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The Politicizing of Science: Implications for Education
Transcript of The Politicizing of Science: Implications for Education
Running head: THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE:
IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION
by
Thomas A. McDonald
August 13th, 2012
A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University at Buffalo,
The State University of New York
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Education
Department of Learning and Instruction,
Science and the Public Program
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank everyone behind the program in Science and the Public for making it possible,
including all those in the UB Graduate School of Education, in the Department of Learning and
Instruction, and at the Center For Inquiry. It is difficult to undertake advanced study as a working adult,
so I am especially grateful for the communication and support that have been available throughout my
studies; for me, the faces of the program have been Louise Lalli, Dr. Xiufeng Liu, and Dr. John Shook,
so this sincere thanks is directed to you. I also want to extend a very special thanks to Dr. Anantha
Sudhakar for her kindness, scholarly feedback, and infinite patience through many long and helpful
discussions.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................................... iii
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... v
Method and Definitions .............................................................................................................................. vi
Chapter 1. The Politicizing of Science ........................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2. Science and the Public ................................................................................................ 22
Chapter 3. Science and the Rule of Law ...................................................................................... 35
Chapter 4. Science and Biopolitics .............................................................................................. 52
Chapter 5. Science and the Subject of Moral Autonomy ............................................................. 68
Chapter 6. Science for the Public: An Outline ............................................................................. 91
References ............................................................................................................................................... 106
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ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the politicization of science in recent times coincides with a necessary turn
toward social epistemology and historicist conceptions of science and rationality. It is shown how
history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) make important contributions to interdisciplinary
research in public understanding of science (PUS). However, it is argued (in agreement with Kuhn’s
finding) that critical HPSS is not a necessary part of traditional, pre-professional science education, but
is a necessary part of any general or liberal science education, the latter being needed to foster critical
ability among citizens to judge increasingly complex science-related public issues. With a view to
informing such an approach, fundamental problems at the intersection of science and society are
analyzed, concerning the relationship between science and the state, implications of the new life
sciences for politics, and ultimately whether modern science is to remain in contradiction with modern
political self-conceptions.
Keywords: cultural authority of science, liberalism, philosophy of science, political science, public
understanding of science, science education
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METHOD AND DEFINITIONS
Method
Multiple methods are deployed including empirical, textual, historical, and conceptual analysis.
Theoretical Definitions
Liberal: The term liberal used herein, as in reference to the development of a liberal science
curriculum, does not refer to the currently popular usage in American media to refer to left-wing politics
as opposed to right-wing politics. Rather, it refers to the traditional meaning from which the notion of a
liberal arts curriculum derives, which is related to the classical liberal political tradition in the West. In
the United States, today’s right-leaning libertarian conservative and left-leaning liberal progressive
sensibilities are both offshoots of this classical liberal tradition; despite superficial appearances, each
basically adhere to the principle of individual right as outlined in the US Constitution and Declaration of
Independence. This concealment of similarity behind differences is clearer to European observers, going
back to Alexis de Tocqueville. For such observers, the alternatives of aristocratic traditionalism and
radical socialism, a communitarian right and a collectivist left respectively, give much clearer definition
to liberal in contrast. It is part of the intent of this paper to show how the relative lack of such historical
understanding in America hinders our public discourse about modernity and the role of science. In the
Western tradition preceding the United States, the word derives from the Latin liber, meaning “free”:
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Thus, a liberal education, as the term is applied traditionally to liberal arts curricula, means a system or
course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free individual human being.
Historicism: Historicism refers here to a philosophical view on the nature of knowledge or
epistemology, and rationality. It applies to both scientific knowledge and political self-understanding. It
rejects as a fundamental misconception the intuitive notion that there is some information or knowledge
that is immediate; all information and knowledge are mediated by historical, linguistic, and socially
shared categories. In science this entails that explanations are not judged solely by comparison to
empirical data; explanations are understood as alternatives to historical predecessors, potentially
superseding them by accounting more adequately for both (a) new empirical data, e.g., empirical
anomalies that disrupt the coherence of currently viable explanations, and also (b) why past views were
held. At the least, theories always involve cognitive virtues in excess of the empirical data they reference
(Kuhn & Hacking, 2012, p. xxxi). Thus the context of discovery is essential (not only the context of
verification), and it follows that we should be generous in reconstructing past conceptions. Major figures
in the literature include 19th-century German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel and 20th-century
American historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn. Historicism is not necessarily opposed
to the objectivist view that science progresses toward a more and more accurate account of the world, or
the associated view that science begets a progressive rationalization of society. However, it qualifies
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objectivism through critical analyses revealing the mediation of all such accounts by shared social and
historical categories, i.e., by criteria internal to real, historical inquiry.
In education, historicism is aligned with constructivist approaches, which recognize that new
concepts are built up from the context in which the learner begins.
Objectivism: Objectivism in epistemology and science refers here to the view that an explanation
can be judged in immediate comparison to empirical data, thereby obviating the significance of past
views, which can be relegated to mere historical error. While this view has diminished with increasing
critical scrutiny in 20th-century philosophy of science, it has been given its most sophisticated and
durable philosophical formulation by Karl Popper. Popper’s falsification criterion underwrites the
pragmatic acceptance of present understanding so long as present views do not appear falsified; this
underwrites the dismissal of history, which is needed to better explain and understand the present.
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CHAPTER 1
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE
This paper is in part a response to Brian Wynne’s call for the interdisciplinary field in public
understanding of science (PUS) to “draw more fully on wider and more historical work in political
philosophy” (2008, p. 21). Wynne argues that the political dimension of the subject has tended to be
construed too narrowly, as pertaining only to issues involving expert risk management and public
perceptions of risk. Such approaches assume the political legitimacy of the present, the world of liberal
political freedoms—the public—in which science has grown and flourished, but they do so without
necessarily understanding how or why such a political system came to be justified, and thus they do not
necessarily understand what makes science possible.
Therefore Wynne points to a significant gap in the literature of PUS. In Chapter 2 the history of
research in PUS is traced in order to better illustrate the development of the discourse, and its
outstanding questions, from which Wynne’s point follows. In Chapter 3, in response to this problem, I
argue that a complex understanding of the political history in which science has developed and
flourished is essential to understanding the political present in which science is now situated and
challenged; this is done through an analysis beginning from Donald Stokes research on the dichotomy
between pure versus applied science when public funding is called for. In Chapter 4 I investigate and
illustrate the complexity of the challenge in a free, liberal polity where scientific arguments in public
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appeal to genetic science in a manner that would impact normative and policy actions like the creation
of single-sex education. The biopolitical debate examined in Chapter 4 reflects the long-running
divergence between scientific and humanistic intellectuals in the public sphere, identified by Charles P.
Snow as the “two cultures”; thus Chapter 5 takes up a more theoretical inquiry into recent advances in
neuroscience and cognitive science with a view to how these might help bridge the alienation between
these two modes of inquiry. Humanistic intellectuals tend to fear that science threatens freedom; this
problem between the two cultures centers on the nature of the free, morally autonomous individual actor
or subject—the ideal of political liberalism in its right-leaning and left-leaning modern guises: classical
liberalism and progressive liberalism; the former referring to that formulated in the natural rights
philosophy of John Locke, written into the constitution of the United States, and characterizing modern
American libertarian conservatism; the latter referring to that more recent strand given progressivist and
collectivist modifications in the work of theorists like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, yielding the
left-liberalism to which the word “liberal” in recent American discourse has unfortunately become
nearly exclusively identified. Thus Chapter 5 is an attempt to help detail a meta-ethical theory for how
recent neuroscience and cognitive science can be bridged with this public ideal. Chapters 1 to 5 are
intended as a contribution to the scholarly discourse within PUS. These chapters help identify the
parameters of appropriate general or liberal science learning that the public needs today. They are aimed
at other educators, education policy makers, communicators, historians, and philosophers of science.
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Not all of the material in Chapters 1 to 5 will flow into a science curriculum plan for the public, but
rather they are intended to preface my outline for such a curriculum with a survey that enriches
appreciation of the challenges. A curriculum for the public must be broad enough to address various
communities within the United States. Therefore the outline in Chapter 6 emphasizes science as a
method and the conclusions of historical and contemporary science not as dogmas but as conclusions
standing for free minds to test. Final judgments of absolute truth are suspended, so that learners can
appreciate how scientific theories can be freely entertained, considered, examined, non-coercively, by
free minds.
Wynne’s call follows from many detailed empirical studies and much scholarly reflection in PUS
recognizing breakdowns of trust and communication between science and the public, over the last four
decades especially (Irwin & Wynne, 1996). In the studies presented here, I find a philosophical root
common to various problems identified in PUS research. In 20th-century Anglo-American thought there
has been lacking both in philosophy of science and in political philosophy insufficient attention to the
legitimating basis and rational authority of modernity or modern life; the claims of science and the
claims of modern, liberal belief in individual freedom have been equally essential to modern life, while
contradicting each other. This takes a number of forms. Most essentially, in modern science we see
things and persons as determined by external causes—e.g., magnetic forces, genetic expressions—and
this has helped yield the tremendous successes of modern science and technology; while in modern
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politics we are called to recognize the individual as (at least potentially) a free, self-determining center
of responsibility, endowed with an intrinsic dignity and ‘rights’ that make no sense in the scientific
picture of the world. Also, modern science and technology create the need for new regulatory systems,
and then the tools for creating the systems themselves in which life is collectively limited and shaped,
for example the production and the regulated use of modern medicine and industrial systems. Michel
Foucault described the latter, technocratic effect of science on modern life as “biopolitics,” and Jonathan
D. Moreno argues in The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America (2011), that Foucault’s term
must be updated to consider the impact of genetic science, insofar as its ripples are already beginning to
be felt (Fukuyama, 2002; Moreno, p. 19). If modern life means living in contradiction between the
claims of science and the claims of freedom then the fundamental question is whether we can learn how
to make the contradiction productive in each of these essential domains—science and political life—
rather than poisonous to both. It is thus that it becomes clear we need a different approach to science
education for the non-specialist public. This must foster not only an appreciation for the basics of
science practice and present scientific knowledge, but it must also show how the legitimacy and
authority of science is grounded in history, experience, and a culture of mutual criticism.
The need for such an approach is made more urgent by the unprecedented implications of 21st-
century sciences of life—molecular biology, population genetics, behavior genetics, evolutionary
biology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropharmacology, and DNA-level genetic engineering. Even if we
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do not see the most extreme possibilities of genetic engineering like “designer babies” realized, the
growth of knowledge in these fields is already creating the ripples of the new biopolitics, which harbors
major consequences for future public science policy. Already in the 1990s, The Bell Curve (Herrnstein
& Murray, 1994) created a huge stir by arguing that intelligence, at least whatever is measured by IQ
tests, is about 70 percent genetically inherited, and that racial differences have a genetic basis. Of course
the counterargument must entail looking to historical environmental conditions, rather than genetic, to
explain racial differences in the data. But the investigation of this paper is concerned with how to
prepare the citizen to be critically equipped to parse and judge science-based arguments like this in the
public sphere, which harbor the most serious ethical, legal, and policy consequences. The rise of life
sciences complicates an arena already politically charged by the disputes in recent decades over climate
change science and policy, evolution and human origins in education, and mass vaccination safety and
policy. I argue that the future authority of science in such a political climate will depend upon a more
complex appreciation of its historical coevolution with modern politics, more so than is common in the
United States today.
To these ends, I find there are two distinct approaches in the PUS and science education literatures
that can be discerned and respectively justified: a post-Kuhnian, historicist approach, largely informed
by history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS); and a Popperian, neo-positivist approach,
often suspicious of the former. The latter aligns with traditional science education, with the preparatory
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requirements for professionals to advance in specialized sciences; while the former, I argue, is better
suited to the requirements of the general, liberal science education citizens need, insofar as they will be
among various parties to science-related public debates in the 21st century. There are reasonable
Popperian worries to be addressed, legitimate concerns that HPSS fields have been to blame for
postmodernist relativism, skepticism, and undermining of science. That is why Kuhn ultimately wound
up arguing that the history of science proper belonged to general or liberal science education, but was
not a necessary part of special science education and professional training (Kindi, 2005). Once this
distinction is recognized, the stage is set to further explore how HPSS, indeed of enlarged scope, should
be used to assess public challenges and to develop appropriate liberal science education curricula.
The Standing of Science in America Since the 1970s
The standing of the scientist in general remains high in American public opinion; according to a
2009 survey by Pew, roughly 70% of Americans believe that scientists “contribute a lot” to society,
compared to 38% for journalists, 23% for lawyers, 40% for clergy, and 21% for business executives;
Nisbet & Scheufele point out that “Only members of the military (84%) and teachers (77%) rate higher
in public admiration and esteem” (2009, p. 1769). In light of such data it seems a paradox why recent
decades have been characterized by public disputes so politically charged, over issues including climate
change science, evolution in education, nuclear energy safety, and vaccination safety.
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A broad gathering and analysis of American survey data by Gordon Gauchat, spanning the years
1974 to 2012, confirms a general decline in trust of science as an institution, but the decline is reflective
primarily of change within distinct subpopulations by political self-identification. Social conservatives
began the period with the highest levels of trust in science, but ended with the lowest. Gauchat notes this
in his report, but does not address the fact that the trend among self-identified moderates tracks closer to
the pattern among conservatives. It is the self-identified left-liberals alone who do not reflect the decline
in trust among conservatives and moderates during the period (Gauchat, 2012, p. 174):
This period spanning the last four decades coincides with the decline and end of the Cold War; the
end of the Space Race era symbolized by NASA; and the rise of neo-liberal policies in the West, which
have decreased public funding for the research university and effected the decentralizing of much
scientific research, now often dispersed into private and commercial enterprises. When writers in
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Popular Mechanics lament that “the future isn't what it used to be” and call for the return of “big, bold
science fiction” writing (Reynolds, 2012) they bear witness to an unbounded optimism about science
and modernization in American life once felt during the Space Race era of mid-20th-century, and
inscribed in the very name of NASA. In view of the increasing public conflicts over science
characterizing recent decades, such unbounded optimism about it must be difficult for younger
generations of Americans to grasp. Thus the interdisciplinary problematic emerging in this time under
the name of research in PUS can be illuminated more by the past century, despite an explicit premise to
address the problems of the next. Like Hegel’s remark on Minerva’s owl: it takes flight in the evening,
arriving on the scene only in time to know a form of life in its passing; for scholarly reflection in PUS
the high-water mark of the cultural authority of science in 20th-century America becomes evident only
in retrospect, and the ‘grey on grey’ of theoretical reconstruction or scholarly reflection will not
rejuvenate it. But in this one can at least gain clarity about the standard in the shadow of which the
present of PUS appears problematic, and this is needed if mere nostalgia is to be distinguished from
genuinely promising points of departure and renewal.
Barbarians at the Gates
Prompted by this troubling change in social circumstances, the science community, institutional
defenders, and public advocates have tended to a defensive stance concerned with rising ‘anti-science’.
There is a natural default to objectivist epistemology deriving from the revolutionary 17th-century
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European philosophy of science, which identified rational authority with the present state of scientific
knowledge, liberated from historical error, especially that of religion. This stance appears supported by a
widely assumed theory of modernization, disseminated by 20th-century sociology influenced by Max
Weber; this theory predicts the progressive “rationalization of society” (Locke, 1994; 1999a, pp. 3-43)
and the inevitable “cultural ascendancy” of science (Gauchat, 2012, p. 171) as modern institutions
become more dependent upon scientific knowledge, technology, expertise, and a corresponding need for
greater public science education. Defense of objectivism seems not entirely unfounded, owing to the
undeniable successes of science and technology since the 17th-century scientific revolution, greatly
responsible for the rise to global dominance of modern, Western liberal states (Fukuyama, 2006, pp. 82-
108). Objectivism remains plausible especially in light of the weakest criticisms of science by the
postmodernist left and religious right. Thus the Public Understanding of Science movement was
stimulated by institutions like the Royal Society of London during the 1980s (Bauer, 2012, p. 2) on the
premise that the recent challenges for science in the public lie in a deficit of scientific knowledge or
literacy among the public; the problem is in the public: not enough citizens are educated like scientists;
greater knowledge and greater support for science simply go hand in hand.
Most in the professional science community would agree with Shirley Ann Jackson, who urged in
her 2005 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that “we are
at a critical juncture regarding the nexus of science and society” (Jackson, 2005). Such urgings often
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come with worries about decreases in public funding for research; at the April 2012 meeting of the
American Physics Society, physicists expressed worry that there is a “crisis looming” for science in
America, related to a drop in funding for fundamental research (Moskowitz, 2012). But precisely why
we should be at this critical juncture with a crisis looming for science in America remains unclear
despite two decades of research in PUS and related efforts at public outreach. Before addressing the
question of trust between science and the public, Jackson highlights the recent trend toward “multiple
voices” in the public agora. She resurrects the Greek term agora to designate the site “where the public
selects its ‘truth’; or put differently, what society will accept as ‘fact’.” The agora is, she notes, “where
leaders make public policy decisions.” But what shall be “the role played by science [in the agora?]” (p.
