Reply to comment

Given that this forum was meant to meander, I'm going to take the initiative and discuss one of my oh so favorite topics: loopy-science. When Nietzsche asserted that "God is dead!" what he really meant was that we, humans, created the all-powerful entity to whom so many are willing to ascribe their own greatness. So too have we lowly monkey created the unwieldy giant that is science, a concept as subject to foibles and folly as any other of man’s making. Two specifics topics come to mind when I consider the human origins of science; the limits of language and the necessity of self-reflection for the scientist.

Too often science has been thought of delivering a truth tantamount to that of a religion. A veritable war of words rages on the internet between fundamentalists of either religious and scientific persuasion, and unfortunately but for the words “Darwin” or “Jesus,” the structure of the arguments are largely identical. Science and religion (for now I’ll focus on the religion I’m more familiar with, Catholicism) share other similarities; both make use of the Latin language in an obfuscatory manner, both come with socially legible vestments that demarcate the wearer as a practitioner, and both are thought to revolve around glass receptacles filled with mystical liquid. While many followers of “Science” fail to conduct themselves in manner which distinguishes their beliefs from religious faith, science itself calls for the scientist to consider himself and his role within science as a body. The scientist should be aware that he is first and foremost a human, not the objective all seeing eye that the public often regards him as. The scientist needs to consider her position not only within her phylogenetic history, but her ontogenetic history as well. Education, family structure, citizenship; all these social structures will augment the practice of science within the lab.

Language is a particular favorite limit of mine. I’ve always tended more towards a Whorf-ian conception of language, which asserts that language comes after perception of reality and thus comes to drive our understanding of the “physical” reality around us. If language really does control how the world is perceived by the brain, then certain “truths” or physical laws may be limited to the language within which they were invented. Consider a hypothetical language which has no means to express time (Whorf asserts that Hopi is one such language, but this assertion remains controversial[1]). If one cannot express time, then among many other issues, one cannot express velocity. While this would make physics much easier for speakers of English, what does this do to the reality of the speaker of our hypothetical language? More to the point, what does it do to their science?

1. Whorf, Benjamin, “Science and Linguistics,” in Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ED. Carrol, J.B., MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1956.