How would that work? The gender of scientists plays a role in evaluating experimental results? The racial views of an author are used to determine whether a paper is published? Could you provide some examples of how embracing value-ladedness would be beneficial.
Great thread.
Excellent response. Very well said, and I think you get right at the root of the issue–
Can an ontilogical status be anything more than a description? As far as I can see, even our best ‘explanations’ are essentially specialized descriptions. We experience some behavior, or phenomena, and infer causes through observation and description of predictable reactions. That is to say, explanations speak more to predictability than any universal or absolute Truth. Ask “why?” or “how?” enough times and everything becomes an unknown.
Science describes how things act, not what they are. Problem arises when the actors start saying what the play is, or worse when they deny there is anything bar actors.
That’s a philosopher’s point of view. A scientist believes that the more you ask, the more you will know.
yes i also would like to see an example of value-ladenness science…i hope this is not off-topic…
actually we need a philosopher-scientist at this point and music may be the man…on the topic of ontology-tyranny…
If, ultimately, there is an objective, ontological reality that expresses and explains everything then would that not also include these speculations about it? And if it does, does that not then infer that human autonomy is an illusion—merely another inherent manifestation of the tyranny?
Thus the world “tyranny” itself would become an anthropomorphism.
yes yes all of this is real but there is objective truth that we use to control our environment…the tyranny part is how some people try to distort reality for their own little benefit…
I couldn’t find a summary of this online - do you think you could give a precis?
Do you feel a moral duty to disarm the weapon, rather than to appropriate it?
How do we control anything at all if we ourselves are just an inherent aspect of the objective, ontological reality? Tyranny is a word we invented to connote something deemed [by most] to be “bad”, “evil”, “immoral”. But if everything is intrinsically part of the TOE, how can anything we name actually be these things at all? Right and wrong seem moot sans autonomy.
To me it’s like speaking of moral responsibility while positing an omniscient God. If God knows all, He knows everything we do—before we do it. Similarly, if there is a material totality that encompasses, ontologically, all that exist, then it encompasses everything we think and feel—before we do.
I just cannot wrap my mind around ontology and free will. Either the human mind is somehow the exception here or its “freedom” is just a chimera.
And what happens when he runs out of answers? More opportunity to know maybe, but a question doesn’t imply any easy answer [if any at all]. Everything becomes a matter of speculation and hypothesis if examined rigorously enough. Even scientists don’t claim to have all the answers, though they may have higher hopes of someday attaining them.
There isn’t a human among us who’s completely without bias or prejudice, but does that mean that all science is locked into an ontological ‘tyranny?’ (I, too, am slightly bothered by
tyranny’ because of its connotative meaning.) Chemistry don’t seem to be and quantum physics shouldn’t be, and often isn’t, although is may not seem so to the laity.
I think w-m already said there’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with ontology within science when he said, “Why not affirm value-ladenness, why not embrace it! Instead of thinking science to be infected and demeaned by values, why not think it strengthened by them! This is my position, turtle.” If science is value-laden and if a part of that ‘value’ is a search for Gott, das höchste Gut, or Supreme Being, if that search has led to a greater knowledge of the workings and substances of the universe, doesn’t the search, itself, have value beyond the ontological?
Agreed, but instead of Objective truth you probably want Absolute truth. Objective truth isn’t too hard to find, there are a ton of objective truths. Inertia is a good example, Inertia is an objective truth that applies to everything in our universe. We have no idea ow it works, or how it is, why it works the way it does, but we do know it’s there. And it’s there for not just me, or you, not just in our minds, It’s everywhere.
Objective = Not dependent on the mind for existence
Truth = The quality or state of being true
Is inertia in our minds? Does it exist? If life was nowhere, would inertia still be?
Very true, but what if these descriptive methods eventually described everything that is needed to be described? How can the following not meet the necessary criteria: We still don’t know what reality is, but we know everything it does.
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In what terms?
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What should we do with this information?
Inertia isn’t a truth. Truth applies to statements. “Inertia describes the resistance of matter to acceleration” is a statement that is true, “inertia applies to everything in the universe” is a statement that as far as we know isn’t false (does it apply to neutrinos? I’m honestly not sure).
Inertia also isn’t a Thing. It’s a description of how things move relative to each other: it’s a relation. It can be described in other ways, depending on the fundamental units we choose and the way we formulate our models. It may not be valid for all regions of the reality it attempts to describe.
Take Newtonian mechanics: it’s excellent for life on our scale. All our modern machines and structures are designed based on its principles, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the shock-resistance of an iPhone to the cars we drive and the planes we fly. But it’s not objective truth, only a very good approximation for some regions and states of things.
