Sciences and humanities : ne'er the twain shall meet?

[Mr. Tea]

A lot of the discussion going on in the Baudrillard thread has touched on something I've been thinking about for a long time now, namely: is there any inherent reason why developments in the fields of mathematics and the sciences - particularly the physical sciences - should have any effect whatsoever on the purely theoretical disciplines within the humanities?

I'm reading 'The Appropriation of Chaos Theory' posted by kpunk in the the other thread at the moment, and although it's too early for me to draw any conclusions from that text itself, I think it's still a valid question to ask: on what grounds do people seek to draw conclusions about, or identify trends in, human cultures and societies based on developments in scientific discplines which have nothing to do with human beings? I'm not after answers like "all science is to do with human beings, since it is developed by humans", I'm talking about the subject matter itself.

A good example of this supposed influence working the other way is the physicist David Bohm; it's said that his political convictions (a Marxist, in the days when they still called themselves Communists) led him to vociferously oppose the statistical/probabalistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, as this denied a fundamentally deterministic worldview.
So my question is: for what reason should ideas from (say) chaos theory inform sociology, beyond the fact that some of the equations might be useful to an economist trying to predict the behaviour of markets? In the same way, what *direct* consequence does quantum mechanics have for society, beyond enabling the microchips that have led to the 'information revolution'?

 

[tryptych]

A good example of this supposed influence working the other way is the physicist David Bohm; it's said that his political convictions (a Marxist, in the days when they still called themselves Communists) led him to vociferously oppose the statistical/probabalistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, as this denied a fundamentally deterministic worldview.

As did Einstein, for i guess ideolgical convictions ("God does not play dice").

So my question is: for what reason should ideas from (say) chaos theory inform sociology, beyond the fact that some of the equations might be useful to an economist trying to predict the behaviour of markets? In the same way, what *direct* consequence does quantum mechanics have for society, beyond enabling the microchips that have led to the 'information revolution'?

Because as ideas from science penetrate into society, they produce changes in how people perceive fundamental things - e.g. the metaphysical aspects of quantum mechanics, the role of the observer. I guess in literature and sociology first, which gradually filter towards mainstream opinion. Views on non-determinism certainly seem to be gaining ground.

 

[Eric]

Wouldn't the paradigm example of interactions like these be game theory: initially oriented (more) toward pure mathematics, but now with extensive applications in economics, philosophy, linguistics, etc, and with these fields being the places where the mathematics is being pushed further, generally speaking?

 

[gek-opel]

Or Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis and its application in the ontology and ethic of Alain Badiou?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Wouldn't the paradigm example of interactions like these be game theory: initially oriented (more) toward pure mathematics, but now with extensive applications in economics, philosophy, linguistics, etc, and with these fields being the places where the mathematics is being pushed further, generally speaking?

Oh, sure - there are going to be plenty of examples of actual applications based on ideas in physics and maths having profound effects on society. Equations once studied for purely abstract purposes are now routinely used to model animal population dynamics, for example. What I was getting at is more at the level of: why should someone thinking about political philosophy or psychology or sociology care what sort of physical laws apply on the atomic or cosmological scales? Other than, perhaps, providing new terminology as a source of metaphors and analogies? (If this is the whole deal, then fair enough But in which case, would a subject 'closer to home' like evolutionary biology or linguistics not be a more suitable source?)

 

[dHarry]

A real intellectual scandal of our time is that scientists, by extrapolating from genetic research, measuring subjects' brain activity in reaction to images, or some experiment involving rats, are constantly making public pronouncements about gender or social issues about which they have absolutely no specialised knowledge, completely ignoring socio-cultural and psychological factors, blinded by their objective scientific method. This creates a false belief across our culture that science will soon know everything there is to know about Human Nature, if only they can conduct enough experiments on rodents or attach enough sensors to people's heads, and philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and psycho-analysts can be safely retired.

 

[Mr. Tea]

A real intellectual scandal of our time is that scientists, by extrapolating from genetic research, measuring subjects' brain activity in reaction to images, or some experiment involving rats, are constantly making public pronouncements about gender or social issues about which they have absolutely no specialised knowledge, completely ignoring socio-cultural and psychological factors, blinded by their objective scientific method. This creates a false belief across our culture that science will soon know everything there is to know about Human Nature, if only they can conduct enough experiments on rodents or attach enough sensors to people's heads, and philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and psycho-analysts can be safely retired.

