Key Concepts: "scientism"

This is part of an article series called “key concepts” wherein I define key concepts I often refer to. 

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"There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them." - Shevek in Ursula Le Guin's novel, The Dispossessed.

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I once had a conversation with friends about Xenon-129. I had read a book that discussed the preponderance of this isotope in the Martian atmosphere. This was discovered by plasma physicist Dr. John Brandenburg. The isotope is estimated to have an age of about 250 to 500 million years and has so far been found in only one other place in the universe: Earth's atmosphere. It is correlated with nuclear activity because Xenon 129 spiked in Earth's atmosphere after the usage of atomic weapons. My friends immediately blustered forth saying it was preposterous to say that nuclear weapons had ever been used on Mars. Which is not what I was or am saying. My friends reassured me that Science would discover a prosaic explanation for the discovery of Xenon-129 on Mars. I didn't pursue the conversation further. Faith is defined as "the assured expectation of things yet unknown". It is not yet known that Science will discover that Xenon-129 on Mars is a prosaic, meaningless, random thing. Instead of "I don't know" my friends chose faith in Science; Scientism. Power to them if it is their true path. It isn't mine. In my world, moon walking bears exist. 

One of Thomas Kuhn's opening statements in "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that our mind map of science is incomplete due to it being informed primarily by achievement. Kuhn: "The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise." Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is generated exclusively via paradigm destruction. Ideas displacing other ideas is Science's mode of being. Because Science is so directly predicated on paradigms shifting, the key to understanding Kuhn's argument is to understand paradigms. 

The purpose of any given paradigm is to dictate the boundaries of what entities exist. This reductionist approach to reality was born from necessity from the very beginning. When Fidanza set out to gain a granular understanding of nature he was faced with the question of what is worth studying. There is an infinite amount of things. Without value judgments made about what things matter there is no reason to study one thing over another. From a purely scientific perspective, crossing small pox with polio to make a lethal bio-weapon is a legitimate pursuit. It is some sort of morality that tells us this is a bad thing. Kuhn explains how once any given field establishes certain facts the outer edges of that field's paradigm contract. The contractive pressure creates convention. The convention is handed down to students. These are story legacies in the form of textbooks. The textbooks are downstream of a boundary setting enterprise emerging from moral hierarchies. So Science is a moral myth. Kuhn drives a truck through the romanticized view that science is the process of uncovering ever-increasingly refined truths or that it brings about an infinitely upward pointing progress curve. Instead science is a story about what we think matters. Its evolution into the collective cultural context is resonant with archaic motifs of initiation. The paradigm shift is a death rebirth cycle.

Image credit: public domain 
(publicdomainvectors.org)

There is a study about playing cards discussed in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The story goes like this: Bruner and Postman showed subjects playing cards one by one for a brief period. Most of the playing cards fit to the standard four suits categories. But some were anomalous; a black 4 of hearts for instance. The subjects for the most part did not see the anomalous cards. As the researchers increased the amount of time each participant could see each card some people began to notice certain odd cards. But in general they still could not identify the true color of the card. Some even entered a cognitively dissonant state, seeing cards with colored borders. Finally when the anomalous cards were recognized the majority of participants could then easily identify all the cards. The study is one of many arguments demonstrating that until a paradigm is destroyed in favor of the anomalous, the anomalous goes largely undetected. An important note to make about this study with the cards is that some participants never succeeded in overcoming their cognitive dissonance. 

1546 map of the world by Pierre Desceliers -
source: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-231279715/

The adverse effects of Scientism's paradigm isn't confined to the laboratory. Ever look at maps used by Europeans who first came to Canada? They were inaccurate but somehow enough. In consultation with indigenous nations the maps were refined in no small part by way of stories; legends of great rivers and mountains and paradisiacal land in the west. The explorers did not dismiss the stories. They pursued them; through hunger, cold, sickness and thirst with nothing guiding them but scribbles on birch barks and often less. Try after try over several generations they failed to find China. Each failure refined their maps until they eventually did find paradise at the end of the world and renamed it British Columbia. The lesson to take away here is the same one learned from studying the structure of scientific revolutions. The map is not the territory.

How does this relate to music? The contractive pressure of scientism has squeezed out the existence of something that is central to understanding a power in music. A power that I am insisting is necessary to recognize; an ability to heal and build bridges. If this power is to be surfaced into a wider cultural context it must be placed on the spectrum of possible existing entities. Music is a moon walking bear.  

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Further reading:

• A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land - Adam Shoalts
• Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre - Dr. John E. Brandenburg
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas S. Kuhn
• The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
• Six Signs of Scientism - Susan Haack

More info: