Science does not, by nature, undermine its own search for answers. It might seem so, from what seems to be a growing movement away from science, fuelled by the growing list of concepts and phenomena which people want explained, and which mainstream science ignores or tries to debunk. In reality, however, science does not kill discovery. People do.
Movements against science are nothing new. History is riddled with the persecutions, and executions, of scientists in societies ruled by the Church, where scientific discovery challenged the dominant paradigm. It is hard to imagine in our secular society, someone being placed under house arrest for life for trying to prove that the Earth goes around the sun. At one point, you would have been jeered to tears, or worse, for believing that the world was a sphere.
Of course, science won the day in the end, as it efficiently lubricated the world, making things better. Truth couldn’t be denied, for a while at least. Challenges to science in the 20th Century were not unheard of, and no longer exclusively from the same quarters. The feminist perspective challenged the reductionist approach and suggested that true objectivity was undesirable, and unattainable, new age philosophy has long advocated a paradigm shift, and alternative medicine has made millions flying in the face of what is all filed under the category of Science.
In the latter part of the last century and into this one, the scientific establishment’s inability to explain to people’s satisfaction, and at times its outright ridicule of dear-death experiences, ghosts, UFOs, religious experiences and the like, has ignited a new revolution against this “science”. But it is not science, the scientific method, which is undermining the quest for answers. When we use the word like this, it is a metonym, like referring to a political decision as having been made by Ottawa or Washington. Ottawa and Washington do not make decisions, nor does science. People do. Science doesn’t proclaim that everything not observable by its method is untrue, or withdraw funding from projects dealing with the paranormal when they start getting results. Science doesn’t refuse to grant patents to people inventing new energy technologies. People are the barriers to progress, and more importantly, the dogmas that they set in motion. We undermine our own search for answers. There is a term that refers to the individual researcher’s sense of responsibility for the end results of their work. It is called “praxis”, and it’s something we have lost with our financially and politically driven method of doing scientific research. Perhaps if we can get our praxis back, and at the same time remove some of the trappings of exclusivity from within the scientific world, we will not render ourselves obsolete.
Note: For a more detailed description of the feminist perspective in science, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology.
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