Segment 6
Dear List,
First, thank you, Gene, for your post. It zeroes
in on a phenomenon that has not been addressed
since the opening segments of this slow read: Big
Science (this is certainly the target of much of
Kleinman's critical research). I so appreciate
the manner in which you have characterized this
phenomenon as it complicates the understanding of
"science" and of "scientists," as both JR and
Peirce discuss them. Your comments, among other
things, bring out the limitations of using
allegories, such as "the scientific man," and
"the academic politician," in addressing
subject-matter that has such a detailed, complex
history.
Along the lines Gene has pursued, and by way of
moving into my final post for the slow read of
this paper, I will introduce at this juncture a
few additional quotes from Peirce, which are
taken from a short paper by Peirce entitled,
Definition and Function of a University (a
"petite" as Torill Strand has characterized it in
his 2005 essay, "Peirce on Education: Nurturing
the First Rule of Reason", Studies in Philosophy
and Education 24:309-316). This paper appears,
among other places, in the volume, "Values in a
Universe of Chance" (Philip P. Weiner ed., 1958,
pp.331-335). Weiner notes that Peirce's
definition of "university" comes from the 1889
Century Dictionary; the paper, however, is a
collection of excerpts from a review of Clark
University that Peirce published in the journal,
Science in 1900. In the paper, as Strand notes,
Peirce addresses explicitly the topic of higher
education. In so doing, he contrasts the
scientist--the figure who rightly belongs in a
university in Peirce's view--with "the practical
man"--another allegorical figure, who does not.
It seems clear from this contrast that Peirce was
centrally concerned about the same trends that
Gene has identified.
Peirce comments, for example,
"The average trustee of an American college will
think it a commendable thing for a professor to
employ all the time he can possibly save in
making money; but if he devotes much energy to
any purely theoretical research, the trustees
will look upon him askance, as a barely
respectable squanderer of his opportunities"
(Weiner 1958, pp.331-32).
Peirce is obviously well aware, here, of the
fundamental tension between modern capitalism and
science, as he conceived of it, and of the
relatively marginal position that scientific
inquiry, as he envisioned it best being
undertaken, already occupied in American
university life even at this time. I don't think
that Big Science would have been seen as breaking
news to Peirce. It would have been seen by him
as "dirty science" in Gene's terms, and he would
have identified it, as Kleinman does, as the most
serious threat to the pursuit of genuinely
scientific inquiry present in academic contexts.
Peirce continues:
"Our scientific schools distribute circulars
which dwell chiefly upon the handsome incomes
their alumni are making, thereby calling up such
images as a handsomely laid table with a pair of
Havre de Grace ducks and a bottle of Chateau
Margaux" (p. 333).
This "low view" (p.333) of learning and science
was what Peirce contrasted with his own, and not
only with his own, but with that of his
scientific community as well, as it was
represented by those who were his readers.
Peirce claims, "No reader of this Journal
[Science] is likely to be content with the
statement that the searching out of the ideas
that govern the universe has no other value than
that it helps human animals to swarm and feed"
(p.333-34). This claim seems consistent with the
one by Peirce that Gene supplied in his post from
1905.
I wouldn't say, in contrast to Gene, that Peirce
is "glossing over" the here-and-now in these
comments. I read him as marshalling a long-run
perspective on the value and meaning of science
in an effort to criticize and fight against the
"practicalism" as he called it, and its
"sham-reasoning" (cited in Strand 2005, 313),
which was prevailing in the here-and-now of his
time and which continues to prevail in ours. He
is vigorously rejecting such practicalism as a
fitting basis for university life. It is a
losing battle, to be sure, but he is in there
waging it, championing an alternative to the
practicalism that in our time fuels Big Science.
My question, now, is: how does JR's figure of the
"academic politician" fit into this opposition
that Peirce defines between the scientific and
the practical man?
In the final segment of JR's paper, "Sciences as
Communicational Communities," (paragraphs 24 and
25, which are reproduced at the end of this
post), JR concludes with recommendations for the
members of the APS to follow in dealing with
academic politicians. These take two separate
tacks:
* JR recommends not to debate the topic of "what
is true" with academic politicians (paragraph
24). He justifies this by identifying debate as
a political rather than a logical mode of
discourse and, so, of no value ("one wins
nothing"). This refusal to engage will short
circuit the attempted interruptions of the
interlopers.
