Democracy and Rhetoric by Crick Nathan;

Author:Crick, Nathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press

Recoupling Science and Common Sense

Science has the possibility of enriching the quality of these conjoint activities, but learning how to actualize this possibility requires looking more closely at the communicative relationship between science and common sense. As indicated by Dewey’s complaint that the application of science is to human concerns rather than in them, the problem with the modern era is that in “the things of greatest import there is little intercommunication” so that the “paths of communication between common sense and science are as yet largely oneway lanes.”83 The route that was of most concern to Dewey was the path from science back to common sense. He took it for granted that “science takes its departure from common sense” but noted that “the return road into common sense is devious and blocked by existing social conditions.”84 As a result science grows out of organic activities only to become caught into a self-perpetuating logic no longer directed toward resolving any long-term problem. There are two results to this. First, it perpetuates a dualistic justification of knowledge that exists “for itself,” a justification which culminates in dogmatic public assertions of “truth” that seek to enlighten the beliefs of common sense. Second, it licenses industrial “applied” science to dominate the sphere of practice. When combined, one thus has the metaphysics of realism appearing to license the wholesale exploitation of knowledge for specialized interests.

In short, in a decoupled science, the conclusions of research are co-opted by the needs of the system, which draws upon its technocratic ethos to force itself upon a reluctant lifeworld. In this situation a “class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all.”85 This situation manifests itself in what Charles Alan Taylor calls the rhetoric of demarcation in which practicing scientists seek to “exclude various non- or pseudo-sciences so as to sustain their (perhaps well-earned) position of epistemic authority and to maintain a variety of professional resources.”86 When successful, the rhetoric of demarcation results in what Steve Fuller calls “plebiscience,” which is characterized by an elitist “distinction between the production (by experts) and the distribution (to nonexperts) of knowledge.”87 This demarcation, moreover, creates an “internalist” account of science that largely walls it off from public influence—the only interaction coming from “publicity agents” that purport to serve the public interest by flooding it with press releases from the citadel of knowledge.88

As most activists know, however, scientific authority in some form is vital to advance any cause. What is needed is more than a critique of realism; for as Ziman points out, those activists who unmask the technocratic ideology of “objectivity” are actually “breaking their own swords in the struggle against their most feared opponents—the corporate and governmental enterprises that drive post-industrial society.”89 The issue is not science versus no science, but a worse science versus a better one. Therefore a form of expertise must be developed that has a kind of authority for the public beyond that of the magician or the monarch.

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