The Role of Social Formations in the Growth of Knowledge
Friday 26 July 2024
The trajectory of the growth of knowledge that I have traced over the last several newsletters (nos. 291, 295, 296, 297, and 298, et al.), covering epistemic enclaves, the assembly of floating enclaves into larger epistemic structures, the resulting reticulate structure of knowledge, both synchronically and diachronically, and the infinitistic telos of knowledge, is simultaneously an epistemology, a philosophy of science, and a philosophy of history. Part of this conception of the infinitistic telos of knowledge I have formed in conscious opposition to claims that science is reaching the limits of human knowledge, or that it must eventually — and sooner rather than later — reach the limits of human knowledge. There are many ways to understand this and related claims. We can understand the exhaustion of human knowledge to be claims such as:
- Everything in the universe is, or will soon be, known.
- Everything that can be known about the universe is, or will soon be, known; however, there may be much more about the universe that simply cannot be known, or cannot be known through the methods of science.
- Everything that human beings want to know (i.e., everything worth knowing) is known or will soon be known.
- The bounds of human knowledge are set by extrinsic limits
- The bounds of human knowledge are set by intrinsic limits
- The bounds of human knowledge are set by both intrinsic and extrinsic limits
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. That science was close to being exhausted was memorably formulated at the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a spurious quote often attributed to Lord Kelvin such that, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Even though Lord Kelvin never said this (you can read the paper from which the quote is said to be taken, “Nineteenth century clouds over the dynamical theory of heat and light,” and satisfy yourself it’s not in there), there were others who said similar things, so that the idea did have some currency at the time. For example, there is a quote accurately attributed to Albert Michelson (of Michelson-Morley experiment fame) such that, “… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. ” The reason that quotes like this circulate is because they are amusing in hindsight, but our foresight today is no more penetrating than Lord Kelvin or Albert Michelson more than a century ago, and much that is said today will be similarly used against us as evidence of our spectacular self-deception.
The argument that has perhaps influenced me the most is Nicolas Rescher’s Scientific Progress: A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science. Since Rescher’s work focuses on the economics of research, this is implicitly a focus on the extrinsic limits of human knowledge, but there are also those who implicitly pursue the intrinsic limitation line of argument. Scientific and philosophical reformulations (i.e., secularizations) of the idea of original sin attribute some fatal moral flaw in the human character, or some inescapable cognitive flaw in human reasoning that will, at some point, prevent us from continuing the pursuit of knowledge. Further distinctions can be made for a more fine-grained account of epistemic failure. Those who focus on the incompleteness of science as a way of knowing represent one approach to intrinsic limits to human knowledge, while those who focus of the inadequacy of the human intellect in terms of its ability to know the world, represent another approach to intrinsic limits to human knowledge.
I don’t deny that there are a great many limitations in our path, both intrinsic and extrinsic. I agree with much of Rescher’s argument about science delivering diminishing returns on investment, and the past several decades have served up copious research on cognitive biases and evolutionary psychology that show us in excruciating detail the short-comings of human reason. The brain is not a reasoning machine, but rather a survival machine, and it will set aside rationality at any opportunity to survive and to reproduce. Fair enough. The more clearly and unambiguously we state this, the better we know what we need to do to continue to the growth of knowledge. Science today, science-as-we-know-it, for all its shortcomings, did manage to emerge from the superstition and irrationality that preceded it, and the more self-conscious and self-critical we become in the exercise of scientific reason, the better we get at it. Yes, the failures are embarrassing, but are they any more embarrassing than the failures of our forebears in knowledge?
I often mention the difference a science of science would make in the ongoing growth of knowledge. I’ve started collecting some of these observations about the science of science in one place, hopefully to see if any taxonomy naturally emerges from this effort. But for the time being we must pursue science without a science of science — there is nothing even like this on the horizon, and I could even argue that, as science as progressed, we have regressed from the idea of a science of science, which was at least entertained as an ideal in the nineteenth century. Short of reviving this ideal, one line of development to pursue would be a more comprehensive account of the limitations under which we labor as we do science today, to better define our present position, and, again, with the hope that a taxonomy emerges that will give us a schematic overview, which will in turn allow us to identify limitations that we hadn’t even previously recognized. To this end, I could work on my unsystematic list above and attempt to make it more adequate, more explicit, more detailed.