* JR recommends to focus communications on what
science, in truth, is "all about"--what keeps the
tradition of inquiry "healthy" as a form of life
in the long-run. This kind of communication, JR
argues, will be attractive to non-scientists, as
it will lay out what is inherently admirable in
scientific life, its "adventurous and
chance-taking spirit" and its "commitment to
turning failure to success by treating mistakes
as opportunities to correct one's course rather
than as signs of defeat or incompetence."
(paragraph 25)
Before returning to the question above, I can't
help but say that JR's idea that debate--of any
kind--could be illogical seems hard to fathom.
His recommendation that scientists refuse to
communicate with academic politicians on the
topic of truth as it relates to science, is even
harder to swallow (swallowing in the spirit of
Peirce here). How can such a refusal be
considered a sincere, logical response worthy of
a scientist? The recommendation seems to
exaggerate the differences between the scientific
and the political modes of life, dissociating
them to a degree that is dehumanizing. It also
seems to discount the possibility that scientists
could actually win such a debate and that their
victory, if they did so, would have any
meaningful consequences at all for their
community as well as the political community
involved. Wouldn't a Peircean outlook see more
potential for communication here? Wouldn't it be
more likely to place scientific and political
forms of communication, logic, debate, and life
in relation to one another and to situate them
along a spectrum of human experience, rather than
to dissociate them in such a radical way? In sum,
I am having trouble imagining Peirce recommending
this course of action, let alone following it
himself. Peirce wasn't one to refrain from
engaging in debate of any kind, with scholars or
with politicians, academic or otherwise, whether
or not the topic was initially framed in
accordance with his views. Perhaps listers can
supply some evidence in support of the Peircean
spirit of JR's first recommendation--I'm drawing
a blank.
In any case, with regard to the question at hand,
in these paragraphs, as in the rest of the paper,
JR continues to contrast the figure of the
academic politician with the scientist. Is this
academic politician the same character as "the
practical man" that was Peirce's contrasting
figure in relation to the scientist figure? I
look especially to the last sentence of JR's
paper to answer this question. JR's final
sentence is a dense and complex one. However,
within it lies reference to what is also at the
core of Peirce's contrast between the practical
man and the scientific man--what has been called
Peirce's "first rule of reason." Before going
further, I will cite two passages from Peirce
that define this rule:
1) From the 1898 Cambridge lectures (cited in
Strand, 2005, 313; reproduced from Reasoning and
the Logic of Things, Ketner, ed., 1958):
"Upon this first, and in one sense this sole,
rule of reason, that in order to learn you must
desire to learn, and in so desiring not be
satisfied with what you already incline to think,
there follows one corollary which itself deserves
to be written upon every wall of the city of
philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry." (my
underlining)
2) From the Collected Papers (1.44) (also cited
in John J. Stuhr, "Rendering the World more
Reasonable: the Practical Significance of
Peirce's Normative Science," in Peirce and Value
Theory: on Peircean Ethics and Aesthetics, Herman
Parret, ed. 1994):
"Science and philosophy seem to have been changed
in their cradles. For it is not knowing, but the
love of learning, that characterizes the
scientific man; while the "philosopher" is a man
with a system which he thinks embodies all that
is best worth knowing. If a man burns to learn
and sets himself to comparing his ideas with
experimental results in order that he may correct
those ideas, every scientific man will recognize
him as a brother, no matter how small his
knowledge may be." (my underlining)
Both of these passages identify the most basic,
distinctive guiding spirit of the scientific form
of life in similar terms, as a love of learning,
a longing for understanding, a burning
curiousity, "an intense desire to find things
out" (1898/1958).
Peirce contrasts the scientist, not only with the
philosopher, but with "the practical man" as
well, in terms of the first rule of reason. The
practical man, he notes, in his discussion of
higher education, "knows what he wants and does
not desire anything else" (1900/1958, p.331). JR
would seem to be employing this same contrast
with regard to the academic politician in the
last sentence of his paper. When JR recognizes
the "devotion to the adventurous and
chance-taking spirit" that "treats mistakes as
opportunities to correct one's course," he seems
to be invoking Peirce's first rule of reason.
The politician seeking to politicize science
"knows whats he wants" as does the Big Scientist.
