Away MAVE

The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Block 1: Science, Enlightenment, and Value

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	1. The norms of reason		2. Enlightenment science
	3. The doctrines of Value Freedom		4. The critics of value freedom

Exercise

I am sure that we all bring to questions about science and the domination of nature a complex of ideas both sophisticated and simplistic about what science is, or what counts as domination and so on. Before going any further I suggest that you write down a few first thoughts, just off the top of your head - stream of consciousness - about what the word 'science' suggests to you.
When you have a list of images, ideas, trigger words etc. you can reflect in a more thoughtful and considered way about where these ideas have come from and how they may effect your approach to the kind of questions we will be exploring. Please write a few sentences about this and send it to the discussion site.

The norms of reason

To start off we will look at 3 normative issues within the philosophy of science. Then look at how some of these norms can be seen in society's values outside of science.

1. Standards of rationality

Views about the standards of rationality that apply in science do shift, it is not the case that there is one view and everything outside of that view is irrational for all time, even within science what counts as rational shifts - through argument and debate- over time. To demonstrate this I will give two versions that have been widely defended, both make claims about what the standard of rationality within science is. The first we can call verifiability and the second falsifiability.
The verifiability doctrine was central for the logical positivists and it has its roots in the earlier empiricist tradition. Here access to reality is by experience and only statements that contain their means of verification are meaningful. As Hume famously put it:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding p.163)
The means to verify abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number is given. Truths like this are true by definition. For example, 2+2 = 4 regardless of what the world is like. Experimental reasoning is verifiable by scientific method and a statement is meaningless if the means to its verification is not empirical testing. So with verification the standards of rationality are clear and hard line.

Exercise

Take a moment to think of some statements that seem reasonable to you, but that this view would class as meaningless.

Falsifiability is a seemingly less exacting standard and it will allow some of the statements that you thought up to be meaningful even if it would not class them as scientific. The idea of falsification as central to scientific method is argued by Popper (1902 - ) He proposes that science progresses by a process of conjecture and refutation. So the scientist puts forward an hypothesis and then it can be tested to breaking point. So everything that lasts the process is, for the time being, the best working hypothesis. It is not and can never be verified it just has not yet been falsified. Philosophers of science have found problems with both falsification and verification, but a central achievement of Popper's idea is that it sets a standard of what is scientific. That is, Popper found a way of defining what was science as opposed to pseudo-science. If an hypothesis or theory does not contain the means to its falsification then it is not science. Chalmers explains the distinction clearly:

An hypothesis is falsifiable if there exists a logically possible observation statement or set of observation statements that are inconsistant with it, that is, which, if established as true, would falsify the hypothesis. (1999:62).

What Popper was trying to rule out were the kind of theories that explain everything by a process of expanding to encompass and reinterpreting all events. His targets were Freudian theory and historical materialism. The interesting shift for our purposes of looking at examples of standards of rationality is the move from verification to falsification. However, note that for Popper scientific method was not the only realm of rationality, he wanted to rule out the possibility of some things calling themselves sciences, but did not think that rationality begins and ends with science. Some of the statements you thought up earlier may well be rational according to Popper, even if they do not stand the test of falsifiability.

2. The Intellectual virtues

Our second normative issue is the idea of intellectual virtues. Aristotle made a distinction between the moral and the intellectual virtues. The latter are those qualities we possess and should develop that make us accept rational principles. Our understanding of the things we encounter are assisted be the intellectual virtues whether it is the rightness of the statement 2+2=4 or the wrongness of injustice.

3. The Institutions of Science

The third area to think of when looking at the normative issues of science is how standards are embedded in the institutions of science. For example, learned societies, the refereeing process of publication of findings or the long training involved in becoming a scientist. The standards that operate within science were discussed and neatly laid out by Merton as institutional imperatives or what he called the CUDOS norms. These are:

Communality: the findings of science should be common property. Science is seen as a joint venture and so although a law may be named after its discoverer, there is an imperative to publish early and make it common property so that others can use the information. He says: "Secrecy is the antithesis of this norm; full and open communication its enactment".

