The Implications for New Models Arising From Within Science

John Maxwell Kerr

Introduction

 

In Robert Browning's poem, Fra Lippo Lippi , the quintocentro Italian friar and artist is talking about attending to the discovery of meaning. I have tried these lines on many scientists in various disciplines: in them, in this array of metaphorical language, they recognise themselves and their quest . For me, it is almost a credal affirmation of my work in science and theology:

This world¹s no blot for us, nor blank;
It means intensely and it means good.
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

Recent admirable biographies of scientists, such as Richard Westfall¹s study of Newton and Geoffrey Cantor¹s of Michael Faraday, and recent studies in the history of science (I cannot commend too highly Brooke and Cantor's Restructuring Nature ) show that science has never been an activity in which fact and value were separated. Science does not flourish in a realm remote from the social matrix from which scientists themselves are drawn: it participates in and interacts with society¹s preoccupations. And yet, the positivistic model of naive realism and indeed of naive inductivism is still held by many scientists: it is a myth which attributes an unique status to scientific knowledge and to scientists which is hard to shed.

Modern philosophy of science finds a place for inductive reasoning within science but also notes Popper¹s hypothetico-deductive model whilst drawing attention to the wide range of methodologies and approaches which produce very acceptable science: the myth of a single scientific method. The objectivist model then cuts science off from its historical continuity and so misrepresents to scientists the very activity through which they seek the meaning(s) of this world. We are alerted to the historical truth that science is a way of becoming,: our current theories and models are the best available so far: there is no reason to suppose they will not in their turn be superseded by further developments and indeed the seeds of those developments are , one expects, being planted and starting to grow within the world-wide research community now. Even the science's self-understanding about how its history proceeded, Kuhn's myth of paradigm shifts and scientific revolution (drawing too exclusively on examples from the history of physics), is being questioned.

One of Goethe's most perceptive prose aphorisms was 'science is the history of science'. This is a truth too generally neglected: it is true for each individual scientist (q.v. even Consilience by E.O. Wilson, a humane and literate advocate of something very like scientism) and it is true for the processes of the scientific enterprise as a whole.

I was fortunate once to pick up from a stack of magazines in a second-hand bookshop a copy of the very first issue of Nature, that hugely prestigious scientific journal. Nature, 1, No. 1, November 4, 1869. In it is an article by T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, a figure thought to represent old-style Victorian scientific materialism. His opening article is based on, of all things, Goethe's participatory model of science, the radically new model of the understanding of science written about in such hopeful terms for the 21st century!! Huxley's words restore science to its human context:'It seemed to me that no more fitting preface could be put before a journal, which aims to mirror the progress of fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of man, which we call the progress of science.'

METAPHOR AND MODEL IN SCIENCE

It is Huxley's metaphor that presents itself to us as useful in this present context. Huxley¹s metaphor suggests that science is a picture. Not the picture. And it is only ever a picture, not the thing itself, the Ding an Sich, and there is no implication that our present theoretical picture, nor any subsequent one, constitutes the final, exhaustively objectively true, complete and only formulation of the image of Nature. Science has always employed metaphor even though the Royal Society, according to Sprat's seventeenth century history, determined to avoid the use of flowery language and to stick as closely as possible to the plain naked mathematical way of speaking. As closely as possible. A metaphor is figure of speech, a trope, a way of 'seeing as'. It is not a convergent mechanism: one could see Nature as whole, reducible to mathematical formulae, something extrinsic to the observer, something within which the observer participates and by participating brings about changes, something charged with the grandeur of God.

And if the metaphor developed by seventeenth century science, that of Nature as clockwork mechanism, as 'it', was fruitful as no other metaphor before that, it seems to me that such a metaphor never precluded the employment of other heuristic metaphors. Nor could it be defended that the implied, 'I - it' relationship of observer to the observed which was generated by that model of the universe the only possible relationship. We stand within the artifice of interlocking theories premised upon the 'onlooker consciousness' of the mechanical model of the cosmos: the structure is indeed admirable. It is like gazing at a great secular cathedral. It is not like gazing at the universe itself: it is a means to that end. And that interlocking framework of theories is made up of theoretical constructs which have been and are fruitful, capable of generating new theoretical possibilities, new approaches, one of which is the paradigm we are exploring here. The structure was never intended to restrict our view nor to foreclose thought. It is certainly possible that a model of science which approached Nature with a logic of self-involvement, working with an 'I - thou' (Buber) model, might in some regimes be more fruitful, more adequate, yield better explanatory scope, than that used so far. The spirit of science would not preclude formulating such a testable hypothesis as this: there are aspects of Nature which are more adequately approached by a participatory model rather than a disengaged observer model of science.

The role of metaphor and model in science and in theology have been illuminated by excellent studies by Barbour, Leatherdale, Soskice and others.

TWO AREAS OF SCIENCE WHICH EVOKE A TRANSCENDING OF THE MODEL OF SCIENCE AS VALUE-FREE MEANS OF EXPLORING AN EXTERNAL MECHANISM

I am sure my colleague Chris Clarke will deal with quantum theory and Schroedinger¹s cat. I will offer two other possibilities.

