Science & Ignorance: Does Science Increase or Decrease Knowledge?
Austin Dacey writes in the Nov-Dec, 2004 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer:
Consider the question of what we are. One way to approach this question is through a complex of cultural beliefs about the self; for instance, that it is a coherent, unitary entity, mostly transparent to introspection, which authors behavior by the free directives of its will. Now, neuroscience is probing the brain and behavior and discovering some startling facts. By observing electrical activity around your hippocampus on a computer screen, others can predict more accurately than you can whether you will successfully recall the name of a person you just met. Meanwhile, the neural activity associated with a choice appears to precede your conscious experience of that choice. This is just the beginning. Do these facts contradict the received cultural understanding of the self? Do they reinforce it? Or are they not facts about the self at all but about something else? I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone does at this point.
And that is how science is making us more ignorant. Before neuroscience, the received cultural understanding of the self was reasonable because it was favored by the balance of the total evidence available to us. That evidence included our own introspection, along with the cultural sources just mentioned. We had an idea of what was going on with the self. With the advent of neuroscience, the total evidence available to us came to include the results of the investigations of that field. Yet we don’t know what this expanded set of evidence should lead us to conclude with respect to our cultural beliefs about the self. Thus, we have become more ignorant about the self. The point is not that some people don’t yet understand the latest relevant science. Rather, the latest science makes it the case that we no longer understand what we once did about the self.
Technically speaking, I guess it would be incorrect to say that science is truly decreasing knowledge. If knowledge is a “justified, true belief,” then the beliefs which sciences like neuroscience are undermining were never really “knowledge” to begin with — they may have been reasonable or even justified to some degree, but evidently they weren’t really true. So, they weren’t really knowledge.
At the same time, though, it is reasonable to say that these sciences are making us more ignorant than we thought we were because previously held beliefs are being undermined without having new beliefs to put in their place. When the geocentric model of the solar system was undermined, for example, science provided a heliocentric model as a replacement. We don’t have something similar happening today in places like neuroscience and so we appear to know less than we thought we did. This is disconcerting and makes us feel less secure, which is an issue that deserves closer attention.
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Comments
I disagree. We don’t “know” less than we thought we did — we actually know that what was previously believed was not fact. “It ain’t what you don’t know that’ll hurt you; it’s all those things you know that ain’t so.” We have to unlearn sometimes, it’s actually the same as learning.
With whom are you disagreeing?
I don’t think you are disagreeing with me because I wrote “it would be incorrect to say that science is truly decreasing knowledge” and “these sciences are making us more ignorant than we thought we were” (emphasis added). That last sentence means that the sum total of our knowledge isn’t less than it was, but it appears to be less because we thought we knew more than we did.
Or are you disagreeing with my conclusion that this situation, knowing less than we thought we did, is an issue that deserves closer attention?
This article certainly reinforces what I believe to be the reason why certain religious people feel so threatened by science. I’ve heard creationists argue many times that science is unreliable because the “knowledge” we derive from it is subject to change with the next discovery or experiment. They seem to yearn for the “absolute truths” provided by religion. As such “absolute truths” are not subject to revision, they are also not subject to refutation by counter-evidence. (Especially evidence from bad ol’ unreliable science.) Those who are resistant or opposed to science can dismiss it because its rules for evidence don’t–can’t–apply to their beliefs.
Just my observations!
It is not all that important whether science decreases or increases knowledge. Real science refines knowledge through testing it time and again.
The real problem with science is that it is not an isolated enterprise. It is a tremendous source of evil in the hands of the military, the rich, and crooks of all kinds.