From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject The Knowledge Machine
Date December 31, 2020 1:00 AM
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[A fascinating and timely history of how science developed via the
achievement of pursuing only observation and experiment (not
politics).] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE KNOWLEDGE MACHINE  
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Stuart Jeffries
December 22, 2020
The Guardian
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_ A fascinating and timely history of how science developed via the
achievement of pursuing only observation and experiment (not
politics). _

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_The Knowledge Machine
How Irrationality Created Modern Science_
Michael Strevens
Liveright
ISBN: 978-1-63149-137-5

Isaac Newton had a problem. He didn’t believe in the divinity of
Christ. Scriptural study had convinced him that Jesus was not equal to
but created by God the Father. In 17th-century England, this was
heresy. Newton’s conviction meant that he could not in good
conscience be ordained as a clergyman, which was necessary if he
wanted to remain a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Lucasian
professor of mathematics.

King Charles II made an exception for Newton, who was able to continue
at Cambridge; he publicly conformed with Anglican precepts while
privately thinking they were nonsense. This matters for philosopher
Michael Strevens because Newton is the hero of science’s origin
story. The genius who discovered gravity also set what Strevens calls
the knowledge machine of science in motion. He writes: “If the human
race was going to get its vaccines, its electric motors, its wireless
communicators – the wellsprings of health, the armatures of
industry, the filaments of human connectivity – something out of the
ordinary would have to shatter the barrier.” Newton shattered the
barrier by devising what Strevens calls the iron rule underpinning
science’s claims to objectivity. It states that all scientific
arguments must be conducted by empirical testing, excluding all
subjective, philosophical, religious or aesthetic matters.

Only a few years before Newton’s crisis of conscience, this iron
rule was scarcely conceivable. True, Francis Bacon
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earlier extolled inductive reasoning and close observation, but these
methods could not yet be widely employed. Strevens cites Newton’s
near-contemporary Descartes, whose philosophy relied on divine
intervention. Before Newton, such a deus ex machina was if not
necessary then commonplace; after Newton, citing unobservable causes
was intellectually shoddy.

If God lurked behind data or if snowflakes were beautiful, such
matters were not the scientist’s business. “I do not feign
hypotheses,” Newton wrote imperiously in the second edition of his
_Principia_ in 1713. Strevens calls this iron rule unreasonable.
Science is stimulated because of subjective impulses, he argues. And
yet they can play no role in scientific argument. Science
self-immunises from the corruption that makes it worth doing.

His suggestion is that after the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Europe
changed: the resultant separation of civic and religious realms
resulted in a zeitgeist where fruitful compartmentalisation such as
that that kept Newton in Cambridge was possible. Strevens’s
brilliant, bracing story of science’s happy abasement before the
iron rule, you’ll notice, flouts that rule.
He tells the history of science this way to counter two rival
narratives. First, the radical subjectivists detect only power and
interest behind scientific’s putative truth seeking. Think how
tobacco companies’ hirelings game data to produce commercially
palatable results. Second, those such as Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper
suppose there is a special technique for dealing with empirical
evidence called the scientific method. Kuhn was wrong, Strevens
argues, in thinking science makes progress because scientists are
incapable of questioning intellectual authority or what Kuhn called
the prevailing paradigm. Popper was wrong to suppose that science
proceeds by way of falsification of theories that don’t match the
data.

There are no objective constraints on scientists’ interpretation of
data, counters Strevens. Rather, the iron rule keeps scientists honest
while subjective speculation gets them up in the mornings, or as he
describes it “raw unchecked opinion gives science a vitality”. Not
quite raw: scientists, he thinks, use plausibility rankings to
determine which interpretations of data are, if not permissible, then
plausible.

One experiment, though, risks falsifying Strevens’s account. In
1919, astronomer Arthur Eddington wanted to know if Einstein’s
general relativity is right in predicting that massive bodies bend
space and time around them, or whether Newton’s thesis that
gravitational force holds between them is correct. One ship headed to
Brazil and another to an island off west Africa, both with equipment
to photograph the sky at the moment the moon obscured the sun. If
Einstein was right, incoming light rays would be deflected by twice
the amount Newton’s account suggested. Astrographic photographs from
Brazil supported Newton, but Eddington dismissed them, claiming that
they were distorted by the sun’s uneven heating of the telescope’s
mirror. Eddington used only photographs confirming Einstein’s
account in his interpretation.

Doesn’t this show how science is corruptible? Certainly this
pacifist Quaker had an agenda: Eddington wanted to prove Einstein
right because of relativity’s beauty and also to dissolve post-world
war one rancour in Europe. Strevens holds, though, that painstaking
measurement showed the iron rule was followed, but concedes there was
neither tribunal or method for sorting good photographic plates from
bad. Eddington’s suppression was not science, but as Strevens puts
it, what often goes on in science’s name – “partisan argument,
political maneoeuvres and propaganda”.

Matt Hancock, in 2020’s get-out clause for bad politicians, claims
the government has followed the science over Covid-19. He should read
Strevens to find out what that entails. Science is not only stranger
than the government believes, it is stranger than the government dares
imagine.

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