Universality: the standards of evaluating claims made by a scientist are consistant throughout the community. No personal or social attributes are taken into account. The claim stands or falls by virtue of its scientific credibility.

Distinterestedness: the scientist should not be attached to their ideas and should be ready to drop them when the evidence is not forthcoming. The instilling of disinterestedness within the community is linked to the rarity of both scientific fraud and the misuse of scientific authority for personal or political gain.

Organised Scepticism: the scientific community regulates the acceptance of findings through a process of critical scrutiny. The idea is that judgement is suspended until the facts are at hand and the community has applied empirical and logical criteria to assess the claims being made.

These norms have been criticised and I am sure you can think of practices within science that seem to break with the cudos norms, but they are widely acknowledged by scientists and are central to the popular picture of how science operates. They could be seen as having a rhetorical function.

One of the short essay questions is: 'Do you think that the norms associated with standards of rationality, the intellectual virtues and the institutions of science tend to issue in a particular orientation towards nature? If so, why? If not, why not?' Even if you are not doing a short essay it is probably worth having a go at an answer to that to help your thinking.

The significance of these normative issues outside of science: science and the enlightenment.

The normative issues we have looked at do not just effect science. There is a sense in which they effect the world outside of science because they embody something we value in general - reason. Here are 3 ways this works.

1. science embodies standards of reason over superstition
2. science offers models of rational persons who use their reason over authority
3. science offers a model of a community of rational persons over communities governed by arbitary power.

You may want to disagree and say that science does not do this, but it has rhetorical power even if it is not what actually happens. By saying that it doesn't work like that we may be suggesting that it should work like that, in which case we are affirming the value of reason.
Perhaps we might want to say that yes science should work like that, but other areas of knowledge should not be governed by the same principle.
What other sources of knowledge do we have?

Consider some of the basic beliefs you have about the world, for the common and garden (e.g. 'Britain is an island', 'Arsenal won the cup', 'I am wearing clothes'), to the more theoretical (e.g. 'the sun is the nearest star to the earth', 'water is H2O', 'there is no greatest prime number'). What justifies you in holding those beliefs?

Consider why you hold those beliefs. Here are some possible answers (I am not assuming that you have said all of these or that all are sound sources of knowledge):

* Direct empirical evidence: e.g. 'I saw it with my own eyes.' (I am wearing clothes)
* Indirect empirical evidence: e.g. 'I saw it on TV'. (Arsenal won the cup.)
* Reason: e.g. 'to assume the contrary leads to a contradiction' ('there is no greatest prime number')
* Revelation: 'God told me in a vision'.
* Intuition: 'Murder is just wrong - it is a basic moral intuition'
* Authority: e.g. 'that is what the church teaches'
* Tradition: e.g. 'that is what we have always believed'.
* Testimony: e.g. 'I read it in a book', 'someone told me'.

Exercise:

Which of those sources of belief in the list above do you think give good grounds for making a claim to knowledge?

One view that expresses some of the basic values of the enlightenment is that what gives us grounds for belief are 1-3, empirical evidence and reason. One possible problem with that view is that your answer to the question as to the sources of your beliefs is often 8 - testimony. Now someone might think that if testimony is a sound source of knowledge it must be possible to reduce it to empirical evidence or reason. Whether this response is adequate is a question to which we will return later in the module.

A clear understanding of the idea of enlightenment values is crucial for the rest of the course so I am suggesting quite a bit of reading.

Enlightenment Science (a historical diversion)

Many of the criticisms of science that we shall explore take as a fundamental figure of Western science the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626). He was hugely influential, particularly in the development of a 'scientific method', and thus is seen as setting in train science as we know it today.
Various commentators will take issue with aspects of his philosophy and see in its bolstering of the position of man (the generic 'he' is justified here) over nature, the seeds of environmental destruction, technophilia, and the subjugation of women. A case can be made for all of these, but what I propose is that rather than looking at Bacon for evidence of his culpability we begin by just looking at what he was trying to do in his own terms.

Bacon's aim was to find and set out the foundations for all human knowledge. He shunned the academic philosophers' adherence to Aristotle's accounts of nature and anything he deemed to be based on superstition. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) he explained the need for, what he called, a "Great Instauration" and described the form it would take.

Phase 1: a survey of the whole of learning to identify areas where little was known.
Phase 2: the development of a method that would help to fill in the gaps.
Phase 3: detailed reports of natural and, particularly, experimental phenomena.
Phase 4: a demonstration using specific examples of how, by examining the accounts described under 3 we can draw, well founded, conclusions and secure knowledge.
Phase 5: "for temporary use" collect provisional findings.
Final phase: set out the results that have been obtained by the careful application of all the previous stages.

Bacon knew this was a large undertaking and recorded a wish that others would take up the challenge and help him. Getting to the end of part three would be laborious work, but once these were in place Bacon thought that the final stages would be swift, as he said in 1620: "the investigation of nature and the sciences will be the work of a few years" (1985:272).
The purpose of all this was to, in Bacon's words, "improve man's estate". This did mean material circumstances. For Bacon science was the means to cure disease and create technological solutions to problems. And politically, reason would create utopian conditions (for man).
The relationship between religion and reason is complex, it is too easy from a modern perspective to assume that reason overides revelation or more traditional ideas of authority. However, Bacon's ideas could not have taken hold in the 17th century if they had not been framed within Christianity. He would have wanted to set his venture apart from the work of alchemists anyway and certainly would not have wanted it tainted with the same suspicions of magic. Science had to be part of humanity's spiritual task and Bacon presented it as such. He held, or at least for public consumption maintained, that Adam before the fall would have known nature and the task of science was to return to that state. The fall was precipitated by the hubris of trying to judge good and evil. So the good Christian, according to Bacon, must trust morality to faith and must through hard work regain a knowledge of nature. As Leiss in The Domination of Nature points out this not only legitimises scientific exploration of nature, it neatly separates it from the moral realm and this carries through into the modern separation of facts from values. He demonstrates this with the following quotation from Bacon.

...in flying from this evil [alchemy] they should fall not into the opposite error, which they will surely do if they think that the inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden. For it was not that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures according to their propriety, which gave occasion for the fall. It was the ambitious and proud desire of moral knowledge to judge of good and evil, to the end that man may revolt from God and give laws to himself which was the form and manner of the temptation.
In Leiss (1974:51)

Bacon was a key figure in the enlightenment rise of reason and he set up the project of science as re-envisioned in the 17th century. However, the question that remains for us is 'do enlightenment values necessarily entail a particular form of science that sees its aim as improving man's estate? '. And does such a science necessarily entail the domination of nature?
Either parts of this question could be used as short essay topic.

For more information on Bacon visit here. http://www.knuten.liu.se/~bjoch509/philosophers/bac.html

The doctrines of value-freedom

We have seen that there are certain standards that apply to science and have looked at the issue of enlightenment values shaping and directing science. However, there does appear to be an important sense in which science should be value-free, that is, that it should not embody non-scientific values.
The most basic version of this is that science is about matters of fact, and values are about human preferences. Though we might want the facts of a matter to be a certain way it would be seen as unscientific to ignore contradictory evidence, or to look only for confirmation of our preferred view. It is not just that mixing facts and values will lead to bad science, but also that mixing facts and values will lead to bad ethics. The latter point is laid down in what is called 'Hume's Law' or the 'is-ought gap'. Hume points to the tendency to interpret what 'is' as what 'ought' to be and proposes that they are entirely different and an ought cannot be derived from an is. For example, 'nature is red in tooth and claw' so humans ought to act with (and society endorse) unbridled competition. We might want to reject this idea and point to the is-ought gap to do so. However, we must also reject any idea that takes the same form. Even if new facts come to light and we say that nature is in fact a co-operative system of mutual support we still cannot derive anything about how we ought to behave from this new fact.
There do seem good reasons for maintaining the fact value distinction. However, in practice the issues are complex and we will need to unpack them.

