The Construction of Ignorance and the Evolution of Knowledge

PAUL BOUISSAC The Construction of Ignorance and the Evolution of Knowledge During the last few decades, scientific research conceived as the empirical pursuit of truth and objectivity has been put on trial. For many, scientific knowledge has lost its prestige, integrity, and quasi-transcendence, and has come to be variously considered as a set of rival incommensurable theories similar to ideologies and religions, unstable configurations of power and authority prone to irrational changes, or even fictions generated by self-delusion, if not deliberate deception. Landmark works in this critical process include those of Kuhn (1970),- Popper (1972), Feyerabend (1975), and Lakatos (1978). Their criticisms have triggered many debates (e.g. Suppe 1977; Serres 1989) and have permeated our 'episteme' in more or less radical forms.1 Scholars from all fields have subsequently transferred these arguments from the natural to the social sciences (e.g. McCloskey 1986; White 1986), and, more generally, have questioned any intellectual endeavour inspired by the modern scientific ethos or modelled on the empirical method. The notion of knowledge as revealed or discovered truth has shifted towards a view which holds that knowledge is constructed, if not fabricated. Trivial versions of this new scepticism have filtered through to the general population via the media, and, according to some, explain the marked decline in government funding for scientific research which characterized the 1980s? Confronting the issues raised by this epistemological crisis not only is an intellectual challenge but also has political and ethical dimensions. Efforts towards a critical understanding of the scientific development of knowledge, including its sociological and rhetorical strategies, do not necessarily lead to a radical dismissal of its value and virtue. They may, however, help reassess its significance in the broader theoretical context formed by the interfaces which are developing between the humanities and the social sciences on the one side and the formal and the natural sciences on the other. After focusing on some of the most pressing issues of contemporary epistemology, this essay will examine strategies of knowledge construction, and will conclude by attempting to explain, from an evolutionary perspective, why theories can be both arbitrary and objective in the same manner as genetic mutations can be both random and adaptive. UN1VERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1992 IGNORANCE AND KNOWLEDGE 461 I OBJECTS OF PERPLEXITY Obviously, the first relevant question to ask bears upon the status of the object of knowledge. This issue has triggered intense discussions, particularly in relation to experimental research (e.g., is the object an artifact?) and the social sciences (e.g., is the object a function of the position of authority of the investigator?). One may ask, for instance: Which method is most appropriate for reaching an accurate description and a satisfactory explanation of a sociocultural object? This question suggests that, on the one hand, institutions and their productions stand as objects and that, on the other hand, methods are commodities among which a discriminating researcher can select the one which is best suited to the task at hand, given the assumed nature of the object. But such naIve positivism tends to ignore the extent to which methods and objects are intimately associated, almost indistinguishable from each other like mutually definable correlates. Indeed, any method presupposes a model of its object, conceived in terms of the sort of information that the method is conceptually equipped to detect, if not to construct. Methodological strategies necessarily imply the elaboration of their object of inquiry within a more general conceptual scheme, and endeavour to determine the range of variables set forth by the model that is thus elaborated. Is saying this the same as claiming that all methods are equally valid or equally vain, and that the quest for knowledge proceeds through a forest of epistemological fantasies? Are researchers corning from various theoretical horizons doomed to confront one another in a conflict of interpretations? Is the cognitive interplay between models and methods necessarily condemned to be circular, thus locking researchers, individually or as groups, in epistemological solipsism? This is, of course, a possibility, and, as pointed out above, contemporary polemical debates, focused upon epistemological relativism, have called attention to the extent to which theories, scientific or otherwise...