Matthew J. Brown - Science and moral imagination a new ideal for values in science

Some problems never go away. How we act on what we know is surely a problem that predates Homo sapiens, and over our long history one aspect of that problem has evolved into the vexed relationship between science and values, which has puzzled philosophers from the ancient Greeks on. In various manifestations, such as the is/ought problem or the fact/value distinction, it has been discussed by many writers, and has remained one of the most important philosophical problems we have. Indeed now that our powers of action in the world have grown so much, by way of the application of science as a set of tools, this area of thought is more important than ever.

But over the course of the twentieth century, philosophy became theory. This shift began with thinkers like Nietszche, Wittgenstein, and Gdel bringing into question the bases of philosophy itself, and it gained momentum in the second half of the century when an immense intellectual pressure was exerted on all received ways of thought, including language and cognition. Entire academic disciplines dissolved at their foundation under this intense interrogation of first principles, and fields like anthropology and history have had to struggle ever since to understand what they are and where their validity lies, if anywhere.

For the field called philosophy of science, the shift to theory manifested as what we now call science studies. What before had been regarded as a nearlyindependent history of ideas, based largely on mathematics and therefore almost metaphysical in nature, became radically historicized and situated in the particulars of the social contexts in which science arose and evolved. Science was now understood as a particular kind of praxis, meaning a political-social-economical-instrumental intervention into relations of power among human groups, and between humanity and the rest of Earths biosphere. As such, science studies blossomed in a period of detailed phenomenological inquiry into a fractal array of historical circumstances that had never been properly investigated before. In this garden of forking paths, philosophy of science became much more history of science; using one of the last great models out of philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhns paradigms, we might say that the old paradigm of science itself broke apart under the impact of theorys radical questioning of language, history, power, and cognition.

One result of this paradigm breakdown was that academic science studies became more and more technical and ingrown, such that only other practitioners of science studies could understand the context and import of new work. The academic field plunged down rabbit holes; it got lost in the weeds, such that its use value to working scientists and the general public, or lets just say everyone interested in science, which really ought to be everyone alive (theres that word ought again, but lets keep it), can no longer get much use out of the discipline. And yet the big problems of science and society remain, and are even growing more pressing as we move into an era of unprecedented scientific-technical powers and unprecedented ecological damage. More than ever we need a solid sense, if we can make one, of the relationship between facts and values, between our actions and our hopes. Maybe you could say we are between paradigms and need a new one, if this now old-fashioned formulation has any residual power to clarify things.

This is the situation I think Matthew Brown is taking on in his very interesting book. His is an attempt at paradigm construction by way of clarification, in a moment when clarity is both difficult and crucial. To achieve that clarity, he uses aspects of the scientific method itself, which in a philosophical discussion of science is recursive but also effective and pleasing. Among other aspects of the scientific method deployed here, we see a kind of structuralist description of the problem, de-stranding conglomerate realities in hopes of finding causes and effects; also reductionism, where the problem is contained to the point where it can be understood and discussedeven Occams razor, by which I mean that Brown has decided to trust the language to convey commonly agreed-upon meanings.

This is crucial, because after the stupendous and no doubt useful work oflinguistic deconstructionism, which turned the lens of philosophical inquiry onto language and cognition itself, one now has to work with a level of uncertainty concerning the level of discourse one wants to use to make the points one wants to make. Everyone now has to acknowledge that words are mysterious bags of allusions and connotations, completely contingent on their placement in sentences and in history. Fine, undeniable. But what then? In this moment, which used to be called postmodernism, and now is maybe better called the Anthropocene, choices have to be made about the level and mode of ones discourse. High modernism in literature, which was may be another kind of theory devoted to tightly focused case studies of subjectivity, was famously dense and obscure, difficult and challenging, a mode which supposedly reflected the actual nature of thought. In that model the common parlance of popular culture and ordinary people was seen as a degraded commercial product, thus a kind of false consciousness. This was the famous high/low split in modernist aesthetics, but what if it was wrong in its basic assumptions? In any case, in postmoderism, in the age of theory, that divide collapsed, and all aesthetic forms had the potential for artistic distinction, and any individual artist could choose any style from the past and do something interesting with it. This is one of the greatest (one of the only?) strengths of postmodernism as an aesthetic, as it represented an opening up of possibilities, acknowledging that different styles are appropriate to different purposes, with no hierarchy of better or worse applicable to the choices made.

How that has played out in science studies is harder for me to see. There are dense networks of technical literature, difficult to the point of being esoteric; there are also shorter and longer forms of popular nonfiction, explaining various aspects of science to the general public. These are the extremes, but there is also a realm in between the two, which is maybe just a way of saying that philosophy persists, despite all. And philosophy, to be effective in the world, has to be comprehensible. Sometimes its appropriate to chase an idea into depths where only a few dozen fellow specialists can understand you. Other times its appropriate to speak in registers that will reach the widest audience possible. And the more important the topic, the more important it is to communicate widely and effectively about it.