1635). From Jackson’s ambiguous—if not ironic—use of “truth” and “fact” in this context we may infer
on her part a politically astute allusion, or bait, to a common belief among her audience that, despite
other nuanced points within her speech, the real, underlying problem with society is simply stubborn
unwillingness to accept the truths and facts of science. However, in stateswoman-like fashion, Jackson
urges plainly that science must recognize the emergence of “the media” into a major role in the agora,
competing for the attention of citizens and leaders among its other, traditional residents: government,
industry, religion, the academy. Jackson worries that the media have come to be influenced by the
Washington think tanks that have proliferated since the 1970s (p. 1638), many of which are politically
conservative, like the Heritage Foundation, which has been a leading supplier of criticisms of much
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climate change science, for example (Sandoval, 2012). The media filter, editorialize, comment, and
otherwise interpret an increasing flood of information confronting the citizen. The Internet has only
intensified this trend. What happens when self-proclaimed experts proliferate in the marketplace of
ideas? When we have instantly available authorities to support every view? Jackson asserts that the
result of this trend is “the devaluing of information and even the devaluing of science”; it “threatens the
concept of the scientist as the dispassionate, objective voice of reason, as well as the authoritative role of
science in helping shape sound public policy” (p. 1638).
Jackson is right to point to a relation between the recent fortunes of science—for good and ill—and
the information technology (IT) revolution. What Scientific American described in 2000 as the
“bioinformatics gold rush” is a merger of biology and the IT revolution; bioinformatics is necessary to
the rise of the new life sciences because it would be impossible without modern computing power to
store and interpret the overwhelming amount of data generated by genomics and to build reliable models
for representing complex biological phenomena like protein folding (Howard, 2000, p. 58). On the other
hand, the IT revolution in the form of mass Internet communication is responsible for an extreme
democratization of public interpretations of science that is especially threatening to the notion of science
as a domain of expert and singular knowledge. But this social phenomenon can be understood as a
further radicalization of political liberalism in the West since at least the Protestant Reformation of the
16th century, whose epistemological upshot is a universal recognition of the individual, in his or her
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freedom, as the ultimate standard for interpretation of the truth (Fuller, 2007, pp. 12, 60; Jensen,
Fukuyama, & United States Institute of Peace., 1990). Science is itself paradoxically bound up with this
particular history in which it is both nourished and threatened.
Directions in Public Understanding of Science
Even if public education providing more factual information about science did entail greater
support, how is one to address the cases in which the public is beset by conflicting views of the facts and
conflicting experts? On the question of nuclear energy, a potentially clean, 21st-century power source,
the public is confronted by an abundance of technical arguments from experts on opposite sides of the
issue, pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear, environmental skeptics (Irwin & Wynne, 1996, p. 2); in this case it
is right-leaning industrial scientists arguing for its safety, while left-leaning environmental scientists
provide reasons for skepticism. On the question of stem cell medicine, we find a political inversion;
right-leaning scientists arguing that supporters of embryonic stem (ES) cell research have exaggerated
the scientific evidence for its curative potential (George et al., 2012, p. 19). Examples such as this make
clear that values and commitments must be admitted more into public scientific debate, e.g., regarding
degrees of risk acceptance, and how those different degrees of acceptance figure into different visions of
life.
By focusing too narrowly upon the plight of the institution of science one may be led to ignore
much empirical data showing that since the 1970s, decline in public trust has been a widespread problem
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afflicting other social institutions besides science, particularly political institutions (Fukuyama, 1999;
Inglehart, 1997; Pharr, Putnam, & Dalton, 2000). It is reasonable then to infer that the conservatism
often dismissed as anti-science is a social phenomenon responding to a larger pattern of erosion in social
trust. This is supported by Gauchat’s data (2012, p. 175), as well as a recent survey, conducted by
Evans, finding that among “high-information,” educated conservative Protestants, it was not science in
general or scientific method that was cited as the object of skepticism, but rather claims that science is
value-free (J. H. Evans, 2011).
Matthew C. Nisbet presents data showing that the broad public trust in science expressed during the
Cold War period did not correlate with greater literacy or knowledge of the factual or technical content
of science, and nor does the trust expressed today so correlate (Nisbet, 2010, p. 1769). Furthermore, why
should anyone expect that greater information or knowledge about science among the public would
uniformly predict greater support? It is clear that the deficit model of public understanding, insofar as it
deduces the decline of institutional trust from low-information, is not empirically supported. Why does it
endure then?
This question leads the wing of PUS informed by recent work in the fields of history, philosophy,
and sociology of science (HPSS). The dismissal of such work by deficit views of the public may be
pragmatically justifiable insofar as one’s time is consumed by the requirements of advance within
increasingly specialized sciences. We may agree with Kuhn that in this respect the historicism of HPSS
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is not necessary to special science education (Kindi, 2005; Kuhn & Hacking, 2012). The fields of HPSS
in the American academy since the 1970s have begun to explore the difficult but inevitable subject of
social epistemology, long developed in post-Kantian continental European thought, while largely
shunned by the analytic philosophy dominant in the Anglo world. Steve W. Fuller notes that the recent
emergence of “social epistemology” as a distinct area of inquiry for analytic philosophy, as opposed to
the continental traditions, reflects how accounts of knowledge in the latter already presuppose a social
dimension, which make ‘social epistemology’ a superfluous term (2007); from the 19th century onward,
epistemologies descended from French positivism and German idealism have constantly stressed the
systematic and collective character of knowledge (p. 1). The tension between Popperian and Kuhnian
philosophy of science in PUS and in the American academy in general, is itself a symptom of a long
tradition in which British philosophers of science and their American followers have sought to
demarcate liberal Anglo thought from the dark, exotic, socially illiberal thought of the European
continent. Popper’s strong anti-historicist philosophy of science, given its political form in The Open
Society and its Enemies (1945), expresses Anglo fears that the social epistemology derived from
continental philosophers like Hegel was ultimately to blame for 20th-century communism, fascism, and
World War II (Rose, 2007, p. 7; Stewart, 1996, pp. 87-102). This view seems plausible in the case of
Heidegger, a major influence on postmodernism, who took the historicism without the rationalism from
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Hegel’s theory of modernity. This strand in the history of ideas tells us an important part of the tale
leading to current differences of view within PUS.
On my argument post-Kuhnian HPSS is best positioned to diagnose and devise appropriate
responses to the social situation of science in America. Post-Kuhnian HPSS opens paths to long-needed
social epistemology, to Geisteswissenschaften in American philosophy; it opens the path to what Dewey
began (Shook, Good, & Dewey, 2010), only to be overshadowed during the middle of the 20th century
by the ascendance then of logical positivist philosophy. These fields evidence the socially contingent,
historically rooted character of public reasons and their normative authority. They point to a more
complex, varied picture of modernization than the rationalization hypothesis of Weber, which leads to
the deficit model in PUS and its problems for the science community (Locke, 1994; 1999a, p. ix; 1999b,
2002).
Wynne evidences this influence of HPSS in his call for PUS to draw more fully on wider and more
historical work in political philosophy (p. 21). In the science community, backlash against HPSS, and
the influence of Kuhn generally, is based on worry that these fields have fostered postmodernist
skepticism, undermining scientific realism and reason. On my argument these philosophical worries are
misguided, and such a backlash amounts to ‘shooting the messenger’ of a real problem. Kuhn’s insight
that science is intrinsically historical need not undermine rationality or progress, as Kuhn himself argued
in his own defense during the years of debate following the publication of The Structure of Scientific
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Revolutions (Kuhn & Hacking, 2012, p. xxxi). Historicist epistemology may however require significant
alterations in our conception of rationality.
Having given an exposition of the social situation of science during the last four decades, Chapter 2
traces how the field of PUS has developed since the 1980s, coinciding with the decline and end of the
Space Race and the Cold War. Through analysis of debate over the deficit model of the public, in
comparison with more recent critical views, I find that two distinct approaches in PUS and science
education can be discerned and respectively justified: a post-Kuhnian historicist approach, largely
informed by history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS), as well as a Popperian neo-positivist
approaches often suspicious of the former. The latter aligns with the requirements of pre-professional
education aimed at the advance of specialized sciences, while the former better to the requirements of
the general, liberal science education citizens need, insofar as they will be among various parties to
science-related public debates. This curriculum outlined in Chapter 6 follows from this.
Whereas Chapter 2 demonstrates the contours of the necessary turn toward history, philosophy, and
sociology of science (HPSS) within research in public understanding of science (PUS), Chapter 3
undertakes historical analysis of the relationship between science and the state and between pure and
applied science. The analysis yields important conclusions for the kind of literacy a liberal science
education needs to provide for contemporary civic discourse. I begin with an examination of political
scientist Donald E. Stokes’ study of the weakened state of the compact between science and
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government. Stokes argues that the traditional distinction between basic and applied research is at fault
in part for the recent weakening of the relationship between science and state. I extend Stokes’ search
into the history of ideas for the origin of the distinction between pure and applied science, thus between
the often conflicting ideals of knowledge and social utility. If civics refers to the study of the theoretical
and practical aspects of citizenship—its rights and duties; the duties of citizens to each other as members
of a political body—then the aim here is to understand why modern science is aligned with the
particularly modern norm of universalism in civic affairs, the notion that science should serve all. This is
peculiar because there is no reason in the scientific pursuit of knowledge as such to entail this attitude.
In fact the invention of theoretical science by the ancient Greeks involved no such sense of duty beyond
the ethnic group toward a universal humanity. In the West, it is the intervening centuries of medieval
Christian ideas, which—contrary to their demonization by traditional science history—mediate the
transformation of science from a purely theoretical pursuit to understand nature—as the Greeks
conceived it—into the modern instrumental pursuit to transform nature toward human ends. More
historically informed ‘old atheists’ like Nietzsche have recognized—and lamented—this connection
between Christianity and the universalism of modern secular humanism. The aim here is not to justify
the content of any particular ethical claims, whether religious or secular-humanist, but the analysis
shows that recent approaches to science advocacy in the public, like the supposedly science-based ‘new
atheism’ of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, make errors in both substance and
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 18
strategy insofar as they ignore or attempt to purge religious thought from the historical grounding of
modern science and politics. The analysis here yields a solution for appropriately situating science and
religion within a liberal science education that would elevate the civic discourse, and this is addressed as
a unit within the curriculum outlined in Chapter 6.
While Chapter 3 analyzed the historical evolution of science in the civic realm, Chapter 4 looks at a
contemporary public policy debate involving claims appealing to recent genetic science. This illustrates
the complexity of the challenge in a free, liberal polity where scientific arguments in public appeal to
genetic science in a manner that would impact normative and policy actions, like the creation of single-
sex education. The need for critical science literacy in this respect is made urgent by the unprecedented
implications of 21st-century sciences of life—molecular biology, population genetics, behavior genetics,
evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropharmacology, and DNA-level genetic engineering.
Even if we do not see the most extreme possibilities of genetic engineering like “designer babies”
realized, the growth of knowledge in these fields is already creating the ripples of the new biopolitics.
Psychologist and family physician Dr. Leonard Sax mounts a sophisticated public argument that recent
research in brain genetics confirms a natural, genetic—not cultural or socially constructed—basis for
differences in the behavior of boys and girls; this entails, Sax argues, normative implications for
differences in how we educate boys and girls. Sax is prompted by developments arising from another
area of the new life sciences, neuropharmacology. He criticizes for a lack of prudence the recent, sudden
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 19
wave of brain- and behavior-altering psychotropic drugs during the sudden wave of mass diagnosis of
ADHD in boys. On Sax’s genetics-based argument, such prescriptions are detrimental to natural
differences of disposition in boys that require attention within educational contexts to fulfill their
educational potential. Sax’s critics, often humanist intellectuals and feminists like academic
psychologist Cordelia Fine, charge in return that his argument amounts to no more than another attempt
to prop up old-fashioned prejudices for socially constructed differences under the authority of science.
Such debates are so controversial in the public sphere because they suggest science may be in conflict
with our political ideals of freedom and equality. Addressing how to navigate this new iteration of the
nature-nurture debate yields important conclusions for the kind of critical literacy a liberal science
education needs to provide in contemporary civic discourse.
In Chapter 4 we gain a sense of the depth of conflict between naturalist and social constructivist
views of human behavior. Fine’s feminist criticism of Sax is aligned with the strong social constructivist
views common in the humanities. This biopolitical debate reflects the long-running divergence between
scientific and humanistic intellectuals in the public sphere, identified by Charles .P. Snow as the “two
cultures”; thus Chapter 5 takes up a more theoretical inquiry into recent advances in neuroscience and
cognitive science with a view to how these might help bridge the alienation between these two modes of
inquiry. Humanistic intellectuals tend to fear that science threatens freedom; this problem between the
two cultures centers on the nature of the free, morally autonomous individual actor or subject—the ideal
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 20
of political liberalism, including both the classical, conservative, Lockean liberalism, written into the
constitution of the United States, as well as the more recent communitarian modifications of liberalism,
as articulated by Dewey for example. Thus Chapter 5 is an attempt to help detail a meta-ethical theory
for how recent neuroscience and cognitive science can be bridged with this vital public ideal.
Chapters 1 to 5 are intended as a contribution to the scholarly discourse within PUS. These chapters
help identify the parameters of appropriate general or liberal science learning that the public needs
today. They are aimed at science teachers, education policy makers, communicators, historians,
sociologists, and philosophers of science.
Thus, in Chapter 6, I outline a proposal, in the critical light of preceding investigations, for a non-
specialized, liberal science education for non-majoring students and adult citizens. This follows from
Kuhn’s view that the historicism of history and philosophy of science is not a necessary part of
traditional, pre-professional science education or training for specialized sciences, but it is a necessary
part of general or liberal science education, needed for critical appreciation of science by citizens. It is
especially important to prioritize and develop liberal science educational programs for non-majoring
students and adult citizens, as they will be among various parties to increasingly complex, science-
related public debates in the 21st century. A curriculum for the public must be broad enough to address
various communities within the United States. Therefore the outline in Chapter 6 emphasizes science as
a method and the conclusions of historical and contemporary science not as dogmas but as conclusions
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 21
standing for free minds to test. Final judgments of absolute truth are suspended, so that learners can
appreciate how scientific theories can be freely entertained, considered, examined, non-coercively, by
free minds.
An important philosophical point: The guiding approach in the following analyses of issues at the
intersection of science and society takes special heed from a hard-won, sage insight, thusly expressed by
the 20th-century heretic analytic philosopher Richard Rorty: “Take care of freedom and truth will take
care of itself” (Rorty & Mendieta, 2006). His deceptively simple point conceals a lifetime of
philosophical labor in the trenches of impassioned disputes, and speaks to a perennial—perhaps
irreconcilable—tension between the pursuits of truth and democracy, a problem recognized since at least
Plato’s Republic. Should we expect it to be any easier for us?
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 22
CHAPTER 2
SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC
In Chapter 2 the brief history of interdisciplinary research in public understanding of science (PUS)
is traced in order to better illustrate the development of the scholarly discourse, and its outstanding
questions, from which Wynne’s call for PUS to “draw more fully on wider and more historical work in
political philosophy” follows (2008, p. 21).
Having exposed the social situation of science over the last four decades, which gave rise to the
need for research in PUS, Chapter 2 traces how the field of PUS has developed since the 1980s,
coinciding with the decline and end of the Space Race and the Cold War. Through that two distinct
approaches in PUS and science education can be discerned and respectively justified: a post-Kuhnian
historicist approach, largely informed by history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS), as well
as a Popperian neo-positivist approaches often rightly suspicious of the former. This analysis of debate
over the deficit model of the public, versus more recent critical views, we can find leads to a conclusion
that the latter aligns with the requirements of pre-professional education aimed at the advance of
specialized sciences, while the former better to the requirements of the general, liberal science education
citizens need.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 23
Who is the Public for Science?
Within the field it is generally recognized that a unifying theory of PUS is lacking (Lewenstein,
2002, p. 2; Locke, 1999b, p. 75). Reasons for this include that it is a relatively young and
interdisciplinary field, having become a formalized area for scholarly inquiry only during the 1980s
(Kahlor & Stout, 2010, p. 12); that there is to contend with the historically typical resistance of social
science to the positive character of a formal science or a natural science; and that we are dealing,
arguably, with an intrinsically discursive subject (Lewenstein, p. 3; Locke, p. 76). Yet there is a clear
need for empirical researches, quantitative and qualitative, when one is dealing in the speculative,
precarious territory of conjectures about “the public,” regarding what it does or does not understand
adequately enough (Irwin & Wynne, 1996, p. 1; Prpic, 2011, p. 734).
The problem of how to represent the public is widely addressed in PUS and related literature, often
including investigations into its historical connections with the emergence of modern science (M. S.
Evans, 2009; G. Holton, 1993; G. J. Holton & Blanpied, 1976). Today it is common in public life to
observe that appeals to any particular representation of “the public” provoke skepticism. This usually
occurs on those occasions when a political dilemma calls forth claims appealing to universal interests
the public is supposed to possess. But healthy skepticism at this juncture remains superficial if it does
not prompt deeper inquiry into who “the public” is and how it is constituted. In a modern, liberal,
middle-class, democratic culture, such as our own, it is taken for granted that the individual is a part but
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 24
also apart from the public, with only a minimal need for concern about or duties toward it. The assumed
practical procedures and technological characteristics of this public culture are, if only implicitly, deeply
entwined with the historical emergence of science, reflecting the instrumental rationality through which
modern science has managed to avoid disputes over values and achieve the great modern technological
revolutions (Gray, 2007, pp. 81-83; G. Holton, 1993, p. 298; G. J. Holton & Blanpied, 1976).
