Manny’s Reviews > Defending Science-Within Reason > Status Update

Adolf Hitler announced: "I don't want there to be any intellectual education. We stand at the end of the Age of Reason... A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising, an explanation based on will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral or the scientific sense. Science is a social phenomenon, and like all those, is limited by the usefulness or harm it causes."

A correspondent points out in The Wall Street Journal that you can find in the Old Testament not only the proscription against homosexuality cited in an article earlier in the week, but also proscriptions against touching the skin of a pig, against eating shrimp, and, in the "exquisitely numbered" Leviticus 20:20, against allowing people with imperfect eyesight to approach the altar.

Henry Drummond derided those who "ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the book of Science in search of gaps - gaps they will fill up with God"; God is to be found, not in gaps that science cannot fill, but in the entirety of nature.

On appeal in Berry v. City of Detroit, Judge Guy took the Daubert factors to apply to non-scientific as well as scientific experts, ruling the testimony of a retired sheriff as to the inadequacy of the City's police training and disciplinary procedures inadmissible: his theories had not been tested; he had no peer-reviewed publications; and his methodology was as suspect as his conclusions.

What is troubling is less some English professors' ignorance of specific ideas and theories than a weakening of their grip on the differences between inquiry and fiction; and the fact that some of the goddamn philosophy professors have been tempted to follow suit, transmuting their enterprise from a kind of inquiry - which is what, if it is to be worth anything, all philosophy must be - into just "a kind of writing":

Some years before World War I, a political journal asked several prominent French social scientists what they regarded as the most important method of their field. Others returned detailed methodological recommendations; Georges Sorel replied in one word, "honesty".

"I first became interested in social stratification as a farm boy in northern Pennsylvania," Vincent Packard wrote in 1959, "when my father pointed out to me that one of the cows, I believe her name was Gertrude, always came through the gate first at feeding time."

The scientific method, as far as it is a method, is doing one's damnedest with one's mind, no holds barred.

- Percy Bridgeman, "The Prospect for Intelligence"

New Cynics like Harry Collins assure us that "the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge"; Ruth Hubbard urges that "feminist science must insist on the political nature and content of scientific work"; and Sanda Harding asks why it isn't "as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's laws as 'Newton's rape manual' as it is to call them 'Newton's mechanics'."