Stephen -
Thanks for passing this article along. Here are my comments:
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Dennett has written about the "Science wars" before, for example in an
early chapter in "Consciousness Explained".
Dennett writes: "When philosophers argue about truth, they are arguing
about how not to inflate the truth about truth into the Truth about Truth,
some absolutistic doctrine that makes indefensible demands on our systems of
thought". There should be an entire book devoted to this distinction. It's
at the core of one of the most popular strawman arguments against science -
that science fails because it can't provide us with permanent and certain
"Truth". His later example of drawing a circle freehand works quite well
here. He writes that with a compass, one can "get a nice clean, objective
result, the same every time". But the postmodern skeptic will protest that
it's NOT exactly the same - that if you look close enough you can find
differences from one circle to the next. So far, I agree. But the
postmodernist says "Therefore we should stop granting 'priviledge' to the
use of a compass, and recognize that the use of a compass is merely
different from, not better than freehand for drawing circles. After all,
neither _really_ provides an objective perfect circle...".
But if the postmodernist were to descend from the ivory tower for a minute,
s/he'd notice that in the world, what we typically need is not perfection,
but predictable reliability. "The methods of science aren't foolproof, but
they are indefinitely perfectible". Engineering diagrams call for certain
tolerances, and the objects built according to those diagrams work. The same
goes for handmade musical instruments and native crafts. The Balinese
craftsman carves and measures and recarves and remeasures until things fit
together properly. He doesn't throw up his hands and say "It's imperfect,
so it's not worth doing" or "It's imperfect, so next time I won't even
bother measuring".
I find this analogy compelling, and I'd also point out that the case for
scientific methods as a means for moving towards truth is even stronger than
the case of the use of a compass for drawing circles. Scientific methods
identify and address _specific, predictable_ errors made by less
sophisticated methods, while the use of a compass merely dramatically
reduces random errors in freehand drawing.
The point of view presented in the entire article feels simultaneously like
common sense and cultural heresy. On the one hand, people generally seem
aware that there are truths and falsehoods and sufficiently reliable means
for distinguishing the two, and therefore that the postmodernist position is
just silly. But at the same time, when one gets down to the specifics of
those "sufficiently reliable means", people in general seem to set an
unwarranted priviledged position for personal experience (again, see that
Change Magazine article by Carol Trosset). It's as though we drew a circle
freehand, and another using a compass, and then insisted that the compass
must be unreliable because its product does not agree with the unquestioned
freehand method.
Perhaps that's the unrecognized distinction that results in our inability
to agree whether science is orthodoxy or heresy.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
