Every scientific activity has some relationship, negative or positive, with the other ways of human thinking, which may occur in diverse instances, such as religion (i.e. hermeneutics), politics, medicine, media or more simply the individual man.
According to the definition given to scientific reasoning, its links to the other ways of thinking may be very different. I will not present here the different definitions we can use, but look in more detail to two major approaches: inductivism, in the sense given by Bacon, and deductivism, in the sense given by Hume and Popper. However the participants to this discussion are invited to introduce other scientific approaches.
For inductivism, Bacon said:
There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgement and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.
This new way leads to a true induction (as discovering principles from the study of their consequences), while the first leads to idols and false notions, which are used by the other ways of thinking. The discovered principles are not numerous, and without the laws of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, et al., the facts observed would be different.
For deductivism, Hume revived the traditional meaning of induction (as generalization) which was clearly rejected by Bacon, and restored its deductive conception. This leads for example to the falsificationism of Popper, which accepts different hypotheses in order to try to falsify them. These hypotheses can easily be drawn from other ways of thinking, if they don’t contradict our observations, but they may be as numerous as them.
The joined document examines the interrelationships between scientific and non-scientific thinking about inoculation and vaccination against smallpox, and is part of a more detailed paper not yet published. For the Baconian idols, you may have a look to the paper I presented with Jakub Bijak, Robert Franck and Eric Silverman on: Are the four Baconian idols still alive in demography?, at the Chaire Quetelet 2013.
I would appreciate an exchange of ideas on this topic, as well from natural sciences as from social sciences.
One weird connection between rational thought, as we usually think of it (rationally, perhaps) and the broader notion of religious thought has to do with the assertion by some that religious thinking does change the way people think. One possible change would be that in the rhetoric of one's prayer to a supreme being, there is one appeal that goes right out the window, the appeal to ethos. One cannot argue to god what god says. That leaves a person with either the pathos or the logos. There is a chance then that when one prays, one actually can become more rational than usual. Though I am an atheist, I find praying to Uncertainty quite gratifying.
I see William of Ockham as an early pioneer in the philosophy of science. The principle of parsimony known as Occam's razor originated with him. I see this as the religious root of science as a process. Perhaps the reasoning of medieval scholastics were in a sense a bridge between what we would term today as the "science-art divide".
Thank you Scott for your answer about religious thinking.
I think that religion may play a negative role in the dissemination of scientific results, revealing the importance of hermeneutics in religious thought. We are dealing here not with “popular” knowledge but with theologians’ knowledge, which differs in kind from scholarly knowledge. It consists in interpreting Scripture or texts by saints or renowned theologians. As the authority of the Church—itself rooted in divine authority—is the source of all truth, so any opinion that contradicts it can only be condemned. Graunt, for example, was afraid to estimate the population of London because the Bible stated that God had punished David for his census of the Israelites. However, having established the legitimacy of the estimation, Graunt went nevertheless ahead with his project. Similarly, the position that Suarez expressed under the doctrine of probabilism went against Pascal and Fermat’s discoveries on probability, condemned by Pope Alexander VII’s Bull. In my paper on smallpox, this hermeneutics is what inspired the writings of Rev. Massey in England and Rev. Dr. Williams in New England against inoculation, in which they clearly stated that the method could not be based on any religious text and was accordingly a diabolical operation. Interestingly, in New England, it was Puritan ministers, Increase and Cotton Mather, who recommended inoculation on the strength of the Biblical commandment: Thou shalt not kill. In other words, the same hermeneutic method served for some religious figures to condemn inoculation as a sin and for others to sanctify it as God’s providence.
I think also that Bacon's idola theatri are in part coming from religion and theology. He clearly said: For were it not that now for many ages men's minds have been busied with religion and theology, and added later: on the phenomena of he heavens many hypotheses may be constructed ...
I agree that the theological foundation for knowledge is understandably bankrupt, especially for hard science and that makes sense. However the modernist project of establishing an alternate foundation has also fallen on hard times. We may think those that argue for a return to pre-modern ideas of knowledge are barking madly up the wrong tree (as I also believe) but we ignore how we have performed a kind of substitution exercise: god the unknowable has been replaced by god the so-far-unknown. We still think is religious ways about what we believe. And that might not be completely bad. I am thinking of John Milbank's clever argument about how Christendom created the secular in Theology and Social Theory. It is a fairly Hegelian argument that our argument against religion is done in the context of it. In "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Derrida suggests that the language of such an argument must contain and presume the existence of theology, and follow its logic.
