Engineering Intuition and the Folk Science Thesis
The View from Oregon — 304: Friday 30 August 2024
Sometime in the past few years I heard about a new specialization in science education, called science communications. Science communications focuses on communicating the findings of the latest science to a popular audience. Perhaps I should say, “to a broad audience,” so as not to imply that the primary function of science communications is popularization. Popularization has its place, but it doesn’t have the greatest reputation, and some of its practitioners discredit the genre. I have myself read a great many science popularizations, as it is my way of keeping up on sciences that I don’t follow closely. I have mentioned many of these popular science books in these newsletters, some of which I have praised, and some of which I have damned (and perhaps some of them I have damned with faint praise).
I haven’t taken the trouble to study any science communications curricula, so I have no knowledge of the discipline other than what I read in a few articles, but the idea of science communications intrigues me, and it intrigues me because it is, or it ought to be, closely connected to what I have been discussing over the last several newsletters, and that is the finding of new intuitions to express the findings of recent science. Alternatively, I could say that it is the problem of framing new intuitions to replace intuitions that have been superseded by the growth of knowledge. Science communications could sound like an utterly trivial undertaking, but I think that nothing could be more important than this task. Moreover, it requires extraordinary insight to frame intuitions with a sufficient conceptual naturalness that they can supplant our established intuitions. Very few have the insight necessary to (successfully) undertake this work.
Science communications as I have described it above (in admitted ignorance of what the practitioners of science communications claim what they are doing) is nothing less than the engineering of intuition. At the basal level of intuition, there is probably little that can be done, since our basal intuitions are gifted us by biology and evolutionary psychology. Perhaps we can change the coloring and the implication, but not much more. At the next level up, where intuitions are still relatively fundamental but not necessarily basal, we have a freer hand to construe their meaning. Up another level again, and up again beyond that, we have a freer hand still. In some areas of knowledge where science had expanded itself well beyond basal intuitions, and even beyond fundamental intuitions, new bodies of knowledge have been created almost whole by science, and here the engineering of intuition can have potent effects, getting us to see the world in fundamentally distinct ways depending upon the intuitions we frame and the way we present them.
I often use set theory and the theory of transfinite numbers as an example, and here I will invoke it again, as when Cantor proposed his methods, and others began to adopt and expand them, a vast new terrain of knowledge was opened up. We have some fundamental intuitions about the infinite, among which I would count the distinction between the infinite as a completed totality and the infinite as a never-ending process (effectively, the distinction between Platonistic and constructivistic conceptions of the infinite). These have been with us since at least Aristotle, if not before, and they have been chewed over by philosophers ever since Aristotle. But with the vast expansion of ideas about the infinite that came with set theory, knowledge was being pushed far beyond the bounds of any intuitions inherited from biology, evolutionary psychology, or even the development of science and philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Thus a powerful intuition like one-to-one correspondence as a method of counting, as well as counter-intuitions such as proposed by Brouwer and other constructivists, had a chance to establish themselves on a blank slate of intellection.
The exotic and bizarre constructions of modern science and mathematics have, in this way, taken us far beyond our intuitive comfort zone and forced us to create intuitions of our own to navigate these new regions of thought. It is a relatively easy matter to propose a new intuition — like coining a new term, which probably happens thousands of times a day, but only a few rare instances of new terms make it into popular speech — but difficult to get it to stick. The requirement of conceptual naturalness is exceedingly difficult to define, but here it is crucial. I have no suggestions at this time how to define it or how to harness it, but I think it is within our cognitive capacity to clarify the nature of conceptual naturalness, and doing so would be a great step forward in the engineering of intuition. I suspect, without having yet thought deeply about the matter, that analogy is at the root of conceptual naturalness: what has worked, conceptually speaking, in familiar and established areas of thought, is a model for what will work in other areas of thought, even when these other areas of thought are virgin soil. If we can frame an intuition that is analogous to a fundamental intuition, even though it is intended as a cognitive schematism for an unprecedented region of thought, then that intuition is more likely to be successful than an intuition that is not an analogue of some familiar intuition.
