MDers,
In this post I'd like to critique Pirsig's complaint about the
scientific method and his reasons for thinking it leads to
social chaos. He starts talking about the sci-method in
chapter 10 of ZMM, which is page 112 in the 25th Anniversary
edition. The chapter is only six pages long.
As Jon said, he finished his first year of college
at 15, and his major was chemistry, his principle field being
biochemistry. Obviously he was a gifted child, undoubtedly
possessing a high IQ.
Teenage years are interesting times in a person's intellectual
life. If you are bright, you are capable of understanding any
adult concept, and you arrive with a boundless energy and
appetite for knowledge. Teenagers often have very stratified
views of the world, a strong sense of right and wrong politically,
and idealism about the nature of the world. All the problems
and mysteries of the universe are attacked afresh by the bold
ideas of the teenager at university. I know. I've been there,
and I've felt it myself.
What comes along with this idealism
is the notion of absolute truth, and the promise that science
and philosophy are the instruments for extracting that truth.
It appears Pirsig fiercely held this view in his college years,
and when he realized they weren't up to his expectations,
he rejected them with a vengeance that can only come from the
worst kind of betrayal. And the thing that betrayed him so was
the method for finding absolute truth: the scientific method.
Perhaps he was interested in chemistry in its own right, but
it doesn't seem that way, because he immediately turned his
attention to the method for pursuing truth, which is really
outside science and belongs to philosophy. He noticed several
things about the scientific method that startled him:
1. The source of hypotheses is not nature and not even man.
2. Hypotheses make themselves known through intuition.
3. The number of hypotheses you can think of to explain a
phenomena is infinite.
Of these, #3 caused him the most trouble and caused the "break"
with science that led to his expulsion. But let's start with #1.
He's half right, in my view. Nature certainly does not suggest the
hypothesis of their own inner workings. This is obvious. The
chemicals don't whisper ideas to the scientist, they only provide
data. Maybe this isn't obvious to a precocious teenager, but at
least he got it right. His next insight, which he attributes to
Einstein, is that even people don't come up with hypotheses:
EINSTEIN:
Nobody who has really gone into the matter will deny that in
practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the
theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no
theoretical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical
principles.
This quote is supposed to explain why Einstein thought people are
not the source of hypotheses, but as far as I can tell, it says
nothing about this.
Let's move on to #2. I agree that hypotheses are arrived at
through intuition, particularly your first guesses, where you
don't yet have a firm grasp of the phenomena. You are just
grasping, but you try anything to get you started.
#3 really threw him for a loop. Based on his laboratory experience
he found, to his surprise, that hypothesis making was the easiest
job of science and the hypotheses never stopped coming:
PIRSIG:
As he was testing hypothesis #1 by experimental method a flood
of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing
these, more would come to mind, until it became painfully
evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating
them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It
actually *increased* as he went along.
He grew increasingly distressed by this. He said that the ability
to come up with an infinite number of hypothes meant you couldn't
possibly test them all, and your results would be forever
inconclusive.
PIRSIG:
[it] is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. [It] is
completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof
of the general validity of all scientific method!
If this argument is true, then the folks at Xerox, for example,
were extremely lucky when they came across the principles
required to invent a photocopy machine, stumbling along for
decades, trying out thousands, perhaps millions of hypothesis,
until they hit on the right ones. Obviously this is not how
science is done, but from reading these few pages in Ch. 10, you
get the impression from Pirsig that hypothesis making is like
spinning your wheels in a muddy bog, with no real progress
possible.
But this is not the case. The scientific enterprise is a lot
like playing 20 questions, the game where somebody thinks of an
object, and you are given no more than 20 yes/no questions to
find it out. Amazingly, you can almost always do it, and the
reason is that effective guesses divide the world in such a way
that many things are eliminated, so that it is unnecessary and
therefore foolish to make future guesses in areas that were
rendered impossible by past guesses. In this way you hone in on
the answer quite quickly. The same kind of thing is done in
science, where the pool of available hypotheses is drastically
trimmed by knowledge gained by previously tested hypotheses
carefully chosen to maximize the honing process.
It's difficult to imagine how someone could make such an error
and yet call himself "classically" trained. It leads me to think
he means something else, and I'm missing it.
Perhaps what Pirsig means (although this is by no means
evident in his writing) is that while progress is made, there
are always fresh new questions to be asked at every stage, and
so finding absolute truths is unattainable due to the limits of
scientific knowledge. It's like the child's game of "why", which
bottoms out only after one or two explanations:
Why is the drop of water sticking to the side of the glass?
It's not heavy enough to slide down.
Why is being heavy important?
So that the gravitational forces overcome the electrostatic
forces bonding the water to the glass.
But so little of the overall drop is bonded to the glass. Does
that mean electrostatic forces are stronger than gravitational
forces?
Yes.
Why?
I don't know. Ask your mother.
But endless questions are not the same as endless hypotheses, so
this is not what he means.
The other thing that bothered him was that there seemed to be
no permanence to scientific truths. New theories would pop up
to explain old facts, and this hardly seemed like absolute truth,
which you'd expect to be true forever. He concludes that "through
multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information,
theories, and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading
mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate,
relative ones."
>From here he makes a bold, speculative leap: "The major producer
of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values
that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other
than science itself...The cause of our social crises is a
genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until
this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue." Then
he says the whole structure of reason is no longer adequate for
our modern times, and "it begins to be seen for what it really
is - emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually
empty."
Wow, that's quite a stretch. With every sentence of this rant,
which are separated by only a couple paragraphs, the charges get
more and more horrible. Remember, the basis for all
these derogatory remarks about science are
because he [wrongly] thinks there's an infinite number of
hypotheses to be tested for every phenomena and because science
can't come up with absolute truths, finding it necessary to
correct itself every so often.
Near the end of the chapter he laments over the problem: "It's
so big-that's why I seem to wander sometimes. No one Phaedrus
talked to seemed really concerned about this phenomenon that so
baffled him. They seemed to say, 'We know scientific method is
valid, so why ask about it?'"
Indeed, the scientific method works, and the problem seems so
big to him because he's talked himself into it being big. The
social crisis he's referring to is simply the alienation the
DeWeese's feel toward technology, mainly caused by them knowing
they are dependent on technology and having the discomfort of not
knowing how any of it works. But somehow he insists on tying the
problem all the way back to defects in the scientific
method and expectations concerning truth, the former
being bogus and the latter being unrealistic.
Glenn
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