thinkfetti

Recently I was a guest lecturer in a Philosophy of Science course, an occasional offering at our university taught by an extremely well-read senior professor. I focused on a book chapter that called into question “external” factors influencing scientific theory-making, from quantum mechanics in the early part of the 20th century to more contemporary chaos, complexity, and superstring theories.

The most interesting “external” factor the author considered was beauty; he asserted that the quest for this elusive (and difficult, if not impossible, to define) factor called beauty was undermining the exercise of the scientific method and corrupting scientists, who ended up formulating misanthropic theories. The author considered chaos and complexity theories to be misanthropic, because they removed humans from the top of the evolutionary ladder, suggesting that humans might be examples of larger trends, rather than the ones in control. The idea that chaos and complexity theory amounted to a collective throwing up of the hands, insofar as they would represent an admission that a comprehensive, precise “theory of everything” would be a misguided goal, stood as a betrayal of the birthright of human reason to the author.

In one portion of the guest lecture, I asked students to discuss in groups the following four questions:

1. When is science used?
2. When is the scientific method used?
3. When not?
4. What does beauty have to do with it?

Admittedly, this was a lot for 10 minutes, especially in a group. But afterwards, when I asked each group to write on the board one of their findings, the answers surprised me.

One group wrote that science dealt with quantitative questions only; qualitative questions were outside its purview.

Another wrote that people generally employ the scientific method in their daily lives, even if they don’t refer to it as such. For example, we avoid hitting our heads into walls, because of informal experimentation we’ve done and observation. (This, of course, is rather contradictory to the previous statement.)

A third group wrote that “everything is subjective. I think.” Part of this response was motivated by the fact that the small group couldn’t agree on any answers to the questions I posed (or on approaches to the questions). Still, I found this quite a surprising response, coming from undergraduates at a science and engineering university…

I think the reluctance or inexperience of the students to analyze an argument rhetorically (be it the author’s argument, or just the way I led the discussion) left them in a bit of a bind, when it came to moving ahead confidently in their thoughts.