet.
and just to introduce a reductio ad absurdum to the question of "evidence"—i don't believe that Monaco exists. the idea that there is a separate country on the southeast corner of France is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. it's a pernicious falsehood meant to discredit the proud nation of France, or for the counterfeit self-aggrandizement of these so-called "Monagesques," or to serve a variety of economic and political schemes, not unlike those perpetrated by the Vatican. the history of "Monaco" is invented. i could travel to Monte Carlo and see another French city. i could talk to every single one of its 36,000 inhabitants and listen to their deluded beliefs about living in a separate country, and it would not change the fact that "Monaco" does not exist. any claims to the contrary are part of the same conspiracy of graft and ignorance.
No, you can't play that game. If you don't agree that an argument can be decided by evidence then you are not arguing, you are just asserting. You say you're right. I say I'm right. The end. You started by implying that you approve of "good" lower-case-s science (the methodology), but it doesn't sound like you do: the methodology is worthless if evidence has no meaning.
You also contradict yourself by saying that scientists have arrogantly ignored claims they don't like (spirits, etc), but at the same time say that they cannot be proved. If they cannot be proved, then aren't adherents of the scientific method (good lower-case-s science) right to ignore them? You can't have it both ways.
I re-published this article because the chorus against science grows ever louder, and some scientists are becoming defensive and even apologetic. They have nothing to apologise for. Just because science (like all forms of knowledge) can be used for harm does not mean that science should not be pursued, and certainly does not mean that it is invalid.
I tagged you because I want to make the case to people who I think have the wrong idea of what science is and how it works and why they should instead whole-heartedly support it. But if you confuse argument for bullying and assertion and hollow claims of moral superiority and aesthetic sensibility, then there is no point continuing the discussion.
You say scientists are professional bullshitters; I say your beloved jungle shaman is an amateur bullshitter, with his fairy stories and his goof-juice. He maintains power by claiming unique access to secret knowledge, which no-one has the means, or even the right, to question. Scientists strive to make their methods and their findings as clear as possible, and invite everyone to test them and challenge them. I will take that over the lying bully every time. Once that contrast is clear, I hope most people would do the same.
excellent! "fairy stories" and "goof-juice." now we're getting down to brass tacks with the proper racism. thank goodness we have White Saviors with European surnames to lead these jungle-dwelling savages out of their benighted, primitive ignorance, right? doing the Lord's Work on behalf of those who are too stupid to recognize our own foolishness. someday we'll get everyone thinking the right way, and just imagine how much better the world will be then. *that's* the Science i was talking about, beautifully illustrated.
and i'm "bullying," because i won't let you have your sandbox to yourself? maybe you can learn some philosophy along with your science: what you're describing is an ontological frame that is *socially constructed* and not *objectively real*. material science depends on an artificial definition of a closed system where all the inputs and outputs can be measured—and, for that matter, a particular formulation of what constitutes "knowledge." (that's called "epistemology," if you're looking for it in your local library.) it does not circumscribe reality.
those "amateur bullshitters" have evidence that *is* repeatable and verifiable—but not in a way that you recognize. it's a lacuna in your perception that people like you are desperately trying to universalize, through the same petty, blinkered condescension that allows for terms like "goof-juice."
if i refuse to acknowledge that Monaco exists as a country—because it *doesn't physically exist anywhere*—then that means, in very practical terms, that i can never go to Monaco. it simply does not exist for me. all i've done is make the world that much smaller for myself. i have added nothing to anyone's knowledge of the world; i've only tried to subtract from it, to my own discredit. all i can do is stubbornly deny that Monaco exists for anyone else and try to turn that into a fact. if no one else can convince me it's real, beyond a certain point, all they can do is shrug their shoulders and say "your loss." everyone else will go on enjoying a world with Monaco in it; i'll be left muttering bitterly about "amateur bullshitters" and their pernicious lies, and no one will care.
have a happy Winter Cultural Observance, and don't forget to tell as many kids as possible that Santa Claus doesn't exist. we wouldn't want them growing up with the wrong kind of ignorance. keep up the important work.
