Razib makes an excellent and obvious point:
I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why?Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the cumulative and self-correcting rationality of the scientific community. It is the "wisdom of the crowds" at its apotheosis. Additionally, the domain which science addresses is generally skewed toward those which are amenable to abstraction and decomposition. I do not believe that physics is such an awe inspiring science in comparison to biology simply because physicists are more intelligent. They are more intelligent, on average, but that in an of itself does not explain the ability of physics to predict at such a fine grained level. Rather, it is the subject matter of physics which is the variable that makes it so.
I bring this up because many scientists believe that because science is such a superior method of extracting information about the world around us, and constructing predictive models which have been shown to have great utility, that that means that they as scientists can simply transfer their godlike powers to other domains with the greatest of ease. But as the above should make clear I believe this is a false perception, because the power of science arises from the intersection of the communal wisdom of tens of thousands of individuals over decades with the nature of the subject at hand.
I have no idea where those IQ general statements come from - are physicists really smarter than biologists? - but I think the larger point about the power of science depending on the community (and not the uber-rationality of an individual scientist) is spot-on. Razib probably doesn't want to be compared to Richard Rorty, the late pragmatist/post-modernist/left-wing Kuhnian philosopher, but I think Rorty wrote eloquently on the subject of "scientific solidarity":
On this view, there is no reason to praise scientists for being more 'objective' or 'logical' or 'methodical' or 'devoted to truth' than other people. But there is plenty of reason to praise the institutions that they have developed and within which they work, and to use these as models for the rest of culture. For these institutions give concreteness and detail to the idea of unforced agreement.
This is why I don't get worried when a biologist believes in God, or a chemist rejects natural selection, or a cosmologist is superstitious. I trust in science, not scientists. I believe in peer-review, but I don't necessarily believe my peers.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments (25)
Love the last sentence. I'm going to post it in the hallway.
Posted by: Rosie Redfield | September 4, 2008 6:22 PM