05) Science and Scientism

In an article titled “Alternative Medicine and the Appropriation of Scientific Discourse: The Cases for Homeopathy and Radionics” writer Steve Mizrach defines scientism as:

“Scientism is the belief that science is the ultimate authority to which all questions and problems can be directed, and that scientists therefore should be an intellectual elite 'ruling class' of society, since most people lack the scientific expertise to govern their own affairs. Scientism assigns science a greater role than all other knowledge systems, and scientists a superordinate position within society.

“In painting the picture of how Radionics and other similar healing methodologies evolved, Mizrach eloquently describes in broad strokes the rise of scientism to the position we find it today.

“The origins of (Western) science lie in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. This event was connected in many ways with other ongoing 'revolutions' - the Protestant Reformation, the rise of mercantile capitalism, the Enlightenment, and the dawning of the Industrial Revolution. During the Enlightenment, there developed a sincere belief that reason would now come to govern human affairs, thereby replacing "superstition and sentiment." This led people to think that perhaps rational scientific authority would come to supplant 'arbitrary' religious and political authority, and that all that was needed to achieve human liberation was to conquer 'irrationality,' ignorance, and lack of education. This doctrine is what Foucault calls the episteme of the Enlightenment.

“Comte advanced in his doctrine of positivism the idea that humanity, having passed through ages of increasing knowledge, had now reached the culminatory epoch, where governance would be by scientific and technical experts rather than arbitrary elites. The success of science in so many domains sincerely led people to believe that it might solve many of the problems that beset society. By the 19th century, the notions of progress, social advancement, and scientific discovery were firmly linked. Even before the rise of Big Science after World War II, science was already starting to have a great influence on the State, which increasingly relied on scientific expertise for pressing questions of policy and statecraft, and on technology for intelligence and national defense.

”Scientism is, then, the doctrine that science has a greater ability than any other human endeavor (art, religion, philosophy, whatever) for the resolution of disputes and questions; and that science has a special privileged status. (Most Marxists generally believe that science, unlike other forms of 'false' knowledge, belongs in the infrastructure, since it emerges directly from the material 'base,' rather than being mediated through culture, society, or ideology.) Under the doctrine of scientism, science is the ultimate authority for answering questions, and such things as rationality, reality, and truth are thought to be singular and singularly possessed by scientific inquiry - any deviation being clearly 'irrational' rather than exemplifying a different rationality.”
A bit further he adds:

“Despite science's apparent antiauthoritarian origins (many of us are familiar with the story of the brave heretic Galileo confronting the dogmatic Church with his discoveries), it nonetheless deploys authoritarian structures for the evaluation of knowledge. Science possesses five practical types of authority: political, formal-professional, collegial-elite, patronage, and authorship. It utilizes a discursive space (scientific journals, symposia and conferences, scientific honors organizations, etc.) which maintains the boundaries between 'insiders' and 'outsiders,' but the 'outsiders' seek to imitate this space in order to try and 'borrow' some of the 'symbolic capital' and prestige commanded by science. Since scientism guarantees the authority and power of science, it is inevitable that extrascientific fields will seek to appropriate some of that authority as well.”

Big science, once a challenge to religious authority, has replaced much of that authority today with its own set of assumptions and structures. Like the Church, it has its own language and jargon that reinforces its technical expertise and competence; its own complex support system in industry and government; its own media apparatus; its own system of reward and punishment. As such, Scientism guarantees the power and authority of science, while maintaining the ability to neutralize competition from outside its hegemony, which could challenge that authority.

In approaching the notion of 'alternative science' and its resulting technology, it is important to differentiate between the initial goals of true science and the cultural imperatives dictated by Scientism. One must ask if the pursuit of empirical inquiry into areas deemed 'irrational' by Scientism automatically becomes 'pseudoscience' in the pejorative sense of the word, or whether scientific inquiry can remain intact in an unfamiliar intellectual terrain, even one void of a familiar rationality. One needs only to follow scientific rationalism into the world of quantum reality and modern astrophysics to determine just how far this slender thread can be stretched.