Power in the first case, money in the second.
Neither is burning to learn. This is, at bottom,
what makes science different from both economic
and political life, pragamaticistically speaking.
Science is "all about" loving learning as opposed
to already knowing.
In advocating that scientists represent
authentically the spirit of inquiry that
motivates what might be thought of as a "clean"
form of science (however infrequently that might
actually occur), JR invokes Peirce's first rule
of reasoning, and takes a specifically
anti-practicalist Peircean tack in so doing.
This concludes the paper in a profoundly hopeful
way. It implies that the capacity to follow the
first rule of reason, even in a very dirty
capitalist-academic environment, and the capacity
to cultivate a clean scientific spirit in so
doing, is pan-human. It assumes that such a
spirit lurks inside every human being, regardless
of profession, since the public relations
communications of scientific disciplines might
potentially reach any individual, and any member
of that larger public, in interpreting them,
could recognize in these communications something
familiar, attractive, and compelling.
Clean science, in JR's final recommendation, does
not boil down to the love of a certain
subject-matter or method. It is not driven by a
love of unitary and real objects, at least not
insofar as they are already known as such. This
scientific spirit manifests, in contrast, in
relation to subject-matter that is not yet known,
or to aspects of subject-matter that are not yet
known in a satisfactory way. The Peircean
"scientist," is no one other than the person who,
when confronted with subject-matter for which no
method has yet been developed, and for which no
discourse has yet been formulated, continues to
shape a form of life for their community guided
by a love of learning.
What JR thus comes back around to in this last
sentence is the specifically pragmaticist
(un-Jamesian) view that, if there is anything
that unites the members of a university, no
matter how little or much their knowledge, no
matter how great or small the economic or
political value of their work, if there is
anything "unitary" that has the power to shape
them into a healthy community of scientists,
regardless of discipline, and regardless of their
subject-matter being relatively predictable or
chaotic--if there is anything that establishes
them as peers, brothers and sisters in scientific
spirit, it is this capacity to adhere to and to
valorize before all else the "first" rule of
reason and to recognize and honor its having been
followed, however fallibly, by all who have truly
done so. This was Peirce's vision of the
university, elevated to its most ideal form.
JR could not have ended on a better note.
This concludes my final post as an em-cee for this slow read.
Thanks to all who responded to the posts on this
paper, and to all who read and considered these
posts, and particularly to Gary Richmond and Ben
Udell for their assistance both on- and off-list.
Best to all,
Sally
9/28/11
My apologies: Some uncensored thinking out loud follows.
Joe's remarks clarify the scarifying effects of
the authoritarianism of reputation in academic
and scientific life, and show how the reality of
communicative qualities such as sincerity and
earnestness are necessary for science. But
something seems to me to be missing. Science
comes out clean, while self-interested power
mongers and status seekers come out dirty. But
is actually existing science so clean? Or is it
that Peirceans get lost in the mists of the
unlimited community of inquirers, happily
dissecting its way toward the horizon of
truthat any cost?
Big Science in the USA emerged from The
Manhattan Project sucking up to
military-corporate money power, utilizing it to
make precise discoveries at any cost. The big
sciences today function in many ways as the
research arm of global capitalism. Is that just
a "blip"? How about altering genetic codes for
profitable pure research? Don't block the road
of inquiry? Whoops, humans and numerous other
species eradicated. A mere short-term fact
without consequence in the long run of science?
The broader development of scientific
materialism, which animates the sciences today,
is the Frankenstein of nominalism, which would
destroy anything in the interests of "pure"
research. If science is inadequate for the
practice of life, as Peirce saw it, because it
is too thin, then aren't scientists, qua
scientists, inadequately developed humans?
Perhaps subhuman would be a more accurate term.
They can be characterized as subhuman not
because of extrinsic reputational or authority
incursions into science proper, but because
science proper, as is commonly practiced now, is
conceived as a schizoid machine.
It is all well and good to argue that Peirce's
conception of science can overcome the schizoid
machine of science today in the long run, but
that assumes the schizoid machine of science
does not operate under a telos of its own, that
of the sorcerer's apprentice, able and willing
to release powers it has no clue (or interest
in) how to control. Modern, nominalistically
conceived scientific materialism, far from
evicting final purpose from nature, actually
swept it under the table, so that it could
function as the crypto-religious myth of the
machine. The unacknowledged purpose? To
progressively eradicate human qualities and all
that is not machine-like. The deus ex machina
religion of modern sci-tech.