Seems like plate tectonics is a good example of how a scientific revolution should proceed. It was widely debated but not fully accepted at the time Kuhn’s book was published. Did he mention it? I’ve seen someone here on Substack lamenting that the five decades it took to confirm it was just too slow. We need faster science! New theories should be accepted more quickly! Which overlooks that the theory had to wait for the means to test it.
I don’t think he mentioned it (or any debates that were current at the time he was writing), but I may not be remembering correctly.
There will always someone who says a theory was accepted too fast, and someone who says it was accepted too slow. Seems a strange thing to argue about.
I enjoyed this specifically because it helped me think about how bureaucracies function and change. You might think these unrelated to the slow, careful building of scientific consensus, but I find many similarities, particularly how bureaucracies change to eventually embrace new concepts and strategies.
i'm taking your Notes mention as an invitation to continue our debate here.
if i remember correctly, in the original exchange in the comments, i was making a fine distinction between the practical methodology of (good, lowercase-s) science and the ontological project of (reductive-materialist, anthropocentric, ideologically prescriptive, uppercase-S) Science. you seem to be characterizing the discussion as "circular" because, as an insider, you're having a hard time separating the two.
the circularity, from my perspective, comes from your insistence that there is no distinction. from an insiders' perspective, Science is always just an earnest search for the capital-T Truth; its evolution is a product of technical refinement. what we see today is the result of centuries of improving the means of describing the Truth. the scale and complexity of the modern Scientific institution belies the fact that the actual work is no different than Newton observing why the apple falls from the tree: it's the same simple curiosity elaborated to vastly macroscopic and infinitesimally microscopic proportions.
maybe this describes the personal motivation of some individual scientists. but, as you inadvertently point out here, the institution in which they work—the system of carrots and sticks that makes the whole thing go—is a structure of ontological discipline. some things are simply not allowed to exist in order for "progress" to continue. as you say: "What makes a science different is that there is enough evidence to lock everyone into just one agreed picture of what is going on... more precise data or new observations might lead to a new picture, but most of the time the situation is stable, and that stability is essential." i think this bit is particularly salient: "You cannot expect to win millions of dollars in funding for telescopes, particle accelerators and huge laboratory complexes, if no-one can agree on what fire is."
the fundamental question, of course, is *who* gets to define what constitutes "enough evidence to lock everyone in to just one agreed picture of what is going on."
one of the sleight-of-hand tricks that modernity likes to pull is contriving to make this all look like a natural, democratic process. we can see this with Science's modern cousins in economics and philosophy. taken to its ideological extreme—we can find headcases like Ben Shapiro claiming that the success of "Western civilization" is by virtue of its clear superiority. people freely and repeatedly chose "Western civilization" over the alternative because it worked better. never mind all the instances in which "Western civilization" was enforced at gunpoint around the world.
the same kind of self-mythologizing happens with Science: supposedly, the consensus around "evidence to lock everyone in to just one agreed picture" happened earnestly and democratically, driven by nothing but that elemental curiosity to understand why the apple falls. any *ahem* colonial excesses we could point to in Science's history are aberrations; the true Science is a liberating, open-handed process.
this picture is flatly ahistorical and ideologically motivated. for millennia, indigenous people have used the (lowercase-s) scientific method to arrive at conclusions that contradict modern Science's view of reality, and, subsequently, the "Progress" that is possible. it's not that these discoveries are unscientific: they were arrived at through experimentation and deliberate evidence-gathering in exactly the way that Science prescribes. the only issue is that their evidence is deemed invalid. they're excluded from the canon of "evidence to lock everyone in" precisely because that evidence would be troubling for Science's larger ideological project. their conclusions would threaten those millions of dollars in funding, because they might discredit the need for telescopes, particle accelerators and huge laboratory complexes.
if a shaman out in the jungle has equal (or better) access to the big Truths of reality—what justifies all this expenditure of blood and treasure, in the name of the civilizational Progress demanded by Science?
i think i pointed this out in the original exchange, but the pro-Science argument is essentially theological: the directionality of Progress in pursuit of Truth has already been defined, doesn't need to (or can't) be questioned. all that's needed now is diligent adherence to doctrine, matching the evidence to the conclusions and not the other way around. otherwise, everything devolves into a dark chaos of indeterminacy, with everyone claiming that their Science is the One True God.
