Paradigm Shift

Martin Cohen

Description

Why do giraffes have long necks? It can't really be for reaching tasty leaves since their main food is ground level bushes, tidy though that explanation would be. And how does relativity theory cope with the fact that the observable universe defies prediction by being far too small and anything but homogeneous? By inventing a vastly larger, but invisible, universe. And what exactly should we make of the scientists who claim to be witnessing thought itself, when the changes of blood flow in the brain that they observe are a thousand times slower than the neuronal activity it is supposed to reveal? A little scepticism is in order.Yet if philosophers of science, from Thomas Kuhn to Paul Feyerabend, have argued that science is a more haphazard process, driven by political fashion and short-term economic self-interest, today almost everyone seems to assume it is a vast jigsaw of interlocking facts pieced slowly but steadily together by expert practitioners.In this witty but profound 21st-century update on the issues, Martin Cohen offers vital clues for understanding not only the way knowledge develops, but also into the dangers of accepting too readily or too uncritically the claims of experts of all kinds - even philosophical ones! The claims are invariably presented as objective fact, yet are rooted in human subjectivity.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of science

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 09 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845408565
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
Paradigm Shift
How Expert Opinions Keep Changing on Life, the Universe, and Everything
Martin Cohen
imprint-academic.com



Publisher information
2015 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Martin Cohen, 2015
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic,
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally distributed in the USA by Ingram Book Company,
One Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086, USA



