by b_b

Are we to be disgusted with science, because it has not fulfilled our hopes or redeemed its promises? And are we, for this reason, to announce the “bankruptcy” of science, as it is so often and so flippantly done? But this is rash and foolish; for we can hardly blame science because we have not asked the right questions. -Ernst Cassirer (qtd. in [1])

Dear Readers:

Firstly, thank you so much for your gracious attention, which is humbly and most assuredly appreciated. I pray this column is the first of many and will thus do my best to keep your interest (though I make no promise).

Second, and more to the point, in this maiden installment I’d like to discuss the title of the column, Forms of Life, taken from a rather famous passage of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Specifically, paragraph 241 (of the translation by Anscombe, Hacker and Schulte) reads:

“So are you saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” — What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life [2]. [emphasis his]

While many individuals of merit have discussed and disagreed at length about the meaning of this paragraph, I think that it is universally accepted that Wittgenstein was trying to understand the basic question of what is true. I’m not so interested, nor am I qualified, to get into the nitty gritty of the epistemological questions raised by the above quotation. What I am interested in is what its broad implications for the scientific community are?

A man whom I respect perhaps more than any other creator of content, Errol Morris, weighed in on this quote in a piece in The Times:

Wittgenstein...at least in this one instance, seems to be saying what he’s saying. And he opens the door (or the lid of Pandora’s Box) to a relativistic notion of truth. In paragraph 241, it’s agreement between human beings that decides what is true or false. It suggests that we could agree that the earth is flat and that would make it so. So much for the relationship between science and the world [3]. [emphasis his]

As much as it pains me to do so, I must disagree with Mr. Morris on his interpretation of 241. I don’t think that Wittgenstein was arguing at all in favor of a purely relativistic truth. I think that he was arguing that without agreement on definitions of words, there is no truth to be had; truth derives from the agreed upon meanings of words. If we back up two paragraphs, to 239, we can find this: “How is he to know what colour he is to pick out when he hears ‘red’? — Quite simple: he is to take the colour whose image occurs to him when he hears the word.” So, in Wittgenstein’s view, unless we have prior appreciation for the colour red (i.e. someone has shown us what is red), the word red is meaningless. There is no way to describe it, save to point at a red object and say “red”. I love his use of the word “simple” in this context. After all, it is simple. Red is red, but it is only agreement that red is red that gives meaning to the word “red”. It is a definition. This has nothing whatever to do with whether the world is flat. That the world is shaped as it is, is an undeniable physical reality, and we’ve agreed that this shape is a sphere. Without such agreement, we could scarcely communicate.

So, truth—hard, factual, “scientific” truth—has a component of agreement. This concept doubtlessly will make some people uneasy. After all, isn’t science supposed to be objective? Observe and report, if you will? While I disagree with Morris that “agreement”, in the sense in which Wittgenstein uses it, leads (or can lead) to pure relativism, it does suggest that subjectivity is inescapable in all facets of life, science included. I don’t know to what extent, but what I am reasonably certain of is that if there is an objective version of the truth, it is inaccessible to us, given our reliance on language, especially if we are to believe that “What is true or false is what [we] say”.

This is troubling, because in spite of our reliance on language in all of its imperfect glory, we are taught from a young age that the whole point of the scientific method is to determine truth unambiguously. One of the founders of modern physiology (and thus experimental biology), François Magendie, best known as the co-discoverer of the function of dorsal and ventral roots in the spinal column, made the claim that he had no use for theories, that truth and knowledge derived solely from experimentation and observation without pre-formed hypotheses [4]. This represents empiricism at its apex, and it is certainly untenable, as one cannot blindly start doing experiments. One has to at least decide what to measure, thereby choosing one preferential measure over the next, as a photographer chooses to frame this subject instead of that one.

We may look back on Magendie with a snicker, but I think we often unwittingly delude ourselves into believing that we are doing science in the way he envisioned, at least in spirit if not in fact. Not that we aren’t guided by hypotheses, as testing a hypothesis is an explicit step in the scientific method, but rather that we think that data are truth; that the more we “know” the more divine we become. I think data are sometimes treated like scripture, but so much of what we do in science borders on nonsense; data aren’t an ends. That, friends, will be the (loose) focus of this regular column. In the coming columns I hope to highlight what I think are examples of good and bad treatment of science in the popular and academic literature, and to brainstorm interesting facets on the intersection of science and philosophy. This is, obviously, a superficial treatment of a complicated topic, but I hope that this will be viewed as merely the preface to an open ended discussion about such matters; bear with me, readers. And always feel free to critique, complain, or compliment at your convenience.

1. Fischer, D.H., Historians' fallacies: toward a logic of historical thought. 1971, London,: Routledge and K. Paul. xxii, 338 p.

2. Wittgenstein, L. and G.E.M. Anscombe, Philosophical investigations : the German text, with a revised English translation. 3rd ed. 2003, Malden, MA,: Blackwell Pub. x, 246 p.

3. Morris, E., The Ashtray: The Author of the ‘Quixote’ (Part 4). 2011.

4. Gross, C.G., A hole in the head : more tales in the history of neuroscience. 2009, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. x, 356 p.