Peirce sought to put the pretensions
of humanity in their place when he stated in
1905:
"But the heurospudists [scientists who endeavor
to discover] look upon discovery as making
acquaintance with God and as the very purpose
for which the human race was created. Indeed as
the very purpose of God in creating the world at
all. They think it a matter of no consequence
whether the human race subsists and enjoys or
whether it be exterminated, as [in] time it very
happily will be, as soon as it has subserved its
purpose of developing a new type of mind that
can love and worship God better.Remember that
the human race is but an ephemeral thing. In a
little while it will be altogether done with and
cast aside. Even now it is merely dominant on
one small planet of one insignificant star,
while all that our sight embraces on a starry
night is to the universe far less than a single
cell of brains is to the whole man." (Peirce,
1905, ms 1334).
Contrast Peirce with James, who said:
"The only form of thing that we directly
encounter, the only experience that we
concretely have, is our own personal lifeAnd
this systematic denial on science's part of
personality as a condition of events, this
rigorous belief that in its own essential and
innermost nature our world is a strictly
impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the
whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the
very defect that our descendants will be most
surprised at in our own boasted science, the
omission that to their eyes will most tend to
make it look perspectiveless and short" (1986:
166).
If the ultimate purpose of science,
in Peirce's terminology, is found in "developing
a new type of mind that can love and worship God
better," humbleness might have us remove our
eyes from the distant starry night to the
mirror, to see that perhaps the human
personality holds that very capacity to love,
not anthropocentrically, but as our evolutionary
legacy, and that it is the living variescence of
the earth we should love even more than progress.
The living earth itself, that we are
so busily bent on destroying through sci-tech
"progress," is that "new type of mind" of which
we are a dematured manifestation. Perhaps
acknowledging that, and that the mind that
shaped the modern world, including its sciences,
is fundamentally misshaped and destructive,
requiring a reanimated outlook, might mark a
start. That is where I see Peirce's vision as
helpful. But his denigration of the here and now
of creation in favor of the long run glosses
over, irresponsibly to my mind, the
world-destroying destructive fissure of modern
thought.
Gene Halton
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Sciences as Communicational Communities, Paragraphs 24 and 25
Let me conclude by suggesting that although there
is certainly a need to make clear to the general
public that commitment to finding out the truth,
in the sense of what is true, is what science is
all about, the most effective response to the
encroachment of the academic politicians into
scientific fields is not to debate the topic with
them--debate is itself a political rather than a
logical mode of discourse and one wins nothing by
winning a debate, which is not likely to happen,
in any case. when one is debating with people
whose skills are primarily political--but rather
to focus attention on the communicational
practices in one's own field and attempt to
understand what in these practices is truly
conducive to the health of the field considered
as a tradition of inquiry and distinguish that
from what may originate instead from
considerations of institutional expediency only.
With a clear understanding of this--which may not
be easy, since there are many factors in academia
that militate against the health of any
communicational community--the sciences need not
worry about the attempts of the academic
politicians to politicize science; for this will
typically take the form of attempting entry into
the professional communicational loop and
interrupting the normal flow of communication by
diverting it to preoccupation with matters with
which it has no proper concern, and the
interlopers cannot do this without the unwitting
concurrence of the scientific community itself.
[25]
As regards the principles underlying public
relations activities, both within and outside of
the university, the approach taken should never
be based on strategies of persuasion developed by
people whose mode of professional life is
radically different from that of the working
scientist but should proceed rather from
scientific self-reflection and be authentically
expressive of what science actually is as a form
of life devoted to inquiry. Scientific life is
highly and essentially idealistic, and its
attractiveness as a human activity is due at
least as much to this as to its technological
productivity. People outside of the sciences
already understand quite well that science is
highly profitable on the technological side,
which is why they support it even when they
understand little of what it is really like. What
they do not understand is that its success is not
due to magically powerful but essentially
mechanical techniques of grinding out
results--this is, unfortunately, the common view
of it--but rather to devotion to the adventurous
and chance-taking spirit, informed by commitment
to turning failure to success by treating
mistakes as opportunities to correct one's course
rather than as signs of defeat or incompetence.
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