In what is now an infamous agricultural case study, Watson and Kennedy concerned themselves with the traditional understanding of plant domestication. I don’t have the study with me, but the traditional hypothesis was that either: 1) Shamans helped domesticate plants by selecting those that were useful in rituals and planting them near their homes; or, 2) plants domesticated themselves. Of course, I’m being somewhat simplistic for the sake of brevity. Anyway, the traditional hypothesis was absent women, working off an androcentric understanding of evolution that held men to be the purveyors of change, the actors and agents of evolution and progress, while women were merely passive bearers of offspring. On this theory, it seems absurd to posit women as the active role-players in the significant development of plant domestication. For Watson and Kennedy, the traditional hypothesis is blinded by its androcentrism, and so refuses out of hand the most empirically viable conclusion: that women were involved in foraging before domestication, and cultivating afterward, and so might very well have been involved during the domestication. The original hypothesis claimed objectivity, but was rather value-inclusive. The background theory at work is that women are passive and cannot affect change: this background theory both informs the hypothesis – that shamans domesticated plants – while also determining what counts as evidence, since if we think that women cannot affect change, then we are blind to evidence suggesting otherwise. Thus, the background theory ladens the hypothesis and the hypothesis determines what gets picked up as evidence.
In short, by consciously including their feminist values --instead of feigning scientific objectivity – Watson and Kennedy were able to develop the more empirically viable hypothesis, that women played an active role in the domestication of plants. In both hypotheses (the traditional and feminist), values are at work. However, by embracing their values and consciously including them, the feminist researchers were led to a better empiricism.
I’d also like to say, phyllo, that we ought to be more proud of the perspectives we occupy. Many perspectives are earned, not merely given. For Watson and Kennedy, feminist valuation is the product of a life-long struggle and should be embraced with pride!
“This is my way; where is yours? - Thus I answered those who asked me “the way.” For the way - that does not exist.”
[Nietzsche, TSZ, Book III].
Scientific investigation has depended on processes it seeks to replace, call them broadly intuitive processes. But science, whatever the rigorousness of the detachment of its investigators begins with intuitive leaps: axioms like those in local realism and the subject object split. It builds from there. Also during the process of investigation and peer review investigators and critics (within science) use intuitive processes to, for examle, analyze the scope/semantics of words, their own ability to notice their own assumptions and so on. Note: these intuitive processes are kept small. (a little bit like those hidden dimensions you hear about coming from string theory) These intuitive evaluation are reigned in, kept to small steps. Not vision quests in the desert coming up with whole heaps of knowledge, but only tiny leaps - those not necessarily insignificant or misleading ones - that are supposedly damage controlled, when admitted they are their at all. The last area intuitive processes are used in science is not within scientific rationality but is a more individual concern. Scientists know that some of their peers have better intuitions than others. These researchers tend to investigate areas and ideas that later are confimed empirically. Money often flows towards these people. They have some way of getting at knowledge that is not empirically based, in many cases, and this is believed in by the hard ass realists with money, but the very process is not considered, and is not, part of scientific empiricism on the reasoning end.
1 Axioms
2 Small, contained intuitive evaluations - without which reasoning is not possible
3 Acknowledgement that some do have black box (intuitive) processes that of course must be verified but do seem keyed in to knowledge.
I see all this as a reaction to the Abrahamic religions - with their tendencies toward FAITH. I think we are still in a reaction phase to these religions in the Western educated community and there is a fear about what it would mean to honor, notice intuitive processes so they are controlled, marginalized, called working assumptions or denied - ‘that’s not intuition’.
One way you can see this is how the scientific community produces representatives who go after the idea of God but very rarely and generally not polemically against the notion of a self - persistent or other.
Faith based religion and scientific empiricism accept that they do not overlap, however much they skirmish over things like evolution. Outside these two, really rather distracting bullies (in this context bullies), you have experiential based spritualities and religions and ‘researchers’ who are damned as irrational by the scientific community and evil by the Abrahamists. What these ‘researchers’ do is acknowledge that they use intuition - and rational processes also - and do not, generally, see any need to deny scientific empiricism is useful, but consider it limited, a term that is not pejorative, here, simply a fact. It is intended to limit modes of ‘research.’
To save myself from re-typing, I’ll quote another excerpt from the same paper:
[tab]Instead of reasoning in a detached manner based solely on empirical evidence in order to arrive at the truth, knowledge, for Nelson, is grounded in an epistemic community and situated within a web of the beliefs and theories of that community. Such knowledge is always thus contextual with respect to its community. With Nelson, there is a shift from the kind of prescriptive epistemology of the traditional account to a descriptive naturalized epistemology understood as a kind of sociology of science. The traditional account tells us how we ought to attain knowledge, while Nelson’s concern is with how we actually do come to make knowledge claims. The actuality, Nelson claims, is far from the traditional picture of independent and disinterested reasoning up to metaphysically real truths. Instead, she holds that knowledge is attained communally, and that knowers come to know things based on a socially determined set of criteria. The resultant knowledge claims are inextricable from their respective epistemic communities.