This is why I stick to elementary particles. Human beings are far too complicated.

(That's not to say, though, that studies of (for example) physical and chemical differences between healthy and schizophrenic brains are a waste of time, is it? As long as they conducted in tandem with, rather than instead of, studies of social and environmental aspects of the disease?)

 

[nomadologist]

A real intellectual scandal of our time is that scientists, by extrapolating from genetic research, measuring subjects' brain activity in reaction to images, or some experiment involving rats, are constantly making public pronouncements about gender or social issues about which they have absolutely no specialised knowledge, completely ignoring socio-cultural and psychological factors, blinded by their objective scientific method. This creates a false belief across our culture that science will soon know everything there is to know about Human Nature, if only they can conduct enough experiments on rodents or attach enough sensors to people's heads, and philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and psycho-analysts can be safely retired.

Right, this is something I notice very often: scientists can be blind to their own reductionism when it comes to reducing "gender" to "sex." Those scientists who haven't studied sociology will talk about biological findings as if we are determined by our biology, and as if the evolution of our current biological traits couldn't have, in part, been influenced by cultural attitudes or traits that were valued on a cultural level. We will *never* know what is constructed in us as "gender" from what is a biological sex difference on the most fundamental level until scientists learn to parse those concepts and account for them in their studies. Even if this can never fully happen, the effort needs to be there...

 

[nomadologist]

A real intellectual scandal of our time is that scientists, by extrapolating from genetic research, measuring subjects' brain activity in reaction to images, or some experiment involving rats, are constantly making public pronouncements about gender or social issues about which they have absolutely no specialised knowledge, completely ignoring socio-cultural and psychological factors, blinded by their objective scientific method. This creates a false belief across our culture that science will soon know everything there is to know about Human Nature, if only they can conduct enough experiments on rodents or attach enough sensors to people's heads, and philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and psycho-analysts can be safely retired.

Another intellectual scandal of our time is that, even when scientists are careful NOT to be reductionists when it comes to applying their findings about biology and gender, often a journalist untrained in science will (so as to get the good headline and grab the reader's attention) misinterpret the findings of a scientific study and wildly sensationalize it actual impact in such a way that only serves to support the status quo in the worst possible way.

 

[Mr. Tea]

This is a very good point - I think scientists sometimes get unfairly blamed due to shoddy journalism on their work. The British press are awful for this, especially the 'middle-brow' tabloids. Scientists find preliminary evidence that some chemical found in a certain food increases the risk of a certain kind of tumour in rats by 5% and all of a sudden it's "OMG CHEESE CAUSES CANCER!!!111" all over the front of the Daily Mail.

 

[nomadologist]

This is a very good point - I think scientists sometimes get unfairly blamed due to shoddy journalism on their work. The British press are awful for this, especially the 'middle-brow' tabloids. Scientists find preliminary evidence that some chemical found in a certain food increases the risk of a certain kind of tumour in rats by 5% and all of a sudden it's "OMG CHEESE CAUSES CANCER!!!111" all over the front of the Daily Mail.

The BBC is TERRIBLe about this. I've seen articles (I'm paraphrasing and exaggerating from memory, but maybe I could find some) where they will use a headline as stupid as "WOMEN REALLY ARE INFERIOR TO MEN: NEW STUDY FINDS" (of course, what the study found was that in one population of 110 people, women scored a few points lower on the spatial aptitutde section of a standardized test) or "MALE BRAINS INEPT AT DOING HOUSEWORK" (when they've determined that women have better hand-eye coordination).

It drives me absolutely insane. And I find on the BBC website, these articles are appended by dozens of troll-level comments where men (or people who claim to be men, sometimes I wonder if it's women playing a ridiculous role to make fun of chauvinists) decry the decline of civilization solely at the hands of "feminism."

 

[Mr. Tea]

Pfft, come on, I've SEEN you guys trying to reverse-park, it's painful...