Not only do I think that there is no intellectual task more important than the engineering of intuition, as hopefully accomplished by science communications, I also think that there ought to be a discipline of philosophy communications. Philosophical ideas are often quite distant from familiar conceptions of the world, and philosophers aren’t always the best communicators of their work, so philosophy communications would aim to communicate philosophical theories to a broad public. Again, I don’t call this popularization, though popularization has its place. As I see it, philosophy communications would simply be a wider and more comprehensive practice of science communications, i.e., it would engage in the engineering of intuition for philosophy that we have already seen with the engineering of intuition for science.
The business of science communications and philosophy communications is deeply embedded in the problem of relating systematic bodies of knowledge to each other and to the body (or bodies) of proto-science that preceded them. And as we go back into the past, it becomes increasingly impossible to distinguish philosophy and science. Aristotelian philosophy was medieval science, i.e., the conceptual framework within which the thought of the Middle Ages explored the world and framed its explanations. This framework was of course repeatedly revised, subsequently augmented, and often contested. (Eventually it was contested successfully and superseded, but that is another story.) To connect the worldview of the medieval peasant to the intricate theology of the medieval Scholastics was the science communications of its day, indistinguishable from philosophy communications or theology communications. This function was performed by the clergy, and considerable resources were invested by the church in training this clergy to avoid the many pitfalls of unorthodoxy, inaccuracy, compromise, and all of the accumulated problems that inevitably result from leaving the centers of the great tradition, where such training in carried out, and moving into the vast landscape where the little tradition holds sway.
In recent newsletters I have been discussing the problems of folk science (especially in last week’s newsletter 303). The communication of Scholastic theology to medieval peasants was the folk science challenge of its day. Our folk science problem is analogous to this earlier iteration, but not identical to it. Folk science, like the little tradition, changes over historical time, as indeed does the great tradition, which today is effectively science taught in population centers — our conurbations house the great traditions of our time.
Insofar as contemporary science replaces the folk sciences that precede them (an instance of what I call the replacement thesis, most recently discussed in newsletter 268), this is suggestive of systematic ways of understanding the relationship between folk science and formal science. We can formulate one of these possible relationships as the Folk Science Thesis:
The Folk Science Thesis (FST): Every formal science has a folk science correlate.
It seems clear to me that this is false. In the case of formal sciences that break new ground where our intuitions are sparse on the ground, there may be no folk science to precede formal science. Also, some formal sciences are the result of the repeated branching of science as new specializations spawn. This is not a process of the slow formalization of a folk science into a formal science. Probably there are other examples as well that don’t occur to me at the moment. Another possible way of formulate this relationship would be the complement of the Folk Science Thesis:
Complement of the Folk Science Thesis (FST´): Every folk science has a formal scientific correlate.
While this may not be true in fact at any one time in history, if any folk science were identified without a formal scientific correlate, we could go about formulating the formal scientific correlate. In this way, FST´ would then come to hold, even if it did not previously hold. Thus we could say that FST´ is aspirational, and another way of saying this would be to hold that any fragmentary or informal body of knowledge is subject to formalization as a modern scientific discipline. It seems that neither FST nor FST´ are descriptively true, although a simplified view of the structure of our knowledge might suggest that both are true. And indeed both may be roughly true in the big picture, but with any number of deviations when we focus on the details.
There is an additional problem. We need to engineer our intuition to make our formal sciences palatable to the mind, but there is a sense in which the formation of new intuitions, or even the repurposing of existing intuitions to serve some unprecedented end, is the formation of a new folk science. This gives us an evolutionary way to think about the growth of scientific knowledge. The elaboration of a formal science, and the effort to engineer intuition to make that formal science palatable to the mind, generates a new folk science. This folk science, in turn, becomes the focus of formal scientific research and a new formal science emerges, which in its turn necessitates another effort at engineering intuition, with the knock-on effect of creating another folk science.
Now, this idea of a newly created folk science, alongside our formal scientific efforts that we bless with the name of science, is perhaps an odd way to understand the structure of knowledge, but I think this is defensible. I haven’t yet thought this through in detail, so I will leave it there for the moment and, if further elaborations of this idea come to me, I will revisit this in a future newsletter.