Could a sufficiently detailed and systematic account of human epistemic limitations lead to a science of science? Perhaps. Certainly it could contribute to the overcoming of epistemic limitations, and the more we overcome these limitations, the closer to get to ideal knowledge. An exhaustive account of human epistemic limitations would constitute a kind of via negativa to the growth of knowledge; if we could then address these limitations as systematically as we recognize them, we would be well on our way to transcending them. But to pursue such a project would require the right conditions, i.e., it would require a social context friendly to such an effort. Do we have such a social context at present? I don’t think so.
We have a social context that is somewhat, though not entirely, conducive to the practice of science, but not to the practice, or rather the development of, a science of science. Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
“Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product of Europe in the last four centuries. No other place and time has supported the very special communities from which scientific productivity comes.”
In other words, it is a rare circumstance in human history when social conditions are conducive to anything more than a rudimentary science, and a critique of scientific reason could not flourish unless all the conditions for scientific knowledge to flourish obtain plus whatever additional conditions are necessary for science not only be the practiced, but also to be subjected to the most exacting criticism also obtain.
One of the ways in which human beings might seek to realize the full potential of knowledge would be to usher in a scientific civilization, which is an idea to which I have devoted a not inconsiderable amount of thought, occasionally glimpsed in these newsletters. Given a scientific civilization, the familiar institutional structures of civilization would be like guideposts, with the entirety of recorded human history as a model for what is yet to come. But a scientific civilization may not necessary be a civilization that would be optimal for the critique of science. What is possible? Our history to date has given us examples of social formations that include hunter-gatherer nomadism, village agriculturalism, city-states, empires, nation-states, and so on. None present themselves as particularly compelling candidates for a social formation capable of sustaining both science and its critique.
In contemporary civilization we have a social formation within which science is possible; in a scientific civilization, we would have a social formation in which civilization has been yoked to science in an essential way. There remains the possibility of a social formation predicated upon or derived from science itself. However, this is ambiguous. In a blog post from 2021, Science as an Institution and as an Ideal, I made a distinction between the ideal of science and scientific institutions. Scientific institutions are as vulnerable to corruption as any other human institution, and scientific institutions taken as the basis of a society does not sound promising because of this. The ideal of science might serve as a central project of a scientific civilization, but it would unlikely be able to stand on its own, or to provide the primary support of social institutions.
Elsewhere I have suggested one the virtues of the about-face that Toynbee makes several volumes into his A Study of History when he abruptly transitions from being focused on civilizations to being focused on civilization only because civilizations are wombs of universal churches that are the next stage of social evolution, is that Toynbee is one of the few who has tried to imagine a post-civilizational institution, which is (for Toynbee) a universal church. The very idea of a post-civilizational institution suggests the possibility that churches are not the only institutions that might grow into that role, and another obvious candidate is that science itself might grow into a post-civilizational institution. Civilizations could be the social formation that incubates science as a social formation that can follow civilization as the dominant and more comprehensive social formation.
At the end of newsletter 295 I ended with the thought of a research program greater than humanity itself, and science that overtakes civilization as a social formation could offer a research program not limited to human participation, and thus could be the institution that could yoke together worlds and planetary systems into a larger framework than could civilization as we know it. The distances of space and time that separate worlds would be an insuperable barrier for the kind of unity and cohesion that characterizes civilization (something I addressed in my recent essay The Coming Coeval Age), but not necessarily an insuperable barrier for science. On the contrary, for science to study the largest phenomena in the universe, a scientific research program would of necessity have to span the distances between worlds and between epochs. Science at the scale of the cosmos would require some organizing social formation, but civilization does not seem to answer to that need.
