“objective science”: reality, ideal, or chimera?
Where, other than the mind of a knower, could knowledge exist?
AS I think this through, the notion of “purely objective knowledge” increasingly strikes me as a chimera or something of a contradiction in terms insofar as it is juxtaposed against “subjectivity.” Instead, subjectivity seems like something of a transcendental condition1 for all scientific inquiry in the first place. There are two elements to this statement, which I will attempt to unfold below.
First is the mysterious inspiration and the value judgment inherent in hypothesis-formation. Hypotheses do not just form themselves. Instead, each hypothesis is ultimately a function of the creative imagination of a researcher. It might be objected that hypotheses are often formed gradually and by way of repeated encounter with empirical evidence. But this fails to escape the transcendental function of subjectivity indicated at the outset since it is only the subject who is able to engage with empirical evidence in any meaningful way to begin with. Indeed—as per the fundamental axiom of Theoriapress—it is incoherent to think of “evidence” without respect to an idea, hypothesis, or theory to which it is indexed, and a mind which is capable of performing this indexing. Without such a theory, “evidence” is indistinguishable from random data and therefore can no longer be considered evidence at all. A fortiori, only an intelligent agent is capable of winnowing out the “signal” from the “noise.” Hence, evidence, no less than hypotheses, theories, and ideas, are also predicated on subjectivity.
From this insight, it follows that the existence of knowledge presents the ineluctable need for a conscious observer and knower to provide “occasion” for it. This hearkens back to Aristotle’s famous and somewhat abstruse definition of the soul (psyche) as the “place of the forms” (topos eiden).2 Of course, forma is the Latin translation of the Greek eidos, the former from which we derive the English “form” and the latter the English “idea.” The point is that they were understood by pre Modern thinkers as synonymous and it is only due to a sort of Babel induced by the mixing and equivocation of traditional philosophical terms that followed from the scientific revolution that these connections are largely lost on us today. Where, we may merely ask, other than the mind of a knower, could knowledge exist?
To say “the psyche is the place of the forms” is not the same thing as saying “knowledge exists in the brain.” To illustrate the reason for this inequivalence, let the reader imagine, if she will, the perfect “theory of everything” written in some kind of formal notation/hieroglyphics/symbols that no one was capable of understanding and yet on display for everyone: what would this promise in respect to scientific progress? Suppose the tablet on which the answer to this ultimate riddle was written was our own brain and nervous system and the notation was none other than patterns of neuronal activation and wiring. It would still not avail science in the slightest for the brain to be stamped with all of the ultimate mysteries of Creation unless the hieroglyphs by which such mysteries were encoded were confronted by a mind that was adequate to perceive, recognize, and decipher them. Clearly, the state characterized before this fruition represents potential knowledge at best, which could only become actual knowledge through being known/understood by a knower. And for all we know, all knowledge might indeed subsist, in such a state of potentiality, in every neuron and in every grain of sand and still remain opaque to us. If what we have here termed “potential knowledge” were already actual knowledge without being understood, science would have no reason to exist because, as indicated: the scenario above describes the de facto manner in which we encounter the world already. What need would there be for science if all potential knowledge was already actual? God gave the world two books: one is the Book of Scripture and the other the Book of Nature. In the first we have begun to read while in the second we look on like little children who are fascinated by the images and glyphs but who, as of yet, lack comprehension.
The secret of existence is already on display before us, in the Book of Nature, as the phenomenal world only we don’t understand what we see yet. It wouldn’t make sense to think that science is discovering things in some other world than the one we live in. For the same reason, the one we live in must evince the theories of science or else those theories need to be replaced. We might say, for instance, “but the world doesn’t look like what General Relativity describes,” to which the necessarily reply would be “and what do you suppose the world that General Relativity describes would look like?” I don’t mean to imply, by this statement, that any given scientific theory de jour is beyond reproach by further scientific advance. Indeed, quite to the contrary, falsification is perhaps the primary engine for the progress of science altogether. Nor do I mean to imply that the general quantitative, model-centric paradigm in which contemporary physics operates is necessarily adequate to fathom the mysteries of Creation any more than Marxism is a suitable lens by which to resolve all literary classics. My point is rather more axiomatic: namely, that whatever science asserts cannot, in principle, contradict the immediate manifestation of Nature in our experience. If it appears to do this, then it is necessary to reconcile the scientific theory to our self-evident experience. If this is not possible, then so much the worse for the scientific theory. Any other approach would be to sunder a theory from the conditions for its comprehensibility, which will always be found within human experience and not outside of it. This may not seem to matter until it is seen that the effect of such a sundering is to strip the theory of ever becoming knowledge, in the manner that I have construed these terms till now. It might, indeed, attain to the status of potentially becoming knowledge, but, again, that is no great feat.
The scientific enterprise consists in elaborating theories and conceptual relations between phenomena which, when those theories are successful, reveal to us that they were already manifest and yet they remained unrecognised. They are written in the hieroglyphs of phenomenal nature and we only come to understand by degrees. Think, for instance, of how the sunrise would have appeared to a person before the Copernican theory was accepted. The answer is of course, both “just the same way it appeared afterwards” and also “entirely different to the way it now appears.” The difference consists in a coherent conceptual apprehension of what is already arrayed before the senses. The Copernican theory is not the final word on the subject and nor, probably, is General Relativity, for that matter. Still, I think they provides helpful examples of the principle that is at stake.
As an addition to the argument above for the ultimate, transcendental, and irreducible subjectivity of knowledge, I would also like to remark on the fundamental “desire to know” (cf. the first line in Aristotle’s Metaphysics) that seems, at least in an ideal condition, to impel all scientific inquiry as such. Desire strikes me as a subjective (i.e. contingent on a subject) phenomenon that cannot be recreated in purely objective terms. It was noted above that hypotheses do not merely assemble themselves. Instead, they are the product of the researcher’s creative imagination in its engagement with empirical evidence. In a larger sense, we might ask what compels the researcher to bother with such engagement? Prescinding from the very real problems of perverse incentives the drive a great deal of scientific research and publications today,3 the answer must be something like a desire for, and delight in, knowledge for its own sake.
ie as a condition sine qua non, or superordinate condition that must needs be in place before proximate necessary conditions can be fulfilled.
cf. De anima 429a27–29. Aquinas’ locus specierum intelligibilium, “Quaestiones disputatae de anima” III.x, 273.