I make no such error (or espouse no such view, anyway). I insisted that these objects are recalcitrant, that false beliefs about them will lead to courses of actions that are not successful because they involve false beliefs about the way things are. As I said, no doubt a bit cryptically, our interests in making things work, building bridges that stand and rockets that fly, enforced on us by industrial and political competition, push us up against the world in a way that requires us to develop techniques of investigating and manipulating that lead to efficacious results, themselves depending on true beliefs about the objects of our inquiry.
If these objects were not independent of what we thought or wished, it would be hard to explain technological and scientific failure. Correspondingly, our success in predicting, explaining, and manipulating the world is evidence that our scientific standards are correct and our scientific beliefs approximately true.
But all of this depends on a particular set of interests -- the rise of modern science is bound up with the rise of capitalism and the nation state, as the old-time Communist would say, "it is no accident." And truth, simplicity, explanatory power, predictive success, and the like are values. Science is thus interested and value-laden (value-saturated) from the get-go).
But that is exactly why, given its social context, science is objective. The values and interests with which it is imbued are ones that promote truth. Other values and interest that do not force their holders to accommodate their beliefs and practice to the recalcitrant nature of the world as it is (religious values and interests, for example), cannot give us the same assurance that their objects are mind-independent and the theories we form about them are objective.
Incidentally, Kuhn was PhD physicist
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
and Feyerabend trained as an astronomer and a physicist. (As well as a dramatist and singer -- he was a fascinating and unique character: see
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/
Any reading of Against Method or his papers will show the depth of his knowledge of hard science. Kuhn's will as well -- don't just read Structure, Read The Copernican Revolution and the book on the Black Body Problem and Quantum Discontinuity (a lot of which is above my head, and I used know quantum pretty well).
These were not the science-free ignoramuses of today's science studies crowd -- who also lack Feyerabend's genuine European humanistic accomplishments, based on a culture and world now lost forever. (Kuhn is a much more American, technocratic, and less interesting thinker, if perhaps in some ways more deeply right.) I'm not going to name names, but it is a mistake as well as an insult to assimilate either of these thinkers to the fools who fell for the Sokal hoax, for example.
True, Kuhn espoused a sort of relativism at least in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but that is largely extraneous to his views of the structure of science. Relativism (in Kuhn's terms, "incommensurability") does not follow from the fact that science is prejudiced to the core. Kuhn also deeply regretted having loosed on the world the word "paradigm" (which I made no use of or reference to in my discussion).
Feyerabend always insisted that science had to be realist to make progress, although he deplored primitive scientism and delighted in showing that it is only one way of looking at, understanding, and explaining the world, and not the only valid one, also that its realism is internal to it and therefore not to be taken for granted either. (Also I think he overstated it: in my experience, and I think the literature bears me out on this, practicing experimental scientists tend to be instrumentalists or positivists.
Now, all this said, of course I don't dispute that science can be distinguished from scientists. Science is the practice of scientists, what they do and believe and value. It is thus independent of any particular scientist, or even any group of scientists naturally, just as you say the law is of lawyers. But this is really by the way. Science as a human activity, however, the explanation and prediction of the world, is still a human activity, and full of human prejudices. It does embody, as we both say, because of the interests that inform an animate it, practices that promote self-correction, wherein lies its objectivity.
So perhaps in some ways we do not differ as much as you think, or at least in the ways that you think we differ. However, if you think that science is a human practice unlike any other in having no point of view, in maintaining no interest but the truth for its own sake, and in being free from prejudice or presupposition, we do disagree.
--- boddi satva <lbo.boddi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I write:
>
> > > First, Science is definitely a practice
> independent
> > > of scientists.
> > > There are rules and procedures (about
> replicability,
> > > the reliability
> > > of different types of data, what is and is not
> > > adequate peer review)
> > > which scientists lay down as the principles of
> their
> > > discipline. These
> > > rules, one finds, consistently presume that
> > > scientists are prejudiced
> > > and seek to remove that prejudice from the
> > > scientific data and
> > > conclusions.
>
> To which Andie replies
>
> > The first paragraph is a contradiction and false
> to
> > boot. If science is different from the practice of
> > scientists, how can it be the rules the scientists
> lay
> > down to govern their professional behavior? It is
> not
> > imposed on them from outside. (Unless you consider
> > funding agencies liked the NSF,, staffed by
> > scientists, to be "outside").
