Hi all,

I think Jack raises an important point with his "disembodied disconnect" idea. The suggestion that science is just a socially constructed set of beliefs most often arises at a level of intellectual discussion which is disconnected from the everyday experience with the world from which science arises. When science is treated as a sort of intellectual exercise of finding theories to tie together abstract readings on the dials or displays of complicated and mysterious equipment, it is easy to view its conclusions as collectively constructed agreement. Often, in fact, the discourse (e.g. in research journals) describing leading-edge science IS an abstract manipulation of theories relating different display read-outs. And for awhile, the success of a theory depends somewhat on social factors within the culture of that scientific discipline. It is quite natural that this should happen at the cutting edge, where by definition the evidence is inconclusive. (If the evidence were conclusive, there would be wider agreement, and it wouldn't be the cutting edge!). This cutting edge discourse is often the most interesting, and draws the most media attention. But it is misleading to focus on this discourse alone, because it leaves out the connections to the world of experience which motivated the science in the first place. To use Jack's airplane analogy, it would be like taking note only of the debates about the theory of flight, noting that the popularity of certain theories is influenced by opinion and culture, but forgetting that every participant in the discussion ultimately has to fly at 30,000 feet in the airplane of their design! At this point there is an external arbitrator to decide which theories match with "objective reality."

This "disconnect" problem often arises, for example, when someone with little structured education in physics reads many of the popular accounts of hot topics in particle physics or cosmology. Such books often describe amazing but abstract ideas and terminology. They leave out much of the background that might allow people to connect the ideas (and evidence for the ideas) to the experience of their world, where they know what it means to provide evidence for a fact. (For example, in my field, vast distances may be quoted without connecting the way those distances are measured to the way one measures a distance on earth, with a ruler. So someone who would not dream of arguing that a room isn't "really" 50 feet wide after seeing it measured with a ruler, might argue that the earth isn't really 93 million miles from the sun, because they don't know the method and so can't recognize that it's just as sound and real as measuring with a ruler.) This leaves a conceptual gap between the "real world of experience" and the "abstract world of science."

Another illustration of this gap is an ad I once saw for a pain reliever (Bayer, I think). The spokesperson is talking about why he takes Bayer. He mentions that there is all kinds of scientific evidence to support his claim that the medication works. But then he says something like, "But I don't care about that...I'm not convinced by charts and graphs, are you? I take it because it gets rid of my headache!" What struck me about these statements was the implication that the charts and graphs are disconnected from reality. It suggests a lack of recognition that the only point of the charts and graphs is to reflect what will happen in reality - whether it will get rid of your headache.

The existence of this gap is significant for what we're talking about because in everyday life, most people have no doubt that there is an objective reality. It is the distinction between the science world and the everyday world that allows people to think of statements in science as "not objectively real," when they would find it obviously ludicrous to say this about more ordinary statements. As John Searle puts it, "If you ask me how to get to the next town, or what time the plane leaves, or ask the doctor if you have cancer, or just ask me to pass the salt, there's no way that any of these utterances are intelligible without the presuppostion that there is a real world. " Or as Amanda pointed out, "we all live as if there is an objective reality." At a very elementary level, before any kind of analysis or formal discourse enters the picture, we all KNOW and accept that there is an objective reality (by any reasonable, common-sense definition of "objective reality.") It strikes me as funny that in our effort to analyze and better understand, by inventing ever more sophisticated levels of discourse about our experience with reality, we can end up almost "defining away" the very thing that we started out to understand. People end up accepting claims about the "social construction" of science that they would not accept about more familiar and ordinary statements about their world of experience.

So it seems very important to me that in communicating science, we maintain the connection to its origins in the "real world." Most people recognize without a doubt that we live in a world which imposes constraints and limitations upon us. We experience the concept of energy through the need food to maintain our activity, we recognize that certain laws must be followed to make a plane fly, etc. The existence of these constraints is not a collective hypnosis; it is imposed on us by an external world of some sort. What is sometimes missing is the recognition that science was invented in response to these constraints. And these constraints are real, even if the science (the exact way that we describe and understand the constraints) is wrong sometimes.

I think it's for some of these same reasons that I like the (admittedly simplistic) definition of science as "the process of choosing what works over what doesn't work." Such a definition narrows the gap, and makes it more clear that knowledge claims in science are no more outrageous than what we do all the time in normal life.

In response to Jack's question, I think these ideas have tremendous implications for science integration. As long as you feel that science is somehow describing an abstract world, disconnected from the one you experience directly everyday, then insights from science are unlikely to impact your everyday thinking. The science simply doesn't seem to have anything to do with most of your daily life. But if science is recognized as an investigation and expression of the same kinds of limitations we all notice and experience every moment, then it has much more obvious relevance.

The need for science integration is rooted in this "disconnect," which exists in many people's minds, between statements made in the world of science and statements about the world we all experience and in which we live and try to construct meaningful lives.
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From: "JS" <jsa@teleport.com>
To: <science@lists.pdx.edu>
Subject: Re: objective truth
Date: Thu, Jan 20, 2000, 9:52 PM
Hi, Science Integrators,

This is Jack (Semura). I second Amanda's answer about objective truth. It reminds me of the reply: "There are no agnostics at thirty-thousand feet."

The term 'agnostics' in this saying refers to scientific agnostics, not to religious agnostics. Part of the flavor of the modern deconstructionist interpretation of science is that there is no objective truth in scientific fact and that we have essentially developed interpretation by collective agreement (a kind of cultural hypnosis based on our technical society). But when we're thirty-thousand feet in the air, it becomes much harder for scientific agnostics to maintain that we're just 'collectively agreeing on the interpretation' that we're flying.

I'd like to make two other points about the original 'objective truth" quotation posted by Todd.

First, I'd like to mention a kind of curious 'disembodied disconnect' (my invented term) that I've observed. I have had a number of discussions about this topic. I made the argument above (which is also essentially Amanda's original answer) that the reality of plane flight is real and not just a collective interpretation. Several times, in response, I've gotten a completely blank look in return, as if the person I was talking with just did not understand what was being said. The response I've gotten to the argument above is a blank look and the answer, "Well, my mind just doesn't operate that way." (Interpretation: "I just don't understand why you're talking about a plane flying.") What I find really interesting is that I've gotten this response only from very educated people. It almost seems as if it takes years of education to become intellectual enough so that, when I hit my head on a rock, I can then interpret the pain and the lump on my head as just a culturally interpretated relative reality, the "true nature of which we can never know." Physical reality is no longer understood as reality. There is a kind of strange disembodied disconnect between idea and physical reality. In this state, since ideas are more important than physical reality, it does become self-fulfillingly true that everything is interpretation. Let me ask a question: If it is true that some of the most 'educated' possess this disembodied disconnect, what relevance does it have to the goals of science integration?

Second: I think many of us would agree with snippets of the original quote by Schiff and Vaughn, or at least consider certain parts as serious questions to be thought about. I agree that the ways of knowing are not limited to the methods of science. But the quote has so many terms and phrases to define that it would take an essay to just agree on the terms (including truth, nature, reality, myth, etc.). Since there is so much to define, I guess I prefer the short answer that still makes a point: "There are no agnostics at thirty-thousand feet."

Have fun!
-Jack Semura