What follows is the argument in the text set out in note form. As well as helping with this particular reading you can also see here a model of note taking that you could try out - for advancing your own ability with writing philosophical essays it is useful to always keep your eye on the argument when reading.

1. Logical claim:
The core logical claim of the value-freedom doctrine is that inferences from value statements to factual statements in science and from factual statements in science to value statements are fallacious.
a. Why?
i. 'naturalistic fallacy': the logical independence of is and ought claims. Often now based on a non-realist view of value statements: 'value-utterances have no truth-value and hence cannot entail or be entailed by scientific statements that do' eg. Weber holds that values are commitments of will and hence are not empirically justifiable.
ii. The fallacy of relevance: Given that value utterances do have a truth-value, their truth-value is (normally) irrelevant to the truth of any scientific claim: in particular 'it is good that P' is (normally) independent of 'P is true'.

b. the core claim allows facts are relevant to values in that
(a) they can identify means to the realisation of ends;
(b) they can show means to some ends are inconsistent with the realisation of other ends;
(c) if one accepts that 'ought implies can' then if one can show that 'state A cannot be realised' it follows that 'it is not the case that A ought to be realised'

2. Normative claims about the role of values in science:
2.1 The core normative claim is that the only values that a scientist should employ in deciding the truth or falsity of scientific propositions and theories are the internal cognitive values of science - consistency, explanatory power, simplicity and so on. Ethical and political values ought to play no part in the validation of theories.
The thesis can be understood as an injunction against wish-fulfilment: that it would be politically or ethically desirable that P does not entail that it is true that P.

2.2 Scientists as scientists ought to make no value claims.
Weber defends this on political and ethical grounds:
a. to preserve the autonomy of academic life from political interference;
b. to stop scientists giving bogus authority to their value judgements i.e. presenting normative policy claims as if they were scientifically validated.

2.3 Disciplinary autonomy of the sciences (2.2a):
i. the sciences have internal cognitive values associated with truth-finding which are not reducible to other non-scientific values
ii. the sciences have their own internal problems which are independent of problems that society might impose on them.

3. The ethical autonomy of science
1. The ethical autonomy of science core claim: scientific practices are not answerable to ethical and political values.
2. Professional scientists often claim that the only value issues relevant to their work to be those concerned in the validation of scientific theories themselves, and hence to assert that no other value-question can arise:
"I'm a scientist; scientific knowledge is value-free (i.e. assessed by internal standards only); therefore I do not have to consider any value-questions".
3. This is a non-sequitur (but one that often appears to be built into the training of scientists)
Value freedom in senses 1 and 2 does not entail ethical autonomy.
a. That the truth of the propositions of science is logically independent of value-claims does not entail that the aims and activities of the scientist are not open to ethical appraisal.
b. That the only values relevant to the assessment of the worth of a particular scientific claim are the internal values of science - internal consistency, explanatory power, etc. - does not entail that scientists should thereby be indifferent to the ethical issues raised in the pursuit of their research - e.g. the use of animals and human subjects in experiments.
c. Nor does it entail indifference to the implications that their work has when applied and to the political and social contexts in which it occurs.
4. Value-relevance (Weber)
a. The problems one chooses to study will be determined by values:
eg. for Weber a significant problem in the modern world is that of disenchantment: 'The fate of our lives is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment with the world'.
Hence a value question that can be raised: why is this problem being pursued.

