One. Playing with fire
One. Playing with fire
Although an innovative astronomer and an important contributor to the development of planetary science, the late Carl Sagan is probably best remembered among the general public for two of his other activities: his popularization of contemporary natural science (especially astrophysics) and his highly public and unapologetic condemnation of "pseudoscience" concerning crystals, ESP, and alien abductions. The two activities fit together quite well, as they are united by a commitment to spreading a particular sensibility out beyond professional specialists and into the wider community. In a collection of essays entitled The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan borrows a metaphor from Thomas Ady's seventeenth-century tract condemning witch hunts to describe his public and popular work as an effort to shine an illuminating light into the dark corners of the contemporary world: to light a candle in the hopes of banishing the shadows. The candle he sought to light and to wield against the darkness was what he called science:
In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, "facts." We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts. In the course of their training, scientists are equipped with a baloney detection kit. The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you're so inclined, if you don't want to buy baloney even when it's reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken.
Sagan's account of the mechanics of science is probably fairly familiar to us, as it tracks quite closely with the notion of "falsification" famously propounded by Karl Popper: science, in Popper's formulation, proceeds and progresses through successive efforts to disprove conjectures, rather than through efforts to verify or justify them. But Sagan's metaphor-science as a candle in the darkness-should be scarcely less familiar, drawing as it does on a longstanding tradition in the philosophy of knowledge that equates knowing with seeing, and reason-often exemplified by science-with a source of light. Famously, John
Two. Playing with fire
Two. Playing with fire
Locke drew on this metaphor in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, admonishing his readers to use their natural faculties of reason to the best of their ability: "It will be no excuse to an idle and untoward servant, who would not attend his business by candle light, to plead that he had not broad sunshine. The Candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes." Further, Locke deployed the notion of reason as a defense against popular deception in a manner quite reminiscent of Sagan's stance:
Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties: revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately; which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives that they come from God. So that he that takes away reason to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both, and does much what the same as if he would persuade a man to put out his eyes, the better to receive the remote light of an invisible star by a telescope.
Setting aside the language of divinity for a moment, we can see a clear continuity between Locke and Sagan. Both point to a natural faculty that can be developed and deployed against error, and both symbolically equate that faculty with "light"-and oppose it to the "darkness" of misconception and superstition. Similarly, both privilege science as a superior way of gaining and evaluating knowledge-Sagan uses the term "science," while Locke, preferring the term "reason," explicitly associates himself and his argument with great scientists of the day such as Newton and Boyle. Whatever else it is good for, science appears in their conception as our best defense against error.
Of course, such arguments are not only advanced by philosophers and astronomers. Closer to home, as it were, David Laitin advances a very similar image of science-including social science-as containing "ample procedures for figuring out if our best judgments are misplaced" and hence serving as "the surest hope for valid inference." Laitin pairs this declaration with a denunciation of Bent Flyvbjerg's Making Social Science Matter for allegedly violating the strictures of science and opening the door to a kind of anything-goes relativism-the ultimate nightmare about what the abandonment of the ground of "science" might mean in practice. And in their popular and oft-cited methods handbook, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba flatly declare: "research designed to help us understand social reality can only succeed if it follows the logic of scientific inference." The juxtaposition of science and (potential) error, therefore, seems just as prominent in our field as it is in other domains.
Arguments such as these pose extremely fundamental questions about the character of our scholarly enterprise. Scholars of politics who advance such claims are quite clearly drawing on the cultural prestige associated with the notion