By situating knowledge within a community of beliefs and theories, Nelson is displacing the idea that knowledge is unchanging and fixed across knowers, which is central to the ontological tyranny. In essence, Nelson is replacing the objectivity of the ontological tyranny with a kind of social subjectivity, wherein knowledge claims are products of scientific communities, many of which are at odds with each other. She holds that scientific knowledge is “generated within social experiences, relations, traditions, and historically and culturally specific ways of organizing social life” (40). Consequently, knowledge cannot be produced by an individual. It is, on the contrary, necessarily social. Nelson maintains that knowledge is a product of perspective, and perspective relies upon a “host of categories, social relations, practices, experiences, and assumptions” (40). All of which, for Nelson, are social concepts. Thus, Nelson is also removing the idea of truth – as it is understood by the traditional account – from the scientific enterprise. Indeed, as Potter declares, Nelson is “denying the general picture according to which autonomous individuals can produce knowledge” (49).
To clarify her approach, Nelson entertains the common criticism that if knowledge is produced communally, then we have no objective standards by which to declare one community right and another wrong. This challenge is an accusation of relativism, which Nelson refutes with the observation that regardless of the disagreement between two epistemic communities, they are not incommensurably different. This is to say that scientific communities agree and overlap on many grounds, such as which epistemic principles are important and necessary for good science. Quine, however, is more concerned with relativism not between epistemic communities, but rather between the theories they produce. Quine observes that Nelson allows for two incommensurable theories, born of two separate epistemic communities. These theories can both provide coherent accounts of empirical data, but since they rely upon different background knowledge and assumptions and are shaped by different values, they do not agree with each other. We are therefore underdetermined, for Quine, in which to accept and which to reject. To this challenge, Nelson argues that the purpose of science is instrumental; we practice science to help us explain and predict our experiences in the world, to negotiate our way through the world and be better prepared to face its obstacles. Thus, for Nelson, if two differing theories are both adequate in explaining observable phenomenon and predicting experience, then we need not concern ourselves with the question of which theory is false. Indeed, a given theory is valid not because of its truth, but because it is able “to make sense of what we experience and to predict our experience” (37). If the value of science is instrumental, and both theories satisfy our needs equally, then the idea that they can both exist is not necessarily a problem.
In summary, Nelson’s challenge to the ontological tyranny and her alternative holistic account brings with it considerable implications for objectivity and knowledge. First, that knowledge is produced not by individual scientists, but instead by communities consisting of a web of theories, background beliefs and assumptions that all colour and shape the resultant production of knowledge. Second, that knowledge is therefore not separable from knower, that knowledge claims are inextricably bound to the communities from which they emerge. Thus, knowledge is not objective, but rather socially subjective. Third, that truth does not play as big a role in the scientific enterprise as the traditional account purports. Rather, science aims at explanatory power; it seeks the most efficient way to account for observable data. Indeed, Nelson’s holistic account problematizes the notion of scientific truth. Last, Nelson’s approach replaces the traditional conception of science as the best way to access the objective truths of nature, with the view that science derives its value from its instrumental usefulness. That good science is empirically adequate and useful in helping us navigate our way through the world, and that two incommensurable theories can both be valid if they are both adequate in accounting for observable data and their ability to aid us significantly in our experiences.[/tab]
I fully concede to you here. In some instances, it may be beneficial to appropriate “the weapon”; I think you’re right in point out that an out-of-hand rejection betrays the moral will-to-truth at all costs.
Just to raise the controversiality a notch, or, well, five notches…
If we move away from agriculture and look at shamans and medicinal plants, the Shamans have general said that they found out which plants were useful and for what via communication with the plants. IOW they did not do random, empirical studies - look Jimmy died after eating the red berries and Sally’s cold got better eating the blue - but rather whateve empiricism came after getting various kind of information from the plants themselves. Which explains how many plant remedies can involved highly toxic plants that are treated in often long and complicated processes by healers, processes that would have been nearly impossible to arrive at - and why would you bother exploring such things with incredibly poisonous plants - via trial and error. Sometimes including things like…after a long process of treatment adding another plant that inhibits and enzyme in the gut that would break down the active ingredients.
the scientific community, it seems to me, often overestimates how close we are to understanding everything, so they feel comfortable ruling out things - like plant consciousness - even though in strict terms they should be agnostic.