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Description
SIR: In your March editorial you say, "Those who like to speculate that there are avenues to knowledge other than those offered by science are having themselves on ... [though] this does not stop the many prattlers on the ABC who talk about the 'search for meaning', the numinous or the spiritual."
Your reverence for science as the path to knowledge is not shared by the scientists themselves. In The Human Touch, Michael Frayn points out that scientists are:
deeply divided about what science and its laws are. In the course of the last hundred years, since the beginnings of relativity and quantum theory, some of the scientists most closely involved, and some of the most observant philosophers of science, have taken the view that the laws of nature were: invented by man (Einstein, Bohr, Popper); not invented by man (Planck); expressions of a real underlying order in the world (Einstein); working models justified only by their utility (von Neumann, Feynman); potentially deterministic (Einstein); inherently probabilistic (Heisenberg, Prigogine); a dialogue between man and the world (Prigogine); a dialogue between the possible and the actual (Medawar); steps on the road towards complete understanding (Feynman, Deutsch); steps on a road that has no end (Born, Popper, Kuhn); forced upon us by the world (Planck); forced by us upon the world (Popper); potentially all-embracing (Feynman, Deutsch); inherently piecemeal (Cartwright); likely in the end to be not only comprehensive but simple (Feynman); accounting for less the simpler they are (Cartwright).
Science's domain is in fact a narrow one: it enjoys pre-eminence as an explanation of the world where it can measure and generalise. If you want to know how to make a cake, or whether the defendant did it, or when to pass the ball in football, or whether you husband is telling you the truth, the evidentiary processes of science usually have little to offer. As Noam Chomsky said:
[in the case of] people who try to deal somehow with human affairs ... scientific understanding is very thin, and is likely to remain so, except in a few areas that can be abstracted for special studies. On the ordinary problems of human life, science tells us very little.
Paul Hartigan, Ainslie, ACT.... |
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