Sociology of Knowledge
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Topic: Lectures On Doubt
Knowledge as a social institution is most certainly an idea that most atheists aren't going to have much patience for. The typical fear, and in some cases for good reason, is that what's being argued for allows anything to become knowledge so long as everyone believes it and that there is no world external to our minds. Of course, many religious folks in all their simplicity really latch on to this idea because they think it means that if a lot of people believe in something nuts, like their God, then it must be true. This is similar to the tactic I've discussed before about Christian penchant for radical skepticism when they're backed into a corner.

I tried to argue in favor of constructivism as an experiment on FAIR the other day, sort of an unconventional angle to take I know, but then again, why not deny them of their belief that if they can get rid of the enlightenment their problems are over?

Now, I really don't have it in me to do a technical post tonight. Maybe that's a good thing, keep it simple to understand, and me from stumbling over myself. I pick Kuhn for my example here because he's relatively well known and he himself or some variation of his "paradigms" are invoked all the time by religionists who are trying to save their beliefs by making them a "paradigm" without a common ground shared with today's science establishment whereby they could ever risk being wrong.

Well, according to Kuhn, not any old idea with a following qualified as science. Science in fact, was a relatively recent phenomena that required a high level of organization to acheive. A science has an extensive core body of research that everyone agrees on and those working within normal science should strive to work within the paradigm. So not just any rogue professor with a website and an ax to grind against the institution "has a paradigm." It would be difficult to argue that even a large body of informal researches united in more or less the same cause could have a paradigm. Paranormal studies are a good example. In a later post, I might fill in the details on why I believe that. UFO studies are something I follow and fit the bill perfectly I think.

I need to emphasize something I said above. According to Kuhn, researchers should stick with the paradigm. One of the things very troubling to the enlightenment was the opressiveness of religion, and even with the huge success of science as an institution in today's world, the enlightenments glowing ashes are no less concerned. That way of thinking holds out for an ideal where nothing is sacred. Where the institution can never put to death another Galileo. Where the lowliest waif can revolutionize the entire institution overnight given a profound discovery. But the problem here is a practical one. How many straws of hay do we have to pull out of the bail before we draw blood? Shout's like Feynman's "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" seem to assure us that never again will superstition and beaurocracy stiffle progress, but in practice, how much sense does it really make for a large, complex institution to proceed like that? The downside is that pseudoscientists, apologists, and downright cranks LOVE this philosophy! Because to them, today's science is the church and they're justified from the outset to apostatize. Now we might sit back comfortably and say fine, let them bring the evidence! Well, the problem with that is, bringing in extraordinary evidence for review is hard to do even within the establishment. It's not as simple as providing a literal smoking gun picked up from the crime scene. Testing ideas often require funding. Giving research a fair hearing and reviewing the evidence also takes time and costs money. None of this stuff happens in a vacuum where only pure truth zips around as an eternal constant. All those voices challenging the status quo demand to be heard. But if evolution is our goal, giving them all a fair shake would be akin to being open to every mutation, fragmenting the herd and winding up with genetic drift, loosly interconnected colonies of mutants that are doomed to die rather than a stronger species. Kuhn recognized this problem and was therefore, against science as open to all ideas. Revolutions would come, but not everyday or from just any source. As new discoveries are made within normal science, evidence would eventually surface that doesn't fit right, leading to a crisis and a need for possibly a new framework.

I brought up John Gee's apologetics for the Book of Abraham on a post a couple months ago. Gee has invoked Kuhn in the past to make the point that Egyptology might not yet be ready for the Book of Abraham. While it may hypothetically be true that someday the BOA might be vindicated, Kuhn's position would actually be that Gee's apologetics are counterproductive to science - he should be doing "normal Egyptology." And further, Gee's research couldn't really be properly considered science. Whereas from the enlightenment heritage, it's tougher to rule him out of court without sitting down and carefully reviewing his, and every other fringe researcher's, "evidence" and giving him a fair hearing.

That ended up being kind of a long post. To sum up the scope of what I'm trying to say, a lot of atheists when they think of Kuhn or more broadly, any philosophy that considers science a social institution, they think of backs turning on reality. Well, that's a valid concern that I obviously don't have room to talk about in this post, but that's only a small part of what constructive theories are trying to get at. The truth is, and it's ironic for some apologists, that constructivists ideas can actually guard science from the dangers of religion and crackpots better than traditional enlightenment ideas, in some ways at least.