The Future Scope of Science
Friday 02 June 2023
I spent a lot of time in the last week trying to pull together my thoughts on civilization in a coherent outline, and I have a pretty good outline of some of the philosophy of science issues that bear upon establishing a novel science. Partly this is because I am planning to go to the ISCSC (International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilization) conference in Warsaw this coming September. My presentation is based on the relationship between big history and the study of civilization. Here is my abstract:
Big History and Civilization:
Shared Problems, Mutual Opportunity
ABSTRACT: Both the study of civilization and the study of history share the aspiration to be sciences in the strict sense, and both have long histories of attempting to achieve this aspiration and failing to do so. We have enjoyed great success in the natural sciences, with recent interdisciplinary natural sciences like astrobiology rapidly taking their place among the established canon of the sciences, of which they are acknowledged to be a legitimate heir. History and civilization share with the other social sciences methodological problems that have limited the rigor of their formulations in comparison to the natural sciences, but history and civilization have the additional burden of being “big picture” conceptions of human activity which must ascend to more abstract concepts, thus distancing them from empirical research. Big history is the non plus ultra of “big picture” sciences, aspiring to a comprehensive history of the universe entire. This raises questions regarding the (proper) scope of history. In traditional historiography, history began with civilization, so that history and civilization coincide. Given this traditional perspective, history and civilization are the greatest (most extensive) undertaking of human beings; if we extend history beyond the scope of civilization, then history is the greatest human undertaking in extent, though civilization might still be identified as the most comprehensive human undertaking. This requires that the study of history and of civilization be “big picture” inquiries. To do justice to these twin inchoate disciplines, it is incumbent upon us to formulate a conceptual framework of sufficient abstractness to capture the big picture concepts of history and civilization, and yet to responsibly tie them to empirical observation so that it is possible to focus on the construction of a reliable knowledge base. It is only with such a reliable knowledge base that it will be possible to scientifically study and understand clashes of civilizations, clashes within civilizations, and stable planetary futures.
As regular readers know, I’ve been thinking about civilization for a dozen years and my thoughts go beyond the immediate context of big history. The problem of civilization has become a central concern to me, if not my sole central concern. Most of the other questions that interest me have some relationship to the problem of civilization. Thus, for example, problems of our spacefaring future are problems that can be cast in the form of the problems of spacefaring civilization, and problems of space ethics are ethical problems for spacefaring civilizations, and so on.
My attempt to clarify my conception of and reasoning about civilization has brought me back repeatedly to questions in the philosophy of science, and in several newsletters I have touched on the problem of the future of science — how it might continue to develop — and the ways in which science could expand its scope in order to study of objects of knowledge that science in its current iteration cannot do.
A perfect example of this dilemma that is not related (directly) to civilization is the problem of studying consciousness. While there are philosophers who deny the reality of consciousness, most today are willing to admit that there is something that is consciousness, and that the attempts to study consciousness scientifically have not been encouraging. The nature of consciousness — which we cannot even define, and so its nature is elusive — is such that it categorically defies the methods of science as we know science today. The direct evidence of consciousness is subjective, and for science to be done evidence needs to be publicly accessible. There has been some limited success in studying indirect evidence of conscious (in particular, I will note the study “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird” by Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, and Paul Rinnert), and, while I expect there to be further improvements and refinements that will allow for research of this kind to be continued, expanded, and extrapolated, at the same time I acknowledge that indirect evidence of consciousness will never be fully satisfactory. For there to be a science of conscious that studies that direct evidence of consciousness (and here I don’t mean self-reporting surveys), science itself must change or be changed. Perhaps we require a conceptual breakthrough. Perhaps unprecedented experimental techniques will be required. Perhaps it will require novel technology. Perhaps all of these together will be necessary to formulate a satisfying science of consciousness.
I’m not saying that any of the above is just around the corner; don’t hold your breath for a science of consciousness to appear. Conceptual breakthroughs cannot be predicted, and even less can they be forced into occurring. It requires a particular individual to experience a particular insight, and then to be able to make that insight explicit in scientific terms. The essential conceptual breakthrough necessary for a satisfying science of consciousness may come tomorrow, or it may come in a thousand years, or it may never happen at all. I imagine that there would be philosophers of science who, if they read the above, would shake their heads and say that that’s not what science is about. Science is about following accepted scientific methods and techniques to the farthest extent that they can be pushed, but not attempting to go any farther.
There is a legitimate philosophical problem here. Quine in his short book Philosophy of Logic (Chapter 6, “Deviant Logics”), introduced the idea of change of logic, change of subject. The quick and nasty version of this argument is there are no alternative logics; if you change logic enough, you don’t get an alternative logic, but some other discipline what may look like logic, but it no longer has logic as its subject matter, but rather some other subject. This reasoning can also be applied to science, so we can say change of science, change of subject. In expanding the scope of science so that it can study objects of knowledge inaccessible to science in its contemporary iteration, we aren’t formulating a new and more comprehensive science, we have, rather, simply ceased to do science and are doing something else. This new discipline may look like science, or may look like something very similar to science, but it won’t be science sensu stricto.
This may sound rather recondite, but it happens all the time. Is Freudian psychodynamic psychiatry and its method of psychoanalysis a part of legitimate psychology, or is it something different? One could evasively answer that psychiatry is a form of therapy, and therefore a technique (or a technology, or even a kind of cognitive engineering), whereas psychology is a science. I suppose one could get a lot of mileage out of this evasion, but I don’t think it’s going to satisfy a philosopher of science. Freud’s methods were sufficiently unorthodox when introduced that independent analytic institutions were established in parallel with existing educational institutions teaching more conventional psychology and therapy. This situation has continued to the present day.
