Ending the Science Wars by John D. Baldwin

Author:John D. Baldwin [Baldwin, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317260431
Google: rDAeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T02:50:54+00:00

Empirical Realism

Given the unpredictable nature of repugnant facts and our imperfect capacities for reconstructing prior theories, scientific knowledge is not as rational as theories of reason and inductive logic might suggest. Nevertheless, when we scrape our shins on repugnant facts (Mead, 1936: 406), we sense that our experiences are revealing something about our world.

Scientific theories are not merely symbolic constructions and reconstructions, based on whimsical creative processes. Repugnant facts give us reason to believe that there is some kind of “external reality” that lies outside our minds. Repugnant facts can be powerful, and they appear to enter our subjective space from external sources. We notice this most clearly in extreme cases, as with hurricanes, earthquakes, and other calamitous experiences.

Given the distortions introduced by our limited sense perceptions and mental capacities, we cannot know much about the postulated external reality, but repugnant facts give us considerable “security” that something exists outside our field of subjective awareness. “For research science, perceptual findings are part of a world whose unquestioned security is the basis for the reality of the exceptional instance” (Mead, 1932: 98 [italics added]). Sensitive observers can reach an “unquestioned security” that repugnant facts emerge from somewhere outside the mind (p. 98). Repugnant facts appear to come from a source that is independent of the symbolic accounts we create inside our subjective minds: They inform us that some of our symbolic constructions are defective and in need of reconstruction, while others appear to be more credible. This is why the individual observer’s subjective experience of repugnant facts is a precious event: Harsh facts force us to doubt and demote some of our theories about “reality,” while leaving the more successful ones intact—for the time being at least.

The way that Mead used the word “reality” clearly reveals that his concept of reality is a subjective one that is open to change. For Mead, all “truths” and “realities” are hypotheses. “When the hypothesis works it ceases to be a hypothesis; it is reality, not eternal, indefeasible reality, but the only reality with which we are acquainted …” (Mead, 1929a: 331* [italics added]). For Mead, the only kind of reality “with which we are acquainted” lies inside our subjective awareness and is built out of sense images, along with the words and numbers that we and others collectively construct in our attempt to make sense of the things we experience.

The scientist’s reality is not an eternal, static, or indefeasible entity: It is a corpus of symbolic theories that are open to repeated reconstructions as researchers continue to react creatively to repugnant facts. Since our subjective awareness lies in the present, scientists’ postulated worlds have “a reality that belongs to the present, without the slightest prejudgment as to their reality in a later present” (Mead, 1932: 113–114). Mead’s observations about the present and the future fit his views on science nicely (cf. pp. 54–58).

The symbolic models that scientists construct and repeatedly reconstruct may give them a subjective sense of “empirical realism” and “a provisional reality”

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