This is the case by design, deriving from the Enlightenment period in Western history (~ 1650 to
1800) when a confluence of natural science (then “natural philosophy”) and political liberalism, together
under the banner of a single, universal, “public” rationality, defined modernization precisely as the
supersession of historical, religious, and cultural difference (Gregory & Miller, 1998, pp. 20, 56, 66-67,
84). According to research by Evans (2009), the historical development of social science in America
between 1880 and 1920 is characterized by debate over the degree to which the newer social application
of science—and consequently “the public” to be studied—should be defined on the model of the
Enlightenment, Newtonian ideal of a natural, positive science, and the degree to which it might openly
reflect the historical, normative character of progressive social reformers with religiously inflected
desires to advance it (p. 7). The positivists prevailed insofar as the “sociological public” modeled in this
period was deliberately defined “by excluding the undesirable religious public” (p. 5). This was
necessary, Evans argues, since in order to establish credibility against the high bar of the positive ideal,
aspiring sociologists needed to establish the possibility of symmetry between the assumptions of a
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 25
positive science and its object. Evans concludes by suggesting that a significantly flawed model of
science–public relations was established at this particular juncture, helping to explain later, intermittent
eruptions of concern about public understanding by the scientific establishment during the 20th century
(p. 19).
The Development of Models of PUS
In his departing editorial for the Fall 1997 issue of the journal Public Understanding of Science,
founding editor John Durant expressed concern about the lack of theory in PUS generally (J. R. Durant,
1997). Progress at filling this gap is marked by Dominique Brossard and Bruce Lewenstein (Public
Understanding of Science editor from 1998-2003) in “A Critical Appraisal of Models of Public
Understanding of Science: Using Practice to Inform Theory,” their contribution to a 2010 volume on
Communicating Science (Kahlor & Stout, 2010, p. 11). Brossard and Lewenstein present a study of four
models which have emerged in the PUS literature for framing and researching public-understanding-of-
science issues: the traditional “deficit model” in which the public simply lacks necessary technical
knowledge or factual information needed to be supplied by modern science; the “lay expertise model” in
which multiple publics are recognized to possess local and historical knowledge which will shape the
meaning of encountered science; the “contextual model” which updates the deficit model to require
assessment of differences in context of reception; and the “public engagement model” which affirms a
necessity for democratic participation in determining science and technology policies (p. 17).
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 26
Brossard and Lewenstein present field research testing these models in the case of public
educational projects funded by the Department of Energy and related to the Human Genome Project,
specifically the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) component of the Human Genome
Project research program. Results were mixed, with some important implications for science
communication research. In assessing findings, the authors soberly warn that in practice “theoretical
approaches to public communication of science do not capture the complexity of the reality of informal
science education projects” (p. 32). This would not be a surprise to qualitative researchers accustomed to
encountering the limitations of theoretical constructions in practice. More promisingly, they found
“overlap between [the above models, which have been] traditionally presented as incommensurable in
theoretical discussions”, since the outreach projects wound up gravitating toward “mixed approaches
that blended models”. Nevertheless, all of the outreach projects “tended to use the Deficit Model as a
backbone, even if they seemed to follow other theoretical approaches” (p. 32). In the authors’ analysis,
this fallback occurred owing in part to a failure to more carefully assess the context of inquiry for
adequate interest and commitment on the part of the public participants. This may be a problem in the
“contextual model” to the extent that it is only taken up as a rhetorical modification upon the linear
transmission of information sought by the deficit model. “Not all citizens want to be involved in science
decision making” the authors note. But perhaps this outreach failed to elicit public engagement because
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 27
it was not serious looking for it, i.e., not seriously seeking any public involvement or democratic
participation?
Despite the challenges encountered and questions raised in this particular field test, the emergence
of distinct models—deficit, contextual, lay expertise, and public engagement—signals a definite
advance for PUS. They help readers identify key dispositions within its discourse. And they represent a
maturing discourse about the relation between science and the public: creating the terms for structured
arguments; creating distinct areas for diverse empirical research; and helping generally to advance a
lively, critical, stimulating, and productive debate within the literature.
While Brossard and Lewenstein have made a valiant effort to integrate a diversity of theoretical
approaches, it may be argued that their use of the public outreach and informal education wing of the
Human Genome Project did not lend itself to a genuine study of the lay expertise or public engagement
models, setting up an inevitable reliance upon a deficit model approach. This is the case insofar as the
lay expertise and public engagement models derive from practitioners, many trained in or influenced by
sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) (Irwin & Wynne, 1996, pp. 7-8), whose contributions are
aimed at illuminating PUS issues from a citizen-centered rather than science-centered perspective.
From Representation to Discourse
In a different response to John Durant’s concerns about PUS, Simon Locke (1999b) argues that it is
not so much that research has been “under-theorized” but rather that it has been “theorized in
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 28
fundamentally contrasting ways” (p. 75). Locke identifies essentially two contrasting representations of
the public: “deficit” versus “interpretative.” The former characterizes both the “deficit” and “contextual”
models presented by Brossard and Lewenstein, used more so by researchers concerned with how to
communicate science to the public more effectively, in order to create greater science literacy at large;
the latter characterizes the “lay understanding” and “public engagement” models, emphasized by PUS
researchers like Locke (1999b, 2002), Alan Irwin, and Wynne (1996; 2008) concerned to show that
many PUS dilemmas are rooted in an ontological blind spot about the nature of scientific knowledge.
For these researchers, scientific knowledge does not consist simply within a collection of true
propositions or in the factual content of statements, but is reliant upon external, social, discursive,
interpretive performances and manners of comportment, which in turn rely for their intelligibility upon
implicit background assumptions about social context (Irwin & Wynne, pp. 19-20, 39-40). Science is a
practice among other practices, even if a special, theoretical praxis. Because these dependencies upon a
particular praxis are not built into the traditional conception of scientific knowledge, and so are not
taught to be recognized, they constitute in effect an ontological blind spot, which results in the perennial
irruptions of lament over the failure of purportedly objective information to be transmitted into the
deficient public mind (pp. 2-3). This diagnosis of what ills PUS leads these researchers to demand that
science become more reflexive regarding its own social and practical conditions of possibility. It would
be a grave mistake to interpret this diagnosis as a form of ‘anti-science,’ rather than a call for further
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 29
enlightenment about the real conditions of scientific reason and thus for genuinely helping to improve
the relation between science and the public.
Locke is thus led to recognize, in addition to the two contrasting models of the public, two
contrasting models of science: “body of knowledge” versus “golem science” (p. 75). By “golem
science” Locke refers to the humanized image of science developed by sociologists Harry Collins and
Trevor Pinch in The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science (1993), where they urge
displacement of the “god-like” image of science as definitive knowledge. Collins and Pinch argue that
this god-like image of science creates unrealistic public expectations, which in turn fuel “anti-scientific”
reactions in the public when unmet.
But in Locke’s analysis, Collins and Pinch are still not doing citizen-centered PUS, despite their
purported critique of science. Locke argues that their concern remains implicitly framed by a deficit
model of the public, insofar as they represent lay citizens as childishly beholden to and dependent upon
a god-like image of science, bound to disappoint them (p. 79). Locke’s reflexive analysis shows that in
their explicit representation of the dilemma for the public, we also find implicit the dilemma of
professional social scientists, insofar as they appeal to the authority of science while simultaneously
deconstructing it. Locke urges that we see this dilemma as the outcome of a deeper tension within
science between the universal status of knowledge claims and the particular, human conditions of
knowledge production.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 30
Locke finds a dialectic pattern of certain–uncertain, universal–particular, necessary–contingent,
impersonal–personal structuring the argumentative understanding of science equally for scientists and
the public alike, even if the discourse among scientists takes place in a more complex, technical register
or vocabulary about the phenomena under consideration. It can be observed playing out within the
scientific literature between “empiricist” and “contingent” rhetorical repertoires. Locke obtains these
terms of analysis from a study by sociologists of science G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay (1982).
Gilbert and Mulkay examined a controversy between biochemists over the production of adenosine
triphosphate (ATP), a complex molecule that is accepted to transport chemical energy within cells for
metabolism, providing a source of energy for bacteria, animals, and plants. Since the early 1950s, it has
been accepted that, in animals, the process takes place in small membraneous particles called
mitochondria, which are composed of proteins, enzymes, and lipids and contain inorganic substances,
more familiar to common public vocabulary, such as calcium, potassium and sodium. The debate to be
examined emerged in the early 1960s, following a hypothesis by Watson about the mechanism for
catalyzing ATP, put forth in opposition to the prevailing hypothesis of Spencer (pp. 386-387). Gilbert
and Mulkay describe at great length the state of existing biochemical knowledge about ATP (pp. 386-
387) making clear that ‘anti-science’ deconstruction is not their intent. Their approach is not to pass
judgment upon the relative merits of each biochemist’s position, not to pass judgment upon which side
more accurately represents reality, but instead to focus on the discourse itself and the rules of scientific
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 31
argument (p. 402). In regard to our problem of how to represent the public understanding of science in
PUS, clearly there should be instructive lessons to draw from the general, argumentative structure of
scientific understanding by science itself. What Gilbert and Mulkay find in the controversy is that each
side tends to characterize their own actions in the “impersonal” tones of the “empiricist” repertoire,
while describing the actions of their opponents in the “personal” tones of the “contingent” repertoire.
Locke (p. 81) relays that the “key feature of the empiricist repertoire is that it consists of linguistic
formulations that obscure the agency of scientists in the process of fact production.” His phrase “fact
production” will be controversial, but it is at least undeniable that an empirical fact, to be established
and understood as such, must be recognizably picked out by human agents and thus to some definite
extent relies upon a particular, contingent socio-linguistic context, background, and repertoire. Locke is
at pains to make clear that his rhetorical analysis is not a form ‘anti-science’ or an attempt to
delegitimize science:
Studies of scientists’ discourse, then, provide some documentation of this characteristic mode of
argumentative interaction—or, in a word, the rhetoric of science [emphasis original]. It should
be stressed that the use of the term “rhetoric” here is not intended in its common pejorative
sense. Describing science as rhetoric is not intended in itself to downgrade, devalue, or
undermine what scientists say; rather, it is intended to refer to the fact that what they say can be
treated for its features as argument, as part of the broader study of rhetoric referring to the
forms, processes, and procedures of argumentation. (p. 81)
If scientific argument provides an exemplary form of human reasoning toward achieving
understanding, then clearly it should provide valuable lessons for PUS. But this approach poses a
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 32
problem for science presented in public, insofar as the Enlightenment ideal devalues process, demanding
incontrovertible, positive, determinate results, such that can then be presented “in an impersonal, passive
voice, giving them the appearance of direct and universally applicable [universally reliable]
representations of the world” (p. 81). Indeed, Locke finds the empiricist repertoire is favored by
scientists in public settings, such as published research reports. But if science is an argumentative
process, and not only its results, is this not relevant to the public understanding of science? In sum,
Locke finds that the process of scientific argumentation is “dilemmatical”: there is a recursive dilemma
between the universal form of knowledge claims and their factical, contingent grounding in the
particular actions of particular scientists in particular contexts and locations, though the detail of actual
expression varies from context to context (p. 82). What applications might this approach have for PUS
issues more explicitly outside formal science, in the public sphere?
Teaching science as a discursive, argumentative process has a number of potential benefits. For
one, it emphasizes the need for critical thinking and structured reasoning, with application for citizens
and learners beyond science proper. In addition, this approach can encourage science literacy in the form
of enriched science reading. Rather than science being presented as a list of results, which one is
supposed either to accept or not accept upon threat of being deemed ‘unscientific’, an invitation to read
science as a dramatic, discursive process is a step toward creating greater science literacy and inviting
constructive public engagement. For example, reading from the often dramatic public debates over the
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 33
normative consequences of the work of Pasteur, Darwin, Mendel, Watson and Crick, can provide a path
into the fundamental concepts, methods, major themes, and questions of life sciences: natural selection,
genetics, eugenics, genomics, ecology, molecular biology, artificial life, and biotechnology. What has
“life” meant at different moments in history? Does science change the meaning of “life” for us?
In a thorough application of discourse theory in PUS research, Locke presents his study of the
“Creation Science” movement in Britain, where he documented the contrast of empiricist and contingent
voices in the way creationists argue with evolution (Locke, 1994). What he found is that they use the
detached, impersonal, and universal appeals of empiricism when advancing views consistent with their
own, but use the personalized, particularized forms of contingency when characterizing the actions and
beliefs of evolutionists. In other words, creationists in public discourse have adopted rhetorical
techniques of science as means to legitimize their own account of the origins of life and to delegitimize
the alternative account provided by evolution (pp. 409-410). This shows that the Enlightenment ideal
drives a kind of arms race for who can speak more sharply in the voice of metaphysical certitude,
representing no longer a fallible, contingent self, but so as to speak in the name of reality itself. One can
easily find plenty of US-based Internet sites filled with such delegitimizing contests presented as dialog.
What are the lessons for PUS? It may be advisable for science in public to become, as Wynne advises,
more self-reflexive (D. Durant, 2008; Wynne, 2008), thus dropping the harder rhetoric of
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 34
incontrovertible positivity and universal reliability in knowledge claims, and allowing science to speak
publicly in its contingent, human voices.
We have traced how the field of PUS developed since the 1980s, coinciding with the decline and
end of the Space Race and the Cold War. Through analysis of debate over the deficit model of the
public, versus more recent critical views, we have found a necessary turn within PUS toward a post-
Kuhnian historicist approach, largely informed by history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS).
The requirements of pre-professional education aimed at the advance of specialized sciences differ from
the requirements of a general, liberal science education citizens need, insofar as they will be among
various parties to science-related public debates. This conclusion informs the curriculum outline in
Chapter 6.
While this short history of research in PUS illustrates the development of the field into a richer
discourse, we have seen why outstanding questions lead to Wynne’s call for PUS to “draw more fully on
wider and more historical work in political philosophy” follows (2008, p. 21). In Chapter 3, in response
to this problem, I argue that a complex understanding of the political history in which science has
developed and flourished is essential to understanding the political present in which science is now
situated and challenged; this is done through an analysis beginning from Donald E. Stokes research on
the dichotomy between pure versus applied science when public funding is called for.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 35
CHAPTER 3
SCIENCE AND THE RULE OF LAW
Having illustrated why Brian Wynne has called for wider and more historical work in political
philosophy within the field of PUS (2008, p. 21), in Chapter 3 I begin to address this gap. I argue here
that a more complex understanding of the political history in which science has developed and
flourished is essential to understanding the political present in which science is now situated and
challenged; this is done through an analysis beginning from political scientist Donald E. Stokes’
research on the dichotomy between pure versus applied science when public funding is called for.
I begin with an examination of Stokes’ study of the weakened state of the compact between science
and government. Stokes argues that the traditional distinction between basic and applied research is at
fault in part for the recent weakening of the relationship between science and state. I extend Stokes’
search into the history of ideas for the origin of the distinction between pure and applied science, thus
between the often conflicting ideals of knowledge and social utility. If civics refers to the study of the
theoretical and practical aspects of citizenship—its rights and duties; the duties of citizens to each other
as members of a political body—then the aim here is to understand why modern science is aligned with
the particularly modern norm of universalism in civic affairs, the notion that science should serve all.
This is peculiar because there is no reason in the scientific pursuit of knowledge as such to entail this
attitude. In fact the invention of theoretical science by the ancient Greeks involved no such sense of duty
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 36
beyond the ethnic group toward a universal humanity. In the West, it is the intervening centuries of
medieval Christian ideas, which—contrary to their demonization by traditional science history—mediate
the transformation of science from a purely theoretical pursuit to understand nature—as the Greeks
conceived it—into the modern instrumental pursuit to transform nature toward human ends. More
historically informed ‘old atheists’ like Nietzsche have recognized—and lamented—this connection
between Christianity and the universalism of modern secular humanism. The aim here is not to justify
the content of any particular ethical claims, whether religious or secular-humanist, but the analysis
shows that recent approaches to science advocacy in the public, like the supposedly science-based ‘new
atheism’ of Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, make errors in both substance and strategy insofar as they
ignore or attempt to purge religious thought from the historical grounding of modern science and
politics. The analysis here yields a solution for appropriately situating science and religion within a
liberal science education that would elevate the civic discourse, and this is addressed as a unit within the
curriculum outlined in Chapter 6.
Crisis of Purpose in Post-Cold War American Science
What are the goals of science? What level of public investment in scientific research can be
justified today? If we have no fundamental agreement between scientists, politicians, and the public on
these questions, might there at least be a way toward a more effective consensus, an improvement
beyond the worst conflicts in the current science-policy-public nexus? The contentious debate over
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 37
energy sources, climate change, biotechnology, and the teaching of evolution are only the most visible to
the larger public; less visible is a debate about science policy and the funding of pure versus applied
endeavors.