Conventional psychology and psychoanalysis exist side-by-side, just as conventional logic and research into deviant logics exist side-by-side. In some cases, the resemblance between the parallel studies becomes so similar that they merge because it no longer seems necessary to keep the disciplines distinct. The study of second order logic (quantifying over predicates, rather than limiting quantification to individual terms), is on the cusp of this kind of legitimacy. Some logicians will deny outright that second order logic is any kind of logic at all, but the results of research into second order logic have been fruitful to the point that the conventional logical community will make use of it on occasion. One can easily imagine this kind of process going on for centuries, as two parallel disciplines seem to begin to merge, then separate again, then merge a little more, and so on. Sometimes the development points to convergence; other times, development points to divergence.
Science, then, may bifurcate in the future — indeed, it may bifurcate repeatedly as innovative ways are found to expand the scope of science. Some of these innovations will be accepted by mainstream science and its university institutions, and some will not. Perhaps, if the funding is available and the interest is there, the nonconformists will found their own scientific institutions, which, like institutions of psychodynamic psychiatry, will exist in parallel with traditional scientific institutions. (The fact that so many independent psychoanalytic institutions were created in the early years of psychoanalysis testifies to the enormous interest that the psychoanalytic movement generated.) A science capable of studying consciousness directly and integrating this into a larger scientific framework might be sufficiently different from science as we know it today that many would reject it outright, and those who did not reject it would find it a reasonable compromise to create their own institutions of research.
As I wrote above, this example of a science of consciousness is not directly related to the problems of civilization, but it offers a lot of analogies. I have come to the view that studying civilization scientifically will force us to eventually formulate new concepts and that these concepts will be, for want of a better term, what we could call “big picture” concepts. I use this idea of big picture concepts with some regularity, but always with an awareness of the inadequacy of this expression. The special sciences that have been introduced in the past century during the explosive growth of the sciences have been mostly a matter of finer specialization. The study of civilization requires the opposite: some kind of generalization that studies progressively larger phenomena, not progressively smaller phenomena. What should a science of civilization observe? What should it measure? We need concepts that are specific to the problems of civilization in order to even begin controlled observation and scientifically relevant measurement. This need to formulate a distinct class of concepts is analogous to, or perhaps parallel to, the need to formulate a distinct class of concepts to study consciousness scientifically, but I suspect that these two classes of concepts, even if they overlap at some points, will be largely distinct.
Thus the aspirations to formulate a science of civilization and a science of consciousness could lead to the expansion of science in different ways, and that is why I suggested above that science may bifurcate repeatedly in its future development. And if science overall expands in response to these promptings, and in response to other epistemic aspirations as well, and nevertheless retains its unity, eventually science will become so different that it will resemble contemporary science only as much as contemporary science resembles the science known in classical antiquity. That is to say, we can see anticipations of contemporary science in the work of Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and Aristarchus, but the limitations of their time — both in terms of conceptual framework and experimental technology — prevented them from developing the kind of science that Galileo could begin to develop a thousand years later. Analogously, a future greatly expanded science might look back on contemporary science as anticipating the science that was to come, but, because of the limitations of our time — both in terms of conceptual framework and experimental technology — we were not able to begin the development of science that is to come in a thousand years.
The limitations of contemporary scientific method that affect our ability to make a scientific study of civilization also affects our ability to study other “big picture” phenomena, and I can name two specific examples: history and science. In newsletter 233 I discussed the age-old question of whether history is an art or a science. It has been definitively pronounced to be both, and definitively denied to be either. The problem, as I see it — which also explains why the problem has never been satisfactorily resolved — is that history requires big picture concepts, and, without these concepts, history cannot be made truly scientific. In line with what I wrote above, if we do formulate a class of big picture concepts that allows us to transform history into a science, this may change science so significantly that it becomes unrecognizable.
Similarly with science itself. While individual special sciences are scientific by definition, there is no science of science. We have no reliable, iterable method for constituting new sciences, which is why we have not been able to form new sciences to study consciousness or to study civilization. Some new sciences pose no problems. I have often cited the example of astrobiology as a science that rapidly took root and has grown as rapidly; astrobiology works well within the present conceptual framework of science. It represents something of a conceptual breakthrough, but not a breakthrough at the level of, say, relativistic physics or that which would be necessary for a science of consciousness. So there are degrees of the magnitude of a conceptual breakthrough. Not all new sciences require such a breakthrough, but some do, and some new sciences will require a proportionally greater conceptual breakthrough than other new sciences.
Civilization, history, and science are all studies that will require the formulation of a distinct and unique class of big picture concepts that can be made scientifically rigorous. This should be understood as a call to action. There is work to be done; science is far from finished. Nicholas Rescher in his excellent book Scientific Progress: A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science has formulated some ingenious arguments seeking to prove that science must experience deceleration and diminishing returns. While I regard this as a possibility, as should be evident from the above, it is not a necessary outcome. If civilization continues in its development (i.e., if a failure condition does not obtain), science can continue to grow and to develop in unexpected ways that will challenge our conception of science itself. This was already implicit in Karl Popper’s argument for indeterminism on the basis of the unpredictability of scientific research outcomes.