> >
> > Second. Kuhn, Feyerabend, Laudan, Rorty, and
> others
> > have demonstrated that there are no "rules" -- at
> most
> > rough guidelines that vary with the prestige of
> the
> > scientist, the university and the lab or journal,
> and
> > with what the scientist can get away with because
> it
> > works.
> >
>
>
> By your logic law doesn't exist, either. Clearly the
> writings and
> practices of past scientists build up into a body of
> practice
> independent of the scientist. Your objection is a
> tautology. And,
> scientists do have to appeal to the outside world on
> occasion. Nota
> bene the arguments between evolutionary biologists
> and creationists.
>
> Kuhn, et al, were liberal arts majors and I think
> Kuhn made far too
> much of this idea of paradigms.
>
> Of course they exist - String theorists and
> Loop-Quantum Gravity (LQG)
> theorists believe that differing mathematical models
> may explain the
> Universe more clearly and will predict future
> results in cosmology
> more perfectly, but one school is not naive to the
> other. They
> deliberately test the places of distinction between
> the theory because
> that is how you make the theory more predictive.
>
> Paradigms come from the fact that to do good science
> you should have
> an experimental hypothesis which tends to test a
> larger theory. The
> differences between theories are exactly what you
> want to test. You
> want to make the lines sharper so that the theory is
> more precisely
> predictive of more things. Naturally it is a social
> process in terms
> of resources, etc. but, for example, the
> mathematical fact is that
> String theorists posit eleven dimensions of
> space-time and LQG
> theorists accept the standard 3+1 - that's a clear,
> logical
> difference.
>
>
> We exchange as follows
>
> > >
> > > That's really the difference here. Science
> ASSUMES
> > > its own prejudices
> > > and the practice of science is the practice of
> > > finding where
> > > prejudice, wishful thinking and ignorance may
> > > intrude on the
> > > description of Nature.
> >
> > And science is loaded with with wishful thinking
> and
> > ignorance? Top distinguish science `from prejudice
> > when what i sat issue is whether science is loaded
> > with prejudice is question-begging.
>
> Science is not loaded with prejudice, scientists
> are. Your initial
> tautology having failed, science and scientists are
> still separable.
>
> > > Again, the central assumption of science is that
> > > Nature is as it is -
> > > without guile - and that we are eternally
> imperfect,
> > > blinkered and
> > > self-deluding observers of Nature.
> >
> > Sez who? Practicing empirical experimental
> scientists
> > are positivists to the core -- they want to know
> if
> > there are observations that confirm their
> theories. I
> > am a realist, but being a realist is not a
> requirement
> > for being a scientist,
>
> No, I think that scientists themselves are often
> even religious
> people. But science itself demands a test which
> assumes realism.
> Nature is as it is and there is never any
> confirmation which reaches
> the level of truth.
>
> Who says? Well, how about Neils Bohr? He went
> farther than I would
> dare, thusly: "It is wrong to think that the task of
> physics is to
> find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say
> about Nature."
>
> Richard Feynman?: "Science is the belief in the
> ignorance of experts.''
>
> Stephen Jay Gould?: "In science, 'fact' can only
> mean 'confirmed to
> such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold
> provisional
> assent.'"
>
> Sir Arthur Eddington: "For the truth of the
> conclusions of physical
> science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.
> It does not
> follow that every item which we confidently accept
> as physical
> knowledge has actually been certified by the Court;
> our confidence is
> that it would be certified by the Court if it were
> submitted. But it
> does follow that every item of physical knowledge is
> of a form which
> might be submitted to the Court. It must be such
> that we can specify
> (although it may be impracticable to carry out) an
> observational
> procedure which would decide whether it is true or
> not. Clearly a
> statement cannot be tested by observation unless it
> is an assertion
> about the results of observation. Every item of
> physical knowledge
> must therefore be an assertion of what has been or
> would be the result
> of carrying out a specified observational
> procedure."
>
> > > This makes science completely different from and
> > > completely superior
> >
> > Absurd. Religion in its Judeo-Christian forms
> assumed
> > the mind-independence of a supernatural world.
>
> Yeah, but it still talked about a supernatural
> world. Therefore it is inferior.
>
> > > to the systems which preceded it - religion and
> > > philosophy.
> >
> > And as far as I last say, religion and philosophy
> have
> > survived the rise of science, and much of them
> have
> > this objectivist view; moreover philosophy, post
> "new
>
=== message truncated ===
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com