Myth of Science

 

What are myths? The word comes from mythos, Greek for story, and is commonly taken to mean fictions or fabrications. Some anthropologists were inclined to rationalize away myths as memories of some historical figure, or as crude, pre-scientific accounts of natural phenomena by native peoples.

But that didn't explain their power or significance. In his studies of native peoples, Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that the meaning of myths lay not in their surface content but in their underlying structure, an idea which combined with ideas of Saussure and Jakobson to produce Structuralism and good deal of other literary theory.

In a similar way, the psychoanalyst Jung (1875-1961) had postulated shapings of psychic energy or archetypes which emerged into human consciousness in dreams, mental illness and art. Of course, archetypes were not structures, being processes or perspectives rather than content, but they dealt with number and rationality as much as with artistic and emotional expression.

From this meeting of philosophy, anthropology and psychiatry, several new schools of literary theory emerged. Perhaps the best known is that of Northrop Frye, whose Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths in his Anatomy of Criticism {10} brought individual, apparently unrelated archetypal images into an hierarchical framework of myths which could be seen to organize the whole of literature. Myth theory has its shortcomings — the myths "revealed" can be somewhat arbitrary, and have little to say on the quality of a work under review — but the approach does recognize structures that can be studied.

Religion, science and art are all pictures of experience, symbolically created to give meaning to life, thought Ernst Cassirer. They were the emotion-laden, unmediated "language" of experience, which couldn't interrogated for a more primary intellectual meaning. And as to where they came from, the ultimate ground of their representation, one couldn't ask: that was extending everyday attitudes into areas where they didn't belong.

If science, the most prestigious achievement of western civilization, is largely an autonomous system (self validating, regulating and reporting), is it therefore a myth? Some speculative literary theorists have gleefully thought so, arguing from Kuhn that science is merely one paradigm among many. But there are important differences. The research findings of one specialization interlock with those of another, and theories lead on to other theories, which are themselves consistent with matters yet more fundamental. Science is broadly successful in presenting a world that is coherence and consistent, if sometimes by repressing alternative views and presenting research findings with practiced rhetoric.

Science is a practical matter, and modern life is increasingly dependent on its results. Science resolves, explains and predicts matters to a degree difficult for the nonscientist to appreciate. An enormous number of highly intelligent and independent individuals — laboratory workers, researchers, theoreticians — are every day toiling away to test, refine and extend our understanding. At base, science rests on consensus — about what is relevant, how the work should be carried out, and how reported — but the methods have stood the test of time, and the experiments or observations can always be repeated and validated. In this there is little room for widespread collusion, or for the vagaries of personal response that typify the reading of a novel or poem.

Science is not the only world view. The aesthetician Stephen Pepper recognized five ways of dealing with reality: formism, mechanism, contextualism, organicism and selectivism. These root metaphors, as he called them, were the use of one part of experience to illuminate another, to help us understand, comprehend, even to intuit, or enter into the other. Each was a distinct and perfectly plausible way of making sense of the world, but they were independent, and couldn't be mixed. Pepper formulated each root metaphor in his own way, but formism broadly corresponded to Platonism, contextualism to Dewey's pragmatism and organicism to Hegel. Mechanism corresponded to the Anglo-American empiricist tradition: general laws that explain a world ultimately made up of sense impressions. Selectivism was introduced later, in Pepper's Concept and Quality of 1966, as the purposive act.

But if science carves nature at joints of real importance, it still has enormous difficulties in answering simple philosophic questions — the reality of quarks, the nature of scientific laws, and so forth. Moreover, it deals with the morally neutral, and with abstractions amenable only to advanced mathematics. Nonetheless, science is distinctive in two respects. Broad agreement does exist as to how theories should be tested, refined and refuted. And science is much more objective and comprehensive.

A fuller account can be found on TextEtc.

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Myth of Science

 

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