KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA 31 (Feyerabend)

Commentary 8 (to C7 by von Glasersfeld)

( ON SCIENCE, ABUNDANCE, AND ABSTRACTION )
by Malthe Nielsen
14 December 2000*, posted 19 December 2000

Quotations from von Glasersfeld are in "quotation marks", comments by Nielsen are in <brackets>

" On the first pages of his introduction to CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE, Paul Feyerabend describes a paradoxical aspect of the general attitude towards science. He quotes Jacques Monod and comments: "The destruction caused by the progress of science cannot be described more clearly. But, of course, the progress of science is supposed to be something positive and eminently humane. The questions are thus to what extent this destruction helped humanity (or a privileged part of it), how much damage was done, and what is the balance ?" (PF, 1999. p.6).

PF was keenly aware of the arts, including music and the theatre, and it may have been the phenomenon of artistic experience that first convinced him that there are ways of participating in the world that lie outside the rational, scientific domain. "

< Science is not very destructive. But HUMANS are very destructive, especially when they get agressive and irrational. None of the great "events of destruction" (the world wars, the Armenian and Rwanda genocides, Pol Pot and Mao) have had science as their cause. One of PKF's least appealing tendencies is to blame rationality for the doings of irrationality, while at the same time idealizing and romantizising "unscientific" and "irrational" activities. Architecture (Nazi monuments, for instance Olympia Stadion in Berlin) art, poetry and literature (battle songs and propaganda), can very easily be blamed in a higher degree for "destructivity". But, due to some inscrutable reason, literature and art never gets blamed for the use propagandists continually make of it, while science gets the blame that should be directed towards the populations that voted for the politicians that misused the technology you can develop using the scientific theories. >

" He [PKF] hoped to bring about a change of view, by exposing the arbitrariness of the conceptual restrictions the scientific orientation has imposed in order to reduce, simplify, and make more manageable specific domains of experience. A demonstration of the hollowness of the claim of "objectivity" would, he thought, liberate humans to be human in a living space that was far greater and richer than the area admitted by the scientific dogma. "

< PKF never seriously attacked the most important argument sustaining that scientific "conceptual restrictions" are not arbitrary, namely: EPISTEMIC CONVERGENCE. Why did the Astronomers of the Mayas, Egyptians, Chinese, Babylonians, Greeks, and "Westerners" independently of each other conclude that the year had 365.25 days? Why? Just pure chance?? Arbitrary - they might as well have said 648 days, or 2.222 or 99 or whatever? The examples are there for the picking.

Giving PKF the credit he deserved: He developed (with Kuhn and Lakatos) the attack against justificationism started by Popper (and many others: Viktor Kraft, Hugo Dingler etc.) but never managed to make credible his own relativism. Reason: relativism is just plain wrong. (Try to plan your beach holiday with a 300-day calender.) >

;-)

< PS Piagets constructivism has been empirically refuted. See Steven Pinker; The Language Instinct, Peunguin 1994 and Stanislas Dehaene: La Bosse des maths, Ed Odile Jacob, Paris 1997. >

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Malthe Nielsen

* This comment was first posted in the Paul Feyerabend Forum.