Introduction
‘I have opinions of my own - strong opinions - but I don’t always agree with them.’ - George W. Bush
Where do our opinions come from? The answer is more subtle than you might suppose. Experts, it turns out, are often following (or attempting to follow) other ‘experts’ - and the results can be disastrous. From the sub-prime disaster of 2007 that left national economies (and individuals’ life savings) in tatters, to the approved medications that years later turn out to be not only useless but deadly dangerous, what seems to be solid, reliable information turns out to be wrong, often wildly so.
The idea behind this book is to treat a broad sweep of issues, ranging from public health to climate change and even high finance, as a series of ‘case studies’ collectively challenging the view so often put about of science and knowledge generally, as being a very sensible and reassuringly solid sort of affair. Each case study/story naturally tends to highlight one aspect of the philosophical quest for a theory of knowledge.
So, in the chapters that follow, I step gingerly through a wide swathe of modern life and conventional opinion, in an effort to highlight the illogicality, the inconsistencies, and the downright dishonesty of much of what we are repeatedly told is expert opinion, scholarly insight, settled fact. Bear with me, because it is only as that great philosophical fertilizer, doubt, is spread around that we really start to feel a need for the profound reflection that the world really demands of us. But the aim is not to advance a version of scepticism, ancient and modern, which seems to lead on to a further conclusion that we might as well give up serious thinking and do nothing, or act on ‘whatever we happen to believe’, be it by instinct or by custom or by ‘accident’. Acknowledging uncertainty and complexity is, on the contrary, a positive step towards knowledge, just as Plato and Descartes insisted, so long ago.
Why, for example, do some facts counts as ‘evidence’ - and yet we cheerfully dismiss others as atypical, as special cases or just irrelevant? John Stuart Mill asked exactly that years ago (in A System of Logic, 1843) saying: ‘Why is a single instance, in some cases, sufficient for a complete induction, while in others myriads of concurring instances, without a single exception known or presumed, go such a little way towards establishing an universal proposition?’
More recently, the lurking uncertainty at the heart of scientific method was illustrated by the American philosopher, Nelson Goodman, with his imaginary colour ‘grue’ - that is green up to a certain time, and blue afterwards. His point was that no tests (prior to that particular time) would distinguish between something that was green, and something that was ‘grue’. There’s no easy answer to that one, so it is no wonder that we find scientists and experts ignoring the uncertainties instead.
Contemporary debates about the origins of life and the mechanism of natural selection, or more recently about climate change, illustrate how interwoven science is with social values - and how scientists do not really proceed from the evidence to formulate a theory, but rather seek the evidence to reinforce a prejudice. Prejudices? But as Thomas Kuhn says in his monumental but ambiguous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), once scientific theories have become established, they are not only vigorously defended, but rival ideas are fought and suppressed. ‘Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance.’
And that is why this is also a book about group-think and how it determines our lives. The writers and philosophy editors Julian Baginni and Jeremy Stangroom once wrote a book called Do you think what you think you think? and the answer to that, as they say, is surely no. We think what other people have told us to think, a social reality that stretches from the implicit assumptions of our language net to the explicit lessons of schools and universities. Increasingly, too, we think collectively - as English becomes a shared world language, as the internet replaces both traditional news sources and ages old forms of social interaction, the scope for individuals to really think what they want to think diminishes. Literature, politics, and scientific debates alike are reduced to a kind of hard core of facts, before which we must yield. The range of views and perceptions shrinks.
In my line of work, I mean as a philosophy editor, I often see new books on philosophy and social science, and scarcely a few months go by without a new one appearing warning - as though it was the most original thought in the universe - against irrationality. But this is an old, old story.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by the respected astronomer, Carl Sagan, and Ann Druyan (Ballantine Books, 1997) is a good example, still popular despite its age and indeed despite Carl Sagan himself having died just before publication. It shows how strong the desire of readers is to be reassured about what is real science and why all those strange things - Demons, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, fairies, and the like - are all foolish nonsense - or pseudoscience, as Sagan calls it. As the book states, ‘the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.’ At least Sagan also urges readers to critically scrutinize information professed by supposed experts operating on the margins, but the book offers no insight into the problem of being taken in by the much more influential, mainstream scientific ones.
A book by the editor of the Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer (which he acknowledges to be following in the footsteps of Sagan’s) called Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (Holt Paperbacks, 2002) attempts to broaden the debate into areas of sociology and human values - as the present work does. Shermer looks, for example, at economic theory in the shape of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, at Holocaust denial, and at the perennial conflict between evolutionary theory and religion.
In fact, books promoting the comfortable certainties of logic and science are everywhere. Francis Wheen huffs and puffs against ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ and modern delusions; Steven Law gets hot under the collar about vulnerable groups who believe in ‘bullshit’; and Sam Harris offers that it is scientists who should henceforth determine ‘the moral landscape’. The authors insist that their books are needed because people are still trying to think in ways that are not right , not rational. People still believe in astrology, in quack medicine, in anti-scientific theories of all sorts. These books, usually written by journalists, are like the barking dogs herding us sheep back into our intellectual pens. Yet on the other side, the academic side, there is a surprising silence in defence of diversity of opinions, openness to new ideas. It has been a long time since Paul Feyerabend offered his essays on ‘methodological anarchism’ which disputed so many of the orthodoxies of science and contemporary society. Likewise it has been a long time since students marched against wars - or even that television networks experimented with truly alternative comedy! In 2015, Paris’s Charlie Hebdo magazine, which challenged all kinds of political orthodoxies, met the new intolerance in the most horrible way, with twelve of its journalists shot dead as they discussed cartoons for the next issue. Reporting the event, the New York Times declined to reproduce the cartoons, saying that they were potentially offensive! We have become a world-society in which convention has become a vice in which our minds are gripped so tightly that independence of thought and opinion is not only difficult - but dangerous.
Yet what I want to argue here is that, in almost every area you look at, it is excessive orthodoxy, not excessive debate, that is the problem and the danger. From modern medicine - with its mass prescription of mind control drugs - to the grand designs of ‘climate control’ scientists, working on how to bury carbon dioxide in the ground; everywhere you look - if you can step back a moment from the prevailing orthodoxy - there are good reasons both to fear and to be angry about how the authorities, the experts, the opportunists, and (most of all) the unreflective have not only taken control of our lives (and our futures) but also taken control of the terms of debate. The madness is not, as Charles Mackay supposed in The Madness of Crowds , his classic nineteenth-century work on group-think, in the minds of the ordinary people who make up ‘the crowds’, but in the minds of the elites. It is these who have created hierarchies and structures that can only allow one opinion (invariably a self-serving one) and which stifle the extraordinary power and ability of public debate to find wisdom.
In the chapters that follow, I hope to convince you that there are real debates, real issues that deserve consideration, and that the truth, as Socrates also pointed out so long ago, is th