Critics of value-freedom

There is a need to be clear about which doctrine is being rejected.
1. Gouldner rejects 2.2 (Scientists as scientists ought to make no value claims.): One latent meaning of value-free science is 'Thou shalt not commit a critical or negative value judgement'
2. Strauss rejects Weber's defence of 1 (inferences from value statements to factual statements in science and from factual statements in science to value statements are fallacious) on the basis of i.a. (they can identify means to the realisation of ends)
3. Strauss rejects 1 at least for social sciences. He makes the point that values are partly constitutive of the objects for study.
a. His Objection: the necessity of value-loaded concepts
If our theories about society are to be accurate they must employ value-laden thick concepts such as cruelty, justice, art, literature.
For example, to describe concentration camps without mentioning cruelty is to misdescribe them.
b. Possible reply 1: employ the concepts as they are employed in the societies one is studying.
Responses:
i. societies are sometimes based on systematic self-deception (Strauss)
ii. there is often no stable consensus on such concepts since they are themselves essentially contested within the society for normative reasons (MacIntyre)
iii. one cannot distinguish claims of the kind 'the state collapsed because it was illegitimate' from claims of the kind 'the state collapsed because it was believed to be illegitimate' (MacIntyre).
c. Reply 2: given thick concepts like 'cruelty' we can distinguish their 'characterising force' - the descriptive claims they are used to make, from their 'appraising force' - the evaluative claims they are used to make (Nagel)
An example of how this would work with natural science:
Anaemia: 'characterising force' = red cell count
'appraising force' = this level is unhealthy: 'since an anemic animal has diminished powers of maintaining itself, anemia is an undesirable condition'.
The appraisal of the characterising claims can proceed without appeal to values.
Response: the characterising force of the concepts is determined by the appraising force. Even with 'anaemia' judgements of the levels that are anaemic in a particular animal depends on appraisal of what is bad for the creature.
d. implication for natural science
Note the use of value laden concepts in the life and environmental sciences eg. in descriptions of the health or well-being of organism; setting of environmental standards - this level of a pollutant is 'safe', causes no significant damage to marine life, is not a significant risk to human health etc. These rely on the use of thick value concepts.
4. Marcuse: rejects 1. (inferences from value statements to factual statements in science and from factual statements in science to value statements are fallacious) he says "science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man" (Much more on Marcuse in blocks 2 and 3)
5. Science and credibility: entails problems for 2.2 (Scientists as scientists ought to make no value claims.): the practice of science relies on judgements of the credibility of the sources of knowledge; judgements of credibility involve appraisal of both the ethical and intellectual virtues of persons and institutions.
6. The tradition of critical social theory vs.1 (within the Marxian position is especially developed in the Frankfurt tradition: see also Bhaskar and Edgley.)
The account runs as roughly as follows: Social practices, in the widest sense of the term are constituted and sustained by particular pre-theoretical self-understandings and norms: the possibility of market contract is constituted, for example, by self-understandings of the participants as independent agents with property rights which are exchanged according to certain norms; and it is sustained by the assumption that these norms are legitimate. Theoretical reflection on social practices will in part involve making explicit these assumptions. However, at the same time it may make assertions that conflict with the self-understandings of actors by claiming that they are either false or incoherent. (eg. Marx's claim that the market contract between wage worker and the owner of capital is not the free exchange between independent agents that the actors within it conceive it to be.) The conflicts between the self-understandings of actors and the claims of social theory forms the core of critical social theory. This takes as its aim the freeing of agents from those self-understanding by changing those practices that require them: 'to call upon them to give up their condition is to call on them to give up the condition that requires their illusions' (Marx 1843/4 p.244)
The extent to which critical theory provides a purely internal criticism of social practices is open to doubt. Its account of social theory as a critical enterprise is that it presupposes certain cognitive norms in truth and consistency and in the transparency of self-understanding. Those norms are themselves enlightenment norms that are typically contested by the conservative tradition of politics. Moreover, the norms may be too thin to sustain a critique of social practices. They require the support of the appeal to other norms. Hence a more general reflection on the goods of human life may be a presupposition of critical theory.

Exercise

Suggest a piece of scientific or social science research that demonstrates Strauss' point about not being able to avoid value -judgements as they are an essential part of knowing what something is.

Supplementary Material, used in the seminar at Lancaster, on three conceptions of science is in the resources.

Web notes by Isis Brook and John O'Neill