At every step into the world of alternative science one encounters what is said to be an 'appropriation' of scientific method and terminology into what would otherwise be a scientifically unsupported inquiry or discussion. Instead of posing a direct challenge to the ideology of science, many of these inquiries appear only to mimic scientific discourse in furthering what appear to be irrational objectives. To the naive, this appropriation of scientific terminology adds credence to the argument they are bogus. More cynically minded observers would see in this appropriation of scientific terminology an unfulfilled desire to obtain the approval of science, or a crass appropriation of the prestige afforded science in the public mind.

That alternative medicine in general, with Radionics being a prime example, should ultimately be found lacking by careful thinkers like Mizrach is not too surprising. His tough stance is moderated in part by a better understanding of the problems besetting scientism. In that respect, he leaves the door open to the possibility that “clues” to unsolved issues of human health may yet be found outside mainstream biomedicine. Mizrach sums up his thoughts as follows:

“The founders of alternative medical practices often have had very standard medical training. They are not ignorant of the scientific orthodoxy of their time. The reasons for the "rebellions" against medical orthodoxies may be more sociological than intellectual. Unfortunately, their followers have chosen to try and justify their particular heterodoxies while still trying to win the approval of orthodoxy. This is an unstable position which is bound to collapse. Rather than mounting a direct challenge to scientism (e.g., there are "ways of healing" which may not be scientific in the strict sense, but they still work nonetheless) by appealing to pragmatism, alternative medical practicioners have tried to beat biomedicine at its own game, with deplorable results.

“Looking at the genesis and trajectory of alternative medicines is an interesting avenue into the more general problem of examining scientific heterodoxies (Velikovskyanism, etc.) and the accomodations they have tried to make in justifying their existence. Alternative medical practicioners, 'traditional' medical practicioners, and medical anthropologists might consider an alliance against scientism. The Dictatorship of Reason, governed by Voltaire's Bastards, has been allowed to run the West unchecked for too long. Anthropology, itself seeking to betray its origins by aping a long-dead postivism, and taking on the appearance of scientificity through patently unscientific doctrines like cultural materialism, is facing a similar problem. The Horatios of science, with their single reducing lens of scientific analysis, need to be reminded that there is, indeed, more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in their philosophy.

“As science meets anomalies it cannot explain, according to Kuhn, increasingly it starts to enter "crisis" periods where assumptions are revised and paradigms are surrendered. Biomedicine may be entering one of those "crisis" periods right now, as it confronts anomalous conditions (chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.) for which there seems to be no biomedical solution. Alternative medicine could go on aping a failing biomedicine, or seek to uncover terrain it has left untouched. Homeopathy and radionics may contain clues to things about human health which have, up till now, been left unaddressed in 'scientific' biomedicine; but they won't discover those things if they let themselves continue imitating the surface of a vanishing paradigm. It remains to be seen what will happen.”

Mizrach is justified in condemning elements of 'alternative science', especially those hoping to win approval for non-scientific methodologies through mimicking scientific procedure and instrumentation.

Other forms of alternative science, particularly areas like research into consciousness, suffer from the limitations of scientific method as it is applied today, such as observer independence. We argue within these pages that alternative science like Radionics may better be represented as an art form. Other alternative healing modalities, like shamanism, go completely beyond art and science altogether into pure mystical experience. How do you quantify something like that?

Whatever the proclivity for delusion, not all alternative science is without scientific merit. Consider the fate of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, (excerpt from the New York Times, article by Benedict Carey, 2/10/2007):

“PRINCETON, N.J., Feb. 6 — Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events.

“But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time.

“The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university’s engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling.

‘“For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data,” said the laboratory’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”

“Princeton made no official comment.

“The closing will end one of the strangest tales in modern science, or science fiction, depending on one’s point of view. The laboratory has long had a strained relationship with the university. Many scientists have been openly dismissive of it.

‘“It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton,” said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.” “Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.”