I agree that religious censorship of scientific exploration and discourse seek to shut down discourse and create a happy feedback loop of repetition, no doubt. But that perception also includes religious thought, an appraisal that to be valid must observe the nature of theological truth. We have not really left anything behind and that is why the debate is so maddening.
I appreciate your sentence about god the unknowable replaced by god the so-far-unknown. But I think that the so-far-unknown permits advances in knowledge, while the unknown permits only a hermeneutical knowledge, interpretation of what wrote the author, divine for the sacred texts across all faiths.
I also think that a modern form of hermeneutics occurred during the last third of the twentieth century, with philosophers like Gadamer, Habermas, Heidegger and Ricoeur and social scientists like Skinner or Giddens, and that it failed. First, if it does not recognize any value to the usual scientific methods, it is however unable to provide any guidance for their actual practice. Second, it considers that the studied facts may be explained only by the particular ideas in vogue during a short period of time around their arrival. Such an absence of connections between events occurring in different periods of time cuts any link existing between events occurring in different times. Finally, written texts, which hermeneutists mainly consider, come from so many different authors and so often contradict each other than we may wonder how any real scientific result could be extracted from them.
What you suggest about these writers is a bit reductive for me. Not sure if they failed their projects, though you may not see how their approach usefully considers the problem of science. Heidegger, for instance, in Being and Time, really only suggests anything about science by extension. One might consider the scientist as authentic dasein if he cleaves to his findings in spite of what his society believes. One might consider the scientist focused on the world within Heidegger's notion of facticity. Not sure if that is very helpful in the struggle between belief and discovery. On the other hand, some of Gadamer might argue that the meaning of scientific thought over time changes and is irrecoverable. I believe there is something in this idea. The meaning of the machine, for instance, has changed over time (witness "steam punk's" attempt to recover its meaning in fantasy). If I read things usefully, the lack of connection you note in "time cuts any link existing between events occurring in different times," is part of that old anti-Hegelian move that led to logical positivism in modern philosophy. Consider Frege's insistence on math as an example of a rationally transcendent system that is true independent of people and time. It is, against Hegel, always here and now. Aren't some of these folks then your allies?
By the way, I was intrigued with the "Correction of BMI Using Body Shape" article. I was struck with the problem of children's ignorance of parents' social status. Any possible correlation between BMI and social status is problematized by a curiously bourgeois difficulty, the abstraction of social class, parents' careers (what do they do for a living?), how important are they in the society, etc., has been systemically obscured such that the children cannot estimate these things. Very different from some earlier eras.
About modern hermeneutists, I know that a number of researchers think, like you, that they did not fail their project. In order to go further, you will find in the enclosed file a more detailed criticism of this approach. It is a part of a paper on Are the four Baconian idols still alive in demography?, which will be published soon, and considers the fourth idol of the Theatre to be modern hermeneutism. I will be happy to have your opinion on our grievances against such an idol: one of the authors of this paper is a philosopher, Robert Franck, who is editor with me of the Methodos Series, published by Springer, the three others are demographers.
The paper on "Are the four Baconian idols still alive in demography", I prepared with Jakub Bijak, Robert Franck and Eric Silverman is now available in the Quetelet Journal. In this paper, we examine the four Idols that beset human minds according to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620). These are: Idols of the Tribe – false assertions resulting from the belief that «the sense of man is the measure of things»; Idols of the Cave – peculiar to the individual people; Idols of the Market Place – resulting from «the intercourse and association of men with each other», and Idols of the Theatre – stemming from «dogmas of philosophies and… wrong laws of demonstration ». We aim to see if these Idols are still alive in contemporary population sciences, and look at several examples from the fringes of demography – behaviour genetics, postmodern theory, hereditarianism, and modern hermeneutics. The analysis of these examples strongly suggests that demography needs to remain faithful to the scientific method whilst looking for new insights and inspirations.
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