(i) ECOLOGY

Ecology is still an immature science, rapidly developing, with all the problems technical and philosophical;l of a science in a state far from equilibrium. But it is also a science whose practitioners are constantly being asked by society to deal with situations requiring a response in crisis or near crisis , as in the case of the controversies surrounding the introduction of field trials of genetically modified crops such as oil seed rape into the closely-woven texture of the British landscape.

Ecology, especially Deep Ecology, seems to me to resist the decomposing of interactive systems into their elements for reductionistic analysis. In the literature of ecology, one finds models of fact with value. in modernist pictures, what we ought to do follows from what we can do: questions of value are deemed to follow questions of fact. Scientific enquiry is the primary activity and ethical enquiry is secondary and separate from the primary search for meaning. It is all very Cartesian: matter operates deterministically, causally, mechanistically and has properties such as extension in space. Mind, which is separate, operates rationally and alone has the capacity to attribute value. Any value in Nature is conferred, not intrinsic. rational scientific enquiry, then, of an ecosystem would be engaged in postulating hypotheses and discovering facts so as to test the validity of theories about the ecosystem. Such facts would neither entail nor presuppose any claims about value.

Deep ecology is the first post-modernist science. Science, all traditional science, it claims does presuppose value because it is geared to prediction, control, manipulation of Nature as 'it'.

And yet, Deep Ecology claims, ecosystems display features which are more than simply those of a highly complex mechanism. For example, it is asserted that one could speak about ecosystems having features such as self-directedness, purposiveness, harmony and balance. Rather than as a mechanism, a more appropriate model is that of an organism, or a close analogy may be that of a human community. Models appropriate for research should respect the integrity of the whole.

And considered as systems of energy flow, they cannot be studied completely and exhaustively without remainder as one would study a non-living thermodynamic system such as a heat engine.Ecosystems recover from disturbances, display equilibrium and are self-healing to some extent. The language appropriate for description is at a higher level than that of a calorimeter. Ecosystems require metaphors such as self-directing, teleological, having goals, purposes, aims - all of these entail value. To the extent that such metaphorical language and the models constructed from it is actually necessary and not merely an epiphenomenon of this stage of development of ecology, we are here confronted with a model arising from within a science which is novel relative to most scientific models an transcendent in that it necessarily includes value-laden metaphors.

(ii) GENETIC ENGINEERING

In much of the literature of the science of genetics, something akin to genetic determinism is more than merely implicit. It may have less to do with the content of the science and more with the need to attract research funding but values are declaimed in order to sell, or over-sell, the Human Genome Project. There are, it is claimed (more in the press than in articles in Nature ) genes for homosexuality, criminality, intelligence.... The popular literature goes well beyond the identification and treatment of genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis: it presents an anthropology which its critics call 'playing God' with the human and animal and plant genetic future.

Although some geneticists still advance the claim that their scientific discoveries are absolutely value neutral, this shows quite remarkable unreality. At the level of descriptive natural history, it is the case that European Jews have a higher rate of occurrence of Tay-Sachs disease ( a genetic blood disorder) than non-Jews. A claim that this is merely a neutral observation statement even if made in the context of a rabidly anti-semitic culture such as that of the Third Reich is more than naive. And if scientific knowledge is public knowledge, then the incidence of sickle-cell anaemia among blacks could not possibly be seen as value-free in a racist society: this 'public knowledge' would be proof that blacks have 'bad blood'. It is very naive indeed to suppose that scientific data, public knowledge, is such only when it is read by subscribers to Nature

. And if science is an activity done by human beings, if humans do set out to do the science and apply that science so as to direct evolution so as to fulfil human purposes, are such purposes value-free? The old trite distinction between 'pure' and 'applied' science is a byproduct of the myth of scientific objectivity.

There are two functions exhibited by all scientific theories: theories explain and they predict. Evolutionary explanations- and there are several competing models - offer explanatory accounts. They have- and it seems to me that in the radically contingent world in which such theories must apply, they must have - almost zero predictive power. What evolutionary theory could predict the future outcome of events in any meaningful detail on a planet which could be struck by a large asteroid or destroyed by thermonuclear war? One wonders what sense could be made of a claim that humans will take over and control evolutionary progress? A model based on the notion of humans' power over nature and ability to control its processes which is based on theories with zero predictive power is entirely suspect. And the consequences of applying such beliefs in the world are non trivial. We here are begotten , not made, not the product of the commercial pressures which drive so much science, nor of military and political priorities, nor even of our parents' aesthetic sensibilities and unfulfilled wishes for themselves projected into our genetic makeup. What if that were to change? Would our relationship to the human community be 'I-it' rather than 'I-thou' in a society composed of the artefacts of genetic engineering? What model of such science and its applications could pretend to be value-neutral?

CONCLUSION

These are the seeds of discussion: it seems to me that a new kind of model in science isn¹t unthinkable and quantity and causal mechanism - as Goethe saw- (though he wasn't a very good scientist) does not exhaust the possibilities of good science. My final point is a corrective one: how on earth is one to articulate these new models in such a way as to preserve the admirable intellectual rigour of traditional science.