Stokes (1997) argues that the modern research paradigm, which peaked after World War II during
the Cold War, has always carried an inherent flaw, and is in part to blame for current disarray in the
relationship between science and government (p. 1). Stokes’ prime target is the assumption of a
fundamental separation between fundamental, basic, or pure research on the one hand, and applied or
practical research on the other. Stokes finds that “It was widely accepted in the postwar years that basic
science could serve as a pacemaker of technological progress only if it is insulated from thought of
practical use.” He finds this a paradox in view of how often those who built modern science were
directly influenced by applied goals, as Louis Pasteur was influenced by practical goals throughout his
fundamental work in microbiology (Stokes, p. 26).
Stokes revisits the tremendously influential post-World War II government report Science, the
Endless Frontier (United States. Office of scientific research and development. & Bush, 1945). In this
report Vannevar Bush claimed a fundamental dichotomy between basic and applied science, and
articulated a view of science at the core of the compact between science and the state. This compact
enabled the golden age of American science research during the middle of the 20th century. Stokes
observes that this compact has begun to unravel since the decline and end of the Cold War. This trend
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 38
has continued in the decade since Stokes’ inquiry, with globalization and neo-liberal approaches to
science policy relegating more research to private, transnational commercial enterprises, with
diminished funding for the pubic research universities that arose during the post-WWII years. Stokes’
challenges the earlier view of Bush and argues that to restore the relationship between science and the
state, we need to understand what is wrong with that view. Stokes ultimately concludes that the goals of
understanding and use in science are more intimately connected than Bush had assumed. I argue that this
connection of theory and practice could have been explored further earlier—because in fact it was by the
Hegelian, Marxist, and American pragmatist traditions—but it has been forced to the fore in recent
American discourse by the post-industrial IT revolution, in which high-tech is science-based and
sciences have become more obviously dependent upon technology. This is above all evident in the
advance of genetic science and biotechnology (Howard, 2000). Stokes looks for a model of practice in
Louis Pasteur, who laid the foundations of microbiology a century ago, during the era of the “second
industrial revolution,” when the interaction between basic science and technological change became
visible in its modern contours. For Stokes, Pasteur’s work is exemplary, because it aims for and achieves
the goals both of fundamental understanding and making possible applications of moral and practical
significance for society.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 39
Searching for an Ethos
The idea that pure research is fundamentally separate from the practical, even if its proponents
begrudgingly accept that their financial support depends on practical interests (Stokes, p. 61), is deeply
entwined within western history. Considering the close association of science and technology in the
mind of the public today, one might be inclined to think Stokes’ problem not a real one. Stokes is
concerned with a conceptual assumption about science within the research community, and how this
impacts public funding. Many argue that technological innovations benefiting the public flow ultimately
from a pure research unconcerned with consequences (p. 56), but Stokes holds up in response the model
of Pasteur, whose work not only achieved basic insights, but was also motivated by concern for public
utility.
To find a way out of the dichotomy between pure and applied research, Stokes presents a quadrant
model, wherein he locates four possibilities. Along the y-axis he draws a line from lesser to greater
value for fundamental understanding (basic science). Along the x-axis he draws a line from lesser to
greater value for use (applications). This allows him to identify Pasteur’s work in chemistry and
microbiology as expressing a virtuous mean, represented by the upper right quadrant, wherein both
fundamental understanding and consideration of use are exemplary. For Stokes, Pasteur avoids the
distance from practical concerns sometimes characteristic of highly theoretical research, but also avoids
the lack of emphasis on fundamental understanding characteristic of narrowly instrumentalist research.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 40
In the upper left quadrant we might locate theoretical physicist Niels Bohr, as well as Albert Einstein,
who, despite his popular public image, cannot be said to have served the public in the same capacity as
Pasteur. In the lower right quadrant we might locate Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell who
provide models of the industrious scientist-inventor, developing instruments of inestimable utility to the
world (which tend to be highly marketable and profitable as well). We might also include in this latter
category Benjamin Franklin, lesser known for his invention of bifocal eyeglasses.
Into the History of the Present Ideas of Science and State
To better understand the current ideological split Stokes makes a study in the history of ideas. He
traces the ideal of pure inquiry to the Greek development of theory and natural philosophers. In the
Greek world speculative thought about nature was practiced primarily by an aristocratic elite, whose
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privileged economic position (Athens economy depended on slavery) allowed them the generous
amount of leisure time needed for its development. Inquiring about the origins of the modern paradigm,
Stokes finds that
The natural philosophy of the Greek world […] that entered [Europe] during the Renaissance,
continued to be read by the classes in western Europe from which the natural philosophers of
later centuries were largely drawn […] There is little doubt that it kept alive the view of the
superiority of pure science that was so deeply rooted in the Greek world (Stokes, p. 31).
This passage points to the Enlightenment and the beginning of the modern paradigm, but it doesn’t
account for the Enlightenment’s other emphasis on transformation, instrumentality, and the egalitarian
desire for large-scale practical benefits to society, i.e. the universal ethos of the new science. Regarding
this transformation, we have “only partial clues as to why” it should be true that “Europe’s natural
philosophers were readier than he Greeks to see their science as a means of controlling, and not only of
understanding, nature” (Stokes, p. 31). This points us down a path exploring how the ideas of law in
science—natural law—and in politics—civil law—have evolved in Western history.
The Greeks invented the idea of science as epistêmê, theoretical description and explanation of
empirical phenomena according to the discernment of abstract, logical, impersonal principles, instead of
according to animistic or theistic agencies. The pre-Socratic Parmenides (c. 515 / 540 BC) seems to have
been the first to infer the universal, necessary character in the logic of symbols as something distinct
from, over or above the particular, contingent, empirical phenomena, which the logic describes and
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explains. The Greek λόγος is the “ground”, “plea”, “opinion”, “word”, “speech”, or “account” of things.
Parmenides writings say that the logical principle or λόγος of ‘being’ tells what is more true than
appearance, tells what stands somehow apart, above, or behind the manifestly changing appearances of
empirical phenomena. This begets the metaphysical character of science as the positing of principles or
laws to explain phenomena, while not being themselves empirical objects.
Aristotle further elaborates upon this negative character of formal scientific principles exposed by
Parmenides; he identifies the formal rules of syllogism implicit in language by removing or negating the
empirical content of particular linguistic statements (Wittgenstein & Kolak, 1998, p. xiv). For example:
If the sword caused the event, then it wasn’t the rose.
The sword did cause the event.
Therefore, it wasn’t the rose.
Aristotle seems to have been the first to discover that this argument is valid not because of anything
to do with the empirical content or meaning of the words, but due to the syntactical structure of the
sentence form:
PàQ
P
Therefore Q.
The key point here is to see that in logical formulation, required by all empirical, scientific
statements, the ultimate rule is the formal, non-empirical law of identity, the consistency of symbolic
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 43
meaning implicit in the use of language. The rule or law itself never appears, but can only be inferred
from particular empirical cases of the things it is supposed to govern; in being inferred from empirical
things, the rule cannot be directly observed. This creates perennial questions for science.
Contrary to the modern myth that science has become purely empirical, the metaphysical character
of natural law runs through the entire history of science from Parmenides to Aristotle to Newton to
Darwin. The negativity of the formal law, empirically unverifiable, empty of content, continues to hold
sway over science today. For example, consider that the Darwinian principle of natural selection is never
itself observed directly and is never itself supposed to undergo change over time like the observable
things, which it is inferred to govern. From that which can be empirically observed in particular place
and time, like the various objects in the fossil record, it is thought to provide the best explanation. Note
how Richard Dawkins, the strongest public advocate today for a Darwinian Weltanschauung, asserts—
beyond any possible empirical verification or observation—that natural selection is the law ruling
throughout the universe (Dawkins, 2006); and this in a book intended to refute speculative notions.
Now, perhaps one finds this principle does provide the best explanation of what one observes—if this
were the case, it would still not excuse the need for critical thinking about the nature of scientific reason.
This persisting metaphysical characteristic of science, leaving scientific claims constantly open to
question, is the reason for David Hume’s skeptical problem of induction, i.e., the problem that no finite
number of empirical observations can confirm the infinity or universality suggested by the notion of a
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natural law. Karl Popper’s philosophy of science is designed precisely to address this negativity or
emptiness of empirical content in the logic of law. Popper claims the only way around Hume’s problem
of induction is to recognize that the universal statements of science are negative in this formal sense:
they are never themselves proven true or verified, but can only ‘stand’ as yet not falsified by any
particular observation made so far.
We owe to Hume the modern critical recognition that inferences to law in nature give us only
seeming necessities; we can see this insofar as we become capable of critically distinguishing between
(a) the contingency of empirical observations and (b) the logical necessity in symbolic systems. It is
difficult to overstate the importance of this insight for modern, critical thinking in science and practical
philosophy.
The point of this excursion into philosophy of science is to critically expose the theoretical aspect
of science: the constructive work of reason in positing natural laws and principles to explain the
regularity of things in the world. This critical recognition in the history of thought is significantly joined
to coinciding social changes in the conception of civil law, toward recognizing the social construction of
civil law and therefore a greater degree of freedom possible in the creation of the rules regulating human
affairs. This is why the history of the concept of law in both natural and civil senses of the term is
important to understanding the modern senses of science and the state. This will explain the reasoning
behind Fine’s feminist criticism of Sax’s appeal to genetics in Chapter 3.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 45
Now, at the historical birth of the idea, science—epistêmê—is an end in itself for the aristocratic,
contemplative man of Greek philosophy; for the Greeks it is unattainable by the masses among which
technê dominates sans epistêmê, application without true knowledge, particular know-how without
grasp of universal why. The Greeks discover the idea of natural law essential to modern science, but
they also found that some men are naturally free while others are naturally slaves.
To locate the origin of the modern notions of universal human rights and democratic law we have
to look to the appearance of Judaic-Christianity as a slave religion in late Rome. It is a slave ideology
that challenges the aristocratic politics of antiquity with the notion of universal freedom and dignity for
the individual as such, recognized by a transcendental creator and judge of the human world, above even
aristocratic men. The medieval period in Europe, dominated by Roman Catholicism, brings a universal
esteem to the practices and craftwork of the laboring individual person, a social reality unknown to high
Greek thought. Thus the notion of universal rule of law begins to move from nature into the polis, laws
necessary in nature, but laws contingent, created in the human polis upon a moral, historical expansion
entwined with particular religious beliefs about the free individual. This sets the stage for Renaissance
humanism, the Protestant Reformation, political liberalization, and the Scientific Revolution of the 17th
century. The latter gives us our modern idea of science by adding to Greek theory and mathematics the
ingredients of practical experiment, instrumentation, and empirical verification. Hume’s modern, critical
recognition that inferences to natural necessities in nature seem rather to be an effect of merely logical
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necessities within our symbolic systems was not merely an exercise of abstract philosophy, but also a
cultural expression of an emerging realization of human freedom, leading to the modern democratic
revolutions in the Western world, including that leading to the establishment of the United States. Thus
the history of scientific thought is written into the DNA of the US as a distinctly modern nation.
Stokes investigation into the origin of the ideas of pure and applied science thus taps, but only
scratches the surface, of a rich tradition in the study of history, the same tradition that leads along
different branches of thought to Marxist economic history, to the American pragmatism of Charles S.
Pierce, William James, and Dewey, and also to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn. It
follows largely from the 19th-century German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s philosophical
reading of history became influential in the 20th century through Alexandre Kojève, a bureaucrat in the
French Ministry of Economic Affairs and a chief planner of the European Common Market following
World War II (Kojève & Queneau, 1980; Nichols, 2007). Kojève was a student and colleague of the
historian of science Alexandre Koyré when both taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris
during the 1920s. Kojève succeeded Koyré there as lecturer on Hegel, and Koyré is cited by Kuhn in his
introduction to Structure as a key influence in the “historiographic revolution” Kuhn sought to help
bring about in the study of science (Kuhn & Hacking, 2012).
On Stokes’ question about the transition between the Greek to the modern paradigm, Kojève points
to the medieval interlude. In the transition from the ‘dark ages’ to the late medieval period, the masterly,
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aristocratic cultures of Greece and the Roman Empire give way to the Judaic-Christian world built by
former slaves. The slaves’ memory of oppression, signified in the martyrdom of the crucifix, leads to the
notion that each particular individual interests should, in principle, be equally recognized. This ethos
stands in stark contrast to the guiltless elitism of masterly Greek thought (Kojève & Queneau, 1980, pp.
55-58). Stokes remarks how “Those performing the practical arts held a different station in late medieval
and early modern Europe than they did in the Greek world. The medieval guilds lent these arts
considerable prestige, and the Christian tradition gave manual labor a meaning quite different from the
ancient world’s” (Stokes, 1997, p. 31). Kojève remarks how “different is the situation created by work
[the slave’s labor]. Man who works transforms given nature. […] Where there is work, then, there is
necessarily change, progress, historical evolution” (1980, p. 51). On Kojève’s and Stokes’ analysis this
new historical emphasis upon labor, negation, and the transformation of nature is connected to the
Christian notion of the ‘super-natural’, the notion of a beyond-nature, leading eventually to the
temporally-oriented, modern philosophy of science expressed by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis of
1624 (Bacon, Weinberger, & Bacon, 1989), that through science and technology, man is destined to
subordinate nature to his own ends in time, an idea unknown to the ancient Greeks.
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Implications for Study of Science and the Public
We thus arrive at a rich historical explanation for why the contrasting values of pure and applied
science today are prone to conflict. The ideal of fundamental insights achieved through basic scientific
research into nature remains the most esteemed kind of science, scientists’ science. This also helps
explains to a great extend why the deficit model of the public in PUS persists, and why a dichotomy
between the ideals of pure and applied science shall probably remain, despite Stokes’ praise of Pasteur’s
research program as a mediating model.
Consider for example when conservative populists in America appeal to feelings of resentment
toward the ‘Washington elite’ when arguing for religious freedoms and defending religious
interpretations of human origins in education. The preceding analysis suggests how deeply rooted the
practical, Christian, populist element in American culture is, and likely to remain in tension with a
counterpoised high science ethos, ideologically descended from the Greek tradition.
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In this sense, current conflicts over science and its relationship to the state today often involve
complex permutations of two strands of historical thought about science: the high Greek view of pure
knowledge of nature, and a practical view which derives from the Christian, human-centered
Weltanschauung, from which also derives secularized humanistic calls for universal benefits to society
from science.
Returning to Stokes’ question of the weakened compact between science and state following the
decline of the Cold War, could it be that the post-WWII compact was an exceptional condition, a unity
of science and the public made possible only by the dire threat of an external enemy? This would be a
very pessimistic conclusion, but it does not seem wholly implausible. The conclusion that social unity or
universality is conditional upon difference from an opposed other is one of the pessimistic features of
postmodern theory. Disenchantment with the modern pillars of science and progress comes in both right
wing and left wing varieties. For the postmodernist left, Stokes’ quest to establish a new compact
between government and science—with its ethos of universalism—such as we had during the Cold War,
entails, if unintentionally, the need for some enemy to be identified. A variety of anti-science
dispositions which have developed on the left following this picture are described fairly by Jane Gregory
and Steve Miller in their Science in Public: Communication, Culture, and Credibility (Gregory &
Miller, 1998, pp. 53-74). This is an especially disconcerting trend, since the left was traditionally a
strong source of support for science. I will return to this theme in Chapter 5 when considering the
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raproachment betweeen ‘the two cultures,’ and possibilities in recent neuro and cognitive science for
reconnecting science and humanistic inquiry.
If civics refers to the study of the theoretical and practical aspects of citizenship—its rights and
duties; the duties of citizens to each other as members of a political body—then perhaps we have shed
light here on why modern science is aligned with the particularly modern norm of universalism in civic
affairs, the notion that science should serve all. This is peculiar because there is no reason in the
scientific pursuit of knowledge as such to entail this attitude. In fact, as we have shown, the invention of
theoretical science by the ancient Greeks involved no such sense of duty beyond the ethnic group toward
a universal humanity. In the West, it is the intervening centuries of medieval Christian ideas, which—
contrary to their demonization by traditional science history—mediate the transformation of science
from a purely theoretical pursuit to understand nature—as the Greeks conceived it—into the modern
instrumental pursuit to transform nature toward human ends. More historically informed ‘old atheists’
like Nietzsche have recognized—and lamented—this connection between Christianity and the
universalism of modern secular humanism. The point here is not to justify the content of any particular
ethical claims, whether religious or secular-humanist, but the analysis shows that recent approaches to
science advocacy in the public, like the supposedly science-based ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Harris,
and Dennett, make errors in both substance and strategy insofar as they ignore or attempt to purge
religious thought from the historical grounding of modern science and politics. The analysis here yields
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an important approach to situating science and religion within a liberal science education that would
elevate the civic discourse, and this is addressed as a unit within the curriculum outline proposed in
Chapter 6.
The historical and moral evolution of science in the civic realm having been illuminated, Chapter 4
looks at an important instance of contemporary civic debate appealing to current science. Debates
involving appeals to genetics and the new life sciences harbor significant ethical and policy implications
that will decide the fate of the relation between science and the state in the 21st century.
