The Flight from Science and Reason (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)

583 Pages·1997·46.39 MB·English

by  Paul R. Gross

ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Volume 775
THE FLIGHT FROM
SCIENCE AND REASON
Edited by Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W Lewis
The New York Academy of Sciences
New lVrk, New lVrk
1996
Copyright © 1996 by the New York Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Under
the provisions of the United States Copyright Act of 1976, individual readers of the
Annals are permitted to make fair use of the material in them for teaching and re
search. Permission is granted to quote from the Annals provided that the customary
acknowledgment is made of the source. Material in the Annals may be republished
only by permission of the Academy. Address inquiries to the Executive Editor at the
New York Academy of Sciences.
Copying fees: For each copy of an article made beyond the free copying permitted
under Section 107 or lOB of the 1976 Copyright Act, a fee should be paid through the
Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. For
articles of more than 3 pages, the copying fee is $1. 75.
@ The paper used in this publication meets the minImum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.4B-19B4.
The illustration on the designed-cover edition of this volume is El sueno de la razon
produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters), from Caprichos, by
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, first edition 1799. Reproduction courtesy of Alinaril
Art Resource, NY.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The flight from science and reason I edited by Paul R. Gross, Norman
Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis.
p. cm. - (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, ISSN
0077-8923 ; v. 775)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57331-002-6 (cloth: alk. paper). - ISBN 1-57331-003-4
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. SCience-Philosophy. 2. Science-Social aspects. 3. Women in
science. 4. Religion and science. I. Gross, Paul R. II. Levitt,
N. (Norman), 1943-. III. Lewis, Martin W. IV. Series.
Q175.F58 1996
500-dc20 96-5689
CIP
Fourth Printing, November 1998
CCP
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 1-57331-002-6 (cloth)
ISBN 1-57331-003-4 (paper)
ISSN 0077-8923
ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Volume 775
June 24, 1996
THE FLIGHT FROM SCIENCE AND REASONa
Editors
PAUL R. GROSS, NORMAN LEVITT, and MARTIN W. LEWIS
Organizing Committee
LOREN FISHMAN, PAUL R. GROSS, SUSAN HAACK, GERALD HOLTON,
NORMAN LEVITT, and MARTIN W. LEWIS
CONTENTS
Introductory Remarks: Medicine Took an Earlier Flight.
By HENRY GREENBERG ...................................... ix
Introduction. By P. R. GROSS .................................. 1
The Public Image of Science ................................ 9
Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads. By DUDLEY R. HERSCHBACH ...... 11
Conduct and Misconduct in Science. By DAVID GOODSTEIN . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Mathematics as the Stepchild of Contemporary Culture.
By NORMAN LEVITT ........................................ 39
Reasonable Foundations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Concern for Truth: What It Means, Why It Matters. By SUSAN HAACK. . . 57
The Propensity to Believe. By JAMES E. ALCOCK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Flights of Fancy: Science, Reason, and Common Sense.
By BARRY R. GROSS ........................................ 79
Feelings and Beliefs. By LOREN FISHMAN ......................... 87
In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia. By MARIO BUNGE . . 96
The Foundations ~f Physics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 117
Quantum Philr:.sophy: The Flight from Reason in Science.
By SHELDuN GOLDSTEIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 119
a This volume represents the proceedings of a conference entitled The Flight from
Science and Reason, which was sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences and
held in New York, New York on May 31-June 2, 1995.
Physics and Common Nonsense. By DANIEL KLEPPNER .............. 126
Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science? By J. BRICMONT ............. 131
Health ............... ,................................... 177
"Sucking with Vampires": The Medicine of Unreason.
By GERALD WEISSMANN ..................................... 179
Antiscience Trends in the Rise of the "Alternative Medicine" Movement.
By WALLACE SAMPSON. . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 188
Constructivism in Psychotherapy: 'fruth And Consequences.
By BARBARA S. HELD ....................................... 198
Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 207
Radical Environmental Philosophy and the Assault on Reason.
By MARTIN W. LEWIS ....................................... 209
Is Environmental Cancer a Political Disease? By STANLEY ROTHMAN and
S. ROBERT LICHTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 231
Old Messages: Ecofeminism and the Alienation of Young People from
Environmental Activism. By RENE DENFELD ..................... 246
Social Theories of Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 257
Towards a Sober Sociology of Science. By SUSAN HAACK. . . . . . . . . . . .. 259
Wrestling with the Social Constructor. By NORETTA KOERTGE ......... 266
Voodoo Sociology: Recent Developments in the Sociology of Science.
