Review of: Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber & Faber, London, 1992.

In the 1960s, E.P. Snow suggested the need to bridge the two cultures between the arts and humanities on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other. In recent times Steve Fuller suggests that Snow’s two cultures still exist and seem to be played out between science and sociology - the debate continuing more between practising scientists and those engaged in the social study of science rather than between literary intellectuals and scientists.

The new critics think those engaged in science studies have put science in the dock despite the fact that the latter as a group has not elaborated a shared and well-defined theoretical position with respect to science. In spite of the variety of approaches within science studies, these scientists claim that science studies has managed to achieve a shared tone which is unambiguously hostile to science. These natural scientists can be said to constitute a distinct culture owing to their mission to rescue science from this hostility and by the alternative social, moral, philosophical statements they often pronounce themselves in the process. These scientists can be distinguished from other scientists who are interested in positively engaging within the debates of science studies. The Unnatural Nature of Science by Lewis Wolpert has the distinction of being one of the earliest statements which triggered the new debate in the 1990s.

Wolpert defended scientific knowledge by constructing science as a unitary kind of thinking with distinctive virtues distinguishable from mere common sense. The five cases identified as having tainted science and from which science must purify itself and separate its identity are: a) the notion that every human being is a potential scientist, b) the lack of distinction between technology and science, c) the confusing of the Greek origin of science, d) the conflating of artistic creativity with scientific creativity, and e) the claim by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers of science to regard scientific knowledge on a par with other knowledge.

Everyone a Potential Scientist

Wolpert asserts that the view that man is innately curious and thereby capable of critical and self-conscious reflection about knowledge about nature is a myth. Left to his own resources, he opines, man is only capable of curiosity up to matters that affect his conduct. He limits attainable knowledge to common sense and ordinary man’s curiosity to intuition. Both are thought unreliable for scientific thought. In fact Wolpert declares “if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly is not science” (p11). This is because the way the universe works is different from the way our common sense works in understanding the immediate world around us. Science is not a result of a simple interrogation of nature by intuitive thinking and every day experience. It is both counter-intuitive and outside everyday experience (pxii). Scientists are admonished to be aware of the errors of applying natural/intuitive thinking and theories in scientific knowledge production, and to recognise that it is precisely “the unnatural nature of science that historically made it so rare” (p11).

Wolpert employs the rhetorical distinction between thinking and common sense to divide humanity between a vast lay public and a few elite scientists. There are difficulties with this stance. First, the idea that thinking in science is “meta-unitarian” fails to recognise that there is not one kind of thinking which runs through different disciplines of science or within a discipline of science, and in different organisations or within an organisation of science. In physics, for example, there is theoretical and experimental aspects often evolving differing thinking methods depending on the historical development of the science. The Newtonian mechanistic thinking with the universe as a clockwork metaphor is not the same as relativistic-quantum physical thinking or the contemporary Santa Fe’s complexity theoretical thought. Cartesian mechanistic thinking from the seventeenth century has been replaced by the crude holism of late twentieth century contemporary complexity theory. Field theory in physics is different from geometrical kinematics and celestial mechanics. Wolpert constructs a meta-attribute to thinking whilst still recognising that science and scientific method are differentiated. He himself tells us that science does not fit a “simple minded description in terms of Kuhn’s paradigm or Popper’s falsification” (p108-109), adding that there is no such thing as the scientific method. Why is his attribution to scientific thinking a defining, distinctive and singular generality of “counter-intuition” less simple-minded than Kuhn’s paradigms or Popper’s falsification? How can Wolpert square his position of science and scientific methods as differentiated and plural with a single meta-unitarian thinking running through all of them?

Second, Wolpert uses the term common sense in a static and an undifferentiated manner. All kinds of common sense is described as “unconscious”. The self-aware thinking of science is compared to a common sense defined or lumped together in a single category as “unconscious”. Common sense in one culture could just as well be “counter-intuitive” thinking in other cultures.

The conflation of “common sense” with the term “unconscious” is also problematic because examples showing common sense as conscious are legion. Every day existence is full of such examples from crossing roads to making decisions on all kinds of problems. Wolpert seems to be “unconscious” of the contradictions of his own thinking here. The use of the comparison between a unitarian thinking of science and unconscious common sense helps him to build science as an elitist project which only special human beings from the western world with “self-aware” virtues can engage in. With it he classifies scientists as a special breed of men from the west by distinguishing them from the rest of humanity. Only some 15 per cent of the human race are said to be capable of doing science.

