Brief Summary

This book is primarily a treatment on the History and Philosophy of Science, but its major contribution to the field of history and philosophy is my examination of the social and economic context of several unique scientific developments. Bringing this context into the discussion of the history of science helps the reader to understand how some of the controversies which surround concepts in differing branches of science have come to take on the significance they have in their relation to society. The seeming division that we experience between the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences is also something that is brought into greater focus and put into a broader social understanding which helps the reader to contextualize science, in itself, as a whole.

Broad sections of historical significance will be addressed but the main focus of study will review the rise of capitalism in the early-modern era and its influence on scientific development up to our present day and age. We will get the opportunity to see how the industrial revolution has forever changed the independent aims of scientific development and has in turn also altered the ways universities handle entrepreneurial efforts and academic capitalism. The reader will get the opportunity to see how Western education attempted to adapt to the changing social and economic environment by subsuming science into its curriculum and changing the focus of education towards marketable skills and greater integration with the growing industrial economy.

The ongoing focus of higher education in its efforts to teach marketable skills and support industrial trade-craft has made higher education appear as a relative panacea of development. However, reflection on the international state of affairs with regards to our current educational practices reveals that university-industry relations can also have adverse effects on social mobility and the general openness of scientific thought. The imperialistic nature of these university-industry relations is encouraging the growth of a financially risk intensive managerial class which tends to benefit the already wealthy and allows industries to externalize all of their own costs by taking advantage of the university system. Patents, technology transfer offices, and the privatization of knowledge are also acting as barriers to social integration which exclude people from information unless they are otherwise able to accommodate the substantial cost of entry into the entrepreneurial development system on their own.

The capitalistic development of scientific ideas has also been historically disruptive to traditional, or otherwise customary, social practices. Inventions like programmable power looms, mechanized tractors, logic based computers, or any number of other development tools have influences which change what was previously possible and, in the process, introduce many questions about how society should be ordered around such inventions in terms of the appropriate social, political, economic, and even environmental accommodations. Exploitation of these industrialized inventions can generate ideas about social progress, but there are many issues which arise when local norms come into contact with international affairs through international trade. Questions about what “progress” really means and what these appropriate social/environmental relations ought to be begin to emerge in substantial ways as problems with human rights, wealth inequalities, and pollution emerge on scales that independent states are ill equipped to deal with without conflict or international coordination.

Distinctions between local and global norms of social conduct will be seen as central to nearly all of our struggles with what social progress and development mean on an international scale. The fact that the objectivity of science does not seem to tell us anything about what the social order should ultimately be means that scientific developments must be integrated within society and be given values, or purposes, which suit local social needs. Ideas like private property, nationalism, individualism, and a number of other unique points of contact between public and private affairs create a great deal of friction in the process of forming social norms. In analyzing these conflicts, we will come to discover that this divide between public and private affairs is also another way of restating the conflict between the normalizing pressures of traditional institutional order at the social-unit level (i.e., family, city, state, country, etc.), and that of the rebellious impulses of the anti-traditional populist movements with independent innovation and discovery.

Collective social institutions present resistance to change and attempt to limit the impact of innovation as they work to evaluate the value of new ideas. Most people are familiar with Galileo and the struggles that scientific thought had in its attempt to gain a footing in traditional institutions, but science is having a much broader impact on the world today and the divide between order and seeming chaos is still ripe for conflict. We may have, in some sense, overcome struggles with superstition in the development of scientific practices, but environmental degradation, economic imperialism, rampant individualism, and a whole host of other problems with integration have followed in its wake.

When we are talking about scientific development, we seem to always be in the process of recreating the world, rather than simply discovering the world. It is not enough that we come to understand how a plant grows in nature. An objective representation of plant physiology does nothing useful other than simply describe a part of the observable world. We may be able to recognize its existence in the world in the same way we recognize rain falling from the sky but, in order for us to take advantage of this knowledge, we end up recreating what would otherwise be the natural course of things. In other words, the science of irrigation implies that we are to re-create the general order of the world in order to suit our own local purposes. So, when this is taken in context of widespread international development, this divide between public and private interests in science comes to imply much more than a simple isolated adherence to an objective world order because independent local values are attempting to recreate global values in their own image. There are independent motivating interests involved which other groups may not fully identify with and the history of science will show us how these social organizing strategies fall between two overarching methods of world creation: 1.) Organismic and ecological worldviews which seek to find man’s place within nature in order to emphasize integration and sustaining traditional values; or 2.) Mechanistic worldviews which are often believed to be value-neutral as they develop islands of artificial reality, or locally independent conceptions of order within the world at large – i.e., the refrigerator creating an artificial environment for food storage, irrigation for farming, etc.

