Science can also be blinded by faith and dogma
Re: “Make sure you what you believe rests on solid foundations” and “Junk all religion and you throw away priceless tools of insight”, Have Your Say May 1 and 2.
Reading this week’s letter exchange between Christian Knottone and Michael Setter brought to mind a book written by Thomas Kuhn over 50 years ago, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
In the view of “naive empiricists”, scientific advancement is smooth and continuous with the accumulation of knowledge.
But what Kuhn showed is that science progresses in a discontinuous manner, with “paradigm shifts”. With each new theory, all the knowledge accumulated under its predecessor becomes forgotten and redundant.
In the field of psychology, for example, the dominant paradigm until the ’60s was behaviourism. Humans were looked upon as “black boxes” whose behaviour could be explained by the stimulus-response theory. For instance Pavlov’s classic experiment on dogs showed the stimulus for food automatically brought the response of salivation.
Most psychologists followed the
behaviourist paradigm, with career advancement dependent on publishing material within this framework.
But the late ’60s brought a paradigm shift: the cognitive revolution. Now the human brain became important. Rather than being determined by stimulus-response associations, human behaviour was thought to be determined by our thoughts, beliefs and emotions. In other words, it is the human brain which determines how humans will act.
Careers in psychology were now dependent upon producing experiments which supported cognitive theories.
Kuhn emphasised that, like most things in life, science occurs in a social network. It is not just what you know, but also who you know that is important and determines one’s trajectory in life. The smartest and best scientists are not necessarily promoted over others. The point Kuhn was trying to make is that science is not just a neutral discipline in which the best and brightest prosper, but an enterprise heavily influenced by the social nuances of the day.
Christian Knottone may well be correct in asserting that religious belief does not rest on solid foundation, but the question remains: on what foundations does scientific belief depend?
Paul
Khon Kaen
