To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Sunday, September 01, 2019
 

Those in the field of social science usually come up against this insinuation in academic as well as lay contexts that those engaged in natural science or the hard sciences are somehow engaged in a superior enterprise. Social science, according to these people, is not a ‘science’ at all but quackery passing off as a ‘science’. I believe the sense of superiority comes from the notion of ‘objectivity’ or in other words accuracy, reliability, validity which are all seen as must-have attributes of anything that aspires to call itself science—what you see is what you get, in simplistic terms.
The ‘pure sciences’ as they’re sometimes called endeavour to ‘discover’ what is ‘out there’ or ‘explain’ how what is ‘out there’ works as it does. This could be anything, how the human body functions, why rain happens, what makes the earth go round, why animal species go extinct, so on and so forth. The scientific method (observation, experimentation, measurement etc.) is used to make these discoveries or come up with explanations, building our storehouse of knowledge in the process. Science also reserves the possibility of refuting its own explanations and putting up new ones in their place or modifying the explanations given earlier or extending them, as new evidence arises, but whatever it does, it is committed to the agenda of pushing forward the limits of our current knowledge of the stuff of the world (or maybe our world as we with our senses may know it). The more knowledge it discovers or uncovers the more it is able to put it to use for humanity’s benefit (sometimes inadvertently perhaps collective harm).
I have to admit at this juncture that I am not trying to put down science or to diminish its many marvellous achievements but simply trying to present it as a field of enquiry as any other with a purpose that can be construed to be as lofty or less than any other depending on what questions one considers worth asking or what knowledge one considers worth pursuing. While science does a good job of discovering or explaining what is ‘out there’, it cannot tell us much about why what is ‘out there’ is there or why what is ‘out there’ is there the way it is or affects us the way it does, from a larger perspective rather than by referencing the other things that are out there. It can tell us for example that the universe operates according to fixed laws that are mathematically precise and by discovering those fixed laws it can predict events with mathematical precision—but it cannot tell us why the universe operates according to these laws in the first place or what makes it stick to these laws on which our very existence (or at least the order in it) depends. Our scientific ability to discover, control or predict the workings of nature is completely dependent on the fact that nature has this inbuilt unity and coherence in its structure. Science is engrossed in discovering these unities and patterns and laws which is very useful in a way because the more we know about it the more we are able to harness it to our benefit but it cannot tell us anything outside this material scheme of events. And one must see that it is the nature of the universe itself that allows for the possibility of ‘science’ so to speak, rather than science taming nature.
Now, for those who are interested in seeking answers to questions that go beyond the material world or that relate to our inner world, interested in going beyond simply noting the many unities in nature to interrogating the causes of those unities, interested less in the practical implications of those unities and more in the abstract principles from which these unities arise, interested in the nature of the very apparatus we have or the limitations of this apparatus to gain knowledge that transcends the material world… for such forms of enquiry this science or rather its methods would not be amenable indeed. Whether we consider these questions to be less worthy of pursuit simply because we’d rather have accurate, definite, valid answers or whether we consider the exploration or investigation of these questions a worthy endeavour in its own right perhaps depends as much on what we intrinsically value as the value of the questions themselves.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 3:53 am 0 comments
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