Christians have the same problem. it's almost impossible to get the faithful to recognize that monotheism was an ontological choice made by the early Church, rather than a scientific (!) apprehension of objective reality. once that choice was made—once the "evidence to lock everyone in to just one agreed picture of what is going on" was defined—all future work was predicated on erasing the memory of other options. it's *not* that monotheism was a historically-contingent case of zagging instead of zigging. that would undercut the authority of the Church and cast doubt on all of its ontological claims. if monotheism was a (largely political) choice, it would be impossible to justify the collection of tithes, let alone the expenditure of the Magisterium's largesse on a series of war crimes like the Crusades. so it *must* be that the recognition of monotheism was a more refined understanding of the earlier, cruder polytheisms in which people mistakenly believed.
Science (as opposed to science) functions in the same way.
I’m happy to make distinctions between different aspects of science, but we may need more than just two sizes of “s”. Your small “s” science is mostly what I’m talking about. There is a slightly larger “s” that describes the organisation and community and politics of science, and since that’s rife with all of the problems of all human endeavours, critics like to claim that these problems undermine the achievements of small-s science. I disagree, as explained in the article. Your big-S science goes in the other direction, and imbues it with all of the worst features of Western civilisation — or at least the features shouted about by Western civilisation’s most extreme detractors. If we step away from all the polemics and talk about the billions of measurements and observations and details in modern science, I’m curious which of these (which presumably huge collections of these) you think are wrong, and with what evidence they are wrong, and if they are so wrong how it is that we are manipulating scores of measuring apparatus to pretend otherwise. As I said in the article, no-one wanted quantum mechanics. I could add: certainly no-one wanted it or needed it to carry out some vast materialistic colonialist enterprise! People found quantum mechanics, in confusion and against their will, because careful observation forced them to accept it as reality. If they were making up science for greedy political purposes, they would have made up something much simpler!
there's a biased framing in your construction of this: "your big-S science goes in the other direction, and imbues it with all the worst features of Western civilization." this framing puts Science in an innocent, passive state, in which it's being unfairly "imbued" with all these negative characteristics. it reverses the causal direction. what I'm saying is that Science (along with monotheistic dualism, which are two sides of the same coin) is the self-justifying *source* of those moral failures.
as i may have written previously: if we included all the theories for which there is small-s scientific evidence in the corpus of Science—everything typically relegated to "psuedoscience" or "parapsychology"—then it would become something inherently different than what it is. our assumptions about how reality works and our place in the cosmos would perforce be completely transformed. the moral framework we use to make decisions about how to conduct ourselves as a species would need to be radically reevaluated. all of these questions have been sidelined by Western Science for the past several centuries. Science is now busily trying to find solutions for the global crises created by its own moral logic. people are trying to shoehorn "indigenous" wisdom into Western civilization as a panacea for failures and internal contradictions that were set in motion when those same indigenous people, by the logic of rationalism and Western civilization, were put to the sword for standing in the way of "progress." this is not just polemical: it's a direct consequence of the ontological gatekeeping perpetrated since the Enlightenment. pro-Science partisans would prefer this not to be the case, in the same way that Christians would prefer not to be associated with the Inquisition; both try to make an appeal to purity by claiming that these are corruptions of the "true" doctrine, rather than logical outcomes advancing from their own first principles.
the question of which of the "billions of measurements and observations in modern science" are "wrong" is a red herring. the question could just as easily be: how many of the billions of measurements and observations in modern science are superfluous to human flourishing, and only exist to support a manufactured ideal of "progress"?
the quintessential example (which i may have cited before) is the synthesis of ayahuasca. it's an unambiguous fact that the ayahuasca brew—one of the most powerful entheogens ever discovered—can only be synthesized by precise preparation of two plants found in the Amazonian jungle. neither ingredient has any psychoactive effect on its own. the chances of randomly combining these two ingredients in this precise way are astronomically improbable. Western Science would see it as impossible without an understanding of chemical analysis and neurobiology. and yet, somehow, indigenous Amazonians managed to do it—with no modern labs, no formal chemistry, and, presumably, without having any idea of what they were aiming for. if they started mixing plants at random, they were infinitely more likely to produce a hundred varieties of horrible poison, instead of something as radically beneficial as ayahuasca. if you ask them where this knowledge comes from, they'll say the spirits taught their ancestors. the implications of this are massive. it points to a reliable way of accessing and transmitting complex information in a non-material way, which can produce a verifiable result.