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CHAPTER 4
SCIENCE AND BIOPOLITICS
Having elaborated the historical and moral evolution of science in the civic realm, we now turn to a
contemporary debate in the public sphere involving claims appealing to recent genetic science, and with
significant ethical and policy implications. In Chapter 4 I investigate and illustrate the complexity of the
challenge in a free, liberal polity where scientific arguments in public appeal to genetic science in a
manner that would impact normative and policy actions. I look at the case of psychologist and family
physician Dr. Leonard Sax. Sax, who supports his case for single-sex education in large part on appeal
to new, scientific evidence for deeply rooted, genetic-level male/female brain differences.
The need for science literacy in this respect is made urgent by the unprecedented implications of
21st-century sciences of life—molecular biology, population genetics, behavior genetics, evolutionary
biology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropharmacology, and DNA-level genetic engineering. Even if we
do not see the most extreme possibilities of genetic engineering like “designer babies” realized, the
growth of knowledge in these fields is already creating the ripples of the new biopolitics.
Sax mounts a sophisticated argument that recent research in brain genetics confirms a natural,
genetic—not cultural or socially constructed—basis for differences in the behavior of boys and girls;
this entails, Sax argues, normative implications for differences in how we educate boys and girls. Sax is
prompted by developments arising from another area of the new life sciences, neuropharmacology. He
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 53
raises questions about the prudence of prescribing brain- and behavior-altering psychotropic drugs
during the sudden wave of mass diagnosis of ADHD in boys. On Sax’s genetics-based argument, such
prescriptions are detrimental to natural differences of disposition in boys that require attention within
educational contexts to fulfill their educational potential. Sax’s feminist critics like Fine charge in return
that his argument amounts to no more than another attempt to prop up old-fashioned prejudices for
socially constructed differences under the authority of science. Such debates are so controversial in the
public sphere because they suggest science may be in conflict with our political ideals of freedom and
equality. Addressing how to navigate this new iteration of the nature-nurture debate yields important
conclusions for the kind of critical literacy a liberal science education needs to provide in contemporary
civic discourse.
The Fallacy of the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’? Or, Nature-Nurture Redux
Modern Western thought has long deferred to the ‘naturalistic fallacy,’ the view derived from
Hume that there can be no legitimate inference from the ‘is’ of the natural laws or patterns discovered by
science to the ‘ought’ upon which ethical rules and laws of state are supposed to be founded. When
natural scientists assert that their work has no political or policy implications they usually have in mind
this is-ought dichotomy. A recent example of this is evidenced in biologist Paul Ehrlich’s writing on
genetic science and human culture (2000). Like Popperian demarcation, the naturalistic fallacy is
deployed to compartmentalize and insulate science from any complicating external relations. It seems a
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sensible move insofar as a science like genetics might arouse political controversy over what it suggests
about human nature. I analyze exactly such a debate here between Sax and Fine. We can count Sax’s
argument as a part of the new “bioconservatism” identified by Moreno (2011, pp. 24, 58, 121-122, 139,
141-142). Social scientist and philosopher Francis Fukuyama gives bioconservatism its strongest
articulation in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002, pp. 84-
128). These writers are mounting a sophisticated new case, appealing to recent discoveries in the new
life sciences, for the existence of a human nature that may need protecting from potential harms caused
by other, pharmacological and biotechnological advances following from the new life sciences.
This movement reflects a noted affinity between Darwinian and Aristotelian science, insofar as the
centrality and complexity of biology in each bears more in common than either do with the clockwork,
mechanical universe of classical, Newtonian physics. In the face of modern dangers like genetic
engineering, the bioconservative can happily deny the existence of timeless Aristotelian essential natures
while affirming the need to conserve the existence of human traits developed from time immemorial
over the long course of evolutionary history—such traits count as enduring natures for all practical
purposes within normal human lifetimes.
After Darwin, genetic theories of social behavior began proliferating, in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, Madison Grant, and a whole school of scientific racism
appeared, arguing that the stratification of the social world, with white Europeans at the top and all the
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various colored people at the bottom, was genetically based. Debunking the empirical basis for such
claims was an achievement of 20th-century science. Certainly in the political realm Nazi Germany
helped discredit eugenics and the notion of genetic determinism, so that the nature-nurture debate swung
mid-century to an extreme of social constructionism, where liberal sentiment came to conclude that
whatever we are is entirely the product of environment, with genes playing almost no role—e.g., if girls
behave differently from boys, it is entirely a result of socialization and not because of biology. But
recently the debate has shifted again, with the discovery of DNA, the mapping of the genome, and the
molecular basis of genetic causation. In many sensitive areas related to intelligence, crime, alcoholism,
and the like, there appear to be genetic determinants.
Note how Freudianism was considered up to just a few decades ago to give the pivotal modern
understanding of human behavior, at least among intellectuals. The speed with which Freudian talk has
been superseded by genetic, biological, and chemical-pharmacological frameworks for understanding
human behavior and psychology indicates how powerful and compelling the recent developments in life
sciences are (Goodwin, 2008; Jenkins, 2010). These developments have come to public consciousness
through FDA approvals, beginning in the late 1980s, of pharmaceuticals like fluoxetine, marketed under
its commercial name Prozac. Many such antidepressant medications have been introduced and widely
adopted since, belonging to the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
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Clearly, part of the reason for abandonment of Freudian psychoanalysis and talk-based
psychotherapy is the shaky standing in which the social sciences have always been held, as measured
against the success of the strict empirical methods and results in the natural sciences. Skepticism toward
social science as science has gone together with liberal political concerns for individual difference,
autonomy, and freedom from questionable claims to scientific authority on human life generally. The
concerns appear in Fine’s feminist criticisms of Sax.
Genetics, Gender, and Education
Evolutionary theories of sex and gender have begotten a slew of controversies, including debates
over the theory of sexual selection and the evolutionary basis of monogamy, sexual preference, physical
attraction, rape, maternal instinct, and sex differences in cognition.
Here I shall examine some of the most recent scientific evidence presented within the long running
debate about the nature of sex and gender differences. This debate concerns generalizable behavioral
difference we may perceive between boys and girls, between men and women, e.g., a greater or lesser
tendency to express aggression. Do these have a basis in biology, or are they entirely shaped by social,
historical, and cultural forces external to the body? The implications of the normative inferences or
conclusions we come to on such questions are significant. For, it is on such beliefs that policy-makers,
administrators, and teachers decide how education shall be structured. Do we have an imperative to
recognize and accommodate naturally different tendencies in boys versus girls, and if so, in what
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respects precisely? Or do we have an imperative to educationally cultivate greater equality between boys
and girls against merely traditional prejudices held in the name of a natural difference that isn’t
necessarily so?
In Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of
Sex Differences (2005) Sax declares intent to found his case upon empirical evidence. “Every time I
make any statement about how girls and boys are different, I will also state the evidence on which my
statement is based. Every statement I make about sex differences will be supported by good science in
peer-reviewed journals” (Sax, 2005, p. 7).
Sax is particularly concerned about the influence of social constructionist theorizing about gender
on medical and educational practices. He takes as typical of the genre an academic text by professor
Anne Fausto-Sterling of Brown University, titled Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction
of Sexuality (2000). Fausto-Sterling claims that the division of the human race into two sexes, female
and male, is an artificial invention of our culture. “Nature really offers us more than two sexes,” she
claims, adding, “Our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits.” The decision
to “label” a child as a girl or a boy is “a social decision.” We should not label any child as being either a
girl or a boy. “There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).
America’s most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine praised the author
for her “careful and insightful” approach to gender (Breedlove, 2000).
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So is Sax simply going to dress up a traditionalist rebuke in the guise of science? He anticipates this
charge by also taking critical aim at books on the subject from such conservatives who he believes can
be equally guilty of putting political agendas ahead of careful attention to the evidence of recent science.
Sax finds books with such titles as The Wonder of Boys and Girls and Girls Will Be Girls, which he
agrees do “promote antiquated and inaccurate gender stereotypes”, such as that ‘girls are more
emotional than boys’ and ‘boys have a brain-based advantage when it comes to learning math’. But
“those familiar notions turn out to be false” in light of the evidence Sax (2005, p. 7).
Sax first appeals to research that is said to demonstrate how the hemispheres of the male brain are
more asymmetric than are the hemispheres of the female brain, particularly in regard to the function of
language.
Does Sax’s use of the descriptors “male brain” and “female brain” indicate he already assumes or
presupposes certain gender differences that he aims to prove by appeal to empirical evidence? In
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (2010) Fine
criticizes Sax by appealing to the real problem, widely recognized in philosophy of science, that we do
not in fact observe pure empirical evidence in science, free of any prior, historically-acquired categories
or theoretical views. In philosophy of science this is understood as the theory-laden character of
observation. It is related to the realism/constructivism or realism/anti-realism debate. These vexing
problems are skillfully addressed in Hegel’s concept of mediation (Westphal, 1998, p. 23). Hegel argues
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that mediation must be recognized as an inescapable outcome of critical reflection in the history of
philosophy and science: mediation means that reality is for us always mediated by ideas or concepts;
nevertheless, the radical social constructivist view that we cannot or do not grasp the real does not
therefore follow. The strategy is empirical in spirit, since any resolution of realism/constructivism
questions can only take place within experience. In scientific pursuits we should be skeptical toward our
own ideas, but skeptical doubts in science can be overcome to the degree that we remain willing to
honestly and critically examine—and reform—disparity within experience between concept and
observation (Westphal, 1998, pp. 1-19, 93-115). This means that the individual can never simply take a
scientific claim at face value; to come to a justifiable judgment of its merit, one must be able to critically
reconstruct the process leading to the claim.
Reconstructing the Scientific Argument
Sax refers to a number of scientific studies from the 1960s and 1970s, published in journals such as
Nature, the Journal of Neuroscience, and the journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. These studies
involved people who had suffered a stroke, causing damage to the brain. The participating male subjects
who had suffered a stroke involving their brain’s left hemisphere suffered a drop in verbal IQ of, on
average, about 20 percent (from 111.5 to 88.7); the men who suffered a stroke affecting the brain’s right
hemisphere suffered virtually no drop at all in their verbal IQ. The female subjects who had also
suffered a stroke, showed different effects in the brain. Those who suffered a stroke affecting their
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brain’s left hemisphere suffered a drop in their verbal IQ, on average, of about 9 percent (from 113.9 to
103.6); women who suffered a stroke affecting their brain’s right hemisphere suffered a similar drop in
verbal IQ, about 11 percent (from 113.9 to 101.0).
What may we infer from this data? Sax claims the evidence is clear, that we are justified to
conclude that women use both hemispheres of their brain for language, while men do not (p. 12). The
first brick of evidence is laid in Sax’s argumentative edifice for the thesis that behavioral sex differences
have a basis in biology. Sax notes that this earlier research from the 1960s and 70s led to a consensus
built up by the mid-1980s. There was a hemispheric compartmentalization of cognitive function obvious
in men’s brains, where the left hemisphere supported verbal cognition almost exclusively in comparison
to the right hemisphere’s support of spatial cognition. But the evidence did not support this being the
case in women, where such functions seemed more distributed or dispersed throughout the brain.
This leads to the question, why then? What causes the difference? “At that time [in the mid-1980s]
most scientists believed that these differences in the brain derived from hormonal differences” Sax
writes (p. 12). This in turn led many scientists to believe that sex differences must be small in the brains
of children, since prepubescent children don’t manufacture sex hormones in large quantities. But Sax
does not think they were right. If this were so, the differences would be relatively superficial, since they
would be determined at a chemical level, appearing later in development, rather than at a more basic
genetic level. Is there evidence for this?
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Sax cites research in laboratory animals that has demonstrated “large, innate, genetically
determined sex differences in the brain” (p. 13). A 2004 study at UCLA examined a bird that was a
lateral gynandromorphic hermaphrodite, a bird that was literally half-male and half-female. Every cell
on the right side of the bird’s body was male; every cell on the left side of the bird’s body was female.
Anatomically, the bird had a testicle on its right side and an ovary on its left. Chemically, the bird’s
blood contained a mix of female hormones manufactured by the ovary and male hormones from the
testicle. Therefore, Sax reasons, if the hormonal theory were correct, we shouldn’t see big differences
between the left and right sides of the bird’s brain.
Let’s make this reasoning clearer. In the human male and female stroke victims we were able to
identify structural and functional differences between the brain of the men and the brain of women. If
such differences are ultimately caused by differing chemical expressions of testosterone versus estrogen,
then this bird’s brain, nourished by blood containing an equal mix of male and female hormones, should
exhibit a structural symmetry, despite the anatomical asymmetry of his male and female hormone-
producing organs. But, on disChapter, the left and right sides of the bird’s brain turned out to be
“dramatically different,” leading the scientists to conclude that the female brain tissue and male brain
tissue differ owing to a different complement of sex chromosomes, regardless of the mix of hormones in
the blood.
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In regard to humans, Sax finds support for this genetic hypothesis in a 2004 study by fourteen
leading neuroscientists from the University of California, University of Michigan, and Stanford (p. 14).
This study found a “dramatically different” expression of proteins derived from the X chromosome and
Y chromosome in human and female brains. In the men, the study found many areas of the brain rich in
proteins coded directly by the Y chromosome, but these proteins were absent from the women’s brain
tissue. The direct inverse was true for the women’s brains, rich in protein material transcribed by the X
chromosome, but absent from the men’s brains. Thus, Sax infers, “[t]hese sex differences are genetically
programmed, not mediated by hormonal differences” (p. 15) [emphasis original]. This doesn’t mean that
hormones do not affect the brain at all, but it does mean that the effect of chromosomes to structure
brain tissue need not be mediated by hormones expressed mostly following puberty. If the differences
derive from genetic transcription, then they are factors at birth.
What Does It Mean?
Now, all of this seems to amount to a compelling, evidence-based case, but what normative
inferences are we to draw? Should we then in practice accept and perhaps even endorse all the
stereotypical clichés about male versus female behaviors? Does this mean that men and women are
entirely determined in a programmatic manner by nature? Sax’s appeal to genetics does seem to be
setting up a critical attack on the cultural construction theory of gender identification. Is Sax a
reactionary who simply opposes the modern ideal of greater equality? He anticipates this opposition by
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making clear that he does not believe the genetic differences identified so far imply that one sort of brain
pattern is better than other: “Differences. Not one better than the other. Not one worse than the other.
Just different” he writes (p. 15). Thus, we need not abandon egalitarianism, but what precisely does that
mean in practical terms, in the structure of educational institutions for example?
Sax goes on to address many of the commonly perceived differences between boys and girls,
including differing behaviors and attitudes regarding risk, aggression, authority at school, sex, drugs,
and discipline. He also discusses the question of how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered
individuals fit into the picture he presents (biological sex difference trumps sexual orientation Sax finds,
i.e., homosexuals and heterosexuals of the same sex exhibit more of the same natural characteristics in
contrast to the opposite sex). Sax then makes normative arguments for how parents and teachers can
make better informed judgments about how to fairly address differences in ways that are not sexist and
do not violate the egalitarian principal of helping to mediate the realization of free agency in all children.
Nevertheless, there are critics who remain unconvinced. In Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds,
Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (2010), Fine insists that Sax and others are in fact doing
nothing but providing cover and pseudo-scientific justifications for oppressive sexist practices. The
normative implication of the social construction theory of identity is that we should recognize a radical
indeterminacy and thus a fundamental freedom from any sort of ‘nature’ in the human. If that is so, and
if one desires to bring about greater equality in the world, then children, prior to being affected (or
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infected) by cultural traditions that seem to perpetuate inequalities, should be subject to the intervention
of a more rational, egalitarian educational ideal, aimed at ensuring the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest
number’ for people in the future. Perhaps I am overstating the implications of the social construction
theory of identity and behavior, but it is important to draw out why Sax raises a legitimate reason for
concern. If the social construction theory is wrong, then the interventions that it leads one to justify may
in fact do a kind of violence to children, imposing behavioral adjustments upon them that are in conflict
with real natures that they have a legitimate need to express.
This is precisely the underlying problem with what Sax calls a nearly overnight, uninformed
movement to diagnose large numbers of boys in the classroom with ADHD, just as psychotropic
medications capable of altering restless behavior began coming on the market. Ironically, these
medications are products made possible by much of the same recent neuroscience on which Sax’s
argument is based. This helps make clear that the challenge we are facing is not simply descriptive or
positive, not simply a matter of being accurate to the facts, such as Sax presents. To be consistent, Sax
would have to hold that such biotechnologies could not fundamentally alter human natures, but he does
seem to be worried about such a possibility. To worry about such a possibility is to grant that we may
indeed have the freedom, through reason over nature—as the social constructionists claim—to radically
alter what human life is. If this is a possibility created by the new biotechnological treatments, then the
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normative questions raised in Sax’s book take on a different light: ought we preserve anything of human
nature as we’ve known it heretofore? This is the question of bioconservatism.
Nature vs. the Spirit of Identity in Political Recognition
This problem is so vexing because of the modern, liberal, normative ideal of free, rational
individual agency, which contradicts our scientific understanding of the natural organism. On the
Hegelian account of social theorists like Robert Pippin, the fact that this normative concept of self has
become a practical ideal at all, is not a given fact of the natural individual organism, but a collective,
political, social, and historical achievement, characteristic of modernity (Pippin, 2008). It is predicated
on the fact that one’s linguistically-articulated, reflective self-conception as a free, rational individual
agent, whether in critical thinking or in acting, is not a natural given, but is in definite part a product of
mutual recognizability as such an agent within a social context of other such agents. This claim can be
formally expressed as a general, non-empirical rule of subjectivity: I cannot recognize myself as the
owner of my actions and thoughts if I am not actually or potentially recognizable by another I as the
owner of my actions and thoughts; when I take up self-articulation in language, self-reflection, self-
positioning, and explicit reasoning, I am taking up ‘perspectives on myself’ mediated by social and
historical conditions for the possibility of being identifiable or recognizable in a certain manner.
