The Science Police

Abstract

A scientist, a philosopher, a sociologist of scientific knowledge and a science warrior are aloft in a balloon. The balloon begins to deflate. The scientist says: 'A micro-meteorite might have punctured the envelope do we have any sticky-tape?' The philosopher says: 'My inductive propensities convince me that if the balloon deflates we will fall to earth I must work out the rational basis for this belief'. The sociologist says: 'I wonder how they'll reach a consensus about the cause of our deaths'. The science warrior says: 'Told you so there is an external reality!' If I was up in the balloon with only one other, I would choose the scientist, but at least if I had the philosopher or sociologist with me my last thoughts would be interesting. Of these four it is, ironically, only the science warrior who is completely out of touch with reality; it is only a science warrior who could imagine that the sociologist and the philosopher had failed to notice that we are not free to live out our day-to-day interactions with balloons, airplanes, or cups of coffee and tables and chairs, for that matter, in any way we please.' The philosophical and sociological questions are interesting only because we experience the world as an external agency. Science warriors, and how extraordinarily disappointing it is to find philosophers among them, think that making the everyday world out to be an interestingly puzzling place is the same as losing touch with it. What a poverty-stricken way of thinking this is, compared to the thinking of their scientist heroes! Scientists are ready to endorse a 'Many Worlds theory of the universe', which tells us that an almost infinite number of new universes, all subtly different from ours, are being created every fraction of a second; or to toy with the idea that our whole universe is sitting in a fortuitous energy well over the edge of which we might tip ourselves into oblivion at any moment, without the remotest chance of a warning. The most radical relativism is tame compared to such ambitious descriptions of our state of being.2 It is philosophy upon which the history and sociology of scientific knowledge is founded. Philosophy is a wonderful subject. Just as I recall the moment when I heard that President Kennedy had been shot, so I

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