Imperfect Oracle: The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science

3. American Science

In every nation, region, or culturally identiWable society, the contemporary roles of science owe a great deal to the particulars of history and culture. For example, the capacity of science to exercise epistemic or moral authority is vastly di¤erent in a Muslim nation such as Pakistan or Egypt than in a Western nation such as Germany or England. This book is primarily about the exercise of epistemic and moral authority by science in the United States. It makes sense for me to limit the scope in this way because, in the Wrst place, American science and culture is what I am best able to interpret and analyze. Second, the United States has been the most inXuential and productive source of science in the world over the past half century. One might argue that science’s entanglements with other societal sectors, and the oppositions that it encounters in its attempts to exercise authority, follow a nigh universal pattern across nations and cultures. I do not, however, believe this to be the case. In societies that depart radically from the tradition of Western democracies, authority is most commonly based on some inner commitment, a component of self-identity quite foreign to Western ideas of the self as an autonomous, self-regulating agent operating within a framework of rights and external, social constraints (Seligman 2000). We have already seen examples of conXicts in the United States between religious conservatism and science, and will see more in chapters that lie ahead. Historically, deference to the authority of revealed religion has limited science’s capacity to convey authority on many matters. In contemporary India, Israel, and the Muslim countries of three amer ican sc ience the Middle East, the terms of such conXicts are vastly di¤erent. They certainly bear study, but they are beyond the scope of my inquiry, which could be seen as a prequel to a more general study of science’s authority in other cultures. This chapter, then, is a brief history of the rise of science in the United States; in this somewhat episodic scan, there will be pauses for brief accounts of periods and events that have been especially inXuential in determining our present state. The emphasis is on how these events and periods have formed a peculiarly American sense of science’s authority. alexis de tocqueville Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 when he was a young man of twenty-Wve. He and his friend Gustave de Beaumont made the journey ostensibly to study American prisons, a subject of interest to the French interior ministry. Their ambitions, however, far exceeded that limited charge. They believed that understanding the United States, the only nation in the Western world where the people governed, would set them apart from their peers in France and be the making of their careers. The famous result of their journey of more than nine months, covering more than seven thousand miles, was Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. His extraordinary book, published in two volumes, was the product of eight years’ work. It covered every aspect of American life and culture, seen through the eyes of a well-educated young European of noble background. American science received its fair share of Tocqueville’s attention and evaluation: Those who cultivate science in democratic nations are always fearful of losing their way in utopian speculation. They distrust systems, they enjoy adhering to facts which they themselves study. As they do not easily defer to the reputations of their fellow men, they are never inclined to swear by the authority of an expert. On the contrary, they always concentrate on Wnding the weak aspects of his theory. . . . In America, the purely practical aspect of science is studied admirably, and careful attention is devoted to that theoretical area which is closely related to its application. Americans display, in this respect, an attitude which is always sharp, free, original and productive , but hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the 68 foundations essentially theoretical and abstract aspects of human knowledge. (de Tocqueville 1835, 530) Tocqueville found in the United States a culture vastly di¤erent from the one he knew in France, where there were many universities and schools of higher education, and where the sciences were established as recognized disciplines. The École normale supérieure, founded in 1795, was devoted to the preparation of science teachers. The famous chemist Jean Baptiste...