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RE:
THE NEW HUMANISTS
From:
Alison Gopnik
Date: 4.17.02 There
is another reason why recent scientific advances, and the
emergence of the third culture, provide at least some grounds
for optimism. One of the arenas where we are making the most
scientific progress is in our understanding of the origins
of our own knowledge of the world, including the origins of
science itself. It increasingly appears that human beings
are, by and large, designed to get at the truth about the
world. Much of the scientific process seems quite continuous
with the ordinary ways that we learn about and make sense
of the world, literally from the time we are born. From a
scientific point of view, nonscientists ought to be
able to follow, reflect on, understand and even emotionally
empathize with scientific activity—and the success of
popular science suggests that they do. Science provides us
with a structured, socially organized way of exercising our
innate truth-finding capacities. Two sources of "cognitive illusion" are particularly relevant to the current culture. One involves cases where our explanatory drive far outstrips the evidence that is available to us. Ironically, the very motivations and emotions that are celebrated by many of the contributors to this discussion, the sense of glory in order and pleasure in explanation, may also be at the root of the continued appeal of magic, superstition and religious belief. The other, perhaps more serious, problem, concerns the division of labor that is at the heart of the success of modern, socially organized science. The division of labor is itself one of the successful evolutionary devices that allow us to find the truth. By listening to their mothers, each generation of children can jump-start their way to the truth and take advantage of the militia of human investigation that preceded their appearance on the scene. But these mechanisms of authority and deference can easily produce a sort of cognitive software virus, a kind of counterworld in which the conventions take over from the reality—as in the medieval universities or many parts of the "official" humanities today. One of the puzzles of the history of science is why science never really took off in China. After all, China had an elaborate set of social institutions that encouraged and rewarded specialized scholarship, an enormous system of competitive examinations, and detailed mechanisms for establishing authority and passing on knowledge. Maybe the answer is that that social infrastructure, so painfully reminiscent of the contemporary American academic mandarinate, hurt more than it helped. The European intellectuals who started institutions like the Royal Society stayed as far away from the contemporary universities as they could. Ultimately, though, there are grounds for at least a contingent kind of optimism (contingent, for example, on the fact that nuclear war or global warming don't get us first). In other areas, understanding both our capacities and limitations has led us to increase those capacities and overcome those limitations—the fact that I'm wearing glasses and writing this on a computer is testament to that. As we increasingly understand our learning capacities and limitations we ought, at least in principle, to be able to overcome both the intrinsic and social obstacles. Its just a guess, but I suspect that the program of John's essay will be one way to help solve the social organization problem. By providing social institutions that bridge and bypass the divisions of labor we ought to both be able to provide the right links between science and nonscientists, and to prevent the sort of internal wheel-spinning we see in so many parts of the "humanities" and too many parts of the sciences themselves.
ALISON
GOPNIK is a psychologist at the University of California at
Berkeley and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib: Minds,
Brains, and How Children Learn. [more....]
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John Brockman,
Editor and Publisher |
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