For the last three generations it has become fashionable to be relativists about the notion of truth. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a downgrading of science relative to allegedly intuitive, esoteric and non-empirical forms of knowing. Of the popularity of such assertions there can be no doubt. However, there is a minority opinion expressed with characteristically undiplomatic force by an Australian philosopher, the late Professor Stove. In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, he contended that this cultural trend has resulted in “arts faculties becoming forcing houses for every known form of intellectual pathogen.” I think he has a point.
In his book A Devil’s Chaplain, Richard Dawkins quotes from a book by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertgke, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies, who provide us with a half-baked version of cultural relativism feminist style:
Women’s Studies students are now being taught that logic is a tool of domination…the standard norms and methods of scientific inquiry are sexist because they are incompatible with women’s ways of knowing…These subjectivist women see the methods of logic, analysis and abstraction as alien territory belonging to men and value intuition as a safer and more truthful approach to truth…
(Dawkins, The Devil’s Chaplain, p.14)
Well, how should we respond to allegations that faith in logic and established scientific truths are just a matter of faith, presumably no different in kind from the sort of faith that obliges several billion to believe—or at least pretend to believe—in something like the immaculate conception?
In another book of his, The River Out of Eden, Dawkins gives what seems to me a splendid answer:
Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite…If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics the reason you’ll probably get there—the reason you won’t plummet into a ploughed field—is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers got their sums right.
(Quoted in The Devil’s Chaplain, p. 15)
Just so: the ability that physics has evolved over the last 400 years to manipulate matter to great effect on command and, in the case of quantum mechanics, to make predictions accurate to 15 decimal places is not something to be explained away, especially when you cannot reproduce it or anything like it.
It also seems to me that none of the nonsense people like Dawkins, the late Stephen Jay Gould, the late Martin Gardner and the feminist authors in the quotation above refer to in any way affect our ordinary everyday notion of what it means for something to be true.
After all, if you are in the witness stand and a judge asks you whether you were in Cape Town on the night of the murder and were an eyewitness to it, you are not going to be well-received if you replied that it is only in terms of western concepts of truth that you could be said to be “in” Cape Town or anywhere else and that on any of Zulu, Indonesian, Inuit or Navajo conceptions of truth—take your pick, the list is potentially infinite—nor would you expect to be.
It is simply true that I am writing these words using a Samsung laptop to do so, that it is on a table made of wood and that a printer and several books are placed to the right of the computer. These are no more matters awaiting future falsification than that the DNA molecule consists of a double helix or that the sun is a vast ball of hot gas about 1,000,000 times the size of the earth.
If you really wish to be pedantic you can—using fashionable talk—say that all of these are hypothesis awaiting a confirmation that will never come. Well, to take an example of such a line much loved by creationists and other believers in biblical literalism it is a conjecture or, to use their preferred work, a “theory” that dinosaurs do not predate people. They could even be proven right if even one human fossil, credibly dated, were to bear them out.
Don’t bet on it. The cumulative weight of evidence makes biblical literalism false and makes the contrary assertion as true as the fact that I am at the moment typing on my Samsung. The real problem is that the biological and geological evidence get in the way of human vanity and the desires it creates in so many of us to think of ourselves as the summit and purpose of creation rather than as a Johnny-come-lately land mammal that was not around for billions of years and will at some unknown point in the future no doubt cease to exist.
Thomas Kuhn
An explanation of why certain views are so much the rage is something that I cannot answer, but there is no question that Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—or at least what many have made of this book—played a part. I say “what many have made of this book” because the late Professor Kuhn has on several occasions expressed great distress at the conclusions that others have drawn from his work. I am not able to comment on this or the relationship between what is by far his most famous work and the other books he has written.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is best known for its use of the idea of a paradigm and how switches between different paradigms are effected. In ordinary non-scientific English the word “paradigm” means “a typical example or model of something,” and that is how Kuhn tended to use the word in his well-known history of the Copernican Revolution. However, Margaret Masterson has claimed that the word has been used in more than 20 different senses in Kuhn’s most famous book, something which in itself makes assessment difficult. I am going to ignore this complication and give a potted summary of what I believe is a common view of Kuhn’s intentions.
Kuhn claims to have detected a recurring cycle of sorts, one that plays out again and again in the history of science. First one has a pre-paradigm state, to my mind a genteel academic euphemism for a state of intellectual chaos. Difficulties are legion, no widely accepted explanations that account satisfactorily for troubling phenomena are available and one man’s solution is another man’s problem.