By STEPHEN COLE ......................................... 274
The Allure of the Hybrid: Bruno Latour and the Search for
a New Grand Theory. By OSCAR KENSHUR ...................... 288
History, Society, Politics ................................... 299
Whatever Happened to Historical Evidence? By MARY LEFKOWITZ 301
Building Bridges to Afrocentrism: A Letter to My Egyptological
Colleagues. By ANN MACY ROTH .............................. 313
State of the Art/Science in Anthropology. By ROBIN Fox . . . . . . . . . . . .. 327
Liberalism, Public Opinion, and Their Critics: Some Lessons for
Defending Science. By SIMON JACKMAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 346
Pathological Social Science: Carol Gilligan and the Incredible Shrinking
Girl. By CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS ............................ 369
Feminisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 383
Why Feminist Epistemology Isn't. By JANET RADCLIFFE RICHARDS . . . . .. 385
Feminist Epistemology: Stalking an Un-Dead Horse.
By NORETTA KOERTGE ...................................... 413
The Science Question in Postcolonial Feminism. By ME ERA NANDA .... 420
Are "Feminist Perspectives" in Mathematics and Science Feminist?
By MARY BETH RUSKAI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 437
Humanities ............................................... 443
On Sitting Down to Read King Lears Once Again: The Textual
Deconstruction of Shakespeare. By PAUL A. CANTOR .............. 445
Constructing Literature: Empiricism, Romanticism, and Textual Theory.
By GEORGE BORNSTEIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 459
Freudian Suspicion versus Suspicion of Freud. By FREDERICK CREWS 470
Ecosentimentalism: The Summer Dream beneath the Tamarind Tree.
By GERALD WEISSMANN ..................................... 483
Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 491
Two Sources of Unreason in Democratic Society: The Paranormal and
Religion. By PAUL KURTZ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 493
Creationism, Ideology, and Science. By EUGENIE C. SCOTT ........... 505
The Flight from Reason: The Religious Right. By LANGDON GILKEY .... 523
Doubt, Certainty, Faith, and Ideology. By OSCAR KENSHUR ........... 526
Education ................................................ 537
Science, Reason, and Education. By HENRY ROSOVSKY . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 539
Scientific Literacy. By JAMES TREFIL ............................. 543
Science Education and the Sense of Self. By GERALD HOLTON . . . . . . . .. 551
Afrocentric Pseudoscience: The Miseducation of African Americans.
By BERNARD R. ORTIZ DE MONTELLANO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 561
Notes on Contributors ....................................... 573
Index of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 577
Subject Index .............................................. 579
Financial assistance was received from:
Major Funders
• JOHN M. OLIN FOUNDATION, INC.
• LUCILLE P. MARKEY CHARITABLE TRUST
• THE LYNDE AND HARRY BRADLEY FOUNDATION
• UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES
Supporter
• RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
The New York Academy of Sciences believes it has a responsibility to provide an
open forum for discussion of scientific questions. The positions taken by the
participants in the reported conferences are their own and not necessarily those of
the Academy. The Academy has no intent to influence legislation by providing such
forums.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
Medicine Took an Earlier Flight
HENRY GREENBERG
The New York Academy of Sciences
2 East 63rd Street
New York, New York 10021
T
HIS VOLUME EMERGED out of the primary concerns of the hard
physical and biological sciences. The proponents and organizing com
mittee of the conference on which this volume is based reflect this.
And the individual chapters concentrate on the threats to these disciplines.
Although a majority of the authors come from a background in the social sci
ences, the issues under scrutiny relate to scientific reasoning, logical deduc
tion, and professional expertise.
Let me take a brief look at a soft science that engages all levels of society
namely, medicine. Last year I organized a conference, sponsored by this
Academy, that sought to enlarge the view of health care reform so that poten
tiallong-term results could be included in the debate. Its title was Beyond the
Crisis: Preserving the Capacity for Excellence in Health Care and Medical
Science. 1 In my talk I focused on threats to excellence in medicine.2 Toward
that end, I explored the genesis of the term health care provider, a descrip
tion with which we are all familiar and one which infuriates physicians. I tried
to show that the apparent democratizing of the team, the cultural leveling of
the peak usually inhabited by the physician, was a genuine threat to the pro
fessional uniqueness of the physician. The social construction of reality has
come to medicine. Borrowing from Larry Churchill,3 I showed that without
his or her own professional ethic, a physician who is dependent only upon
the usual guiding ethics-law, custom, and common sense-would not be
able to defend the best interests of his patient when law, common practice,
and conventional wisdom defined a patient's interests in terms that best serve
society and not the individual. The loss of the professional ethic will curtail
the physician's ability to defend his patient's best interests.
Since then-and those of us in the east are behind-a new threat has
emerged. The for-profit health maintenance organization (HMO) has arrived
in Gotham. Everyone-hospitals, doctors, medical schools-is fighting to
join. Packaging themselves in new organizations, bundling their services in
financially pleasing ways, and then devaluing these services so as to be the
lowest bidder, they are part of the great game to survive; at least we all think
so. And the HMOs, with their ten-mill ion-dollar CEOs, paying out sixty-eight
ix
x ANN A L S New York Academy of Sciences
cents on the dollar for care, understand and like what they see. With little
extra effort they will reduce the physician to an employee. Again, the unique
professional ethic will be stripped away, and the doctor will measure his life
in degrees of compliance with cost-driven algorithms and will hone his skills
to reduce an office visit to seven minutes.
