Practice

A pragmatist statement

Applications are adaptations of pure science for some purpose.

The more applications a scientific truth has, the greater its power. Power is as important as truth.

A powerless truth with no applications should be suspected of being without scientific value.

The truths of pure sciences can be used as applications or apparatus by other pure sciences (e.g. crystallography in biology), and also for non-scientific applications.

Scientific applications of science are pure truths of one field adapted as apparatus (i.e., for a practical and in that sense impure purpose) in a different scientific field.

Thus, any pure science of any power links one group of applications (its own apparatus) with a different group of applications (its uses as apparatus by other sciences).

Practical applications of science are pure scientific truths adapted for some non-scientific purpose, e.g. in industry or medicine.

Engineering applications of science are applications of pure science to fixed and given instrumental purposes: e.g. agronomy, forestry, animal husbandry, or medicine.

Ethical applications of science (including esthetic and political applications) are pure scientific truths adapted for the open-ended and contested purposes which make up much of human life.

(It is uncertain to me whether engineering applications should be thought of as stereotyped practical applications under conditions of ethical consensus -- a subset of ethical applications, perhaps under a fixed power regime -- or whether engineering applications and ethical applications should be thought of as the two species of practical application.)

Application can be a kind of experimentation, and a field of pure science can be driven by another pure science's need for apparatus. Social science can also quite validly be driven by public policy's need for tools, or by a political movement's need for tools, or by more abstract goals such as peace or social justice or prosperity, and often has been so driven.

Ethical applications are not routine, and scientists trying to develop them will continually be faced with additional non-scientific considerations. This uncertainty can only be avoided by fiat stipulations of contested questions. For example, for a long time forestry concerned itself almost entirely with maximizing the timber cut. The stereotyping of goals is done by a power regime.

The part of a scientist's training which teaches him to bracket out open-ended and contested ethical questions when doing his work often makes him ill-suited to the reintroduction of these questions when the truths are to be applied in a contested area.

In even the purest of the human sciences, instituted and socially-embodied ethical principles are  part of the data. When scientifically examined, socially-embodied ethical principles are found to be extremely slippery: erratically applied, inconsistently understood, deceptively stated, and one-sidedly affirmed for self-serving purposes. This is only to a small degree something which can be made right -- it is really in the nature of the essentially-contested ethical beast. As a result, grave real-world practical decisions are usually made upon inadequate and uncertain grounds. The millennia-long attempt to find a way make all decisions rigorously on logically-consistent, factual grounds has been only partially successful and almost certainly will never be completely so. (Indeed, we should probably hope that it never becomes completely so.)

Any attempt at finding applications of science in the greater world will have to deal with the ethical questions somehow. In particular, applications must deal with the ethical consensus already in place (with all its ambiguities), either by altering the consensus, by following it, or by a combination of the two. These adaptations required may be compared to the adaptations required for the application of the scientific truths of one field of science to different conditions holding in some other field of science, but are obviously much more extreme.

Promoting the idea that the ethical questions are undiscussible is the crime of positivism. A rigid standard of truth derived from science can be used to destroy any ethical consensus whatsoever, or to postpone ethical decision-making to infinity. After WWII a conventionalist, legal-technocratic, purportedly ethically-neutral consensus was imposed in the belief that any attempt to discuss goals inevitably lead to civil war and to nihilistic political movements of the Fascist-Communist type. This was the power regime of that time and place.

There are problems with this compromise, especially when it is accepted as an unquestionable truth or used to surreptitiously sneak particular ethical principles in (as was actually, and probably inevitably, done). Proponents of positivist ethical neutrality also ignored the degree to which scientific rigorism and scientific debunking of ethics were among the sources of political / ethical nihilism. (The positivists' dream of making all decisions strictly scientific collapsed, leaving behind only the wreckage left by their debunking of their hapless adversaries.)

A thick, experimental, practically- and ethically-driven social science is what pragmatists were always talking about. They were never talking about fudging the truth for self-serving goals. In the second half of the twentieth century various schools in various fields endeavored to destroy and supplant pragmatism, and they were reasonably successful in this task.

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

Return to Idiocentrism

jjmrsnx