Self-referentiality of modern science. Faith in research, distrust in science.

Description

Science enjoys an extraordinary prestige in explaining ‘reality’, as well as in looking for solutions to the world’s problems. This is not always been the case, and this is also due the evolution of the social semantics when it comes to the concept of reality. Nevertheless, prestige does not entail the ability of science to dictate rules to other parts of society. For instance, many would like to see politicians developing policies based on scientifically sound facts: however, the tasks of politics are simply not that of science. While science can identify problems for politics (e.g., severe nitrogen pollution) and suggest solutions (e.g., reducing livestock production), it cannot tell politics how to find majority support for the latter, just as law cannot instruct the economy how to gain profit. To be sure no one seriously doubts the descriptions of the world furnished by science, insofar as science itself trusts them. Nonetheless, the effect is ultimately non-binding as far as other systems of communication are concerned, because each system requires specific solutions, which cannot just be transferred to other systems. And this is the problem we are introducing today.

The genesis of the problem begins with the differentiation of science. Pre-modern civilisations developed important mathematical, medical, and astronomical theories and expertise. However, this was usually intertwined with religious, magical, economic and political concerns. The emergence of modern science, understood as the methodologically controlled pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, that is, the demarcation between science and other societal spheres was drawn in the seventeenth-century scientific academies, such as the Florentine Accademia dei Lincei (1603).

By mobilising themselves around a concept of distinctive methods for scientific activity (primarily experimentation) and focusing on the production of new knowledge (‘innovation’) – instead of guarding and commenting on the old one – academic scholars could present themselves to the rest of society as a distinct community.

The old, imagined community of scholars, the res publica literaria broke open and gave way to a special scientific community with narrower membership criteria. Scientists become ‘specialist professionals’ having little in common with literary ‘intellectuals’, who addressed a wider public and were politically committed. Science became the province of the professional figure, with a social role of the ‘scientist’ (a term first used by William Whevell only in 1833).
The Humboldtian ideal of the research university provided the main organisational form in which the practice of science could become a full-time career: by providing wages, fusing research with teaching and allowing the historic prestige of universities as centres of scholasticism to valorise the new science. Research in this period transformed from an activity centred on collecting and organising ‘received knowledge’ from a plurality of sources, to ‘research’, the systematic pursuit of ‘new knowledge’. Producing ‘scientific knowledge’ became a more specialised and demanding activity, in which knowledge was only considered valid if produced according to certain methodological constraints of research’s own making. Science became an ‘autopoietic’ system, in which scientific statements could only come about within the science system and under the rules and conditions of the system itself.

Only scientific observations that have been gathered in a ‘methodologically correct’ way can be retained for future scientific communication, for instance via the ‘learned journals’, that enable authors to publicise their scientific findings and observe how other scientists tackled problems in their discipline. Theories are interrelated statements about the world which are based on concepts; they form the external reference of communication, for example to specific ‘objects’ such as ‘protons’, ‘neutrons’ or ‘social roles’. Methods determine the conditions under which the statements can be considered true or false. Science only accepts self-produced knowledge, certified through the peer-review process, and renewed by every new publication.

Just as modern law can only understand the legal meaning or validity of norms, rulings and contracts, by observing existing (i.e., already accepted and published) norms or rulings, the scientific focus of observation is on how reality has been constructed by previous scientific research, and not on observing reality as such.

The economic value or price of a product does not depend on the quality of the product itself, but on what the market says it is worth. In the case of the science system, it is only through research observing previously published research that science constructs its own realities. Science switches towards second-order observation. The value or credibility of scientific truth-claims can only be determined, rather tautologically, in a scientific context (and not, for instance, in a religious, economic or political context).

So, the self-proclaimed ‘accumulation of scientific knowledge’ entails that scientists must refer to existing publications and connect to research that has already been conducted. Methods generate self-referentiality which secures the differentiation of science from other systems. However, self-referentiality leaves to the public only external references for trust (trust in expertise). But trust in expertise is divisive: it may morph into faith in research, but it can also feed distrust in scientific motivations.

A piece of philosophical reasoning should help. As one function system among others, science hence must be able to account for its own observation position and reflect on its own singularity and irreplaceability. As other function systems, science does so by developing ‘reflection theories’. Just like political theory and theology serve as the reflection theories of the political and religious system, epistemology or the theory of knowledge is the reflection theory of the science system. ‘What is true knowledge?’; ‘How is scientific knowledge to be demarcated from non-scientific knowledge?’ This translated into the eighteenth-century debate between the empiricist (‘sense-data’) and the idealistic interpretation of the concept of the subject, which eventually culminated in Kant’s transcendental turn in philosophy. With the emergence of modern science, transcendental thinking gave way to the insight that all observers are empirical (meaning that they occur in the world, together with their observations, and that observations are observable), and can hence be studied in a theoretical and methodologically controlled way).

Second-order observation: epistemological observations do not focus on ‘what’ is observed but on ‘how’ the observed (first-order) observer observes. Only a second-order observation – which observes this observation based on another distinction – can see how the first observation observes, and see what it doesn’t see. Second order observations, which are allowed by epistemology, can however extend to non-epistemological questions, when it is enacted from outside the science function system. For instance, questions concerning motivations, that bring a social semantics that cannot be managed within scientific communication, where motivations would be relatively straightforward (the accumulation of knowledge).

It is clear, for instance, that contemporary scientific research is dependent on significant amounts of funding and that there is an increased interdependence of science with the economy (for instance, through the pressure to commercialise research findings). On the other hand, economic growth in, for instance, the pharmaceutical sector depends on pharmaceutical research and development, but it cannot simply decree that the research will be successful.
Motives for an empirically (yet uninformed) distrust in science.

Research cannot simply enter another system without ceasing to be just research. The key factor in the interaction between systems is translation or the ‘reconstruction’ of meaning engendered in other systems. Scientific data are condensed, summarised and simplified for political usage, often to such an extent that the advice can no longer considered to be ‘scientific’. Once research findings cross the boundary between research and politics, they will have become reconstructed in political terms, and from the point of view of the political system, they will no longer be scientific but political communication. This describes a condition of functionally differentiated society, which cannot have a unitary approach, for instance, to the serious ecological risks we are facing. The differentiation into function systems entails that ecological problems can only find ‘resonance’ within each different function system. Functional differentiation has allowed society to scientifically register and visualise this problem, as well as to highlight scientifically backed solutions for tackling it: however, it has also dismantled other systems’ ability to tackle the problem by simply ‘following the science’.

Period	25 Jun 2024
Event title	University of Northampton Research Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Northampton, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National