One HMO circulated a memorandum stating that it wanted all its specialists
to have at least twenty office hours a week. Since a physician could arrange
to see a patient within a day should the need arise, why are his ten hours a
week inadequate? I think I know the answer. He must have a financial base
outside the office. If he does, he may not be as subservient to the HMO re
quirements as he should be. But if he is dependent upon his office practice,
the HMO will gain the control it wants. The physician can be kept in place.
Medicine, then, is being put at grave risk by many strong forces. The social
construction of its reality is only one of these forces. This on-going assault
has, however, weakened medicine. The profession's inability or unwillingness
to confront, let alone recognize, this attack has sapped it of much of its vigor.
The other criticisms have a core validity. Because of accentuated attention to
these-arrogance, greed, and excessive paternalism-medicine feels con
strained to defend itself and is paralyzed when it comes to speaking clearly
about its strengths. The rare but highlighted focus on fraud and the less rare
examples of marginally scrupulous physicians feeding at the "pass through"
trough of Medicare and other insurance plans are commonplace headlines.
However, the near-comprehensive inability to distinguish the profession from
the practitioner has inhibited the defense of professionalism. And yet when
the profession is dead, it will be missed, warts and all.
There is a parallel development in the research science environment. If the
incursion of attempted invalidation of scientific reasoning gains a foothold
and then saps significant energy for its refutation, the body politic of science
will be weakened. If the defense is incomplete or intellectually ineffective, the
situation will be frighteningly similar to medicine's. Such a failure to defend
science from its irrational critics can set the stage for a lethal blow when the
real budgetary attacks arrive, and they are nearly upon us. Some would say
they are here, but I am not so optimistic. If science cannot claim a preemi
nence for its intellectual virtues or an excellence for its methodologies and
sense of design, then it will have great difficulty laying claim to a rational
share of the nation's resources for its perpetuation. This volume has an im
portant role to play.
NOTES
H. M. Greenberg & S. U. Raymond, eds., Beyond tbe Crisis: Preserving tbe Capacity
for Excellence in Healtb Care and Medical Science.
2 H. M. Greenberg, "Three Threats to the Capacity for Excellence in Medicine."
3 L. R. Churchill, "Reviving a Distinct Medical Ethic."
REFERENCES
CHURCHILL, L. R. "Reviving a Distinct Medical Ethic." Hastings Center Report 19 (May-
June, 1989): 28-34. .
Introductory Remarks GREENBERG xi
GREENBERG, H. M. & S. U. RAYMOND, eds. Beyond the Crisis: Preserving the Capacity
for Excellence in Health Care and Medical Science. Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 729 (1994).
GREENBERG, H. M. "Three Threats to the Capacity for Excellence in Medicine." In Be
yond the Crisis: Preserving the Capacity for Excellence in Health Care and
Medical Science, edited by H. M. Greenberg & S. U. Raymond. Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences 729 (1994): 8-18.
INTRODUCTION
P. R. GROSS
Center for Cell Signaling
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia 22908
Mephistopheles (disguised, in Faust's academic gown, ready to re
ceive a fawning student whom the sage refuses to see; sotto voce,
after the withdrawing protagonist):
Scoff at all knowledge and despise
reason and science, those flowers of mankind.
Let the father of all lies
with dazzling necromancy make you blind,
then I'll have you unconditionally-
-GOETHE, Faustl
E
VIDENCE OF A FLIGHT from reason is as old as human record
keeping; the fact of it certainly goes back an even longer way. Flight
from science specifically, among the forms of rational inquiry, goes
back as far as science itself. Whenever and wherever what we generally mean
by "science" really began, it is true that rejection of it began in earnest with
the Enlightenment itself. Nor has it been a rejection solely by the ignorant,
by professional irrationalists, or by minor figures. William Blake rejected all
the forms of inquiry upon which modern science was built; Goethe, himself
a keen scientific investigator, author of the diabolical whisper used here as an
epigraph, nevertheless opposed, finally, the very reasoning that allowed
science to escape the straitjacket of naturphilosophie. Examples like these
could be multiplied. 'So flight from reason, and from science, is nothing new.
We owe the reader some explanation for a new volume on the subject.
There are common, and obvious, forms of antireason and antiscience. Re
ligious obscurantism has always been with us. The mountebank healer and dis
penser of potions is an archaic figure of fun on the stage and in print; and there
are plenty of them on the bench today, and the sales of snake oil will expand,
for reasons given in this book. The cults of UFO-watchers, victims of abduc
tion by extraterrestrials, spoon benders, adjusters of human energy fields, re
incarnates recovering their past lives, have had equivalents and defenders in
every period since empirical science arose and posed them a terrible threat.
At no time since the late nineteenth century, when the concordances of evi-