unfortunately, Science doesn't believe in "spirits," so this revelation is either dismissed as unremarkable or explained away as some form of coincidence or cultural cryptomnesia—because the alternative is hugely problematic for Science specifically, and Western civilization generally. it would mean that there is no correlation between knowledge and education, or class status, or literacy, or billion-dollar investments in telescopes and particle accelerators and research labs and all the rest. if an illiterate shaman in the jungle can learn how to synthesize one of the most complex chemicals in human history by listening to the plants—what the fuck is all the rest of this for? and, more importantly, what other knowledge have we ignored or discredited by casting out (or enslaving, or killing) the shaman in favor of the "educated" Westerner in the lab coat?
so this is the self-justifying exercise that Science is now engaged in: "if you can talk to spirits, come over to the lab and show us." i can't talk to spirits in a lab. they don't like it in there. and more importantly, why? "so we can prove that spirits are real." i don't need proof that spirits are real. i know they're real. "right, but we need to prove it to everybody else." who's everybody else? "all the people who don't believe in spirits." the people who don't believe in spirits are a tiny global minority. 99% of humans throughout history have recognized the existence of spirits. and the only reason the remaining 1% doesn't believe in spirits is because Science claimed they weren't real. "right, but wouldn't it be great to have proof? wouldn't that be a benefit to the storehouse of human knowledge?" no, it would be completely superfluous: spirits exist, whether or not they meet the evidentiary burden that Science has artificially erected—again, oftentimes for political and ideological reasons, which are inimical to the development of actual human understanding.
and if Science does come up with some form of proof for psi or non-corporeal intelligence, it's a case of vaticinium ex eventu, in which Science claims that its verification was needed for something people had recognized for thousands of years, which had informed the cultures and the ways of relating to the world that were stamped out in the name of "progress," made possible by Science's ontological offensive under the banner of Western civilization. if there's now a risk of the planet becoming uninhabitable, it's because we spent the past several centuries listening to the Scientists instead of the plants—and were told by the Scientists that the two were mutually exclusive.
If you say something is real, and I say that it's not, and we have no common basis on which to evaluate evidence, then we are at an impasse. That's a pity.
sure. but you're the one who's losing out, not me. you're on the side of diminished human capacity. every scrap of poetry or life-affirming beauty you find in science is taken from my side of the fence. there is no way to rationalize imagination or inspiration. if you're prepared to take "evidence" to its logical conclusion, you're left with nihilism, stuck in an indifferent universe, without love or beauty, trapped in a decaying body, waiting to die.
you can't have it both ways: either you leave the door open for the Big Mystery that transcends evidence, rationality, and logical proofs, which can never and should never be explained—should rightly include the sociocultural technologies of firsthand experience that people have developed for tens of thousands of years, including gods and spirits and psi and all the rest—or you deny the source of our shared humanity. there is no middle ground.
it would be one thing if Science was a kind of anchorite monasticism whose adherents were content to live and die quietly in their little grid world. but what makes it so monstrous is the sustained effort to deny other people access to that wider reality. Science has gone bulldozing around the entire globe, telling people they have no choice but to live in the universe it describes, unless they're willing to submit their experiences to its own self-interested standards of evidence. nothing can be sacred without proof, according to its very particular construction of logic and morality. and so the whole world is at the mercy of the self-appointed experts who decide what counts as evidence and what doesn't. we can all see how well that's going.
on a personal basis, it makes no difference to me. i won't be denied anything because of a lack of evidence for the things i recognize as real. one more or one less picture of a galaxy won't move the needle for me. if we catch a bad break with climate change—if Science fails to live up to its billing by preventing the catastrophic global consequences of its dominance—i'm fully prepared to live without it, just as people did for thousands of years before. "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," broadly understood. i'm not sure the same can be said of the faithful who believe that a diligent adherence to the doctrines of Science would necessarily produce a better world.