Third, ordinary people who carry out ordinary existences partake in conscious thinking. Modern complex societies demand self-aware living. The reduction of common sense only to unconscious reasoning radically simplifies the complexity of common sense experience. It is endlessly problematic to rank one as superior and another inferior - just as it would be to rank one kind of experience or knowledge as superior and another inferior.

Clarifying the Confusion between Science and Technology

His next move is to try to validate this distinction between common sense and science by classifying much of technology as requiring “no understanding or theory of the kinds provided by science” (p26).

The ancient cultures, especially the Chinese, have made significant achievements technologically, but their inventions were not based on science. They never managed, claims Wolpert, to theorise the process or give reasons why the technology worked. Science is said to have played no role even in such inventions like the compass, the telescope and steam engine. Chinese exports to Europe - gun powder, printing, the magnetic compass - “owed nothing to science” (p28). For technology neither learning nor literacy was relevant. The motivations of technology and science are different. The final product of science is an idea whilst that of technology is an artefact. Creators of technology want money, whilst scientists seek esteem. Technology succeeds if it correspond to wants and needs, whilst science’s success is measured when its results correspond with reality. The epistemological status of technology and science are radically different. Wolpert claims that “[t]he very nature of scientific and technological thinking is dissimilar. Many aspects of technology are visual and non-verbal, which is quite unlike scientific thinking” (p33-34). Much of the belief that ordinary intuition can understand science comes from a thinking which adulterates science with technology. There was no relationship between science and technology until the nineteenth century. “Engineering, even today, should not just be construed as merely applied science” (p34).

This position radically simplifies the ontological interpenetration of science and technology in present-day circumstances. The way science is done has changed from the Scientific Revolution to the present. Wolpert does not recognise that much of scientific research has become industrial activity. Much of science is done within corporations, research institutes and universities by specialists based on a division of labour using the latest technologies. The consequence of the industrialisation of science is the development of the “scientification” of technology and the “technologisation” of science.

The Greek Origin of Science

The next move focuses on Greece/West/Christianity and the rest. The author continues the epistemological purification by literally writing the non-West out of the history of science, and definitely science. Wolpert simply asserts that historians who mix science with technology have made two cardinal mistakes: first they deny the peculiarity of science and its radical difference with technology, and, secondly, they admit others and not Greece as the origin of science. Wolpert asserts that the unique Greek “origin is important for understanding the nature of science, since it makes science quite different from so many other human activities, for no other society independently developed scientific thought, and all later developments can be traced back to the Greeks” (p35).

Even the Chinese who are recognised to have developed a sophisticated culture, are merely described as having attained engineering not scientific knowledge. Though persistent and accurate observers of celestial phenomena before the Renaissance, the Chinese were said to have failed to develop planetary theory and geometry (p46). Wolpert thinks a large part to this failure lay in Chinese philosophy. Buddhism with its eternal returns, Taoism with its intimate link between nature and man, and Confucianism with its core emphasis on human conduct and personal cultivation probably prevented the origin of science in Chinese society. Perhaps this can be easily extrapolated to all other societies having belief systems like that obtaining in China. Paradoxically, Japan has been advised that it may not be able to develop science and technology without taking western values, languages and concepts. It was able to introduce selectively scientific knowledge into its culture without borrowing from the humanities originating from the west.

Wolpert claims that Christianity has had a positive influence on scientific development. Theological disputes on the nature of Christ had the salutary effect of helping those engaged in the debate to undertake logical consistency and reasoned argument. Christianity fostered scientific thinking. It provided “a system in which there was the possibility - even the conviction - that there were laws controlling nature. Such a conviction was unique to Christianity” (p48). Wolpert mentions the methodological difficulty “in looking for elective affinities between Christianity and science” (p48). What he means by this is the association of scientific pursuits with different forms of Christianity raises methodological difficulties; i.e., whether Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, and both vs. protestantism facilitated science. In spite of this reservation, the importance of Christianity in fostering science is upheld.

Wolpert makes no reference to the historians of science who tried to establish the African and Egyptian connection to Greek science, as Martin Bernal demonstrated in Black Athena. He stresses the Western/Greek influence on Islamic scholars and not the Afro-Arab contribution to Greek science. In one paragraph consisting of less than three lines Wolpert concedes that Islamic scholars have “also continued the Greek tradition”. He failed to point out how Islamic scholars continued the Greek tradition. For someone who makes such play of the distinction between knowledge and scientific knowledge, it is not clear what epistemological status Wolpert assigns the “Islamic scholars’ contribution to knowledge”. On Islam this is what he says: “[i]t may not be irrelevant that Islam offers a unifying perspective of knowledge and considers the pursuit of knowledge to be a virtue” (p51). This could be any knowledge and may not include his epistemologically privileged scientific knowledge.