How can one know one is free? In the Hegelian account of the realm of political right, the subject
firstly demands to know how he can be certain that he is different from animals and does in fact act on
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his own will as opposed to external necessity. The answer is through the validation of others: I must be
sure that they are aware of me as free and I am aware of them as free and this certainty is gained through
interpersonal recognition that is not strictly empirical, i.e., is based on recognizing how the subject is
more than an object (Pippin, 2008; Rose, 2007, p. 61).
This helps addresses fundamental problems for contemporary cognitive science: the modern ‘mind-
body problem’ or mind-brain dualism, i.e., the fact that we speak to each other in terms of an intelligible
difference between “I” and “my body”; the related question of naturalism, i.e., can human rationality
and freedom be reconciled with the naturalistic, deterministic worldview of science? In contrast to
earlier English reception of Hegel, the more recent scholarship (Brandom, 2009; Krasnoff, 2008;
Pinkard, 1994; Pippin, 1989, 2008, 2011; Westphal, 1990) recognizes compatibility with naturalism,
albeit a liberalized naturalism that recognizes a ‘space of reasons’ for human freedom—including
science itself—to appear historically, even if the world is largely determined by natural causes (De Caro
& Macarthur, 2010).
Implications for Science Representatives in the Public Sphere
This helps explain cultural clashes representatives of science in the public representatives often
encounter. For example, when neuroscientist Sam Harris (2012) claims that new research refutes belief
in free will we can see better, in light of the preceding analysis, why such a charge does not resonate as a
merely technical or scientific matter. If one can only achieve knowledge of one’s freedom of action
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through the validation of others: through awareness that an other recognizes me as a free, then the denial
of this recognition by an other amounts to their being a threat, an enemy. Now, it may be a skeptical
duty in philosophy to constantly question and challenge anew such notions as freedom, but
representatives of science in the public like Harris should give more due to the historical and political
dimension of such questions and not merely the scientific when doing so. I would further argue that in
much of the intellectual clash between ‘new atheist’ figures like Harris (2004) and American Christians,
the object of religious belief, i.e., the idea of God, functions as a proxy in a sublimated struggle for
recognition in the above sense.
The biopolitical debate examined above reflects the long-running divergence between scientific and
humanistic intellectuals in the public sphere, identified by Snow as the “two cultures”; thus Chapter 5
takes up a more theoretical inquiry into recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive science with a
view to how these might help bridge the alienation between these two modes of inquiry. Humanistic
intellectuals tend to fear that science threatens freedom; this problem between the two cultures centers
on the nature of the free, morally autonomous individual actor or subject—the ideal of political
liberalism, including both the classical, conservative, Lockean liberalism, written into the constitution of
the United States, as well as the more recent communitarian modifications of liberalism, as articulated
by Dewey for example.
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CHAPTER 5
SCIENCE AND THE SUBJECT OF MORAL AUTONOMY
Can the modern scientific worldview be reconciled in public with our equally modern moral and
political commitment to the idea that each person is a morally autonomous individual agent? If it cannot,
then we should not be surprised if the public is more inclined to sacrifice the former for the latter.
The biopolitical debate examined in Chapter 4 reflects the long-running divergence between
scientific and humanistic intellectuals in the public sphere, identified by Snow as the “two cultures”;
thus Chapter 5 takes up a more theoretical inquiry into recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive
science with a view to how these might help bridge the alienation between these two modes of inquiry.
Humanistic intellectuals give only a more sophisticated voice to what is essentially the same fear found
among the religious public, that science threatens freedom. This problem between the “two cultures”
centers on the nature of the free, morally autonomous individual actor or subject. This ideal belongs to
political liberalism in various stripes, including the classical, conservative, Lockean natural rights
liberalism, written into the constitution of the United States, as well as the more recent progressivist and
collectivist modifications of liberalism, as articulated by Mill and Dewey. Thus Chapter 5 is an attempt
to help detail a meta-ethical theory for how recent neuroscience and cognitive science can be used to
build bridges with the public ideal.
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The analysis here utilizes again the broad outline of the history of science and the state sketched in
Chapter 3. I analyze Paul M. Churchland’s “Toward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues”
(2010) as a candidate for a descriptive neuroscience of ethics. I draw significant connections between
Churchland's account and phenomenological philosophy influential to recent humanistic inquiry. I also
examine Robert Brandom’s “How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science” (2009), drawing
implications for how cognitive science can be reconciled with the important modern ethical
commitments to individual freedom and humanistic self-understanding.
Paolo Costa raises the problem of neuroscience and agency in his essay “Personal Identity and the
Nature of the Self” (Giordano & Gordijn, 2010, pp. 117-133). Costa takes a cue from Heidegger in
arguing how the threat is not that science will show there is no personal agency in behavior, but rather
that we might come to misinterpret ourselves by not recognizing how selfhood is a precondition for
having a world to investigate at all. I will show how such points can be more rationally unpacked
through a consideration of Brandom’s “inferentialist” account of cognition (2009, pp. 197-224). On this
view both scientific-theoretical and moral-practical activities can be understood as species of normative
inference (reasoning) requiring a world-situated agent.
Churchland claims that his neurobiological account of moral behavior does not reduce human
agency to the effects of neural automata (2010, p. 147). If what we normally call agency in moral action
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can be adequately described and predicted by a neuroscience of ethical behavior (a meta-ethical theory),
could this advance the project to secularize morality?
I will unpack our normative concept of agency by way of Brandom’s argument that cognitive
science in general has not been well enough served by important developments in analytic philosophy,
especially regarding the nature of inference in human thought. Then I will consider Churchland’s
proposed neurobiological account of the moral virtues (p. 144) as one of the most promising candidates
for a descriptive neuroscience of ethics. I find Churchland’s account distinctive for helping to advance
the beneficial reconvening of two long-separated threads in modern thought: Anglophone analytic
philosophy and the so-called ‘continental’ or phenomenological school.
Analytic philosophy has traditionally played the role of the ardent supporter and champion of the
natural ‘hard’ sciences, creating distance in the 20th century between Anglophone philosophy and the
‘fuzzy’ concerns of the humanities. In contrast, the ‘continental’ school of philosophy has played a key
role informing the American humanities in the 20th century through phenomenology, existentialism,
neo-Marxist critical theory, poststructuralist anthropology, the deconstructive approach to literary and
cultural studies, and Nietzschean postmodernism. English professor Mark McGurl of UCLA provides a
prototypical lit-crit take on the issue at hand, informed by this tradition. In a review of the recently
popular ‘mash-up’ novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and the prevalence of zombie themes
generally in the zeitgeist, McGurl gives rich rhetorical expression to a dilemma facing the humanities:
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What should the novel do once consciousness has been physically “explained”? What happens
to the tradition of novelistic realism stemming from Austen when the reality is that we are all a
bunch of tottering skin-bags animated by neural subroutines? (McGurl, 2010)
Though we might be inclined to agree with McGurl as to this dismal vision of the human, we
should not therefore let philosophical thought generally fall into this sort of postmodern pessimism,
becoming soured on science. This postmodern mood has led to a rejection of reason by many smart
people, believing that reason can no longer be bent to distinctly human purposes, including political
reform. My argument in part is intended to show that this is a mistake and a loss for everyone in the
conversation.
Science and Freedom
By agency I refer to our attribution of causality to the subject of such statements as ‘President
Obama signed the bill into law today’ and ‘scientists now know that there is water on Mars’ and ‘Ivy
believes that Margaret did the right thing when she chose to leave her abusive husband’ and ‘Coltrane
produced his finest work during the recording sessions for A Love Supreme’. The notion of the freely
willing individual agent seems indispensible to the modern way of life wherein we emphasize
individuality and attribute responsibility.
This notion has never squared with our equally modern institution of natural science and the
worldview we acquire with it. The contradiction between our liberal, humanistic vocabulary of
autonomous individual agency, on the one hand, and our scientific vocabulary of universal
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determination by natural cause, on the other, constitutes one of the persistently perplexing ironies in
modern life. From the standpoint of natural science, the inducted behavior of any particular object is to
be understood by inference to general causal laws that best explain it in terms of a pattern to which it
belongs. The disciplined practice of this inductive logic in modern science has made possible the
acquisition of extraordinarily successful power at predicting, controlling, and regulating nature by means
of the technological applications, which follow seamlessly from the causal models of science.
It is a significant problem for us that this success leads us to skepticism regarding our liberal,
humanistic vocabulary of the individual as a free will in self-legislating, in guiding their own actions
from the rule of their conscience (Pippin, 2008). We are led to this skepticism because the inductive
logic of science outlined above does not attribute ultimate agency to any particular individual object.
Science attributes ultimate agency to the causal law or rule or pattern of nature inferred as being the
essential force behind the observable behavior of any class of objects to which one in particular happens
to belong.
One solution to the problem, exemplified in modern Kantian ethical philosophy, is to make belief in
the agency of free will and moral responsibility a matter of a sort of rational faith. Despite its troubling
contradiction with a commitment to natural science that Kant shares, he argues that freedom is a
rationally normative concept, required by or intrinsic to the nature of reason itself. We seem to discover
this when we become creatures capable of complex reasoning about our situation, but the question of
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precisely how that becoming is supposed to occur is a problem Kant does not address. The Kantian
ethical position explains the persistence of religion in the modern world. If free will cannot be an object
of empirical science, but is nevertheless a normative concept we find binding on reason in practice, then
one is justified to infer that the idea derives ultimately from a transcendental condition of subjectivity.
This solution is obviously dissatisfying to anyone concerned with promoting science and secular
values in the public sphere like Harris (2004). Such advocates would do better to recognize that they are
crying for the moon so long as scientific approaches to morality do not account for the experience of the
individual conscience as distinct from general principals no matter how seemingly empirical or universal
or rational or useful or scientific. In the following I aim to give an outline of how this problem can be
approached in a way that does justice to at least some central concerns of both religious traditionalists
and secular modernists in the debate.
Ought We Be Scientific? Normativity in Science
In philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1997 introduction to Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the
Philosophy of Mind (originally published 1956) he notes Sellar’s own description of that work as “an
attempt to usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage.” For Rorty and
Brandom, Sellars’ work is a key step in each of their (differing but complimentary) philosophical
projects to ‘usher analytic philosophy of science out of its Kantian and into its Hegelian stage’
(Brandom, 2000, p. 34). What this means in the post-analytic pragmatisms of Rorty and Brandom is a
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turning away from dead-end problems in empiricism and representation toward the logic in language-
use, and the abilities we acquire with language, to express self-awareness, and to alter our conditions.
On this view, knowledge and moral practices, science and social institutions, are understood as based in
the normative logic of social development, not based in representation of or correspondence with a
nonhuman ultimate reality whether that is supposed to refer to Deus or Natura. This is not to say that
something like ‘representation of nature’ does not take place at all in science, but it is to emphasize the
much greater importance of the fact that human beings are uniquely self-creating creatures. Agency is
seen to emerge on this model in being able to grasp, describe, and justify one’s actions and thoughts as
one’s own to others linguistically.
Brandom’s inferentialism is a general theory of intelligence (Brandom, 2000). In the following I
want to give a basic reconstruction of Brandom’s argument that the skill of normative inference is the
genus from which theory and practice, scientific cognition and action-taking are each species. He
provides the most compelling contemporary clarification of this substantive claim originally made by
Hegel (p. 26). On this view, reason as such is a normative, self-legislating power that grows in human
life from or out of nature, yet is thereafter distinct and irreducible to the nature from whence it came.
It is remarkable that Brandom is able to make the case for reviving this humanist view using
analytical tools developed to show the mathematical logic and sense in language. 20th-century
Anglophone philosophy, descending from Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein,
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developed these techniques expressly for the sake of supporting the mathematical and natural sciences,
and for criticizing allegedly obfuscating lack of rigor in other sorts of humanistic philosophical work. In
fact, this school traditionally defined itself against Hegel in particular and in general the various
‘continental’ schools descending from his influence (Glock, 2008, p. 133). Thus Brandom reveals a
remarkable irony in modern philosophy by demonstrating, in the very language of Anglophone technical
philosophers, the persistent relevance of a humanistic view of science that they had explicitly
endeavored to ban permanently from all serious-minded scientific discourse.
A version of Brandom’s argument is given in his case for how analytic philosophy has failed to
share its most important insights with cognitive science, and how this failure can be redeemed
(Brandom, 2009, pp. 197-224). To this end he articulates four clear stages in cognitive development, of
which I cannot claim to do full justice in reconstructing. At best my recount here aims to provide the
rough-and-ready outlines suitable to supporting the case that science is grounded in normative reason.
The first discernable sort of cognition is sense–perception accompanied by simple naming or
labeling, taking the form ‘that is x’. Brandom illustrates using the example that
We might train a parrot reliably to respond differentially to the visible presence of red things by
squawking “That’s red.” [However, this acquired linguistic skill] would not yet be describing
things as red, would not be applying the concept of red to them, because the noise it makes has
no significance for it. It does not know that it follows [to infer] from something’s being red that
it is colored, that it cannot be wholly green, and so on (p. 204).
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Now, many people nowadays, with whom I share a deep and abiding affection for animals, tend to
become defensive at this approach. It can appear arrogant because there is now a norm to infer
dangerous human arrogance from any suggestion that human beings are especially peculiar, unusual, or
distinct compared to the rest of the natural order. (Don’t go thinking you’re special, people!). This is a
good point on which to note that normative inferences are always more or less contestable. This one is
clearly contestable. It’s an intriguing speculation that my cat Ulysses might be privately cogitating a
universal theory or science of the cat world and cat behavior, as yet unexpressed to me. But, lovable as
he is, I find this a highly implausible inference. Brandom discloses that his interest differs from most
approaches taken during the 20th century, which have sought to assimilate cognition to animal
psychology on behavioral sensory-motor-reflex modeling. In contrast, he is interested in investigating
what distinguishes discursive creatures, as subject to distinctively conceptual norms, from their
non-concept-using ancestors and cousins. Products of social interactions (in a strict sense that
distinguishes them from mere features of populations) are not studied by the natural sciences—
though they are not for that reason to be treated as spooky and supernatural” (Brandom, 2000, p.
26).
In order to get from mere perceptual classification, such as the parrot demonstrates in our example,
to the sort of conceptual classification necessary to do science, one must develop skill at drawing
inferential consequences from a description. Yet, in this second stage it still remains plausible to stop at
a behaviorist model, assimilating human inferential skills in science to animal skills. A basic descriptive
classification has the form ‘x means y’, e.g., ‘wolves mean danger’ or ‘mold means germs’ or ‘red
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means stop’ or ‘falling means gravity’. We can see how these require inferential skill at drawing a
regular consequence from a perception. But there is a question at this stage: will the consequent
prescription immediately entail an instinctual, practical action to take? For example: ‘wolf means run’;
‘cold means fly south’; ‘hunger means eat’; ‘green means go’. Or will it entail a conceptual meaning that
appears to stand apart from any obvious, immediate implications for action? For example: ‘the temple
means Athena watches over the city’; ‘a science means control’; ‘a beginning means the end’. Thus we
arrive at the cognitive condition in which the break of reason from nature—whether in the sense of
primary or ‘second’ habitual nature—becomes in principal conceivable, where more knowledge and
more freedom imply each other. In Hegel’s phenomenological account of Kraft und Verstand—“force
and understanding”—the Newtonian systematic theory of forces is described as the greatest
achievement, up to that point in time, of the descriptive inferential cognition that is science (Hegel &
Pinkard, 2012 (projected publication date); Pinkard, 1994, pp. 34-45; Westphal, 1990, pp. 93-120). The
normative establishment of Newtonian physics as the legitimate, authoritative, recognized description of
the universe was not only a scientific achievement. It also provided support to the normative
establishment of greater freedom in legal, civic, and cultural domains. A new normative judgment in
culture appears on the scene along with Newtonian science: if one can conceive the universe to behave
without a divine rule, i.e., according to merely natural, mechanical regularities, then one is justified to
break from other (cultural) practices thought to be given by divine rule. Scientific theoretical
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construction in this way gives coherence and expression to the reality of human experience, which
includes the progressive realization of freedom as self-regulating reason. It is significant that the
superseding of Newtonian physics by relativity theory in our own time, as a matter of desire to represent
new observations that do not cohere with the Newtonian view, does not at all invalidate Hegel’s
phenomenological approach to how the philosophical-normative implications of science exceed
professed ambitions of practitioners simply to represent the laws of nature.
