Morsels of Knowledge Banquets of Ignorance: Scientific Fallacies Exposed July 18, 2013 | By Dylan Charles Richard Heinberg, New Dawn Waking Times [Humankind] approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. - Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics” A state of thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance of knowledge. - James Clerk Maxwell Culture consists, in large measure, of commonly shared sets of assumptions and expectations about reality. It is a kind of lens through which we look at the world, one that is implanted in us in infancy and childhood and that is continually readjusted throughout life. According to the curvature and distortion of our lens, some things appear substantive that are actually only phantoms, while other things that are indeed quite solid and real are, to us, invisible. We take this cultural astigmatism for granted in religion and politics. In politics, facts are widely understood to be merely incidental to worldviews constructed out of ideological and economic necessity. For example, recently most Americans have been convinced by politicians that crime is the result of too few people being in prisons — this despite the well-known fact that their nation already incarcerates a greater percentage of its citizens than does any other, with no observed effect on the crime rate (unless it is an inverse one). They have likewise become convinced that the poverty of the Third World is due to the sad circumstance that people in certain “backward” countries are “not yet ready for democracy,” are inherently unindustrious, or are overburdened by irrational tradition. Meanwhile nearly everyone (in the U.S., though this is not so much the case elsewhere) studiously ignores the clear fact that the Third World has been — and continues to be — systematically plundered by corporations that routinely use the power of the CIA, the World Bank, and (if necessary) the U.S. military to dominate or destroy indigenous enterprise. While this fact is frequently pointed out by certain “radical” political scientists and by the alternative press, it is rarely mentioned by politicians or by the mainstream media because its widespread acknowledgment would be inimical to the purposes of power. But no one is surprised, because most people believe that this is how politics works — that political worldviews are always shaped more by the self-interest of powerful individuals and groups than by mere facts. Science is supposed to be different. The goal of the founders of Western science was to create a system of inquiry based on evidence, one in which theories would be continually tested, discarded, and replaced according to the impersonal dictates of fact and reason. Science was meant to stand above culture. This was, and is, a laudable ideal. But science’s quest for objectivity has always had to contend with two unalterable obstacles: the fact that scientists themselves are human beings with prejudices, fears, and ambitions; and the fact that the practice of science takes place within a cultural context wherein the economic goals of elites, class power relations, and a host of shared unconscious assumptions cast an unavoidable and mostly invisible influence on the proceedings. Science does not stand above culture; it swims in it. In science, as in religion and politics, there are power bases to protect, careers to maintain, masses to convert, empires to build. And so the history of science is full of examples of dogmas constructed and defended, evidence suppressed or twisted, and alternative theories ignored. Such historical examples as the disbelief of early-19th-century scientists in the existence of meteors, Lord Kelvin’s denunciation of X-rays a hoax, and the unwillingness of 18th-century chemists to abandon the phlogiston theory, make for interesting reading. But we seldom look at contemporary science with the degree of skepticism that such past failings would seem to warrant. Yet when a lengthy series of theoretical presuppositions is necessary to form the concepts which lead to experimental and equipment design in a typical research project, which then yields data that must be processed according to the same theoretical presuppositions in order to make sense, then it should be clear to us that even many of the “observed facts” of modern science are largely hypothetical. That’s not the impression one gets when reading science articles in news magazines, or when watching television science documentaries, in which we are told repeatedly that scientists now “know” that the Universe began fifteen billion years ago in a Big Bang; that life on this planet evolved first from terrestrial chemical processes and then by way of competition and natural selection; that atoms are made up of tiny charged particles; and so on. Recently it occurred to me that it might be helpful to make a brief reconnoitring of the boundaries of our collective ignorance. My objective here is not to denigrate the achievements of those who have expanded the territory of the known, but merely to call attention to — and honor — the great ocean of the unknown in which our collective knowledge floats. wakingtimes/2013/07/18/morsels-of-knowledge-banquets-of-ignorance-scientific-fallacies-exposed/
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 08:37:16 +0000
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