and if somebody does conjure up some cold fusion and prevent the ice caps from melting—wonderful. i still get to live in a more beautiful world than the people who insist on "evidence" for everything, with the added benefit of knowing that my grandchildren will get a chance to live on a habitable planet.
and just to introduce a reductio ad absurdum to the question of "evidence"—i don't believe that Monaco exists. the idea that there is a separate country on the southeast corner of France is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. it's a pernicious falsehood meant to discredit the proud nation of France, or for the counterfeit self-aggrandizement of these so-called "Monagesques," or to serve a variety of economic and political schemes, not unlike those perpetrated by the Vatican. the history of "Monaco" is invented. i could travel to Monte Carlo and see another French city. i could talk to every single one of its 36,000 inhabitants and listen to their deluded beliefs about living in a separate country, and it would not change the fact that "Monaco" does not exist. any claims to the contrary are part of the same conspiracy of graft and ignorance.
prove me wrong.
No, you can't play that game. If you don't agree that an argument can be decided by evidence then you are not arguing, you are just asserting. You say you're right. I say I'm right. The end. You started by implying that you approve of "good" lower-case-s science (the methodology), but it doesn't sound like you do: the methodology is worthless if evidence has no meaning.
You also contradict yourself by saying that scientists have arrogantly ignored claims they don't like (spirits, etc), but at the same time say that they cannot be proved. If they cannot be proved, then aren't adherents of the scientific method (good lower-case-s science) right to ignore them? You can't have it both ways.
I re-published this article because the chorus against science grows ever louder, and some scientists are becoming defensive and even apologetic. They have nothing to apologise for. Just because science (like all forms of knowledge) can be used for harm does not mean that science should not be pursued, and certainly does not mean that it is invalid.
I tagged you because I want to make the case to people who I think have the wrong idea of what science is and how it works and why they should instead whole-heartedly support it. But if you confuse argument for bullying and assertion and hollow claims of moral superiority and aesthetic sensibility, then there is no point continuing the discussion.
You say scientists are professional bullshitters; I say your beloved jungle shaman is an amateur bullshitter, with his fairy stories and his goof-juice. He maintains power by claiming unique access to secret knowledge, which no-one has the means, or even the right, to question. Scientists strive to make their methods and their findings as clear as possible, and invite everyone to test them and challenge them. I will take that over the lying bully every time. Once that contrast is clear, I hope most people would do the same.
excellent! "fairy stories" and "goof-juice." now we're getting down to brass tacks with the proper racism. thank goodness we have White Saviors with European surnames to lead these jungle-dwelling savages out of their benighted, primitive ignorance, right? doing the Lord's Work on behalf of those who are too stupid to recognize our own foolishness. someday we'll get everyone thinking the right way, and just imagine how much better the world will be then. *that's* the Science i was talking about, beautifully illustrated.
and i'm "bullying," because i won't let you have your sandbox to yourself? maybe you can learn some philosophy along with your science: what you're describing is an ontological frame that is *socially constructed* and not *objectively real*. material science depends on an artificial definition of a closed system where all the inputs and outputs can be measured—and, for that matter, a particular formulation of what constitutes "knowledge." (that's called "epistemology," if you're looking for it in your local library.) it does not circumscribe reality.
those "amateur bullshitters" have evidence that *is* repeatable and verifiable—but not in a way that you recognize. it's a lacuna in your perception that people like you are desperately trying to universalize, through the same petty, blinkered condescension that allows for terms like "goof-juice."
if i refuse to acknowledge that Monaco exists as a country—because it *doesn't physically exist anywhere*—then that means, in very practical terms, that i can never go to Monaco. it simply does not exist for me. all i've done is make the world that much smaller for myself. i have added nothing to anyone's knowledge of the world; i've only tried to subtract from it, to my own discredit. all i can do is stubbornly deny that Monaco exists for anyone else and try to turn that into a fact. if no one else can convince me it's real, beyond a certain point, all they can do is shrug their shoulders and say "your loss." everyone else will go on enjoying a world with Monaco in it; i'll be left muttering bitterly about "amateur bullshitters" and their pernicious lies, and no one will care.
have a happy Winter Cultural Observance, and don't forget to tell as many kids as possible that Santa Claus doesn't exist. we wouldn't want them growing up with the wrong kind of ignorance. keep up the important work.