 

[nomadologist]

i wish i could find some of the best ones...

 

[zhao]

no time for proper dissertation but for now:

the two are one. not mutually exclusive. there is no dicotomy.

both sides of the science vs. religion debate are morons.

 

[shudder]

re: the second scandal nomadologist mentioned: Science journalism seems to be at an all-time low. For the last few months there have been countless crap stories related to Louanne Brizendine's best-selling book, The Female Brain. In it, she makes a lot of baseless claims about men and women's brains and the implications these differences have for their language use. The BBC, along with most of the crappy science reporters in the mainstream media, have been happy to report these totally unsubstantiated and usually totally false claims. (FWIW, I majored in linguistics.) The really excellent Linguistics group blog Language Log has been documenting and repudiating many of the worst examples of these claims. One of the bigger and most-reported claims is that women use three times as many words in a given day than men do. Unsurprisingly, this is bunk.

The same blog posted an interesting report about people's suggestibility once neuroscience is invoked as an explanatory factor for a psychological process:

In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones

 

[John Doe]

Another intellectual scandal of our time is that, even when scientists are careful NOT to be reductionists when it comes to applying their findings about biology and gender, often a journalist untrained in science will (so as to get the good headline and grab the reader's attention) misinterpret the findings of a scientific study and wildly sensationalize it actual impact in such a way that only serves to support the status quo in the worst possible way.

I've found one of the most interesting, and telling, case studies is the recent attempts to establish that there is some sort of universal ideal of the female body that constitutes 'attractiveness'. It's a debate I've kept half an eye on over the past few years and often it surfaces in the pages of the newspapers along the lines of: 'experts have established that there's a certain ratio of size of breast to size of waist that men universally respond to as attractive'. Such work is carried out and promoted by the ethno-biologist school and, to echo Shudder's point above, is little more than cultural value masquerading as hard science. Their project seems to be able to reduced to the fact that 'evolution' has made 'us' as a society value Kate Moss, say, as a paragon of beauty and not another body type.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I've found one of the most interesting, and telling, case studies is the recent attempts to establish that there is some sort of universal ideal of the female body that constitutes 'attractiveness'. It's a debate I've kept half an eye on over the past few years and often it surfaces in the pages of the newspapers along the lines of: 'experts have established that there's a certain ratio of size of breast to size of waist that men universally respond to as attractive'. Such work is carried out and promoted by the ethno-biologist school and, to echo Shudder's point above, is little more than cultural value masquerading as hard science. Their project seems to be able to reduced to the fact that 'evolution' has made 'us' as a society value Kate Moss, say, as a paragon of beauty and not another body type.

Moss certainly doesn't do much for me, and I know I'm not alone in this.
Fashion designers like skinny models because it's easier to design clothes for them, and because they then show off the clothes without the model's own body distracting from them too much, IMO.

(I know you picked her as an arbitrary example, just saying.)

 

[Mr. Tea]

no time for proper dissertation but for now:

the two are one. not mutually exclusive. there is no dicotomy.

both sides of the science vs. religion debate are morons.

Rubbish. I hold scientific ideas because they make logical sense and are backed up by observation, not because a holy man told me or because I read it in an old book of fairy-tales. That's it.

 

[nomadologist]

In an odd coincidence, I just had to transcribe a debate between a few scientists about Popper vs. Kuhn and the role of speculation in science yesterday. I'd get in trouble for this, so don't distribute it, but read if you like. These scientists (one of whom has a Nobel prize, you know, the layperson's idea of "cred") seem to think speculation, not just in the form of spin and politics, always threatens to corrode science.

 

[nomadologist]

Rubbish. I hold scientific ideas because they make logical sense and are backed up by observation, not because a holy man told me or because I read it in an old book of fairy-tales. That's it.

You have to be careful when you talk about "logical sense." In ancient Egypt it made perfect logical sense to believe the universe was sitting on a lotus bud. What seems "logical" to someone is always only whatever that person already thinks, whatever their thought process already allows. Everyone always thinks their own ideas "make sense." I'm more impressed with people who can find a reason to make me believe something even when it's counterintuitive and doesn't make sense. I think science often plays this role, rather than the role of arbiter of all things sensical.