Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 8

AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

Science is knowledge, and what qualifies a statement as a scientific statement is contained within the process by which we have arrived at the conclusion that it is true. The credentials of a scientific statement are established by the method we have used in order to prove it. Basically, this method consists in the rigorous testing of the statement in competition with other statements that claim to describe or explain the relevant sensory evidence. All scientific knowledge is empirical (which is to say, based on sense-data) and systematic (which is to say, concerned with organizing such data by means of generalizations). Any statement whose truth cannot be established by reference to sensory data falls outside the scope of science.

At one time, it was believed by the most enthusiastic champions of science that the answers to all conceivable problems lay within its scope. Science, it was said, would in the fullness of time reveal the grand plan of the universe and permit perfect understanding of the system of systems. It was recognized that people could devise questions that science could not hope to answer, but those questions were ruled out of court, as illegitimate and essentially meaningless. All that was not knowable was held to be nonsensical. Metaphysics, the speculative philosophical discipline that attempted to investigate what lies beyond the scope of scientific enquiry—the reality “behind” the perceived world—was deemed to be a barren and sterile pursuit. The questions of metaphysics, it was said, were questions that could not sensibly be asked, because they could not sensibly be answered.

That era of confidence in science is now past. It is not that the character of science has changed, but that we have changed. Once, a majority of intelligent people could feel secure within the horizons of expanding scientific knowledge, but now we feel insecure. We have discovered that the system of systems offers us less self-satisfaction than it once did. We have discovered indeterminacy in the physical world and uncertainty within ourselves.

We now feel that the limits placed by the philosophy of science on what we can know are narrower and more restrictive than we require. We have become uncomfortable within the world-view of modem science.

It is by no means simple to find a cure for this discomfort, and the one thing that is certain is that more scientific knowledge cannot ease the situation in the least; the fault is in ourselves.

It is in response to this gathering sense of insecurity that there has been in recent years an increasing interest in the speculative disciplines of metascience. It is, I think, more reasonable to talk of metascience than of metaphysics, firstly because the new metascience is quite unlike the classical metaphysics, and secondly because our new speculations are more concerned with reaching through and beyond the biological and the social sciences than with the shadowy area of first causes that lies beyond the physical sciences.

There is, however, another reason why the renaissance of interest in metascience was inevitable, and which sustained metascientific speculation even through the era of its disreputability. This reason is that the perfectly true allegation that the statements of metascience could never be known to be true is and always has been quite irrelevant. We can never have certain answers to the questions of metascience, nor, indeed, any answers which we can rely upon in the slightest degree to inform us as to the nature of the world in which we find ourselves, but that does not affect the need that drives us to ask such questions in the least. The fact that metascientific statements can never be verified in no way threatens their psychological utility. In purely pragmatic terms they remain not merely valuable but absolutely necessary to our well-being.

In a sense, we are the victims of a cruel situation, in that we so desperately want to know things we cannot know. Such questions as the existence of God, the purpose of life and the ultimate destiny of the universe are devoid of scientific significance, but we feel them to be important, and by virtue of that fact they become important. The situation of craving answers we cannot have is an unhappy and distressing one, and if we accept the situation at face value we are driven to the conclusion that the human condition is unfortunate and irredeemable.

There is, however, a way out of the trap if we are simply prepared to recognize that the value of metascientific speculations is not in the least reduced by their having the status of speculations rather than facts. It does not matter in the least that metascientific statements are created rather than discovered, for the need which we have for them is psychological, not technological, and the statements need only be believed and never applied. We never have to expect or demand that the perceived world will comply with our metascientific speculations, provided that we are careful never to include statements within our metascientific systems that are not metascientific, but hypotheses that can actually be tested by reference to sensory experience and experiment.

Much confusion has arisen in the past by virtue of the fact that we have habitually construed the word “believe” as “believe to be true”. This has led us to assume that, in order to believe in a metascientific statement, we need to assert that it is true, which, by definition, we cannot justifiably do. It is time now to recognize that this is a mistaken notion of what belief involves and of what beliefs consist, and for what purpose they are useful.

If we know something to be true, because it has been established by the methods of science, we do not need to add something extra which converts that knowledge into a belief. If we do “believe” it, we do so in the special sense that the knowledge must always remain provisional, dependent upon further data. Scientific knowledge is always subject to revision or rejection in the light of further discoveries, and any commitment of faith to the current body of knowledge is both superfluous and dangerous.

By contrast, commitment is exactly what is involved—and exactly what is needed—in holding to a metascientific statement. Belief in a statement involves shielding and protecting it, holding it invulnerable against criticism. There can never be any logical warrant for such a strategy, which is, of course, completely out of place in science, but in metascience we need only seek a warrant on pragmatic grounds.

If, because of an excessive admiration of science, or because we have excessive expectancies of its rewards, we find ourselves unable to make a commitment to metascientific speculations of one kind or another, then we are the poorer for our failure. Indeed, it might be that such a psychological stance is literally impossible to maintain, for what is actually involved in the rigorously skeptical world-view of the determined empiricist is not an absence of metascientific commitment but a metascientific commitment to the present state of scientific knowledge, which reads into that state an authority and invulnerability to falsification which science simply cannot possess. People who can do that are doubly unfortunate, firstly because they delude themselves as to the extent of their own metascientific commitment, and secondly because their commitment is tied to a speculation which is likely to be psychologically unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, such people are certainly better off than they would be if they genuinely had no commitments of the kind we call belief.

To sum up, therefore, the situation is this. We need metascientific beliefs. We cannot get by in life without them. We cannot select these beliefs on the grounds of their truthfulness or their likelihood, because there is no way that we can establish the truth or likelihood of metascientific statements. That such statements do sometimes seem likely or unlikely is a function of their aesthetic appeal, not of their logical appeal. It follows, therefore, that the most reasonable strategy is to select beliefs for commitment on the grounds of their psychological utility, in purely pragmatic terms. If asked what our warrant is for the commitments which we make, we need only answer: I believe it not because it is true, but because it is necessary.

It is the only answer we can give, but it is the only answer we need.