To clarify what was unclear about how human science is built on descriptive inferential skill,
Brandom proceeds to the import of the conditional, i.e., the cognition the logical “if,”, e.g., ‘if p then
what would follow, then what should follow?’. He argues against attempts to reduce the conditional in
logic to a psychological attitude. To do this would be to make “the same mistake as believing that denial
can do the work of negation.” In this way the perennial critique of empirical positivity about rules
(Fukuyama, 2002, pp. 112-115) appears again: don’t mistake the normative conditions of reasoning for
merely subjective or psychological dispositions; a simple psychological denial that behavior y follows
from x, a denial that xày, is not identical to one’s determinately reasoned negation that behavior y does
not in fact follow by any logical necessity from x, that ~(xày). Brandom writes:
Conditionals make possible a new sort of hypothetical thought … Can [the non-human] not just
use concepts to describe things, but also semantically discriminate the contents of those
concepts from the force of applying them, by using them not just in describing but in
conditionals, in which their contents are merely entertained and explored? … Conditionals are
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special because they make inferences explicit—that is, put them into endorsable, judgeable,
assertible, which is to say propositional form (Brandom, 2009, p. 212).
An implication to draw out here is that the ability to distance oneself from, or freely endorse,
conditional inferential norms (theoretical or practical) makes possible what we mean by self-
consciousness in human discourse. To describe an agent as self-conscious is to describe them as capable
of ‘taking-oneself’ to be the holder of certain inferences that they may or may not endorse, may or may
not judge to be the right inference, may or may not act upon (Pippin, 2008). Clearly this capability
requires expression in dialog to count, but we could also say that its genesis, constitution, and
perpetuation are not other than the expression in dialog, i.e., the expression is not a representation of a
‘hidden subject’ but the directly expressed reality.
Wittgenstein discovered the need to contrast a representational with an expressive understanding of
language when he found his earlier “picture theory” of knowledge could not make sense of the
expression of pain. The linguistic utterance “ouch” does not represent, picture, or stand-for an empirical
object that can be studied scientifically. From the standpoint of medical science one might be tempted to
infer that the empirically represented correlate of “ouch” is the stimulation of nerve fibers. But this
would disregard that a creature needs no empirical training in identifying C-fibers to give expression to
the reality of pain-experience (Rorty, 1979, p. 74). Wittgenstein’s investigations of this problem
(Wittgenstein & Anscombe, 2003, pp. §244-351) begin to point linguistic analysis in the more fruitful
direction of expressionism. But for Brandom, Wittgenstein remains a cognitive assimilationist insofar as
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he does not move us beyond a naturalistic stimulus-response model to explain the logic of language. The
value of Wittgensteinian analysis is that it opens the way for better explaining the distinguishing
possibilities for language users, not exclusively as a tool for empirical representation of the world, but
also as the direct—non-representational—expression of self-conscious intelligence and its freer agency
in the world.
The fourth stage of cognition identified by Brandom, beyond simple labeling, descriptive inference,
and conditional inference, is the philosophical practice of logical concept-analysis itself, the practice that
simply attempts to make more explicit the formal logical and the normative inferential conditions, the
syntactic and the semantic conditions, giving intelligible shape to all the previous sorts of cognitions.
This is consonant with Hegel’s concept of philosophy, that despite desires to the contrary it cannot
change the world, or resurrect previous ‘forms of life’ (in Wittgenstein’s phrase), but only understand
them (Hegel & White, 2002, p. 10).
This helps makes clearer the systematic relationship between the acquisition of propositional
knowledge about the world and the capacity for normative self-legislation. From this account we are
entitled to infer that the basic skill of normative inference is the genus from which theory and practice,
scientific cognition and action-taking, are both species.
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Neurobiology and Philosophy of Right
In view of the above account of how we come to acquire and express agency, we now turn to look
at Churchland’s proposal for a neurobiology of the moral virtues (2010). Churchland’s project promises
to provide empirical, scientific support to philosophical accounts of morality, and it appears particularly
compatible with Hegel’s approach to the latter. Churchland shares with Hegel a concept of human
subjects as thoroughly embodied, socially situated, and self-constituted by normative challenges, i.e.,
learning processes, in how to think and how to act vis-à-vis their environment and each other. Such a
concept can help resolve the modern ethical paradox described earlier by enabling us to think of
ourselves as free in the act of negating or affirming norms, i.e., as self-legislators, setting rules from our
own nature, in contrast to the entities ruled only by external laws that we study in the natural sciences.
This move would also seem to provide a further step toward completely secularizing morality, although
that remains unclear.
To Churchland’s credit, he formulates his neurological proposal in explicitly non-reductionist
terms. He urges that “[w]hat we are contemplating here is no imperialistic takeover of the moral by the
neural” (p. 147). In his view humanists and philosophers need not fear the mutual informing of moral
theory and cognitive neurobiology on the assumption that it would threaten to deduce normative
conclusions from purely factual premises. To justify this claim he illustrates by way of analogous
conclusions following from his earlier work in philosophy of science:
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Cognitive neurobiology is also in the process of throwing major illumination on the philosophy
of science—by way of revealing the several forms of neural representation that underlie
scientific cognition, and the several forms of neural activity that underlie learning and
conceptual change … And yet, substantive science itself will still have to be done by scientists,
according to the various methods by which we make scientific progress. An adequate theory of
the brain, plainly, would not constitute a theory of stellar evolution or a theory of the underlying
structure of the periodic table (p. 147).
The inference we are to draw is that no matter how detailed the empirical description of the morally
engaged brain, substantive practice, negotiation, assent and dissent about societal norms will still have to
be done. A theory of the brain could not constitute Hippocrates’ oath to ‘first do no harm’, or the
Christian injunction (as translated in the King James Bible) to ‘not do to thy neighbor what is hateful to
thyself’, or the American celebration of the admonition (attributed to Patrick Henry) to ‘give me liberty
or give me death.’ An empirical science of the brain would not replace the motive, the desire for a
Malcom X in 1965 to publicly express that
We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human
being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we
intend to bring into existence by any means necessary (X, 1992).
What an empirical science of the brain could do, by giving us detailed correlations between subject
moral cognitions and patterns of neural activity, is to help us infer more (and perhaps more interesting)
connections between various sorts of moral cognitions. Such a science would not necessarily threaten to
undermine, but could enrich what we understand about being human through introspection.
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Churchland undertakes to reconstruct moral cognitive phenomena in cognitive neurobiological
terms. This follows on a model developed during earlier work aimed at reconstructing the epistemology
of the natural sciences in neural-network terms. He now aims to “draw out the central theoretical claims,
within the domain of metaethics, to which a neural-network model of cognition commits us”
(Churchland, 2010). This is consonant with Hegel’s general philosophical project in the Phenomenology
of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right to reconstruct and justify the historical appearance of rational-
normative propositions and claims to right on the basis of a more concrete comprehension of their
experiential and social conditions (Hegel & White, 2002, p. viii). Hegel’s project is also meta-
epistemological and meta-ethical in the sense that it aims to draw the theoretical claims, which follow
from situating first-order epistemological and ethical claims in socio-historical context.
Churchland begins with an account of how “to teach or train any neural network to embody a
specific cognitive capacity is gradually to impose a specific function onto its input-output behavior”
(Churchland, 2010). We’re dealing here with the sort of cognition Brandom described earlier in the
parrot who we can train to say “That’s red” (Brandom, 2009, p. 204). The “input” is our flashing a red
thing for the parrot to perceive and the “output” is the activity of the motor or muscle-driving neurons
that should empirically correlate with the parrot’s consistent utterance of the label “red.”
The parrot re-described as a neural network of sensory and muscle-driving neurons “thus acquires
the ability to respond, in various but systematic ways, to a wide variety of potential sensory inputs” on
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Churchland’s account. This ability to respond to external stimuli can also account for some of what
Brandom identifies in his second stage of cognition outlined above, the first he recognizes as genuinely
conceptual, since it requires the ability to draw meaningful and practical inferential consequences: when
Peter cries “wolf” it means ‘something fearsome looms…’ and it means ‘one ought to run for safety’.
Churchland continues to account for various types of moral cognitive phenomena in terms of the
human neural network learning and acquiring “a sophisticated family of perceptual or recognitional
skills” (p. 150). He uses the model of an artificial network trained to discriminate human faces from
non-faces, male faces from female faces, as well as some named individuals. Churchland posits “an
intricately configured matrix of synaptic connections, which … also partition an abstract conceptual
space, at some proprietary neuronal layer of the human brain” (Churchland, 2010, p. 152). This is
precisely where the description becomes questionable in seeming to attribute subject agency to “the
configured matrix of synaptic connections” which are said to do the active partitioning that creates “a
hierarchical set of categories” such as ‘morally significant’ versus ‘morally non-significant’ actions, and
with the significant category ‘morally bad’ and ‘morally praiseworthy’ actions. But Churchland is saved
by his prudent initial disavowal of reductionism, the description can stand as empirically justified
without necessarily attributing the essential agency to the observed neurons instead of the person.
From Brandom’s logical and Hegelian perspective, such skills provide at best a background of
common conditions, structured inferential practices, without which it does not seem possible that the
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idea of individuality and moral autonomy could appear as a variation or difference-from-the norm. This
would require individual distancing, differentiating, creating the ability to freely endorse or not endorse
normative judgments. This is described by Brandom as part of the third cognitive stage of where the
conditional inference is grasped. What if Peter was lying about the wolf? What then? What would it say
about me that I was so gullible and reacted immediately? Might others then infer from my immediate
reflexive action at the “wolf” alarm that I am easily manipulated? What should we infer then about
Peter’s character, if he was lying? Only skill at conditional reasoning and speculative inference can
make possible such thoughts and the individual freedom from immediate, conditioned practical reflex
that such thoughts imply. Further, this shows how a social context, language, normative inference, and
discriminating conditional inference are all necessary ingredients for arriving at self-conscious agency,
at the skill of being able to count oneself as the individual doer of a particular deed in the world or the
individual thinker of a particular thought about the world.
Churchland indicates how his neurobiological model can support this line of reasoning. In terms of
this framework he defines that
[A situation is] morally ambiguous [when] it is problematic by reason of its tendency [its pattern
of external stimuli to the sensory neurons] to activate more than one moral prototype [more than
one possible motor neuron response], prototypes that invite two incompatible or mutually
exclusive subsequent courses of action (Churchland, p. 155).
In Hegel’s historical analysis of the emergence of the concept of right, he describes how
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Among the Greeks, the ethical was in the form of [universal] ethos more determinately than is
possible in modern times, because [individual] reflection was not as developed in the Greeks as
it is in us; the ancients knew nothing of conscience. They acted on the basis of ethos; they were
thus ethical without being moral (Hegel & White, p. 126).
What both of these statements point to is that the distinctly modern sense of the individual
conscience emerges in the difference between equally reasonable but incompatible traditional or
practical inferences. Modern self-hood is contradictory.
Some technical clarification of terminological differences may be required here. Whereas
Churchland seems to use the term “moral” more generally (to describe any moral or ethical behavior),
Hegel uses the term “ethical” as the more general description, and “moral” to identify the particularly
modern species of ethical genus that invokes rights of individual conscience in distinction from the
universal or common ethos.
Terminological issues need not obscure what is clearly a great deal of agreement. The two accounts
dovetail to support the substantive point that it is the event of “incompatible or mutually exclusive
subsequent courses of action” (Churchland, p. 156), an increasingly ubiquitous experience in modern
life following socio-economic globalization, which results in both painful social alienation but also the
emergence of the individual conscience with its claims to autonomy.
Individual vs. Community
This preceding explains why Churchland positions his neurobiological proposal in respect of but in
contrast to contemporary virtue ethicist criticisms of liberal modernity and their arguments for
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communitarian solutions. Churchland again echoes Hegel’s position when he says of Alistair MacIntyre
(2007) that “he hankers after the lost innocence of pre-Enlightenment human communities, which were
much more tightly knit by a close fabric of shared social practices” (Churchland, p. 166).
It is often mistakenly assumed in Anglophone intellectual circles that Hegel is one such Romantic
‘hankering after the lost innocence of pre-Enlightenment community.’ A notable case is Karl Popper’s
mistaken view that Hegel’s political philosophy justified (or even could justify) Nazism in Germany
(Popper, 1945; Stewart, 1996). The preceding argument should show it is precisely the opposite; Hegel
was arguably the first to recognize the complexity of the problems created by conflicting commitments
in modern life between science and freedom; his sensitivity to this conflict between modern
commitments just makes him easy to misread.
If one recognizes how concrete normative conditions are required before individual freedom can be
realized, one may appear a postmodernist/anti-Enlightenment thinker through increased sensitivity to
tradition. But such increased sensitivity to historical context and tradition is not ‘merely sentimental,’ it
is grounded in a rational judgment—following logically from both Churchland’s and Hegel’s meta-
ethical theories (Pippin, 2008). What Churchland and Hegel do share with MacIntyre is a rejection of the
concept of man we inherit from the British Enlightenment. In Churchland’s words:
Homo economicus … a hedonic calculator almost completely free of any interest in or resources
for evaluating the very desires that drive his calculations (Churchland, p. 167).
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Following this model described by Churchland, Hegel in 1817 finds a correlation with the fact that
“in England, six-year-olds clean narrow chimneys … in industrial cities, in England and elsewhere,
quite small children must work” (Hegel & White, pp. §175, note 105). English philosopher Herbert
Spencer’s application of the principal of the survival of the fittest to human social thought was to follow
just a few decades after Hegel’s observation. To Hegel’s assertion then that “in such cases the state has
the duty of insisting that the children be educated,” one still today does not find many well-developed
rational inferences as to what that could mean. We shouldn’t be surprised then when it is revealed that
contemporary beloved icons of industrial science and technology such as Apple and Steve Jobs are still
producing our gadgets at the cost of inhuman factory conditions, situations bad enough to motivate
suicide, and managerially enforced pledges from workers to stop killing themselves (Moore, 2012).
Yet despite this significant problem with modernity Hegel and Churchland do not turn against it but
search for solutions within it. The problem with the increasingly common communitarian sentiments,
among disenchanted liberals who turn to radical collectivism or postmodernist pessimism, and among
frustrated conservatives who turn to radical religious fundamentalism, is that they threaten to throw the
baby out with the bathwater. That is, they threaten to sacrifice the fragile ideal of individual self-
determination by sacrificing the modern culture that also makes it possible.
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It would not be inaccurate to say that Hegel’s seemingly obscure but central concept of “spirit” just
refers to the modern form of life in which the individual is universally respected. Protection of
individual freedom of conscience is more important than the findings of science.
A “phenomenology of spirit” is then a philosophically justifying account of how civilization has
appeared historically and collectively arrived through trial-and-error at this modern ethical
determination; and a philosophy of right is then needed to provide the understanding necessary for
adequate appreciation, preservation, and support of that ideal in a modern society.
I hope to have made clearer how scientific reductionist approaches no less than religious
fundamentalist approaches are equally unacceptable to the modern ethical question of human agency.
The former would submerge the individual under the notion of universal sensory-motor complexes
subservient to the rules of exclusively natural needs, whereas the latter would return the individual to
subordination under the notion of universal metaphysical rules.
Thus modern individual freedom can be threatened by both science and religion. Churchland’s
project for a neurobiology of the moral virtues provides a promising direction for scientific and
humanistic voices to find common ethical ground. Among proponents of science on ethical matters in
the public sphere, including Dawkins and Harris, Churchland’s more nuanced appreciation for modern
ethical problems is admirable for its rarity in recognizing that empirical science is truncated without
philosophical insight and reason.
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Chapters 1 to 5 have been intended as a contribution to the scholarly discourse within PUS. These
chapters help identify the parameters of appropriate general or liberal science learning that the public
needs today. They are aimed at science teachers, education policy makers, communicators, historians,
sociologists, and philosophers of science. Thus, in Chapter 6, I outline a proposal, in the critical light of
the preceding investigations, for a non-specialized, liberal science education for non-majoring students
and adult citizens. This follows from Kuhn’s view that the historicism of history and philosophy of
science is not a necessary part of traditional, pre-professional science education or training for
specialized sciences; but it is a necessary part of general or liberal science education, needed for critical
appreciation of science by citizens. It is especially important to prioritize and develop liberal science
educational programs for non-majoring students and adult citizens, as they will be among various parties
to increasingly complex, science-related public debates in the 21st century. A curriculum for the public
must be broad enough to address various communities within the United States. Therefore the outline in
Chapter 6 emphasizes science as a method and the conclusions of historical and contemporary science
not as dogmas but as conclusions standing for free minds to test. Final judgments of absolute truth are
suspended, so that learners can appreciate how scientific theories can be freely entertained, considered,
examined, non-coercively, by free minds.
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CHAPTER 6
SCIENCE FOR THE PUBLIC: OUTLINE FOR A CURRICULUM
The term liberal as used here in reference to the development of a liberal science curriculum, does
not refer to the currently popular usage in American media to refer to left-wing politics as opposed to
right-wing politics. Rather, it refers to the traditional meaning from which the notion of a liberal arts
curriculum derives, which is related to the classical liberal political tradition in the West. In the United
States, today’s right-leaning libertarian conservative and left-leaning liberal progressive sensibilities are
both offshoots of this classical liberal tradition; despite superficial appearances, each basically adhere to
the principle of individual right as outlined in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
This concealment of similarity behind differences is clearer to European observers, going back to Alexis
de Tocqueville. For such observers, the alternatives of aristocratic traditionalism and radical socialism, a
communitarian right and a collectivist left respectively, give much clearer definition to liberal in
contrast. In the Western tradition preceding the United States, the word derives from the Latin liber,
meaning “free”: Thus, a liberal education, as the term is applied traditionally to liberal arts curricula,
means a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free individual human being.
