An interesting editorial by Won Joon Choe appeared in The Dartmouth last Friday about the irrelevance of the science distributive to a liberal arts education. Not being particularly enthusiastic about the distributive system myself, I was hesitant to criticize what I read, but the manner in which the column dealt with the topic left me feeling great unease.
Several contentious points were raised in the article, the first of which was that the study of the natural sciences has little to teach us about the human condition, and is somehow inferior to the study of the humanities. In particular, Choe says that a liberal arts education should "encourage the emergence of free, autonomous and responsible citizens," and in the next paragraph says, "such an education rightly considers studies devoted to the knowledge of the stars, of the animal world or of mechanics as inferior and subordinate to the study of man."
It is one thing to say that one should not be coerced into taking science classes, and quite another to make such accusations about the sciences as have been quoted above. In the present anti-scientific world in which we live, where science is blamed for all evils from oil-pollution to the alienation of man from his environment, we are psychologically primed to see Choe's attack on the sciences as perfectly apt, yet we would be quite wrong in doing so. A proper understanding of the questions which the sciences are wrestling with will not allow us to accept Choe's thesis.
One must first ask what exactly these weighty questions that science presumably cannot address are. In the column we find mention of "the fundamental human questions, such as the nature of justice or the best political regime," and "the normative questions regarding human life." By this, the author is talking about the great ethical issues, such as the nature of the good life, and such like.
But where Choe sees in such questions limitations to the scientific method, I see in them science's greatest achievements. Questions which all manner of philosophers and armchair theorists have wrestled with for millennia have edged far closer to resolution in our century than they have been moved by Socrates, Aquinas and all the rest.
For instance, mathematical logicians have much to tell us about the nature and limitations of reason, far more than Kant or any other non-mathematicians who have grappled with such questions do. The findings of Kurt Godel on the nature of axiomatic systems, and the contributions of Alan Turing, especially in showing the essential equivalence of all computing machines, are landmarks in the history of the theory of knowledge. Godel's incompleteness theorem tells us that no finite list of rules sufficient to describe number theory can embrace all mathematical truth. Worse yet, we can never prove our mathematical schemes consistent, unless they are in fact inconsistent. To all those philosophers who have sought absolute and a priori knowledge this is nothing short of a route.
Turing, on the other hand, showed that there are problems which are, even in principle, undecidable by any machine, regardless of the resources at it is disposal. It is natural enough to then ask if there are questions which we humans are also not capable of solving, even in principle.
These are all nice enough, but science presses in on the great questions in other ways. Physics, and in particular cosmology and the attempts at finding what may be vulgarized as a "theory of everything," attack the questions of the origin and destiny of man and the universe head on. The consequences of a theory which would serve to explain everything in existence need not be pointed out as relevant to us all. Biology, via the genetic revolution, exponentially increases our knowledge of who we are and why we act the way we do.
To pick an example, we all like to think of ourselves as free agents, but the findings of genetics tell us that this is not entirely true. We are born with instincts which manifest themselves all our lives in varying degrees of subtlety, and their influence is often more far reaching than we realize. A case in point is a piece of information which was in the news a while ago, about the preference of women for men with histoimmune complexes different from theirs. To every woman who has imagined that her choice of partner was based on his personality and attractiveness, this might come as a surprise. This and other such findings make dents in the free-will debate centuries of semantic squabbling could not.
The upshot of all I have tried to say is that the scientific method, far from being mere "technique," as some would have it, is in fact a means, and perhaps even the only means, by which we can answer those "great" questions which bother us so. Socrates may make for enjoyable reading, but he and his cohorts have often been woefully wrong, and we should not let an undue deference to the authority of prominent names blind us to the reality that they have even less to say about human possibilities and limitations than the men in white suits do.
