I’ve finished reading Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but I continue to think about the issues he raised. Some of his attempts to make sense of these “scientific revolutions” involve efforts to make sense of the language used by various groups of scientists.
When talking about the need to use a assumption-loaded (my term) language when doing even the most ‘objective’ of scientific work, Professor Kuhn tells us:
As for a pure observation-language, perhaps one will yet be devised. But three centuries after Descartes our hope for such an eventuality still depends exclusively upon a theory of perception and of the mind.
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No language restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on “the given.” Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.
This idea of a language which can provide “mere neutral and objective reports on ‘the given'” assumes that there is a mind which is independent of the world to be explored and understood. Against this, St. Thomas Aquinas had stated a theory of the mind shaped by active response to the environments of that human being. Modern neurobiology has independently confirmed this Thomistic understanding of man as an organism which develops by intention, that is, by growing and moving in a purposeful direction though that man might well not know what he might become.
Moreover, this idea of a language which provides “mere neutral and objective reports on ‘the given'” assumes that what is out there are things and relationships between things which come to us in the form of objective data, or potentially objective in the sense of being ‘free’ of what might be roughly called organizing preconceptions. It assumes perceptions are to be had by the simple opening of our eyes or the lifting of our noses to the wind. In fact, perception is proving to be an intense and purposeful ordering by a creature of its environments to its own needs and desires, to its purposes. Even reason is to be had in increments by the properly active exploration of our environments. Reason is not something we have and bring to the task of making sense of a chaos in which we’re embedded.
Many creatures have somewhat limited purposes to pursue as they move about and grow, but man seems to be the sort of creature who functions best, in various ways, when he has a good understanding of all that is visible or imaginable to him, even a good understanding of all which might be speculated to exist by a St. Augustine or an Albert Einstein. That’s where my problem lies with modern scientists. For example, some of the best of modern neurobiologists tend to be pragmatists along the lines of William James and don’t recognize that we, and even aardvarks, grow into a world, a universe which is, in a manner of speaking, overloaded with value and meaning by the purposes of its Creator. Yet, most of the points I raise in the rest of this article remain valid for either a Jamesian pragmatist or a Christian, Thomistic existentialist.
I’ll make summary comments on four points and provide references to earlier articles on this weblog. I’ll also make a short concluding statement.
1. We often need to speak in vaguer ways, such as those of traditional wisdom-literature, before learning enough to speak in the way of a truer knowledge.
Wisdom is the fumbling substitute for perfect knowledge. [The American Story by Garet Garret, Henry Regnery Company, 1955 and made available as a pdf file on lewrockwell.com through the generosity of Lew Rockwell and his associates.]
See What is Wisdom? for my comments upon this quote.
I speak to one aspect of the evolution of languages towards a greater capacity for true knowledge, truth, in Why Do We Need to Speak As-if?.
More powerful languages would emerge, and have emerged, naturally as the human mind develops toward a richer and more complete encapsulation of Creation, yet, even ideas once expressible in clear ways can be obscured by changes in words and concepts — see Christian Misuse of the Concept of ‘Person’ and If We Can’t Understand What We Shall Be, We Can’t Be It for discussions in a Christian context.
Progress will come if we’re careful to be facing in the right direction as we walk along and so long as we continue walking, but the path can curve away from us as Dante’s pilgrim realized in the first verses of the Inferno.
2. We shouldn’t mix epistemological (biological) issues with metaphysical issues.
See Wrongful Formation of Minds: William James and the Loss of a World for a more complete statement of this point. There is no real detailed discussion in that article about the point though I’ve provided such discussion in earlier articles.
3. As the American historian Carroll Quigley told us: The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Knowledge has a social dimension, as Kuhn discusses in various ways without saying so directly. I would even say that this social dimension is dominant in the more abstract forms of knowledge, including most of the specific sciences — physics and biology and chemistry and so forth. For a discussion of the general problem of a people, the citizens of the United States, with a poorly integrated knowledge of certain important aspects of reality, see Ways of Thought in the Modern West and Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict: The False Promises of the American Dream.
4. Perceiving what lies around us is an active and not passive process.
This is to say that perceptions are themselves ‘taken in’ by way of processes not so different from cognition. The neurobiologist Semir Zeki discusses the complexity of the processes by which we see the world of color in his book, A Vision of the Brain. I discuss the discovery of the neurobiologist and philosopher Walter J. Freeman along with his students that “the brain response generated by the same stimulis is not always the same” in the article What is Mind?: Perceptions and Context.
Freeman tells us that even when we’ve actively perceived our environments, we make them our own, we come to understand and know them, by our active involvement. We learn to manipulate natural objects and to make artificial objects for our needs and pleasures. We run and dance and sing. We begin to move under the seas and to enter space. We build bridges and university laboratories.
Any useful language will, in fact, be structured to help the active man to direct his efforts to obtain and organize observations in terms of a plausible understanding of at least his immediate environments. That understanding can lead to power plants and productive farms, whether Amish farms or petrochemical complexes. If we have to speak of biases, then we we should simply say we should be aiming at languages with better biases rather than no biases. Biases can be encodings of the best and most plausible knowledge we have at any particular time. Even when our inherited biases are wrong, they are necessary as a starting point. This is the reason historians of science now take alchemists seriously as pioneers in exploring the nature of matter and astrologists as exploring the movements of planets and stars.
Our biggest problem in physics right now would seem to me to be unaffected by any possible language which can provide “mere neutral and objective reports on ‘the given,'” but perhaps solvable if we could develop concepts and a related language capable of allowing us to speak of a reality in which both quantum theory and the general theory of relativity are true. Both of those theories are highly specific and have been verified in many ways by way of finely targeted experiments, that is, experiments biased to seek very specific information. Those experiments were the results of theoretical physicists interacting with experimental physicists, sometimes one man or woman being both. Those physicists, theoreticians or experimentalists or both, had minds well-shaped to one or more of the quantum theory and general theory of relativity. They thought not only in terms of the theories and their real-world implications but also of the measurable and observable effects of those theories. Now we need to learn how to think and speak of the universe as if both quantum theory and the general theory of relativity were true. I suspect the mathematics would fall into place if we could do so. As it is, we see a lot of confusion coming about as physicists tackle the mathematics when the concepts and language provide no unified way of speaking of both theories at one time.
5. In summation, we need biases to function as human thinkers and doers.
The main conclusion I’d draw is that, at least to the understanding of a Thomistic existentialist, the very nature of created being and of mind tell us that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about a language which can provide “mere neutral and objective reports on ‘the given,'” and yet there may be some good which will come from the efforts to develop such a language on the part of those with different beliefs as some good came from alchemy and astrology.