The purpose of the kind of curriculum outlined here is to give non-majoring students, or adult
citizens in a continuing-education situation, enough of the criteria and vocabulary, i.e., general literacy,
needed to (1) enrich their own intellectual appreciation of science through enlarged interpretive ability,
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and (2) be equipped as a citizen to make reasonably knowledgeable inferences from publicly
disseminated information and from expert judgments about science and technology issues.
This will require sensitivity to those intersections where scientific claims seem to conflict with
traditional beliefs. So for example, Darwinism should be introduced to audiences as an intellectual
achievement of the human mind within the parameters of scientific explanation, showing how it works
by adhering to the rule of methodological naturalism, i.e., being self-limited to natural or physical
mechanisms for explaining empirical phenomena. Creativity in various domains requires such
limitations or parameters, and methodological naturalism functions as such in science. This provides an
excellent lesson in how to distinguish (a) the parameter of methodological naturalism from (b)
philosophical or metaphysical naturalism, a belief about absolute reality that remains open to
philosophical question.
Audience
The curriculum outline is drawn mainly with the informal education of a general audience of high
school age or older in mind. An appropriate context for the units would be a series of free or low-cost
public seminars, or alternately a single, longer public seminar in which each unit is edited to fit within
the allotted time.
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Rationale
The rationale for this kind of education is akin to the rationale for teaching art appreciation. While
it is true that anyone can form an immediate aesthetic judgment or private opinion of a work of art, it is
not true that anyone can in the same manner access the public reasons or criteria that enable experts in
the field to engage in critical appreciation, discussion, and interpretation of a work, weighing its merits
in comparison with other, similar works. Experts do this by considering historical background, shared
disciplinary criteria, methods and techniques, as well as the particular situation or context from which an
individual work was produced. The goal of a short-term, informal education program in art appreciation
for the layperson cannot be the depth of knowledge that experts acquire over the greater parts of their
lifetimes. The modest goal is to give the layperson enough of the criteria and vocabulary, i.e., general
literacy, needed to (1) enrich their own aesthetic and intellectual appreciation of a work through
enlarged interpretive ability, and (2) make sense of publicly disseminated information and of expert
judgments about a work.
Now clearly this analogy breaks down when we consider the weightier issues at stake in the
formation of lay public judgments about science and technology. An informal education curriculum
aimed at enabling critical appreciation of science for citizens must take into account the most pressing
issues of the day and their possible consequences. Thus this curriculum outline conjoins the teaching of
core concepts in scientific inquiry with the discussion of contemporary issues like environmental risks,
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the relationship between science and religion, and the increasing commercialization of science. The
latter is of particular concern in regard to biotechnology. A trend toward private, industrial funding and
patenting of biotechnological knowledge calls perhaps more clearly than any other issue for wider and
more informed public deliberation, judgment, and participation in deciding policies for governing the
direction of scientific research and technological development (Brown, 2001, p. xi).
Nevertheless, to plant a germ capable of bearing life-long interest for the non-specialist in science,
the educational experience should go beyond emphasis upon pertinent social issues, dangers, or utilities
of science. Thus the curriculum outlined should aim to exhibit for non-specialists the meaning behind
Werner Heisenberg’s statement that “in the exact sciences, no less than in the arts, beauty is the most
important source of illumination and clarity” (Barr, 2006, p. 64). That is to say, such curricula should
show adult learners how understanding science can be a rewarding intellectual achievement in itself,
specifically in regard to the grasp of theories elegantly honed to fit the observable phenomena they seek
to explain. It can be argued that the great theoretical achievements in science contribute to and constitute
part of the cultural heritage we cherish in the humanities.
The style may thus be described as humanistic science education, in contrast to the traditional
format of high school general science education in the 20th century that had been geared to preparing
students for eventual specialized training in the scientific world. While this curriculum outline does, like
the traditional approach, appeal to canonical science, the central emphasis is on personal and social
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context and relevance. Thus, while a unit may introduce science concepts, the teacher’s goal is to ensure
the material is connected to the particular, individual audience of participants. The affective outcome of
learning is important, i.e., how the participants feel about science, how it impacts their lives, and what
they can do to solve science-related social issues. The cognitive outcome sought is not that of specialist
depth but of generalist familiarity with a broad area. The humanistic approach takes heed of the
principle finding of hermeneutic phenomenology: all understanding requires conceptual criteria and
skills for interpreting phenomena. In this case the phenomena is that of science as it is encountered in
our public life. The cognitive outcome that should be sought is a generalist competency to discuss and
critically inquire further about public science issues.
Overall Goal
Each member of the audience should walk away with an enriched ability to situate, interpret, and
appreciate the science they encounter in public life. The goal of a short-term, informal education
program in science appreciation for the layperson cannot be the depth of knowledge that experts acquire
over the greater parts of their lifetimes. Nevertheless, a realistic goal is to give the layperson enough of
the criteria and vocabulary, i.e., general literacy, needed to (1) enrich their own intellectual appreciation
of science through enlarged interpretive ability, and (2) be equipped as a citizen to make reasonably
knowledgeable inferences from publicly disseminated information and from expert judgments about
science and technology issues, especially when faced with differing expert judgments.
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1st Unit: What is Science?
Objective: Know the basic outline of science history. Know the basic criteria commonly used to
demarcate scientific from pseudoscientific claims. Materials: Presentation slides with illustrations on the
history of science.
This unit opens with questioning as a way to arouse genuine intellectual curiosity about science. To
that end we need to challenge ordinary assumptions. We are all likely to be already in possession of the
vague intuition that astrology is not a real science while astronomy is, but why precisely is this taken to
be so? What makes science special? Can proper science always be clearly distinguished from pseudo-
science? Were pre-modern people irrational? Brief historical lesson on the difference between ancient
and modern ideas of science, i.e., looking at Aristotle’s idea of physics and Ptolemaic earth-centered
astronomy in comparison with the modern theories of Newton, Einstein, and Darwin on the other hand.
This will require sensitivity to those intersections where scientific claims seem to conflict with
traditional beliefs. So for example, Darwinism is introduced to audiences as one of the great intellectual
achievements by the human mind in the realm of scientific explanation; it is shown how it works by
adhering to the rule of methodological naturalism, i.e., being self-limited to natural or physical
mechanisms for explaining empirical phenomena. Creativity in various domains requires such
limitations or parameters, and methodological naturalism functions as such in science. This provides an
excellent lesson in how to distinguish (a) the parameter of methodological naturalism from (b)
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philosophical or metaphysical naturalism, a belief about absolute reality that remains open to
philosophical question. We’ll consider the logical positivist criterion of empirical verifiability for
knowledge claims; Popper’s alternative hypothetico-deductive model and criterion of falsifiability;
following Kuhn we’ll look at some historical case studies in science, like Pasteur’s development of germ
theory, which show evidence against adherence to the falsification criterion in cases of good science. So
even natural science can be more complicated than we ordinarily assume after deeper consideration, but
what about social science? Can anthropology, psychology, or economics be regarded as legitimate
sciences if they do not appear to be governed by laws like the natural phenomena of classical
(Newtonian) physics? Having aroused the spirit of intellectual inquiry, the next unit brings science down
to earth.
2nd Unit: Scientific Methods
Objective: Experience hands-on science. Understand scientific methods through engaging, hands-
on activities that provide direct, memorable experiences with physical, earth, chemistry, and life science
materials. Materials: Activity 1: electromagnet, nails, magnetic wire, batteries, sandpaper, iron filings,
plates; Activity 2: weather vane, farmer’s almanac, slides for weather forecast, weather map; Activity 3:
microscopes, elodea specimens; Activity 4: cleaning liquids, vinegar, salt, tarnished copper pennies.
This unit is intended to remind those for whom science often signifies a remote, abstract discipline,
removed from ordinary concerns, of its embodied basis in material experience. We look at the empirical
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approach to knowledge. Using direct observation to obtain knowledge. Is everyday, direct observation of
individuals or objects of interest the same as scientific observation? No. Empirical research in science is
motivated by a question, hunch, or theory (inference, hypothesis) and then entails planning by
researchers of what, who, how, and when to observe against the hypothesis. We will use hands-on
activities common from high-school level science.
Activity 1: Physical science: Electromagnetism: Hands-on experimentation, observation, and
description of characteristics of electromagnets. Involves assembling, disassembling, and making
changes to a working electromagnet. Materials include nails, magnetic wire, batteries, sandpaper, bags
of iron filings, and plates on which to work.
Activity 2: Earth science: Weather forecasting: Traces history of human weather forecasting from
ancient observation, experimentation, and prediction using the simple weathervane, to the Farmers’
Almanac, to modern meteorology and computer simulations. Activity includes interpretation of a
modern weather map. Materials include visual slides for presentation.
Activity 3: Life science: Observe live elodea plant specimen under the microscope. Examine the
cell wall and the chloroplast. Learn about differences between plant cells and animal cells.
Activity 4: Chemistry: Experiment using a variety of liquids to attempt removal of tarnish from old
copper pennies, discovering in the process that vinegar and salt will dissolve the tarnish. What explains
this effect? Learn established theories about three types of chemical reaction, which explain what we
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have observed. But how precisely did chemistry arrive at these laws of chemical reaction? What is a
scientific law? This question leads us to Unit 3 on scientific explanation.
3rd Unit: Scientific Reasoning
Objective: Critically differentiate empirical observation claims from reasoning about what was
observed. Understand the central role of mathematics in modern scientific theories. Understand how
theories acquire their status in science. Materials: Presentation slides with illustrations to assist in
showing the calculus of acceleration as developed in the work of Newton and Leibniz.
When C.P. Snow criticized literary culture in his famous essay on the “two cultures” of the sciences
and the humanities (Gregory & Miller, 1998, pp. 46-51), Michael Yudkin responded in defense that “to
read Dickens, or hear Mozart, or to see a Titian can be in itself a rewarding activity, but to find out what
is meant by acceleration is to gain a piece of factual information which in itself has no value” (Leavis &
Yudkin, 1962, p. 35). This module shows how such statements miss something about science as an
intellectual and cultural activity valuable in itself.
Using precisely the example cited by Yudkin, this module looks at the scientific conception of
“acceleration” as hard won in the work of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Using a visual model,
we’ll consider the distinction between (a) measure of velocity and (b) measure of changes in velocity;
the role of mathematics in modern physics; the development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz to
measure changes; understand “force” inferred to causally explain the phenomena; consider Newton’s
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reasoning process when addressing the normative question whether his explanatory laws should be said
to infer, posit, or describe unobservable causal forces (metaphysical realism about theoretical entities)
behind our empirical phenomena of measured changes in velocity, or whether we should say that our
explanatory laws are limited to empirical adequacy for us (pragmatism), i.e., only requiring that they
adequately describe and predict the empirical regularities we humans do in fact observe on each specific
occasion. These are vital concepts not only for specialists in philosophy of science; they can help elevate
the level of public discourse, humbling all parties, when cultural conflicts about science, religion, and
reason arise.
We will also look at the tradition of thought experiments in science from Aristotle to Galileo to
Einstein, including Einstein’s “moving train” thought experiment, essential to the development of his
theory of space-time relativity. This module is thus intended to show, contrary to Yudkin, how scientific
understanding can indeed yield intellectual delight and value in itself.
4th Unit: Social Science
Objective: Understand the differences between natural and social sciences, including
methodological issues. Know essential concepts of statistics, including different averages, distribution,
deviation, correlation (versus causation), and inferential statistics like margin-of-error that appear often
in polls claiming to represent public opinion. Materials: Presentation slides on social sciences,
presentation slides on concepts in statistics.
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Examination of the growth and development of social sciences such as sociology, anthropology,
psychoanalysis, psychology, political science, and economics from the Enlightenment to the present.
Innovators devised these fields to provide new, scientific ways to gain insight into age-old philosophical
and religious questions, such as, What is the nature of the ‘self’ or the ‘soul’? What binds human beings
to one another? What is free will? What are the limits of social control, behavioral engineering, and the
possible reach of techniques for adjustment and manipulation?
Are social sciences sciences in the same sense as what we have been studying in the last two units?
Can anthropology, psychology, or economics be regarded as legitimate sciences if they do not appear to
be governed by laws like the natural phenomena of classical (Newtonian) physics? The question whether
they are genuine instances of science turns on their methods in comparison with the methods of physical
sciences. If the object of social science is humankind, can the same methods we’ve been covering in
units 3 and 4 apply? Is the human being a thing in the same sense as the things studied by physics? In
this unit we compare a variety of factors in science and how they differ between physical and social
science: (1) experiment; (2) generalization; (3) complexity of phenomena; (4) prediction; (5) objectivity;
(6) individualism versus holism; (7) interpretation.
This unit will also address knowledge of elementary statistics. Social statistics are encountered with
increasing frequency in our information-saturated environment. It is thus critical to know how to
interpret statistical claims. Basic concepts will be covered including the descriptive statistics of mean,
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median, mode, bell curve distribution, and standard deviation, plus key concepts of correlation (versus
causation), and inferential statistics like “margin of error” which appear frequently in political polls
claiming to represent public opinion.
5th Unit: Science, Technology, and Risk
Objective: Understand the need and elements for improved communication in science and public
risk assessment in light of recent case studies. Materials: Presentation slides and video showing
historical media coverage of Cumbrian nuclear-contamination incident. Presentation slides with
illustrations on emerging biotech innovations.
This unit looks at public risk and risk perception issues. Do we normally understand “risk” in the
statistical sense of professional risk assessors? Sociologist Brian Wynne argues that it is problematic for
science risk assessors to expect the public to understand the mathematics of risk. It is a complex,
technical matter, properly the job of experts. Citizens must nevertheless make evaluations of risk.
Wynne argues the public must do this on the grounds of trust that one can reasonably place in the
authorities making the risk assessments. How might we rationally judge the trustworthiness of the
institutions and people making the risk assessment? Is there a difference between trust levels for science
in general (which surveys show remains high) and trust levels when we are confronted with specific,
local risks potentially affecting us directly?
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We'll look at Wynne's classic case study, in which he analyzed the experience of the Cumbrian
sheep-farming community in the UK with expert technical advice following the Chernobyl nuclear
reactor accident of May 1986. The incident led to caesium isotope fallout on upland Cumbrian pastures,
which found its way quickly into the wool and flesh of grazing sheep, making them unfit for human
consumption. Early scientific advice suggested the long-term risks from this fallout were low and would
disappear in a matter of weeks. But in practice it persisted for months and in some cases years. Local
conditions were such that fallout predictions based on laboratory experiments did not apply. It took time
for scientists to work out what was going on and make a more accurate assessment (that the risk was
long term and persistent), and they also did not make use of local expertise, which might have led either
to the answer more quickly, or to formulating more useful advice about processing livestock tailored to
local circumstances. The incident offers a general lesson for science and public communication. It brings
to light the need for mutual accommodation between the culture of increasingly specialized scientific
institutions and publics potentially affected by risks.
An area likely to see rising need for public attention is biotechnology. A trend toward private,
industrial funding and patenting of biotechnological knowledge calls perhaps more clearly than any
other issue for wider and more informed public deliberation, judgment, and participation in deciding
policies for governing the direction of scientific research and technological development (Brown, 2001,
p. xi). But the issues that arise when we consider biotechnology show us the limits of science. For
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example, it is factually informative to be told that a scientist in the United States claims to have cloned
or biotechnologically enhanced an organism. We will be provided with knowledge if we are told how
cloning or a bio-enhancement is done, and how soon we may expect applications to arrive for humans.
But in order to evaluate the act of cloning or bio-enhancement as such we need more than factual
information or even knowledge. Science itself cannot help us on this question. Science can tell us how it
works. What can tell us whether we should be happy or sad about this? What can tell us if there are
policies that need to be developed to control such a process? What can tell us if this is progress or
regress? To begin to think at all about such questions, we would have to be referred to things like the
bodies of historical, humanistic knowledge we call religion, moral philosophy, political history,
sociology, etc. (Postman, 1999, p. 95). Knowledge cannot judge itself. Recognizing that knowledge
must be judged by other knowledge may point us to a meaningful distinction to be drawn between
knowledge and wisdom.
6th Unit: Science and Religion in Society
Objective: Understand how the historical relationship between science and religious tradition is
more complex than partisans make it out to be. Know a variety of ethical approaches available for
handling conflicts between science and religious tradition when issues arise. Materials: Presentation
slides with historical illustrations.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 105
The lessons of the last unit should help to show why the relationship between science and religion
is more complex than the partisan voices in recent public clashes have tended to represent it. This unit
needs to investigate historical details about the relationship between science and religious tradition; how
our modern, secular, liberal political order—in which science has grown and flourished—has its
historical roots in religious beliefs regarding individual freedom of conscience; how extra-scientific,
religious belief in a universe ordered by “reason” motivated figures indispensible to the historical
development of science like Newton. If the latter notion is no longer tenable within science, it
nevertheless remains important for the public understanding of science as significantly indebted to
religion.
THE POLITICIZING OF SCIENCE 106
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