Science and the Quest for Meaning (review)

Science and the Quest for Meaning, by Alfred Tauber, attempts to define a peace treaty in the Science Wars which have dominated much of the philosophical world in the past two decades. For those not familiar with that debate, the longstanding tension between two philosophical camps, which used to be called modernism and postmodernism, reached a crisis point when physicist Alan Sokal succeeded at publishing a nonsensical article in a peer-reviewed postmodernist-oriented journal. Sokal then went around the country giving talks about the silliness of postmodernists, and of course many of them responded with vitriol, leading to counterattacks, etc. Sokal’s derision, like that of many of my colleagues in science, was directed at those who claimed that all scientific knowledge is optional, and for all we know, ancient Babylonian astrology was better. Books such as Higher Superstition, by Paul Gross and Norman Leavitt, Fashionable Nonsense, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, and A House Built on Sand, by Noretta Koertge, have documented some of what scientists find ridiculous. And as Tauber notes, scientists have the upper hand: they have created airplanes, electricity, satellites, and the Internet, while postmodern philosophers have created a few impenetrable articles and maybe a couple of good poems.

Yet postmodern thinking has some good points, and most scientists I know today acknowledge this. Not many scientists today think we are always “neutral”—we go into the lab looking for something that we want to see. Most also agree that scientists themselves are legitimate topics of sociological study. Most scientists agree that there is still a place for “large concepts” like beauty and wonder, and they like to walk under the moon or in the deep forest as much as anyone else. What scientists insist on is, first of all, that there really is a world “out there” that cannot be constructed just any old way we want, and second, that the scientific endeavor has self-correction mechanisms that eventually undo abuses that can arise from non-neutral scientists or dominant paradigms. Even the sociological study of scientists follows scientific rules. Tauber’s discussion of sociological studies of scientists is ironic, because it implicitly sets the sociologists in exactly the same position as the one they claimed to critique: the position of objective, impartial observation of scientists. Thus, the really useful critiques of science are actually self-corrections, coming from people working with a scientific mentality.

Tauber gives the impression that the academic Science Wars are largely over, and perhaps he is right. One telling fact is that Tauber rarely uses the terms “modernist” and “postmodernist”; instead he prefers the terms “positivist” and “postpositivist.” Does Tauber’s avoidance of the term indicate that “postmodernism” is now a dirty word? If so, it would indicate that at least some of the criticism of postmodernism has hit home, and a retreat to a less extreme position has occurred.

Tauber presents a moderated position aimed at making peace. He rejects extreme relativism, and accepts that modern science is, in fact, better than that of ancient pagans; progress does happen, and airplanes are real. His program is a rediscovery of both Thoreau and Dewey: romanticism and pragmatism. The romantics provide us with poetic and analogical thinking: the big picture of beauty and meaning instead of just lists of details. Dewey’s pragmatism allows science to talk of value and morality in terms of what works best for society. The inclusion of Dewey as a hero in what is overall a postmodern view is somewhat surprising, because Dewey was no friend of romantics. Dewey’s program of morality was pure scientific hegemony: science would eventually resolve all questions of morality by objective measurements, bypassing all old notions of religion and meaning and displacing all theologians, classicalists, and philosophers. Dewey, in fact, could be called the last great modernist.

This compromise will make many people happy, as it fits the current ethos quite a bit. In my cynical moments, I would describe the main problem...