The Question of Creativity

Art and artistic imagination should not be confused with science and scientific creativity. Creativity in science is unique and has special characteristics different from art. Gifted scientists have “stamina, devotion, psychic courage and character”, and they work very hard at problems (p69). Even some scientists confuse scientific imagination with artistically creative imagination. This notion which equates arts and sciences - both as products of creative human imagination - must be debunked. In science flashes of genius and inspiration are based on painstaking work and perspiration. Scientific research is based not on chance or serendipity, but on highly focused thoughts (p79). It is the best scientists who seem to be the luckiest (p83).

Wolpert acknowledges the difficulty of explaining genius, and claims that in the long run the communal production of science would make genius irrelevant. Art is individual, and artistic genius would remain individualised. A Shakespeare and a Mozart are not replaceable, he suggests. The problem with his account is that he has not provided the criteria for distinguishing creativity in art as opposed to science. Both artists and scientists do hard work. Both do not depend on chance. The characteristics he describes for science apply to the arts.

Criticism of SSK’s Critical Scrutiny of Science

The most vehement opposition was reserved for SSK’s thesis which denies that science is epistemologically privileged or even a separate domain of activity or enquiry. Wolpert dismisses with an uncompromising tone all relativist and social constructivist accounts of the creation of scientific knowledge. Social thinkers of science, like Bloor and Barnes, suggest that scientific knowledge is not discovered but constructed/manufactured. It is not a passive mediated product of nature, but an actively negotiated social construct of the processes of research and enquiry. Constructivism suggests that the expectations, prejudices and interests of the various actors are embodied in scientific knowledge. It describes the social process in which actors involved in a variety of ways in scientific knowledge production manage to attribute the status of objectivity to the resulting knowledge. SSK’s Strong Programme regards science as one of the many belief systems. Its knowledge claims have to be empirically tested and validated. Wolpert selectively took empirical studies done by SSK from biology and physics and pronounced them unsatisfactory.

Wolpert recognises that social factors influence science. Nevertheless, his view of science as a “social process” is radically different from that of the sociologists of scientific knowledge. He complains that SSK studies have ignored the “core of the scientific enterprise”, by “ignoring the achievements of science, by ignoring whether a theory is right or wrong” and “by denying progress” (p122). He suggests that sociologists study the unnatural nature of science by generating research programmes on the external dimensions of science (e.g., funding, institutions, career structures and so on), rather than the intrinsic validity of its knowledge claims and theories (e.g., theorems, laws, methodologies and so on). SSK thinkers would react to this agenda as limiting the scope of social research to external social factors, and would argue that science’s claim to objectivity in discovery as well as the resulting knowledge validation is a proper domain for social research. In many ways they claim that the latter is in fact the more interesting problem to investigate.

So the dispute here is not because Wolpert does not recognise science as a social process (however limited that may be), whilst SSK recognises science as a social process. It is rather between the narrow and wider scope of the definition of science as a social process. By emphasising both the inclusion of context in the process of discovery and knowledge justification, SSK thinkers suggest that they do not disparage the object of their study; i.e., science and scientists. Perhaps the main result they seek is to encourage scientists to become self-reflexive about the work they do. There is room for a healthy debate in how to describe and understand the factors that shape scientific thought if there is restraint from purple polemic and labelling on both sides.

Social Responsibility of Scientists

Having carried out the epistemological purification of science, Wolpert can confidently pronounce it exceptional and unique to western culture. What is left as an issue is to describe the social responsibility of the scientist consistent with his story. Are scientists implicated in the ethical dilemmas which their creations generate? His view on it is consistent with his overall approach. Scientists are obliged to inform the public “about the possible implications of their work” and “must be clear about the reliability of their studies” (p152). Scientists should not be held accountable for the application of their sciences. His truncated view of science as a “social process” translates into a truncated view of the social responsibility of the scientist. Once again the social responsibility of the scientist is not denied, but it is merely qualified and strictly limited. Scientists have more of a social responsibility than that suggested by Wolpert. They are involved increasingly as experts and advisors to government. The position that scientists are free from being implicated in the application of their science exaggerates their neutrality, diminishing their growing and lucrative connection with politics.