Interesting article over at the Skeptical Inquirer about the social role of science. (Hat tip to Ektopos) They basically note that through most history we could through our culture be fairly well versed in terms of the world around us. That is we could, through common sense, come to know our world. Of course our knowledge was limited but it was available fairly equally. However with science we find that more and more common sense is not trustworthy. Further this ends up causing a divide between those who know and the regular folk who can't easily know. The focus of the article is less that avenue than confusion over the social implications of science. What does science say to us? Clearly it doesn't speak to us the way common sense once did. The following paragraph is perhaps helpful.
Consider the question of what we are. One way to approach this question is through a complex of cultural beliefs about the self; for instance, that it is a coherent, unitary entity, mostly transparent to introspection, which authors behavior by the free directives of its will. Now, neuroscience is probing the brain and behavior and discovering some startling facts. By observing electrical activity around your hippocampus on a computer screen, others can predict more accurately than you can whether you will successfully recall the name of a person you just met. Meanwhile, the neural activity associated with a choice appears to precede your conscious experience of that choice. This is just the beginning. Do these facts contradict the received cultural understanding of the self? Do they reinforce it? Or are they not facts about the self at all but about something else? I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone does at this point.
I'll admit that I find the cultural implications of science far less interesting than the opposite. For instance the article notes that with the end of the cold war science funding has dramatically decreased. Even if perhaps cold war money wasn't always spent that well, it was a huge cash infusion into basic research. I'd go so far as to say that a lot of the success of the United States can be tied to this basic research. Now we're losing it, both due to funding issues as well as the difficulty of foreigners coming here to study. I think that will have huge future implications for the economic growth of the United States as well as our social well being.
Part of the problem, and I think this gets to the funding issue as well, is that science doesn't provide clear answers. It is always tentative and often there are confusing and conflicting claims. The amazingly poor state of science journalism doesn't help. People hear things like all the common things causing cancer without being given any context. At a point they cease to trust science and consider everything in science "just an other theory." I suspect that some of the anti-evolutionist fervor going around is a reflection of this. What is at odds is often common sense and science. And it is there where I think the article makes one think.
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Blogged by Clark Goble