This book does not set out to argue that the anti-traditional aspects of capitalism are a net negative for science as a whole, but in the process of reviewing the history of science it is important to reflect on some of these complications in order to put scientific practice into its appropriate social context. A discussion of the economy in terms of personal and collective preferences is mostly meant to set the stage for an examination of how scientific thought develops in practice with all of the tools and technologies we use. My aim in all of this is not to make large comparisons between free-market economies and planned-market strategies, but it is important to recognize that there are always questions about where research and development funds should be allocated when nationalistic, capitalistic, or even generic values are involved in the overall market place of ideas. Researchers and investors are not free from their own biases of what should be done with their work. The existing problems we are dealing with in regards to social or environmental degradation, and the potential problems that could ultimately come about through further innovation, have always been important considerations for scientific research. My book will be taking an international approach to this problem in order to highlighting some of the kinds of cultural impacts that science can have on society when thinking about it in terms of social development strategies.

Purely philosophical treatments of science often look at science as if the development process were cumulative and continuously refined by a self-correcting critique process which adheres to uncompromising standards of objectivity. The historic record of private contributions to scientific inquiry, on the other hand, shows how actual scientific work tends to be just as chaotic and discontinuous as all of the other tools and technologies that are developed in the economy (unless otherwise maintained through traditional practices). Universities and widely distributed networks of journals do help to stabilize our terminology and methods of analysis, but scientific jargon also suffers from the same kinds of problems we see in our economy when it comes to the compatibility issues we have with all of the products and tools that are developed in the overall marketplace of ideas.

It is common knowledge that Blu-ray discs do not work in DVD players and that gas stations do not help electric vehicles very much, but it is not always clear what “progress” really means in the context of these items. Comparing one thing to the other might get us into disputes over whether or not analog recordings are superior, more efficient, or even more convenient than digital recordings. However, none of these standards of measurement have anything to say about what objective order really exists in the world at large, or even how we should live our lives accordingly. The standards of objectivity in science are simply a set of standards for measuring things, and the things that you choose to measure in their relation to reality can end up telling you very different things about our notions of order within reality.

In the same way, we can see that technical jargon within the Physics department is split between the kinds of mathematics that are used in Relativity theory and the kinds of mathematics that are used in Quantum theory. The concepts and theoretical frameworks scientists use within these departments are sound in their own right, and there really isn’t much doubt about how they have been verified through countless rigorous experiments. What needs to be noted, though, is that the concepts being used in each theory are not interchangeable. They measure different parts of reality and ultimately imply differing truths about the makeup of reality. It is not like we can say one framework is more objective than the other because objectivity does not really have anything to say about what it takes to be an explanation in the first place. There are even larger questions about what observations count as fundamental, or even consequential, within any theory if the same evidence can lend itself to alternative modes of interpretation.

Different branches of science are even seen to bring about vastly different ethical obligations when comparing something like the truths of physics to the truths of psychology in their appropriate social settings. We seem to want there to be some kind of “objective” world order that can settle all disputes without conflict, but the social consequences of what we take objective truth to actually represent in society can mean the difference between ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘nihilistic neutrality’ if we are not careful about what we mean to say about what our relationship to science really represents. It is not always as easy as saying that science is value neutral and that ethical debates do not apply to pure scientific thought, either. Both hard and soft sciences exert normalizing influences on the world in the way that they order our community perceptions and enforce restrictions on membership within that particular world view (i.e. paradigms, traditions, citizenship, etc.). This is something that embellishes the distinction between mechanistic world views and organismic world views because the restrictions that physics and psychology put on our social practices work in different ways.

Anyone who wants physics to be completely value neutral might not be fully aware of the ways that engineers bridge the gap between theory and practice in social environments. We seem to be immediately aware of the influence that psychology has on social behavior, but it is not often recognized that engineers also enforce restrictions on our behavior when they construct escalators instead of ramps, or even USB ports instead of 20-pin ports. In ways that are not always fully conscious to the typical operators of these devices, we can see that certain viewpoints about the world have been normalized and values have been imbued into their operation which seem to exclude other things, like wheelchairs or even old video ports. Building machines adapted to us on local orders of value seems to overlook the need to be adapted to the overall global network of ideals. There is a gap between “objective” values and the rest of the world’s values that will often bring our standards of measurement into question and it is interesting to note how the ‘harder’ sciences seem to want to impose order on the world instead of adapting to them, like their ‘softer’ counterparts.