Gradually—sometimes over generations—a widely acknowledged model of how one ought to proceed emerges. The model is often but not necessarily codified in a great book such as Newton’s Principia. Newton’s work is perhaps the greatest example of how the model becomes established among working scientists because of its ability to unify a vast number of previously disparate phenomena such as the fall of an apple, the forces responsible for the oceans’ tides and the orbits of planets. Not merely are many problems solved, but the methods by which disparate facts have been unified suggest productive means by which many other previously insoluble puzzles might be reduced to order too.
The often extended periods in which scientists use these methods to solve new problems using accepted methods are in some ways like a gigantic mopping up operation: such periods Kuhn calls “normal science.”
Inevitably, even though it may take centuries, new problems arise which the now established methods cannot solve. Once the problems become sufficiently numerous and serious, if a new paradigm presents itself we may have paradigm-shift. If the new paradigm proves capable of the kinds of successes once brought about by the paradigm that is now crumbling, a new period of normal science will again ensue.
If you take this simply to be an account of the actual history of science, you will find more or less worth in it depending on how accurate as history you think Kuhn’s work is. However, this is the beginning of the story rather than its ending. Kuhn’s work has certainly been taken by others to be a justification for an extremely relativistic philosophy of science (the extent to which Kuhn himself did is, as mentioned earlier, rather less clear).
Kuhn and others seem to have become reluctant to talk of either truth or falsity because of all this. As a result, “knowledge,” “discovery,” “progress” and the like become rather like propaganda terms used in battles between advocates of rival paradigms. As the great physicist Steven Weinberg points out in his book Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, the effect of all this is to make paradigm-shift seem more like a religious conversion than an exercise of reason. So much so that it is claimed that is almost impossible for scientists to see things after a scientific revolution the way they did before the revolution. This construction of Kuhn’s message is not implausible given Kuhn’s use of the analogy of a gestalt flip.
It is entirely consistent with all of the above that it is claimed also that the standards by which theories are assessed change as well and that, to use a word that has become widely-known as a result of Kuhn, that different scientific paradigms are “incommensurable.” In short, there are no common standards by which to judge theories developed under different paradigms.
An article of this scope does not permit detailed discussion and rebuttal, but some points made by Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a one-time colleague of Kuhn, are worth noting.
First, all the evidence is against the claim that scientists simply cannot switch back and forth between different ways of seeing pre and post paradigm shifts. It is hardly as if Einstein’s theories have made Newton’s so strange that they are scarcely intelligible now. As Weinberg points out, the first thing that university physics and engineering students are taught is good old-fashioned Newtonian mechanics. And with good reason, for Newtonian physics works perfectly well in circumstances where velocities are negligible compared with the speed of light. We are dealing with applicability in a more restricted set of circumstances than was previously believed to be the case, but this is a far cry from incommensurability. Things are the more strange because Kuhn, as a Harvard lecturer, must have taught Newtonian physics himself to undergraduates.
Weinberg, who has participated in major revolutions in physics himself, also points out that they do not change the way in which he and the overwhelming majority of his colleagues assess theories. He and others still assess theories in much the same ways, regarding a theory as a success if it is based on simple general principles—as few as possible—and does a good job when it comes to accounting for experimental data in a natural and unforced way. There are admittedly no algorithms to assess simplicity because a theory which is simpler than its rivals in some ways may be more complex in others, but the need to make trade-offs for which we cannot formulate exact rules is a very different state of affairs from incommensurability.
As Weinberg points out, at some level Kuhn himself seems to feel uncomfortable because he himself in his book on the Copernican Revolution made the point that new and more successful theories incorporate parts of the earlier theories they supplant. At this point I shall let Weinberg speak for himself:
Confronting this dilemma Kuhn gave, in Structures, what for him was a remarkably weak defence, that Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics as we use them today are not the same theories as they were before the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics because they were not known to be approximate and now we know that they are. It is like saying the steak you eat is not the one you bought because you now know that it is stringy and before you didn’t.
Weinberg, Facing Up, p. 198)
Maybe cultural relativism is in part a perverse form of embarrassment in the face of the fact that it is only in the hard sciences that we have been able to make sustained progress and it would be good to know why there are not elsewhere. This is no doubt why Professor Stove calls such relativists “bohemian enemies of success.”
I would like to point out something else of a logical nature. When relativists tell us for a fact that there are no facts or such Marxists as are left assure us that all our views—except presumably theirs—are products of our class position, we are entitled to wonder how they and only they have escaped the general doom so completely as to enable them to inform us of it.
The worst of it is that by setting logic, hypothesis formation and testing and experiment at a discount we end up putting aside what we have painstakingly learned about how to learn, because science is about learning how to learn rather than about specific conclusions.
Perhaps it is time for us—especially in the humanities–to do a bit of rethinking.