Category Archives: Compass

Compass

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I feel we are at a point where we can begin to address the questions posed in the first postings of the blog.  Namely, what do we make of a world that can accommodate a wide diversity of cultures and of ways of perceiving and engaging with it; and, since we can actually change our way of living in the world, is there any sense in which certain ways may be preferable?  The previous posts can be distilled into three main points, which I feel describe our common human experience of living in the world.

  1. First, we are aware of very little, of a tiny sliver, of the world.  This is of course commonplace, but this lack of awareness extends to our own bodies and what they are continuously doing to support and sustain our perception and actions.  Reality is in excess, here and now, always and everywhere.  And of the very little we are aware of, we can put into words even less, a point beautifully made by Bian the wheelwright.
  2. Second, all knowledge about the world is the result of hard work.  It involves the effort to learn to perceive and recognize specific patterns, so as to orient ourselves and guide our actions accordingly.  It also involves the effort to learn how to carry out specific activities successfully.  An important aspect of this hard work is the standardization of perception and performance, which provides the basis of our socialization into particular communities.  It is through this standardization that knowledge – and the work of multitudes that it is based upon – is transmitted across space and time.  A lot of related work goes into structuring and organizing the environment to support and guide our perceptions and conduct.  And it is the extension of standardization across times and places that the power of science emanates from.
  3. Third, our knowledge of the world defines us. Knowledge amounts to discipline of perception and conduct. This disciplining of our bodies makes us who we are – knowing amounts to being in a certain way.  Our knowledge rests on our abilities to perceive and act in specific ways, how we place and orient ourselves in the world and how we engage with it.  With knowledge being the result of hard work, the effort we expend on learning how to perceive and act is precisely the effort that disciplines our bodies and shapes us into particular beings.

I view the three points above as a compass with which to orient ourselves in the world we live in.  First, it is important to keep in mind that our knowledge about the world and about ourselves, even our awareness about what we do here and now, is very limited.  Second, when we consider what is presented as knowledge, including our own knowledge, a most relevant question is where did this knowledge come from, how, through what effort was it developed?  And third, that knowledge also reflects who the knower is, their understanding of themselves and in relation to the world, and how they conduct themselves.

One might feel that the compass lacks specifics, but specifics can only be the outcome of work, which is always particular to a place and time and associated with a way of being.  When we embark on learning something new or on developing new knowledge, this effort also shapes us in novel ways.  In future posts I will be shifting my focus to specifics, to maps, which by their nature will be particular to my own vantage point, my own place in the world.

The Power of Science

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The previous three posts on Truth, Science, and the Duhem-Quine Thesis make a strong, even obvious, argument for the importance of our socialization in our engagement with the material world.  Our socialization is a constituent part of our knowledge, of our ways of going about in the world.  What is more, these posts make the case for scientific knowledge itself being the product of socialization into particular communities, scientific communities, which have their own specialized ways of engaging with the world.  It is the specialized abilities developed by the different scientific communities that underlie scientific knowledge.  The abilities, for example, that allow us to measure the color of an object, or extract and analyze the DNA of an animal.

But if scientific knowledge is the product of socialization, of specialized abilities developed within particular communities, then scientific knowledge is actually local knowledge, knowledge that is specific to these particular communities.  How do we then account for the indisputable power of Science, for scientific knowledge being the basis of so many aspects of our lives, a basis independent of our own socialization?

The discussion of the examples in the previous post, measuring the color of an object and analyzing the DNA of an animal, point to what is going on.  The scientific approach may involve the specialized abilities of individuals, but these abilities have been acquired through supervised training, with the explicit goal of ensuring consistency, that is, of getting the same results regardless of the individual – what matters is doing things according to the training.  The performance reflecting these abilities has been checked and cross-checked many times, by different individuals, at different places, and at different times, and the performance has been adjusted and fine-tuned as necessary. Along with this standardized performance of trained individuals, scientific measurements involve the use of standardized equipment, equipment that has been constructed, checked and cross-checked to perform consistently at different places and at different times.  Indeed, there are standardized procedures (frequently referred to as calibration) that ensure that the equipment is performing as expected. 

It is this standardization of individual performances and tools that underlies the extension of scientific knowledge beyond the boundaries of the particular communities.  And this extension takes a tremendous amount of effort to put in place and subsequently maintain it.  One way to think of scientific knowledge is in terms of the development and dissemination of standards, of immutable mobiles, things that remain unchanged as we take them to different places to assist us in ensuring consistency.  Tools, machines, or chemicals readily come to mind, as we continuously ship them around, regularly exchanging them, allowing the comparison of our actions and experiences across locales and times.  Integral to the successful diffusion of these standards is of course the availability of appropriately trained individuals with the abilities to use them.

And so this is where Science derives its power from: not from special access to the world or a special way of engaging with it, but from the systematic hard work across times and places to standardize our interaction with the world – the scale is immense indeed, indicating the enormous amount of work involved.  The scientific approach achieves that by the standardizing of abilities and conduct through training, and by developing tools, machines, chemicals, and other standards, to ensure the consistency of our interaction with the world.  When considering the scale of effort that goes into this standardization, it is important to keep in mind an essential element of the scientific approach, namely its emphasis on communication, on expressing scientific knowledge in forms that can be easily communicated and shared.  And what is being shared ranges from methods and protocols, what we might call how-to’s, to theories and maps, descriptions that is, to organize our experience and guide what we do.  This communicability allows not only for sharing, but also for the accumulation of scientific knowledge – in some form at least – and its transmission across time and space.  There is a cumulative effect in other words that helps sustain the immense scale over which scientific knowledge is applicable.

We are actually fairly familiar with the importance of standardization, as breakdowns that result from incompatibilities in standards are not an uncommon experience.  There are plenty of Bureaus of Weights and Measures across the world, institutes that store standards and instruments developed by scientific communities.  These standards and instruments allow the comparison of someone’s scales for measuring, length, time, weight, electricity, and so on, with those of others, elsewhere.  In this way, items made in one place can be used elsewhere, the threads of a screw made in Illinois will match the threads of hole in a car assembled in Michigan, the weight of vegetables put in a package in Mexico will match the weight measured in a grocery store in Canada, the cell phone chargers made in Korea will work in Europe, and so on. And there are continuous efforts to work out agreements and establish standards that will ensure compatibility in areas of manufacturing, electronics, communications.