This problem with values in science gets even deeper when we consider the way that traditions and social structures impinge upon our ontological commitments over what is “real” in the world. This is not a trivial matter because we do not know if there are indeed carrier particles of gravity (as Quantum theory suggests) or if gravity is indeed a “real” force of nature (since Relativity suggests it is not). It is not even certain if consciousness is a verifiably “real” phenomenon which can help us distinguish humans from zombies (or even cats from dogs). One can say that the argument from common sense about the existence of gravity is straight-forward enough since we “experience” the phenomena on a daily basis, but the argument does not look much different for accusations about vitalism in organic matter (or otherwise indistinguishable inert/dead matter) because we “experience” consciousness on a daily basis in much the same way. What is “real” and what concepts merit purpose driven attention is largely a matter of public opinion with regards to what kinds of experiments are awarded resources for development, and these issues will be explored in the context of the social/economic development theories of the modern world.

All in all, I want to say that attempting to show how free-market based economies demonstrate non-linear and chaotic behaviors, much like scientific “progress” does in the laboratory, is not something that is meant to diminish science in any way. Scientific knowledge is indeed a remarkable achievement of modern man. The fact that there is value in development is something that I believe is indisputable. It is simply my contention that science needs to be put into the context of human experience because a lot of fundamental questions about what is worth maintaining get left untouched when science is driven mainly by industrial/commercial interests rather than the global community of interests. Part of the argument that I will make about science is that it would benefit everybody to learn more about the kinds of structural interests that are involved in the development process. I want to make sure you are able to take part in the world-making part of the experience and your insights are not left out. It is a matter of how value is expressed in the world that needs to be included in the scientific process, and my arguments will be presented in such a way that academic researchers should be able to benefit, but the general reader is my main target audience.

Bibliographical sampler:

History:

Windelband, W. (1958). A History of Philosophy: Volumes 1-2. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Bernal, J. D. (1979). Science in History: Volumes 1-4. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.

Gregory, F. (2008). Natural Science in Western History. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Grant, E. (2011). The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ede, A., & Cormack, L. B. (2017). A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility, Third Edition. Ontario: University of Toronto Press.

Burtt, E. A. (2003). The Metaphysical Foundation of Modern Science. Mineola: Dover.

Harmon, P. M. (1982). Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Developments of Nineteenth-Century Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Philosophy:

Hanson, N. R. (1958). Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, M. (2009). History of Madness. London and New York: Routledge.

Sober, E. (1997). Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge and London: M.I.T. Press.

Ayer, A. J. (1952). Language Truth & Logic. New York: Dover.

Gentner, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. Cambridge and London: M.I.T. Press.

Bloor, D. (1991). Knowledge and Social Imagery, Second Edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Fraassen, B. C. (2013). The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Heisenberg, W. (1962). Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi, and Auckland: Harper Perennial Modern Thought.

Smolin, L. (2007). The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Lakatos, I. (1977). Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery. London: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, J. (2016). Interpreting Gödel: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Armstrong, D. M. (2016). What is a Law of Nature? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Giere, R. N. (1999). Science Without Laws. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Fayerabend, P. (2010). Against Method, New Edition. London and New York: Verso.

Quine, W. V., & Ullian, J. S. (1978). The Web of Belief: Second Edition. New York: Random House.

Socioeconomic:

Ravetz, J. R. (2019). Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems. London and New York: Routledge.

Durkheim, E., & Trans. Simpson, G. (2019). The Division of Labor in Society. Digireads.com Publishing.

Rhoads, R. A., & Torres, C. A. (2006). The University, State, and Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Sell, S. K. (2003). Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cutler, A. C. (2003). Private Power and Global Authority: Transnational Merchant Law in the Global Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

O'Brien, R., Goetz, A. M., Scholte, J. A., & Williams, M. (2000). Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

MacIntyre, A. (2014). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Michaels, D. (2020). The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception. New York: Oxford University Press.

Markowitz, G., & Rosner, D. (2002). Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of Chicago Press.

Greenberg, D. S. (2001). Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.