the scientific eunuch: the philosophical foundation of his ideological legitimation roger dittmann,...

The Scientific EunuchThe Scientific Eunuch::The The Philosophical FoundationPhilosophical Foundation of of His His

Ideological LegitimationIdeological Legitimation

Roger Dittmann, Ph.D.

Professor of Physics Emeritus

California State University, Fullerton

Eunuch \’yu-nek\ n [ME eunuk, fr. Gk eunouchos fr. euné bed + echein to have charge

of] A powerful emasculation with uncritical loyalty to a master.

The Scientific Eunuch Southern California Federation of Scientists 3

Themes

--Rabelais


Themes

"Huren, Tänzerinnen und Professoren kann

ich für mein Geld überall kaufen."

--Prince of Hannover [Boos (1979) 20]


Themes

"My view, based on long and painful observation, is that

professors are somewhat worse than other people, and that

scientists are somewhat worse than other professors."

--Robert F. Hutchins [(1963)1]


Theses

“Science sans conscience n'est que

ruine de l'âme.”

1. Logical Positivism is the foundation of an Ideology of

Science [including “Professionalism”].


Theses

2. This ideology promotes a scientific ethic of docility and pliant compliance [“Instrumental Rationality“].


Instrumental Rationality

The efficient [“rational”] accomplishment of unquestioned, often irrational, counterproductive, unintended, egregious, or inhumane ends.


An Alternative

3. A critical, contextual theory and model of science, “adequate to the fullness of the phenomena", humanistically taking cognizance of values and consequences in scientific endeavor.

(Palmer 1969:100)


Deviance

Methodological: “Hashing” the data, misrepresenting the results.

Normative: Service to inhumane, profit-taking, exploitative, imperial, and military ends in efficiently dispatching death and destruction..


“Liberation and the Aims of Science”

The buoyant optimism of the Age of Reason that viewed Science as Liberator:

A noble pursuit of “truth" and “knowledge“ to overcome the intellectual tyranny of ignorance, superstition, and religion, and the ravages of nature and poverty


Strategy

4. Grass roots organization of scientists as workers [“proletarians”] in solidarity with other workers and moral leaders both locally and globally.


Images of The Dark Side of Science

A toast to mathematics:

“Here’s to pure mathematics, may it never be useful for anything!"

--G. H. Hardy



Science as Oppressor:

"A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life."

--G. H. Hardy 1940: 121]



“To the typical American scientist who still believed that science has helped liberate men from ancient tyrannies, it was disconcerting to be told by a conservative president that he had become a member of a new priesthood allied with military power...the intellectual problems involved in this new status are likely to trouble scientists almost as much as the fears of apocalyptic uses to which their discoveries may be put by the politicians.“

--Don K. Price (1962) (p. 235)



“The physical sciences, above all physics itself, are at once the most arcane and the most deeply implicated in the capitalist system of domination.”

--Hilary Rose, [Solomon 1995



Changing TimesThe Great War to End All War: “Thanks

for the offer (from ACS), but we already have a chemist.”

—The War Department

WWII:The nucleus as the route to military and

economic power—The Department of “Defense” [ushering in the Age of Euphemisms—]

[”The best defense is a good offense.”]



“Enemy of intellect”

Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect

“Learned ignoramuses and barbarians”José Ortega y Gassett, The Revolt of Masses

“Anti-cultural if not downright anti-intellectual”

Gerald Horton, Science and Culture


Tenets of Logical Positivism

Scientific knowledge is

a) neutral,




a) neutral,

b) objective,




a) neutral,

b) objective, and

c) value-free;



1. Scientific knowledge is

a) neutral,

b) objective, and

c) value-free;

2. There is a unitary approach to knowledge (“The Scientific Method", with physics as the exemplar).


“Contemporary Schools of Metascience”

Radnitzsky: [Chicago, IL: H. Regnery (1973) ]

Anglo-Saxon [U.S. – British], Logical Empiricism

[Logical Positivism]

Continental, Hemeneutics-Dialectics


Mertonian Norms of Science

Disinterestedness

Universalism

Communality

Organized skepticism.


Popperian Norms of Science

"He who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens the way to those who rule by hate." ---(Popper 1966:236)]

[Popper's fear of love recalls St. Augustine's fear of, and preoccupation with glandular tumescence, which is not obedient to human will, or even necessarily rational.] (Dunham 1964).


Science as Value Free and Neutral

"The basis of advanced technology is innovation, and nothing is more stifling to creativity than seeing one's product not used or ruled out of consideration on flimsy premises involving public world opinion“

-----Harold Agnew, Director of the University of California Los Alamos

(Nuclear) Weapons Division, [Chomsky (1971) 25]



"I think SRI people were upset with the notion...that students and faculty should exercise moral control over the work at SRI. This was very upsetting to our professional people”.

--Charles Anderson, President of Stanford Research Institute [Anderson (1969) 24].



Failing to reduce values to science, an attempt was made to exclude them from science, leading to the

"fundamental false consciousness of our epoch":

"Insofar as the practice of the scientific establishment is held to be neutral, while actually justifying the extension of repressive control systems, we can assert that the contemporary self-image of science functions as a technocratic ideology”.

--[Schroyer (1971) 297]


Science as a Faustian Bargain

“While you’re up, get me a grant!”--Dr. Grant Swinger, Operator par excellence,

Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds[Nom de plume of Dan Greenberg, Editor and Publisher,

The Science and Government Report]


Science as a Faustian Bargain

Scientists can gain [limited scientific] knowledge at the expense of their souls [Caring, making judgments, supporting principles and values].

30

“...it became all too clear that the beauty of their calculations had hidden from them the terms of the Faustian contract they had somehow scratched their name to."

-- E. L. Doctorow [(1995) 170]

See also Spencer Klaw (1971)


Professionalism as Ideology

"It is the hallmark of the expert professional that he doesn't care where he is going,

as long as he proceeds competently."--Herman “Thinking about the Unthinkable” Kahn (quoted in Lens

1976)


Professionalism as Ideology

Guidelines to Professional Employment for Engineers and Scientists

"The professional employee must be loyal to the employer's objectives and contribute

his/her creativity to those goals.“

--Adopted by more than twenty U.S. “professional” societies, but not the APS,--it smacked too much of trade unionism!


A Critical Theory of Science

"...it has come about that a generation so amazingly proficient in the practice of science can be so amazingly impotent in the understanding of it...the state of unselfconscious automation in which science finds itself today is due to the lack throughout its history of a critical school working within the scientific movement itself...“

--Herbert Dingle(quoted in Frank 1957:XIV)


A Critical Theory of Science

"In order to understand not only science itself, but also the place of science in our civilization, we need a coherent science of concepts and laws within which the natural sciences, as well as philosophy and the humanities have their place."

-- (Phillip Frank 1957)

the scientific eunuch: the philosophical foundation of his ideological legitimation roger dittmann,...

Documents

scientific endeavor

fullerton slide

rabelais slide

scientific ethic of

eunuch yunek n

ideology of science

model of science

inhumane ends