“PEAR has been an anomaly from the start, a ghost in the machine room of physical science that was never acknowledged as substantial and yet never entirely banished. Its longevity illustrates the strength and limitations of scientific peer review, the process by which researchers appraise one another’s work.

‘“We know people have ideas beyond the mainstream,” said the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, author of “Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States” and senior vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,”but if they want funds for research they have to go through peer review, and the system is going to be very skeptical of ideas that are inconsistent with what is already known.”

“Dr. Jahn, one of the world’s foremost experts on jet propulsion, defied the system. He relied not on university or government money but on private donations — more than $10 million over the years, he estimated. The first and most generous donor was his friend James S. McDonnell, a founder of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.

“Those gifts paid for a small staff and a gallery of random-motion machines, including a pendulum with a lighted crystal at the end; a giant, wall-mounted pachinko-like machine with a cascade of bouncing balls; and a variety of electronic boxes with digital number displays.

“In one of PEAR’s standard experiments, the study participant would sit in front of an electronic box the size of a toaster oven, which flashed a random series of numbers just above and just below 100. Staff members instructed the person to simply “think high” or “think low” and watch the display. After thousands of repetitions — the equivalent of coin flips — the researchers looked for differences between the machine’s output and random chance.

“Analyzing data from such trials, the PEAR team concluded that people could alter the behavior of these machines very slightly, changing about 2 or 3 flips out of 10,000. If the human mind could alter the behavior of such a machine, Dr. Jahn argued, then thought could bring about changes in many other areas of life — helping to heal disease, for instance, in oneself and others.

“This kind of talk fascinated the public and attracted the curiosity of dozens of students, at Princeton and elsewhere. But it left most scientists cold. A physics Ph.D. and an electrical engineer joined Dr. Jahn’s project, but none of the university’s 700 or so professors did. Prominent research journals declined to accept papers from PEAR. One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper “if you can telepathically communicate it to me.”

“Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist, has managed the laboratory since it opened and has been a co-author of many of its study papers. “We submitted our data for review to very good journals,” Ms. Dunne said, “but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?”

“Several expert panels examined PEAR’s methods over the years, looking for irregularities, but did not find sufficient reasons to interrupt the work. In the 1980s and 1990s, PEAR published more than 60 research reports, most appearing in the journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group devoted to the study of topics outside the scientific mainstream. Dr. Jahn and Ms. Dunne are officers in the society.

“The study of telekinesis and related phenomena, Dr. Jahn said, will carry on.

‘“It’s time for a new era,” he said, “for someone to figure out what the implications of our results are for human culture, for future study, and — if the findings are correct — what they say about our basic scientific attitude.”’

Apparently, PEAR’s data and protocols were rejected by mainstream science without ever being given reasonable peer review, despite the status of the scientists and the university involved. In many areas of alternative science, only a hostile intellectual climate, not faulty reasoning or distorted facts prevent serious in depth study of important topics that concern us all.
Rejection of knowledge is as much a social and political process as its acquisition. Scientific and academic taboos can be created where popular culture weights in heavily upon the topic of study, trivializing it in the minds of serious researchers. Research on psychedelic drugs and the widespread reporting of UFO's have suffered from similar constraints. Were this not the case, alternative research might often improve our lives and stimulate our curiosity for knowledge.

A challenge to making studies like Radionics palpable to a broader audience will lie in whether it can be reinterpreted as a creative tool. Radionics was conceived as a diagnostic and treatment technology at a time when modern bio-medicine had not become the dominant science it is today. Radionic devices incorporated early radio and electronic ideas which have since been lost and/or discarded. As Mr. Mizrach has noted, Radionics has continued to appropriate the methods of orthodox science into its design and terminology.

We will examine this appropriation in a spirit of tolerance, given the state of electronics and medicine, circa 1910 when Radionics was first discovered. We will do so in order to shift the focus of this interesting technology from the scientific to the metaphysical, where it can be evaluated by the reader outside of scientific approval. The aim is to provide the reader with a reasonable means of evaluating radionic technology as an artistic methodology.