Received: from smtpgate.uvm.edu (smtpgate.uvm.edu [132.198.101.121]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.7.6/8.7.3/CNS-4.0p) with SMTP id IAA22798 for ; Sun, 20 Apr 1997 08:16:40 -0600 (MDT) Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 08:16:40 -0600 (MDT) Received: from 8N9J6 (132.198.142.106) by smtpgate.uvm.edu (LSMTP for Windows NT v1.1a) with SMTP id <0.AE2417B0@smtpgate.uvm.edu>; 20 Apr 1997 10:14:49 -0400 Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19970420101654.24dfbac8@pop.uvm.edu> X-Sender: tryoung@pop.uvm.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu From: TR Young Subject: The Logics of Scientific Discovery Cc: SOCIAL-CLASS@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU There is much of value in postmodern sensibility. We can appreciate the point a bit better when we step back and look at the knowledge process in history... In that history, there have been two great turning points. It is I believe, helpful to consider that each new knowledge process adds dimensions to the knowledge process...rather than displaces earlier, more 'primitive' pathways to knowledge. In defending/exploring postmodern knowledge processes I usually begin with.. A. Pre-modern knowledge processes, the logic of which is: 1. There is another parallel world from which the souls of humans came and to which they may go after death. 2. In that 'dream-world,' people know ultimate truth since they are immersed in it. 3. While invested in this world, people bring fragments of truth with them...and, in socratic pedagogy, it is possible to draw out that truth...to e-duct it...by careful, sequential questioning of students and others who are close to that other world. 4. In some versions of the other world, the logic is: a. there is a god(s) b. that god has a plan for social life c. the mission of the knowledge process is to discover the will/wishes of the god(s) d. the method is ectstasy: leaving this world, this body in order to be receptive to messages from the spirit world. Spefically, 1) meditation 3) psychogens which alter 2) prayer body states/brain function These pathways to knowledge yield scientific insights no less valuable than statistical inference or qualitative analysis. However, postmodern philosophy of science would agree with a Wm Blake/durkheimian view that these insights come from more from poetic genius; more from the superorganic than from message from the supernatural. For most of human history, pre-modern knowledge processes gave us what insight we have in the ways both natural and social life may be managed. More than that, pre-modern knowledge processes: belief, trust, hope, faith, prophecy and obedience...these are essential to the reality-creating process from which most if not all social forms come... As Marx held, one knows social reality best when one participates fully in the construction of the social institutions in which one must, perforce, live. B. The first major turning point in the knowledge process came, arguably, when Newton published 'Principic Mathematica' ....mathematical principles of natural science...Newton gave us the laws of motion which are very precise as well as a means to predict the behavior of bodies in a gravit- tational field...with amazing accuracy. Building upon the work of Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo and thousands of others since the beginnings of mathematics in India, Persia and Greece, Newton gave us a new logic upon human knowledge is grounded...it is called 'modern' science even though its roots are in ancient efforts to find the will of god in the magic of numbers. The mission of modern science is to map out the workings of physical, natural and social systems using... The method of successive approximations...which requires one take existing statements about natural and social systems and refine them until one has a theoretical model which is: 1. precise...it can predict behavior in the system with an accuracy approaching 10 to the 14th power...Penrose calls these superb theories. 2. univeral...it covers all such systems. 3. coherent...predictions of the behavior of one part of the system can be generated using aristotlean logic upon other better known parts of the system. 4. stable...truth statements, once confirmed, are true forever. Implicit in all these assumptions about 'science' is the assumption of linearity...more about which later. Modern science, using the method of successive approximations has provided great treasure to the knowledge industry. Going from sucess to success, modern science has greatly improved knowledge of communications, transportation, housing, agriculture, materials, medicine, energy systems as well as knowledge itself. The epistemological tools of modern science include aristotlean logic, newtonian dynamics, liebnizean calculus, as well as statistical inference from Pascal and others. C. For most people on the face of the earth today, the knowledge process centers around a huge inventory of pre-modern truths...and truly, these are adequate to basic questions of life: how to do family, how to do economics, how to do politics and how to do education as well as healing. For most universities in the world today, modern science triumphs...students are taught a body of knowledge as well as methods by which to produce more such knowledge. In the past 50 years or so, a new turning point has taken the knowledge process deep into the politics and economics frm whence it emerged. Given this insight...that all human knowledge is contaminated with human desire and human design...and, for some, this contamination is fatal to all human knowledge. Yet a thoroughly postmodern sensibility would take a less nihilist view. If pre-modern knowledge is grounded upon universal truth located in the dream/spirit world, then human agency is reduced to knowing and complying with natural law...i.e., divine law. And the logic of modern science reduces human agency as well. ...reduces it to discovery, compliance and use of these universal and unchangeable laws of nature and society. And if scientific knowledge of the modernist sort is grounded upon euro-centric, masculine desires to know, to control, to manage and to and command, postmodern critique opens the possibility that other voices can also be part of what little human agency is possible. Asian art, African poetry, Native American medicine, feminist literature and the culture of 'primitive' peoples gain stature in affirmative postmodern sensibility. D. Chaos/Complexity and a Postmodern Philosophy of science. In these past 50 years, entirely new findings about the behavior of complex systems add much to modern science logics of discovery. In brief, complex systems may exhibit any number of dynamical states. These vary from very ordered states in which predicition and control are possible...to very disordered states. Systems tranform from linear to non-linear dynamics. For deterministic chaos, this transformation is an elegant procession. And for non-deterministic chaos, such as is found in most social dynamics, efforts of human beings bring enough order upon which to ground knowledge processes in crime, suicide, revolution, bankruptcy and other less ordered behaviors. The tools of discovery in modernist sensibility; linear dynamics of a newtonian sort, formal logic of an aristotlean sort, statistical inference of a probablistic sort simply are not useful...new tools have been developed and are every day being developed...to supplement not dismiss the tools useful for simpler systems. The remarkable thing is that knowledge is possible even in the most disordered [chaotic] regimes... ...and from this disorder, new order emerges with entirely new relationships...reminisce of the hegelian/marxian notion of dialectic change, this new science gives grounding to a critique of 'gran narratif' but at the same time, rejects the nihilism embedded in french poststructural critique. Deterministic narratives such as scientific marxism or Christian/Islamic/Jewish theologies are subverted by the findings of chaos/complexity...and in a way not yet widely understood. Miracles, of a sort, do happen...in deep chaos, disordered regimes transform into entirely new regimes...one does not need divine agency to explain gaps in the geologic record nor in qualtitative changes in social life...such as healing or in discovery itself. A knowledge process is thus possible. It is very different from that of modern science but it does not necessary rebut either pre-modern nor modern contributions to the knowledge process. It adds much. And it locates the regions in which human agency is possible in ways not possible in either modern or pre-modern logic. In other work, I have tried to map out a postmodern philosophy of science as well as a postmodern sociology and a postmodern view of class and class struggle. For those who might be interested, much of this work is found at: http://www.uvm.edu/~tryoung/ We are all, now, postmodernists whether we will or no. Modern monopoly capitalism has given us the tools with which to add greatly to both modern and pre-modern pathways to knowledge. Not to destroy them but to supplement and to integrate them into a much larger, much more democratic and amenable knowledge process. TR Young